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Fear of Eating
Yesterday I did something risky: I ate a salad.
These are anxious days at the lunch table. For all you know, there may be E. coli on your spinach, salmonella in your peanut butter and melamine in your pet's food and, because it was in the feed, in your chicken sandwich.
Who's responsible for the new fear of eating? Some blame globalization; some blame food-producing corporations; some blame the Bush administration. But I blame Milton Friedman.
Now, those who blame globalization do have a point. U.S. officials can't inspect overseas food-processing plants without the permission of foreign governments — and since the Food and Drug Administration has limited funds and manpower, it can inspect only a small percentage of imports. This leaves American consumers effectively dependent on the quality of foreign food-safety enforcement. And that's not a healthy place to be, especially when it comes to imports from China, where the state of food safety is roughly what it was in this country before the Progressive movement.
The Washington Post, reviewing F.D.A. documents, found that last month the agency detained shipments from China that included dried apples treated with carcinogenic chemicals and seafood "coated with putrefying bacteria." You can be sure that a lot of similarly unsafe and disgusting food ends up in American stomachs.
Those who blame corporations also have a point. In 2005, the F.D.A. suspected that peanut butter produced by ConAgra, which sells the product under multiple brand names, might be contaminated with salmonella. According to The New York Times, "when agency inspectors went to the plant that made the peanut butter, the company acknowledged it had destroyed some product but declined to say why," and refused to let the inspectors examine its records without a written authorization.
According to the company, the agency never followed through. This brings us to our third villain, the Bush administration.
Without question, America's food safety system has degenerated over the past six years. We don't know how many times concerns raised by F.D.A. employees were ignored or soft-pedaled by their superiors. What we do know is that since 2001 the F.D.A. has introduced no significant new food safety regulations except those mandated by Congress.
This isn't simply a matter of caving in to industry pressure. The Bush administration won't issue food safety regulations even when the private sector wants them. The president of the United Fresh Produce Association says that the industry's problems "can't be solved without strong mandatory federal regulations": without such regulations, scrupulous growers and processors risk being undercut by competitors more willing to cut corners on food safety. Yet the administration refuses to do more than issue nonbinding guidelines.
Why would the administration refuse to regulate an industry that actually wants to be regulated? Officials may fear that they would create a precedent for public-interest regulation of other industries. But they are also influenced by an ideology that says business should never be regulated, no matter what.
The economic case for having the government enforce rules on food safety seems overwhelming. Consumers have no way of knowing whether the food they eat is contaminated, and in this case what you don't know can hurt or even kill you. But there are some people who refuse to accept that case, because it's ideologically inconvenient.
That's why I blame the food safety crisis on Milton Friedman, who called for the abolition of both the food and the drug sides of the F.D.A. What would protect the public from dangerous or ineffective drugs? "It's in the self-interest of pharmaceutical companies not to have these bad things," he insisted in a 1999 interview. He would presumably have applied the same logic to food safety (as he did to airline safety): regardless of circumstances, you can always trust the private sector to police itself.
O.K., I'm not saying that Mr. Friedman directly caused tainted spinach and poisonous peanut butter. But he did help to make our food less safe, by legitimizing what the historian Rick Perlstein calls "E. coli conservatives": ideologues who won't accept even the most compelling case for government regulation.
Earlier this month the administration named, you guessed it, a "food safety czar." But the food safety crisis isn't caused by the arrangement of the boxes on the organization chart. It's caused by the dominance within our government of a literally sickening ideology.
Paul Krugman is Professor of Economics at Princeton University and a regular New York Times columnist. His most recent book is The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century.
© 2007 The New York Times
20 Comments so far
Show Allagri business has hit the wall. you can only handle so much 'food' before you lose control.
Nearly 30 years ago, Jimmy Carter's 'Global 2000' Report predicted rapidly expanding disease problems in the world... epidemics carried across borders by refugees and various products.
The Bush Administration has let that become a self-fulfilling prophecy by their refusal to screen illegal invaders and imported food products.
As recently as a decade ago, the U.S. exported more food than we could consume in this country, now our imports exceed our exports and certainly more than our under-funded and under-staffed FDA can inspect... partly because of the destruction of the small farms, and partly because the big corporations are writing the regulations for their own industries under Bush.
The cons who swallow Friedman's malarkey whole, including many of those in the Bush criminal gang, cannot even begin to understand that there are no algorithms for success in the social sciences, and especially in the social science known as "economics." Any rules as simple as the one ascribed to Friedman by Krugman are only promoted by naive simpletons or by predators preying on such (or their paid sophists like Friedman).
Humans have to learn what they can about the complex mechanisms, unbounded in complexity, that determine the relationships in consumption and production in human society mostly through rough trial and error as formal experimentation is impossible and the variables are innumerable.
