Vert-à-Go

A doomsday email about proposed US food safety legislation (H.R. 875) has been making the rounds, scaring a lot of people and making a lot of unfounded and rather hysterical claims. Here’s the beginning of it, which will give you the gist:

House and Senate are about (in a week and a half) to vote on bill that will OUTLAW ORGANIC FARMING (bill HR 875). There is an enormous rush to get this into law within the next 2 weeks before people realize what is happening.

Main backer and lobbyist is Monsanto – chemical and genetic engineering giant corporation (and Cargill, ADM, and about 35 other related agri-giants). This bill will require organic farms to use specific fertilizers and poisonous insect sprays dictated by the newly formed agency to “make sure there is no danger to the public food supply”. This will include backyard gardens that grow food only for a family and not for sales.

If this passes then NO more heirloom clean seeds but only Monsanto genetically altered seeds that are now showing up with unexpected diseases in humans.

…etc, etc

I have not read the bill myself, but there have been rebuttals to the email’s extreme claims from a number of well-respected sources. Here are a few:

Tom Philpott at environmental news blog Grist asks, “Would new food-safety legislation criminalize organic farming? No.”

Food and Water Watch has a background page to H.R. 875 that tells you exactly what the bill does and does not cover. And a blog post on the subject.

Professor and author Marion Nestle ‘debunks 6 viral myths about H.R 875′ at The Daily Green.

Factcheck.org also has a great post dealing with a differently-worded email, from a decidedly non-panicked backyard organic gardener.

To sum up: although it looks as if it could certainly do with an amendment to protect small organic farmers from the worst expense of new food safety compliance rules, H.R. 875 will NOT force organic farms or backyard gardeners to use specific fertilizers and sprays, nor will it outlaw heirloom seeds. If you receive this email, please reply to the sender with the above information to reduce unnecessary panic.

The very first meeting of the parliamentary sub-committee dealing with food safety in Canada has ground to a halt because of a Conservative filibuster.

The Conservatives on the committee objected to an NDP amendment, which proposed adding more meetings to the committee’s schedule and which would also limit it to examining last summer’s deadly listeriosis outbreak. Tory MP David Anderson then got up and spoke for over half of this Wednesday’s meeting, while Conservative committee chair Larry Miller denied repeated opposition requests for Anderson to sit down:

Anderson defended his tactic after the meeting: “We wanted to work with these folks. This is a very serious issue. It seems like they’re playing games with this, and we’re not prepared to do that.”

But New Democrat MP Malcolm Allen, who proposed the amendment, scoffed at that.

“If we wanted to do the work, Mr. Anderson wouldn’t have filibustered for the last hour and fifteen minutes,” Allen said.

Opposition MPs noted there are already 47 names on the proposed witness list, and they argued there isn’t enough time to hear them all unless more meetings are scheduled.

Miller said it’s doubtful Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz–who is expected to face tough questions over his handling of the outbreak–will appear as scheduled next Tuesday.

Miller added it’s not clear when Ritz’s schedule will next allow him to be there. (Canadian Press)

Canadians need to tell Stephen Harper to put a stop to the political game-playing and let the committee get on with the vital work of ensuring a safe food supply. Food Safety First (the action campaign started by Canada’s food inspectors) has a sample email that you can send:

Dear Prime Minister Harper,

Perhaps you don’t know that your MPs on the food safety committee hijacked the very first meeting and prevented the committee from getting anything done.

I hope you agree that playing politics with food safety – as your MPs have done – is despicable.  I urge you to order the Conservative MPs to allow the committee to do its work, and quickly.

Please get back to assure me that you do not condone the behaviour of the Conservative MPs that prevented the committee from getting on with the job of making our food system safer.  I’d also like to know what you have done to ensure the committee can get on with its work.

Yours sincerely,

YOUR NAME HERE

Let Prime Minister Harper know that you care about ensuring a safe food supply and the 21 people who died from eating contaminated meat last year.

Tomatoes, spinach, peppers, processed meat, cheese, hamburger, peanuts…sounds like a fairly average shopping list, right? At various points over the past few years, however, each of these foods has been sold with a heaping secret helping of salmonella, listeriosis, or e. coli. Thousands of people have been made sick by these contaminated foods, dozens have died, and many innocent food growers, producers, and processors have been caught in the economic fallout caused by the outbreaks.

The latest exciting poisoned food saga involves peanuts contaminated with salmonella (677 made ill, 9 dead). A peanut processing plant in Georgia linked to the outbreak was found to have dead rats and cockroaches infesting the facility, not to mention big holes in the roof right above piles of peanuts waiting for processing (fyi: salmonella just loooves it damp). Another Peanut Corporation of America plant in Texas was later shut down after a crawlspace was found to contain dead rodents, rodent excrement and bird feathers and that particles from these delightful items were being sucked through the building’s ventilation system. The kicker? Well, there’s at least three kickers:

1. PCA’s in-house inspectors knew that their peanut butter contained salmonella and yet knowingly went ahead and shipped tainted products on at least a dozen occasions since 2007–at the repeated urging of CEO Stewart Parnell.
2. The PCA was certified organic and its certification was completely up-to-date. I guess rats (and rat feces) are, technically, ‘organic’…
3. One of the PCA’s major customers, Kellogg, hired private food safety inspectors who had no experience inspecting peanut processing facilities and who were given insufficient access by plant managers to do their job. Oh, and they weren’t required to test for salmonella. So they didn’t.

