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Everyone’s talking about food safety—or rather, the lack of it—in the American food system these days.

Ground beef in a U.S. supermarket, courtesy Flickr user hfabulous

The New York Times published a deeply disturbing account this week of the trauma inflicted on one young woman by E. coli-tainted beef. At age 22, Stephanie Smith was left paralyzed by the simple act of eating a hamburger—a hamburger grilled by her own mother, who had no way of knowing that the frozen “American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties” she had purchased for her family contained “a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps” from as far away as Uruguay.

Such severe reactions to food poisoning may be rare, but the industry practices revealed by Smith’s story are not. A pound of commercial hamburger contains bits of meat from as many as 400 different cattle, as sustainable foods advocate Marion Nestle has written. The documentary Food, Inc. offers an even higher estimate of up to 1000 cows in a single burger. Gross!

Beef is not the only issue. The Center for Science in the Public Interest recently ranked the “10 riskiest foods” in the country, based on the number of food-borne illness outbreaks associated with all foods under FDA regulation. With leafy greens, lettuce, potatoes, tomatoes, sprouts and berries on the list, it seems that even vegetarians aren’t immune to the risk of food poisoning. Eggs, tuna, oysters, cheese and ice cream are also in the top ten. (Beef isn’t, but it’s regulated by the USDA, so wasn’t factored into this study. Actually, eggs fall partly under USDA’s purview, too. The distinctions can be confusing—maybe this will help, or at least provide a much-needed moment of levity amidst this gloomy discussion.)

“Together, these 10 foods alone account for nearly 40 percent of all food-borne illness outbreaks linked to FDA-regulated foods since 1990,” the report states, adding that because so many cases of food-borne illness go unreported, “the outbreaks included here represent only the tip of the iceberg.”

As a look at a Google News timeline will show, “food safety” has been a buzzword for at least a decade now. Unfortunately, the only thing everyone can agree on so far is that we have a problem. Some people are calling for more government involvement in monitoring and enforcing food safety; others want less; some think oversight should be consolidated. Industry groups hope that advances in food science and technology will provide the answers. Many point the blame at our globalized food system, and advocate eating local.

What do you think?

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Have you ever stopped to think about how strange it is that we drink the breast milk of another species?

And no, I’m not going all PETA on you. I grew up down the street from a dairy farm in Vermont, and drank a glass of fresh cow’s milk every morning at my mother’s insistence. My morning ritual has since turned to coffee instead, but I still eat plenty of cheese, yogurt and ice cream, so I’m not knocking dairy. I’m just intrigued by the idea that early humans had to figure this out at some point; it requires a leap of logic (as well as an evolutionary adaptation to produce lactase, the enzyme needed to digest lactose).

Maybe it was lightbulb-over-the-head moment for a hungry shepherd or cowherd: Hey guys, we know that human breastmilk is edible, and these sheep, goats and cattle we own are edible. They also make breastmilk… so could we eat that, too?

Of course, we’ll never know for sure what happened, but we know a lot more than we used to. Recently, researchers used computer modeling to figure out when and where the trait of “lactase persistence” probably evolved. They traced it back to the Neolithic cultures of about 7,500 years ago in Central Europe and the Balkans, where it seems to have co-developed at the same time as dairy farming, not surprisingly. What is surprising is that it started so far south; as this press release notes, that negates a popular assumption about why the trait developed. If not in response to low vitamin D levels in sun-starved northern climes, why would the human body bother to develop lactose tolerance? (We addressed that question in a previous post, so I won’t get into it here, although I’d love to hear other perspectives.)

This map, recently published in the PLoS journal of Computational Biology, is a cool way of illustrating the point, complete with a diagram of a lactose molecule and photos of pottery from the Linearbandkeramik culture of the time:

The ability to digest lactose developed first in the regions shown in white, then expanded outward. Map courtesy PLoS.

Today’s post comes from guest writer Clay Risen, who is currently in Germany for two months on a journalism fellowship.

Farmers' market at Winterfeldt Platz in Berlin, Germany. Photo by Clay Risen.

Christian Lindner, a farmer in Lietzow, about 25 miles east of Berlin, has been bringing his organic produce to Berlin’s farmers’ markets for years—23 years, to be exact. But it’s only in recent years that demand for his products, and that of his fellow eco-farmers around eastern Germany, has taken off.

“Now I deliver food to some of the leading restaurants in Berlin,” he says in between serving customers at the Wednesday market in Winterfeldt Platz. He holds up a plastic basket of cheese. “I have to take this to Altes Europa [a high-end restaurant near Alexanderplatz] later today.”

The stereotypical images of eastern Germany—rotting factories, polluted streams, and ghost towns—don’t exactly shout eco-friendliness. Yet in recent years the area around Berlin—primarily in the state of Brandenburg, but also in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Sachsen, and the other former East German states—has seen an explosion of organic farming.

