I read a lengthy review of books about food security over the summer. It was in Harper's or The New Yorker. Since these magazines were being brought to me after being fished out of the waste basket because someone at R's workplace was tossing them, I did a bad job of remembering what I was reading. Instead, I'd feast on them with abandon, hardly ever stopping to remember which magazine I was reading.
I looked forward to this article, because the reviews were quite good and brought to light an important issue. I'm currently thumbing through Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, which people here recommended for our book reading group at work.
So, I was intrigued. Still, as i read the passage above, I thought about working in catering many years ago. we had to start washing all melons which grow on the ground. Even though no one eats the rind, we had to wash because, growing on the ground, they rolled around in chicken shit fertilizer. when preparing the melons, if you don't wash, you slice the knife through the rind and the salmonella gets sliced right through the meat of the melon. the new health department directive, to wash all melons, was a response to a wave of salmonella poisoning that year -- probably 1991-2ish.
Thinking of chicken shit fertilizer and death by melons brought me to think of ships full of shit which used (still do?) traverse the oceans in order to deliver the shit to fertilize crops. This was back in 1800s, IIRC. If I'm not mistaken, I think I read in the same book, that trade in guano was big stuff way back when.
Oh. google: http://www.american.edu/TED/guano.htm
So, trade offs, trade offs. It would do well for people who like to co-opt the use of the word (and tactics of the war on whatever makes us feel skeered, as McCain pronounces it) "security" to consider the popular phrase in computer security: "The only secure computer is a dead computer buried six feet underground."
IOW, there are trade offs. Make food really secure, you can't eat it -- to put a pretty blunt spin on it. Which of course Pollan understands since the "omnivore's dilemma" is precisely that: as omnivores that never specialized in eating one or a few things from which we obtain all our nutrients, we can eat almost anything but that also means some things might kill us: poisonous mushrooms and berries, meat invested with trichinosis, salmonella-laden melon, bad clams, etc.
Still, I was rather bothered by the opening of this article. I realize the rhetoric has to be geared toward an election campaign, so the focus will relentlessly be on u.s.ers. Nevertheless, the emphasis on _our_ security really disturbed me because like Thomas Friedman and Richard Florida and a host of other popular writers, they rely on scaring people. Friedman, for all his admiration of India, is really using that to scare us into changing our ways. If we do not, he says, they will rule the world! Similarly, Florida is concerned about the creative class, and our lack of investment in it. If we let the creative class languish, "they" will rule the world!
So, too, Pollan. Omilard, Omilard! If we don't make a vast effort to secure our food supplies, those others over there are gonna kill us with their food!
<quote> Rich or poor, countries struggling with soaring food prices are being forcibly reminded that food is a national-security issue. When a nation loses the ability to substantially feed itself, it is not only at the mercy of global commodity markets but of other governments as well. At issue is not only the availability of food, which may be held hostage by a hostile state, but its safety: as recent scandals in China demonstrate, we have little control over the safety of imported foods. The deliberate contamination of our food presents another national-security threat. At his valedictory press conference in 2004, Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, offered a chilling warning, saying, "I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do."
</quote>
<snipping good stuff>
>Reading Pollan, you'd think that petrol had such such a massive role in
>modern farming, that every element of the process was handled by machine.
>And yet, we have all those migrant workers -- the unhappy targets of
>anti-immigrant attention -- working American fields and meat processing
>facilities. Clearly, farming is still very human labor intensive, despite
>the invention of the internal combustion engine.
>
>
>Apparently missing this element of modern farming, Pollan writes:
>
>
>To grow sufficient amounts of food using sunlight will require more people
>growing food — millions more.
>
>[...]
>
>And then goes into a description of a program to get people to stay in, or
>move to, farming communities to get the numbers up. Well Mr. Pollan, it
>seems there already are many millions of people working in the farm sector.
>
>They're just not officially recognized.
>.d.
yeah. I haven't finished reading Pollan's _Omnivore's Dilemma_ but thumbing through it, I've not really seen a discussion of labor. I looked in the index: nothing under labor, or workers, or migrants.
Something minor also bugged me about the opening of _Ominvore's Dilemma_. He discusses the geography of the supermarket, remarking on how the bounty of the produce section greets you as you enter nearly all supermarkets. He never mentions why supermarkets are set up as they are. Well, he does: "Produce is the only corner of the supermarket where we're apt to think "Ah, yes, the bounty of Nature!" Which probably explains why such a garden of fruits and vegetables (and sometimes flowers, too) is what usually greets the shopper coming through the automatic doors." (p 15)
*rolls eyes*
All the stuff that requires temperature control, produce, meat, dairy, frozen foods, line the walls of the store to make it easier to stock them without exposing them, for too long, to something other than the required temperature. No need to unload the dairy and cart it all to the front of the store or something. All the stuff that doesn't require chilling or freezing? It's in the middle of the store. You could argue that they put the stuff along those walls to force you to go through all the cereal and potato chips. But my experience is that while, yeah, I have to walk a long way to get a gallon of milk, it's also true that I can completely ignore the aisles in the middle, and just make my way from produce to meat to dairy to frozen without ever encountering a Lay's.
minor bitch, I know.
Another minor bitch, because I happened to read this, below, just before I read the moralizing stuff about health:
"See, I was going to tie this all together with a big tirade on the bogus notion of health as a moral issue how people are always yelling at you to quit smoking or quit eating or quit procrastinating when you should be packing or quit doing anything the doing of which is considered a moral failure, ostensibly out of their concern for your health, but in reality because "health," in accordance with some convoluted Christian doctrine embedded in the cultural subconscious, has become a kind of yardstick by which conformity within the social order is measured, and how shaming people who are insufficiently obsessed with their cholesterol puts these concern trolls in a morally superior position and creates an underclass of "unhealthies" who have brought it on themselves through their blatant ingestion of Cheetos but I'm too exhausted from all the delicious smoking. Let's just say that if you ran into me at the coffeeshop and suggested that my self-indulgent punk rocker lifestyle caused my breast cancer, you wouldn't be the first. The idea that you, through some assiduously applied, sanctimonious personal health program, can "prevent" cancer, or death, or whatever, and that such practices should win you higher status in your tribe, is a fucking load of crap. "
heh. I generally don't care for her politics, but she's a good writer. yes.
http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2008/08/19/cardboard-jungle-causes-smoking/
shag carpet bomb