The cheapest commotity on Earth is human life. We all uncnosciouly know this and is why we blithely eat drink and breath poison. Health is something spent for pleasure. Remember how many drunks were in Pottersville? Fat tastes good, Soylent green will fill you up, pet food is made from dead pets. Its the real circle of life. So don't fear, eat, enjoy life, die and reduce over population, the Earth will re-process you eventually. Our largest agri crop is corn, grown with large amounts of oil consumption, which is made from other long-dead things. E-Coli has got a right to live too. The FDA only exists because health concious worry warts exist. Don't worry, be happy. Satire can be both funny an true.
As with so much of what characterized Friedman, he was dead wrong on this one too. Too bad the dead are often children, susceptible to E Coli infection.
Friedman: "It's in the self-interest of pharmaceutical companies not to have these bad things [dangerous drugs]" That is SO naive! Coke anyone? Just head to your local middle school.
hey Paul, hope your salad was good and you ate it with gusto, and it satiated your appetite, hope you used too much dressing and croutons too. Was it fresh, crispy, cold? Did you load up your fork and have to open your mouth realy wide. After all is said and done its good eats and good sex that make life worth living.
I don't think Mr. Krugman's article was satire.
Didn't we go through this whole social-services thingy about a handred years ago? And didn't we decide that if no health services or even food-safety services are delivered to the undeserving poor, you end up with a bunch of undersized, gap-toothed, rickety soldiers.
I do not know, of course, if a lack of what we may include under the rubric of social services makes our young people less likely to join the military because they do not feel the requisite loyalty to a state which seems to care little for their welfare, or more likely to join up in an attempt to ascend in class, but the 2nd Amendment gives all the men the right to bear arms, in our currently badly-regulated militia. I leave that to the experts in the Pentagon.
Krugman forgot the most important factor relative to globalization. It's the "free" trade deals, stupid!!! It's not the limited inspections of imported stuff that is the problem. You have to ask the question of why that stuff is being imported here in the first place. It's ALL about corporate profits! Why can't we buy food grown in America? Could it be because our own farmers have been driven off the land because of cheap imports? Could it be that Con-Agra, Monsanto, ADM et al get the lion's share of the billions given to them through our Farm Bill giveaways? It's the race to the bottom folks!
There are SOOOO many things that need to be done to fix this mess. And they aren't little things like ramping up inspections at the ports, or just fixing the FDA and USDA. There are major structual problems in our economy and our "democracy". We need to take our government back FOR THE PEOPLE not corporate profits. All you have to do is follow the money to see what is wrong.
Why don't we try this? Grow our own food and share what we don't need to use? Victory gardens in WWI encouraged people to grow their own food. I think this sustained corporate attack on personal freedom, and indeed on our ability to survive has to be addressed on a very basic level.
Milton Friedman was a fool and a selfish coward. At least Galbraith had his grounding on the farm and "agricultural" economics. Maybe that's why he was more real.
They are both now dead.
Friedman is remembered for $$ MONETARY POLICY $$
GALBRAITH is remembered for COMPASSION & FAIRNESS
You wanna fix these sorts of problems? Throw the goddam Republicans out on their ass next year, and hope too many people don't die in the meantime.
As many people on Commondreams probably know, the meat is most likely tainted...
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0107-07.htm
All foods, including almost all bread, all condiments, all processed food, fruit drinks, soda, almost everything in the U.S. now contains High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). It makes you fat...
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/blogs/content/
shared-blogs/palmbeach/plasmid/entries/2007/01/08/high_fructose_f.html
In other countries they use sugar, but here in the U.S., huge corn subsidies price sugar too high to be used as a sweetener. Now HFCS is being made with Genetically Modified Corn (40% of corn in the U.S. is GM corn) and it is unsafe to eat...
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0522-03.htm
I will be very surprised if within the next 5 years there isn't a nationwide epidemic of gastrointestinal problems or a major outbreak of mad cow disease... caused by contaminated foods due to lack of regulations and enforcement of existing regulations.
Buy locally grown food from the farmers markets and local farms. Grow your own food where possible. Eat what is in season for your locality.
Yep, buy only locally grown organic food. It's the ultimate practice of democracy, and neatly circumvents corporate farming. Result: cleaner air, cleaner water, and cleaner land.
Do they have Farmers Markets in NYC? I know, kinda silly to ask, but still, there ARE a lot of farms north of the city...
When I went vegetarian i didnt even know that they fed the remains of chickens to other chickens--or cattle to cattle, or that they scraped up manure as well and tossed that in for good measure. I heard about it in an X Files episode and assumed it was science fiction. How wrong! Humans will and do eat anything.
The book Slaughterhouse(written years before Schlosser's take on the same issue) had a great quote from an FDA meat inspector: first we washed the sh*t off the meat, then we scraped the sh*t off the meat, now the consumer eats the sh*t off the meat.
It seems more than that.
It seems that the people who are to be safeguarding our food supply are KNOWINGLY NOT.
And it seems that the media, in large part, goes along and under-reports what is happening. And when they do report, they leave out key details.