Former factory in Forst (Lausitz), courtesy Flickr user Siesja

It’s not all that surprising. The communist German Democratic Republic ran its agricultural industry through massive, inefficient collective farms; after unification, those farms became redundant and were mostly shuttered. Large swaths of that land have since been converted to natural preserves, but some of it, particularly the land closer to large cities, has been sold off to entrepreneurial small farmers looking to exploit the growing demand for organic goods.

It’s a trend that the state governments, still suffering from underdevelopment and high unemployment, hope to exploit.

“The eco-market is booming,” wrote Dieter Woidke, Brandenburg’s minister for agricultural development, the environment, and consumer protection, in a recent report. “Not too long ago organic farmers and stores recalled musli and Birkenstocks. Anyone who has been to a grocery store recently knows how much that has changed.”

Organic farming is big business the world over, and nowhere more so than in eastern Germany. In 2000, the state of Sachsen had just 127 organic farms; eight years later that number had more than doubled, to 304. Sachsen-Anhalt, to its west, has seen similar results: between 2000 and 2008, the number of organic farms there rose from 175 to 305, while the total hectares farmed nearly doubled, from 23,380 to 45,000.

But it is Brandenburg, the breadbasket of Berlin, that is leading the boom: At just below ten percent, it has the highest amount of farmland under organic production anywhere in Germany (the state-level average is 4.7 percent). Starting with just 20 organic farms and about 5,100 hectares in 1990, today it has almost 800, commanding over 130,000 hectares of farmland.

Those farms not only generate higher value-added food products, but eco-tourism as well. At the Brodowin “eco-village,” about an hour northeast of Berlin, for example, visitors can take tours, camp overnight, and even help harvest crops.

Brandenburg hopes that organic farming and related fields like environmental studies can be job engines, as well. In Eberswalde, a commuter suburb between Berlin and Brodowin, students at the local technical college can get bachelor’s and master’s degrees in organic farm management, which cover everything from farming techniques to marketing and sales. According to the state government, the courses
are oversubscribed, full of young people frustrated with the lack of industrial and service-sector jobs in the east.

Yet problems remain. To achieve and retain organic labels, farms have to invest significant capital into modern, energy-efficient equipment. And, the efforts of the Eberswalde technical college notwithstanding, the region still lags in the number of workers knowledgeable in sustainable agricultural practices.

But perhaps the biggest problem is logistical. It’s one thing for farmers like Lindner to pack up a truck and ferry their goods to Berlin. It’s another to link those farmers to the national agricultural distribution network, which is still dominated by western German industrial farms. Small farmers not only need good rail connections, but also things like cold-storage facilities, farmers’ banks, and intermediary markets to reduce the substantial risk involved in national agricultural markets.

For now, though, the demand in Berlin, Dresden, and other eastern metropolises is enough to keep farmers like Lindner busy. “I’m worried about competition from the euro market,” he says. But for now, he’s just happy people finally recognize the value of organic produce.

“They finally realize it’s a lot better than Maggi.”

—Clay Risen is the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and a 2009 Arthur Burns Fellow at der Tagesspiegel in Berlin. He also writes occasionally for The Atlantic Food Channel.

Grape boycott poster. Courtesy of Flickr user Steve_Rhodes

The observance of Labor Day, which was declared a national holiday in 1894, is usually associated more with the organized labor movement in industry than in agriculture. But some of America’s most significant labor milestones have taken place in the fields, not the factories.

In the colonial era, most farm labor was provided by indentured servants from Great Britain—white men and women, even children, who exchanged four to seven years of hard labor for passage to the colonies. Some of these workers were recruited through trickery or force and were kept and sold as property, with few rights. In a letter in the collection at Virtual Jamestown (which also includes a searchable database of records of indentured servants), dated 1623, Richard Frethorne describes to his parents the miserable conditions of his servitude and begs them to purchase his freedom or at least send food. “And when we are sick there is nothing to comfort us; for since I came out of the ship I never ate anything but peas, and loblollie [water gruel],” he writes. “As for deer or venison I never saw any since I came into this land. There is indeed some fowl, but we are not allowed to go and get it, but must work hard both early and late for a mess of water gruel and a mouthful of bread and beef.”

By the 1600s, indentured servants weren’t plentiful enough to provide all the labor needed, so plantation owners turned to an even crueler method of workforce recruitment: the forceable capture of Africans to be used as slaves. Instead of a fixed period of enslavement, these unwilling immigrants had almost no promise of eventual freedom. Over the next two centuries, African slaves became the primary source of farm labor in the colonies. According to the Colonial Williamsburg Web site, by the dawn of the American Revolution, 20 percent of the population in the 13 colonies was of African descent, the majority of them slaves.

