Whenever I read one of these articles related to the vagaries of our monolithic food system, it takes me back to a not exactly idyllic, but certainly more sane & vital period in my life of land-based living.... off the grid, paying attention to compost (including humanure), growing the foods I'd previously only shopped for in bags, boxes and produce departments labelled with nearly never a local (as in same state) source. Trying to learn and unlearn a lifetime's worth of stuff in just a few years... I've been back in the city of my birth for a couple years now and am struck over and over by the profound disconnect we have from the natural world from which springs our food and other 'resources' we commodify without question and own and manipulate to create more money to own more commodities. We do this, I suppose, to build a fortress of security around ourselves, in the hopes that we will avoid inconvenience or discomfort and that we may entertain ourselves mightily so as to distract from all those bothersome 'others' out there. This disconnect is maintained by the monoculture system that insists on the industrialization cosmology of our lives and supported by military and economic violence as well as the violence of ripping human beings out of their natural context of connection and care and forcing them... us... into relationships where dependence and dominance dictate our imprisoned activities for entire lifetimes. Precious networks of family, friendship, co-creativity and open sharing are repeatedly torn by the vagaries of the marketplace, disrupting the integration that could make a saner world possible. Diversity is disallowed, electronic rectangles provide the illusion we are collaborative, when in actuality we don't know most of our neighbors or who down the street needs help we might offer or has some skill we have need for ourselves. A society fully conscious of and participatory in its food system would be a healthy one in which respect for our interconnections would inform decisions, from localized agricultural stewardship to health care to energy use to the sharing of skills, tools and celebratory arts in a manner that praised this mutilated world, rather than merely extracted from it, paying no heed to shredded web-strands or the accumulation of toxic waste and after(if-ever)thoughts left in our wake. Easy words to say; but not so easy to back up with real action when alternatives to car-centric and imposed infrastructures to support the monoculture (and starve out any noncompliant 'weeds') are demonized, disappeared, or just bulldozed over to make way for capital growth and image-preservation. This 'way of life' requires trillion-dollar wars on 'terror' from the biggest terrorists of all.... we, the (ironically globalizing) anti-terra-ists. We need to unplug and reach out to each other. I'm not sure why this hit a nerve... Maybe I'm just sending out an S.O.S. to some random original thinker out there who hasn't yet written us off as a lost cause. But would someone like that own a computer?

Be sure to read the New York Times article linked above.

In the early 70’s as a teenager and college student I worked at a little mom and pop grocery store that had its own meat department. The best choice grades beef were purchased by the quarter and the quarter of beef was then cut up by the owner of the store into cuts, cuts of beef were then sliced, or sawed if the cut contained bones, into steaks and roasts.

Excess fat was trimmed from the beef and reserved to be ground into hamburger. The owner of the store bought frozen blocks of lean (range) beef from Argentina which we cut first into slices then the slices were cut again into ¾ inch thick sticks. The fat trimmings from the choice grade beef were then ground with the frozen sticks of lean beef. We then ground the mixture again and adjusted it fat/lean mix so it was uniform.

The people doing this were the owner of the store and 3 or 4, 18-21 year old college students. He taught us how to make hamburger and how to break down the meat saw, meat tenderizer, meat slicer (lunch meat) and hamburger grinder to clean them. The rate of pay was the minimum wage plus a dime for every six months experience you gained and during the school year you worked 20 hours a week, but back then minimum wage was a lot better.

While the lean range beef was from Argentina it was from the hind quarter of a single animal while the choice beef was from local meat packing plants and was distributed by local meat wholesalers, worst case scenario the meat in our hamburger was from four different animals.

To show how times were different back then the meat was sliced on a wooden butcher block that was scraped clean several times a day and the meat processing area was not refrigerated, on the other hand meat was taken from the large walk in cooler, sliced and placed in the refrigerated display case always in less than five minutes.

There was a broad opinion that this little (even by standards back then) grocery had the best meat department in town. Also all of the cuts of meat were sliced in full view of the customers behind the refrigerated meat display cases.

Honeycrisp and fuji apples are heaven. When I got honeycrisps from the farmer's market a few weeks ago, I was almost moaning in pleasure when I ate them at work with my lunch...fuji's are definitely a close second.

And there is a stall there that sells crab apples from a tree planted on a local riverbank decades, if not longer ago, but I haven't tried them yet.

While I see many stories on CD about "unsafe" food caused by Cargill and other corporate food producer/distributors, I see very little comparative data. Of the 70M cases of food-borne illnesses each year, what are the sources of contamination (e.g. improper handling and storage after retail purchase, improper handling and storage before retail purchase, cross-contamination during or after purchase, soil-sourced microbes, soil-source chemicals, intentional pesticides, unintentional pesticides, etc.

Some historical perspective might also be in order. Most of the articles refer to fresh fruits and vegetables, and fresh and frozen meats. What were rates of food-borne illnesses in the days of predominately home-preservation?

Other journalistic sources don't have much to say in this regard, and the CDC tends toward prevention steps in their publications on the issue. The CD articles may be right and Cargill may be the devil incarnate, but sayin' it don't make it so. Where's the data?

btw, the best fruit ever were the pears from my grandmother's old pear tree. We never knew what kind they were, but I can still taste them, and the pear preserves we ate all winter.