It seems that the main corporations (big pharm) who profit from all the health problems that result are the very ones who buy off our politicians with "fundraisers" (in an earlier time, we called them bribes).
Does it seem to you that there should be CRIMINAL PROSECUTIONS for food poisoners? As in, should we start to hold the officers IN the corporations responsible? (I'd bet they don't give their family's the same food)
And, shouldn't the trade treaties with other countries SPECIFY the SAME REQUIREMENTS for PESTICIDES or ADDITIVES that are the maximums in the US??? (Not to say these are strict enough)
In one of the newspapers, it was reported that at least 8500 pets DIED as a result of the melamine that is added as a "protein booster." The same poisoned pet food was fed to pigs and chickens meant for human consumption. And yet, the chickens (an enormous amount) were ACTUALLY RELEASED TO BE SOLD FOR FOOD!!!
In the end, though, it is the BUSH administration that must be held accountable for the present state of NON-ENFORCEMENT and UNDERFUNDING of the FDA. Nothing will stop them except IMPEACHMENT!!!
Call your electeds, all of them, and demand they stand up and do something NOW. If they don't, it really means they SUPPORT the Bush agenda. And, if we ever have a free election again, you need to keep track of this and throw out the spineless.
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I'm vegan. This means that I "only" have to worry about e-coli tainted Spinach and salmonella spiked Peanut butter. It is a sad state of affairs, when one even has to worry about adhering to a plant based diet.
The safety and quality of our food IS a national security issue. Look at some of the issues. Wheat bleached with a chemical used to induce diabetes in rats, any chemical that gets pasturized with milk doesn't have to be labeled, bread dough conditioned with bromine which, along with floride and chlorine, displaces the pitiful amount of iodine we consume and thus jeopardizes our thyroid health, high fructose corn syrup which is majorly damaging to the health of the pancreas. That is just the national stuff. Then throw in the uninspected garbage we buy abroad. Read labels and find out what the unpronouncable chemicals listed on the packages do to YOU and your loved ones. Jeez. We are a nation of fools if we don't demand pure, safe, HEALTHY food. Obesity epidemic, indeed.
"Neoconservatives", who are, confusingly enough, "neoliberal" economic cultists, like Friedman, are responsible for endless suffering and death. The more salient war deaths and injuries are effectively closeted per order of the Pentagon with the loyal assistance of a complicit news media. But many more casualties of this criminal pod will go barely detected or permanently undetected, thus effectively removing any and all accountability for untold numbers of deliberate and reckless homicides. Health statistics and mortality rates tell a real but barely cognizable story to the average person, whose eyes understandably glaze over at the sound or sight of numbers and statistics and charts and graphs. But the underlying reality is as violent and as real as a bullet to the head. It is useful to compute all the casualties and costs of neocon policies, whether they be cancer rates from industrial pollution, food pollution, or dangerous but legal pharmaceuticals, or diminished health services due to the deliberately contrived poverty of the economic victims of neocon-sanctioned corporate larceny, or the burgeoning numbers of victims of violent crime, some part of which is traceable to economic hardship and despair due to permanent, globalization-induced joblessness. And though these legions of dead, dying, suffering and grieving, already created by the neocon policies, approach astronomical numbers, these numbers are growing and will continue to grow long into the future. Lax occupational safety standards and enforcement has killed many, will kill many more. Politicization of the FDA will be producing strokes and tumors long after George Bush is gone and Richard Perle is permanently retired in the south of France living comfortably off of his war profits. Long after Paul Wolfowitz has spent every last dime of his $400,000.00 reward for disgracing himself at the World Bank, Indian farmers will continue to commit suicide by drinking rat poison, no longer able to bear the anguish of their starving families, victims of a vicious global corporatism.
The whole world has Leo Strauss and this tiny band of devil worshipers for a plague upon the human race which threatens to surpass nature's work during the Dark Ages.
A coule of Christmasses ago I was staying with friends in the States and I was asked to make a fruit salad. I bought melons, apple, oranges, grapefruit and a pineapple. As I cut up each one I tasted it. Unless my eyes were open I couldn't even tell what I was eating. I am spoiled by living in Southern France where things are locally grown and wonderful. I get my cheese from the cheese maker himself, the bread from the baker, the eggs from the farm.
Not only is America's food in danger, it has no taste, it laden with hormones (could that have anything to do with the number of fat people in the US?). America's food supply system is a disgrace.
Unless my eyes were open I couldn't even tell what I was eating.
Yes, it is tasteless, but doesn't it look pretty? The oranges are as bright-colored as a spanking-new caterpillar dozer - and the Washington apples look like the one Walt Disney depicted in 'Snow-White".
And particularly if it comes from California(TM) most of the "organic" stuff is no better. I do have a vague memory of what an orange used to taste like. And I didn't realize what chicken is really supposed to taste like until I was working in the oil field in Venezuela. Back When I was in school, visiting Chinese students used to ask why "Amelican chicken taste like watel".