One of the most horrible aspects of serious food-illness outbreaks is that so many people are made sick and die before the cause of the infection can even be found (overwhelmingly, children, the elderly, pregnant women, and those with compromised immune systems are those who fall victim first). This is due in large part to the incredible complexity of the modern industrial food production, processing, and distribution system, which means that contaminated food outbreaks are no longer limited to a single company or product, or even to the same area of the world (as the melamine-tainted Chinese milk scandal proved).

You’ll remember how meat products from that one Maple Leaf plant in Ontario quickly found their way into dozens of different stores and food outlets, killing unsuspecting people across the entire country last summer. As another example, the Peanut Corporation of America provided peanut products for about 85 different companies who used them in their own processed food products. So although most people would be wary of peanut butter, it might not occur to them to be concerned about energy bars, crackers, or ice cream cones. None of these products come with a huge Peanut Corporation of America logo (or skull and crossbones) on them, so we have to rely on the food recall updates provided by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to find out what we should be avoiding.

Sad to say, it’s important to diligently keep abreast of these alerts in order to protect yourself and your family. An easy way to keep on top of the latest information is to sign up to receive email notification of food product recalls relevant to Canadian consumers straight from the CFIA, and check out the food safety resources below. It’s also vital to ask questions about where your food is coming from and find out how it is produced. Too often, the consumer is expected to bear the majority of the burden of preventing food-borne illness (don’t mix up your cutting boards! never undercook your turkey!), while unscrupulous growers, producers, and processors are left free to play Russian roulette with our health by selling us their dirty and dangerous food.

Food safety resources

• CFIA’s consumer centre Food illness fact sheets, up-to-the-minute information on food recalls and allergy alerts
• Barf Blog Dr Doug Powell bluntly dishes the dirt on all things related to food safety
• Canadian Partnership for Consumer Food Safety Education Advice and information to help Canadian consumers improve food handling practices
• Food Safety First A political action site sponsored by Canada’s food inspectors, urging greater government investment in food safety
• Health Canada’s food safety resources (many the same as on the CFIA site)
• Provincial restaurant inspection contacts Alarmed by a dirty restaurant? Find out who to contact about it here.

“Red meat is not bad for you. Now, blue-green meat, that’s bad for you!”

- Tommy Smothers

“You’ve got to eat a peck of dirt before you die.”

- my grandma

So how much of a daredevil are you? Have you gone skydiving? Rock climbing? How about eating that container of yoghurt that’s gone past its expiry date?

My sister lived with a woman from France years ago and would watch with equal measures of horror and admiration as she would routinely bring home two small chickens from the supermarket, roast them, eat one for dinner, then put the other one on a plate in the cupboard and pick away at it for another three or four days. She never showed the slightest hint of indelicacy and we took this as an obvious demonstration of the superior resilience of the Franco-gastro-intestinal tract, strengthened by years of eating weird stinky cheeses capable of sneaking out the door by themselves.

In the same vein, food writer Tim Hayward, writing in the Guardian, ponders the downside of that miracle of modern life–refrigeration:

“Have our fridges really made us weak? Have they made us forget how to buy and look after fresh food? Are we so afraid of decay that we’re chilling the life and character from our food? Does industrial quality refrigeration in our homes encourage us to to shop less often, buy more than we need, and ultimately throw more away? And the big question … are you happy to eat food you’ve scraped the fur off?”

Now, food poisoning is no joke, especially in these days of industrial livestock production and cross-contamination of vegetable produce. People do get desperately sick and even die from improperly grown, prepared or stored food. Yet one more reason to buy your food from a small, trusted local farmer! But I think it’s equally true that unfettered access to refrigeration and the dire warnings of food safety authorities have conspired to create a population that is so disconnected from how real food looks and behaves, and so fearful of eating something spoiled that we throw away billions of tons of food rather than just give it a quick sniff.

A friend once came to visit us after having just spent six months living in a Mongolian yurt drinking fermented mare’s milk and snacking on sheep eyes. I had accidentally left a pot of beef chilli out on the stove overnight and was staring doubtfully at it the next morning when he came in. ‘I guess I should probably throw this out,’ I told him. ‘Throw it out??’ he cried incredulously. ‘Westerners and their refrigeration! There’s nothing the matter with it!’ We ate it; we lived.* I was converted.

I’ll be posting tips on how to get more life out of your fresh food and how to sensibly gauge food freshness in the coming weeks!

* I must add that this was in cool weather and only involved consenting adults with healthy immune systems!