The unfolding saga of the pet food recall here in the US illustrates several connected threads of the dark side of globalization and the reality of how bizarre our industrial food supply has become.
To summarize, it appears that Chinese producers of various protein-enhancing products like wheat gluten, corn gluten, and rice protein concentrate “spiked” their inferior products with melamine, the plastic chemical used to make cheap furniture to cause the products to test higher for protein. Melamine is very bad to ingest; an estimated 39,000 dogs and cats have been made sick and hundreds have died. The latest twist is that some of the bad pet food was subsequently fed to hogs, raising the question of whether it could ultimately end up in the human food chain.
So many questions, so little time to write! American producers of wheat gluten are upset because the Chinese products are cheaper and undercutting their domestic sales. So, apart from the moral outrage that shoddy practices are killing our pets, it’s also hurting our competitiveness.
This whole saga exposes how “scientific” our food production has become. Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma gave me a great insight into how food has become so processed these days. We are taking apart the natural food, extracting the components, and reassembling them into new products. It makes perfect sense to take a wheat grain, refine it into constituent parts, then resell it. You end up with container ships full of extracted materials being shipped all over the world to wherever they can be reassembled into something some person or animal will eat.
I say “or animal” because the most disturbing parts of the industrial food process are how we feed cows corn–a food they won’t naturally eat, then dose them up with antibiotics to combat how the corn messes up their digestive system. Then, to boost their protein, we feed them chicken or beef byproducts. The animals are just living machines that convert “food” we won’t eat into a “tasty” form: steak.
Now pet food is apparently the bottom of the food chain here. Whatever stuff is left over can be dumped into pet food, produced anonymously by large companies no one has ever heard of, then branded as whatever name is likely to appeal to consumers. The idea that all your Purina pet food comes from some Purina plant is as naive as the idea that any meat you eat came from an animal that was on a farm.
After reading Pollan’s book, I wanted to live and eat differently. I was really impressed by his story of Polyface farm in Virginia–a farm that uses intensive management of natural resources to create a food-producing “ecosystem” that is sustainable. But you can’t mail order food from them–that’s kind of the whole point. Local food for local people, produced in an environmentally-friendly, sustainable, respectful manner. A chicken is really a chicken. Cows eat grass, not other cows.
So if you live near Polyface farm, great. But what if you live in New York City? What if you can’t afford to buy premium food? In the US, you can make an argument to “eat better but less” so that the cost is not a determining factor. But what about the rest of the world?
China is growing at an incredible pace…billions of people need to be fed. The same story in India and Africa. The farms they have have been improved by the Green Revolution in the 1970s and many of the prescriptions for sustainability there call for starting down the path of food industrialization–at least by using fertilizer, etc. We need the science of food production to meet the massive needs of world population growth and to allow for economic development. We need food trade as a part of economic development as well. We don’t need China poisoning our pet food, but it is a predictable economic, captialistic consequence. I’m not condoning it, I’m just saying that when you put food on the free market, people will figure out how to make money from it and some will be unscrupulous. Who cares if a few American pets die when thousands of villagers are starving?
It would be healthful if Americans would change their eating habits and strive for greater sustainability. But as former Harvard president Larry Summers said in a recent trip to India, it is really up to the developing world to deal with these sustainability issues. The industrial world has created much of the problem, but if our actions are hurting the environment and ultimately ourselves, imagine what will happen as all the rising Chinese and Indians begin to live and work like Americans. Time to look for another planet?
The title of this post is Soylent Green because I think that movie–and the horror of discovery that to meet future food needs, we were recycling people into food–is not that crazy a scenario. We already do so much processing of food it would be a small step to add people into the mix. But I think, rather than just be disgusted or angry, we need to think about why all of this is happening and try to find solutions to the food supply challenge. We have plenty of food. The problem is making food production profitable. To that end we have Chicken McNuggets instead of fresh chickens that used to run around a farmyard.
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