As the nation grew and expanded westward, so did slavery, especially in the South. But abolitionist sentiment also took root. By the 1800s a deep rift had developed between the states with slave-dependent economies and those that opposed the practice. In 1808 Congress banned the international slave trade, though not the practice of slavery itself—that took another 55 years and the Civil War.

As the Wall Street Journal’s Douglas A. Blackmon asserts in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2008 book Slavery By Another Name, though, the Emancipation Proclamation did not lead to freedom for all American blacks. From the end of the Civil War through World War II, he writes, hundreds of thousands of African Americans endured new forms of involuntary servitude with the aid of legal loopholes and discriminatory federal policies. Some were “arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines and charged for the costs of their own arrests,” which they were forced to pay through labor in the fields and elsewhere, and others were flat-out kidnapped and compelled into what Blackmon calls neoslavery.

Even those African Americans who were ostensibly free hardly had it easy. General William T. Sherman ordered that freed slaves be granted 40 acres per family on abandoned land along the Georgia and South Carolina coasts, but following Lincoln’s assassination a few months later, the new president, Andrew Johnson, reversed the order. Many former slaves became sharecroppers, or tenant farmers, trading a portion of the harvest for the use of land and equipment.

California became a major agricultural center after the Civil War. There, farm labor was mostly imported from Asia. By the 1930s, the immigrant labor force had begun to shift to Mexico, and during the World War II labor shortage the Bracero Program was initiated, which allowed Mexicans to work temporarily on U.S. farms. The program was ended in 1964, although Latin American immigrants—legal and illegal—continue to make up the vast majority of the U.S. agricultural workforce.

The Mexican-American community organizer and activist César Chávez became a hero of the farm labor movement by fighting for the rights of migrant workers from the 1960s through the 1980s. Along with Dolores Huerta, he founded the National Farm Workers Association, later called the United Farm Workers, which led a five-year strike of grape pickers and a national grape boycott that eventually succeeded in securing higher wages for the workers. Later protests targeted the exposure of workers to harmful pesticides.

Today Chávez’s birthday, March 31, is declared a holiday in California and several other states, and there is a campaign to make it a national holiday, for which President Obama expressed support as a candidate.

Sugar cubes could be a thing of the past? Courtesy of Flickr user Uwe Hermann

It’s often said that Americans are addicted to oil—witness the tizzy that ensued last summer when pump prices topped $4 per gallon in many places. But if there’s one substance we’re nearly as dependent on, it’s sugar—in our treats, in our packaged foods, in our coffee (America may “run on Dunkin’,” but not just for the caffeine). So what would happen if we ran out? That’s what a group of food companies, including Kraft, General Foods and Hershey, warned could happen soon if the government doesn’t allow more sugar imports, in a letter to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack on August 5.

According to Bloomberg news, damaged crops in India and Brazil are leading to a record two-year shortfall in world sugar production versus global demand—and to record sugar prices.

A lot of people (myself included) might react to the prospect of life without sugar the same way Stephen Colbert did last week on his Comedy Central show The Colbert Report: with an extended banshee scream. (He then proceeded to shower himself in a cascade of sugar.) But, his guest, the well-known nutrition professor Marion Nestle (no relation to the Nestlés of Crunch-bar and Toll-House fame), made the case that the shortage is “a manufactured crisis because the food companies want to have cheap sugar from other countries.”

At least, she tried to make the case. As she learned (and later explained on her blog at The Atlantic’s food site), a fake news show is no place to discuss the issues behind actual news stories. In this instance, those issues include the system of quotas and tariffs the government imposes on imported sugar. Calling U.S. sugar the “single most heavily protected agricultural commodity,” Nestle writes that only 15 percent of total sugar in this country is allowed to come from imports. That 15 percent is controlled by quotas distributed among 20 countries, who have to pay high tariffs for anything additional (except for Mexico, because of NAFTA).

Further complicating things is the fact that many food makers are responding to the (unwarranted, according to Nestle) public backlash against high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) by using more cane and beet sugar. At the same time, corn that once was grown for sweeteners is now going to produce ethanol, raising the price of HFCS, too.

But, just as the gas-price freak-out last year forced Americans to, at least temporarily, evaluate their driving habits, a sugar crisis—manufactured or not—might be a good time to look at the amount of sugars in our diets. According to a recent statement from the American Heart Association, “between 1970 and 2005, average annual availability of sugars/added sugars increased by 19%, which added 76 calories to Americans’ average daily energy.”  In 2001 to 2004, the usual intake of added sugars for Americans was 22.2 teaspoons, or 355 calories, per day. And that isn’t even counting naturally occurring sugars, which the body doesn’t distinguish from the white stuff.

Bottom line: regardless of what happens on the world market, most of us could stand a little self-imposed sugar shortage.