New Farming Practices and Food Contamination

Does it seem as if there seems to be an awful lot of press on contaminated food these days? Sometimes it’s onions, sometimes it's lettuce, and other times deli foods.

Although the Center for Disease, Control and Prevention (CDC) has been struggling in the last several years to maintain its integrity and its authority, we hear reports of various kinds of food contamination. According to the CDC, the fresh, slivered onions served on Quarter Pounder hamburgers at McDonald’s are the likely source of a multi-state outbreak of Escherichia coli (E. coli).

Although I have no particular love of McDonald's I also am not in favor of the gratuitous blame that the media seem to be ascribing to McDonald’s. How would McDonald's have know that the food was contaminated? When we purchase food, whether in a grocery store or from a wholesaler, we assume it is not contaminated.

If there is blame to be placed, and there seems to be a lot of that going around in the media recently, it should be placed with Taylor Farms, the California-based onion grower. It is the grower that should be held responsible for growing and selling food free from contaminants. It is reasonable for MacDonald's to assume that the onions they purchased for use in their restaurants are safe and edible.

But in all of the articles, I haven’t read anything about the responsibilities of Health and Human Services (HHS) or any of its twelve subgroups, including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), actually assuring that foods leaving farms are not only edible, but also safe for human consumption.

The 2024 presidents budget request for HHS is $1.7 trillion in mandatory funding with $144.3 billion in discretionary funding. The budget aims to address challenges like improving the behavioral health crisis, public health threats, the needs of unaccompanied children and refugees, and access to affordable healthcare.

We’ve also read absolutely nothing about any of these organizations investigating the kinds of farming practices that promote contamination of the food growing in producer fields.

On June 30, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Wiley act, commonly referred to as the food and drug act. This law says hazardous materials cannot be added to food and problems with food cannot be concealed.

John P. Swann, Ph.D., a historian in the FDA History Office and author of the book Academic Scientists and the Pharmaceutical Industry: Cooperative Research in Twentieth-Century America was interviewed about the history of the FDA.

So why is the FDA allowing contaminants to be added to our food supply? Forbes recently wrote about the listeria outbreak at Boar's Head meats.

Boar’s Head meat is in trouble for many reasons because of their ubiquitous listeria outbreak which has now been traced to multiple meat products, including deli meats and ham. The listeria outbreak in deli meat is linked to 59 hospitalizations across 19 states, and according to the CDC, includes 10 deaths across Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Virginia, Florida, Tennessee, New Mexico, and South Carolina. Those who have become ill range in age from 32 to 95. However, as is often the case in collecting data such as this, the numbers are likely to be much higher than reported. The majority of people who eat contaminated food either don't get sick or don't get sick enough to report their illness.

Unfortunately, the USDA inspection reports going back two years have highlighted alarming issues at Boar’s Head, such as mold, insect manifestations, dripping water, with meat and fat residue on walls, floors and equipment and pools of blood on the floor. These conditions posed an imminent threat to food safety. Senator Richard Blumenthal, criticized the USDA lack of response to dozens of warnings about health risks at the facility  Blumenthal stated:

USDA took virtually no action—allowing Boar’s Head to continue business as usual at its chronically unsanitary Virginia plant—despite finding repeated serious violations. The Virginia plant should have been shut down years ago before people got sick or died from Listeria.

Certainly the federal regulatory agencies did not do their job, allowing the Boar's Head violations to continue for so long. The inspections of plants such as the Boar's Head are usually done by state agencies. In this case the Virginia state agencies apparently made no attempt to correct the problems. The question reporters should be looking at is why these reports of violations escaped the attention of the FDA at the federal level.

And finally, I believe we should be asking why those who grow food for sale to grocery stores and food wholesalers are not held accountable for their contamination of their food products. McDonald's or the shopper in the grocery store have no way of knowing about the contamination—until they become sick.

I suspect one side of the food contamination story has never surfaced in the media. Farming has changed radically in the past 50 years. My belief is that those changes may in part be one of the contributing factors in our increasing problems with food contamination.

I grew up on a farm in North Dakota. I am very familiar with the way we handled manure and crop fertilization in the 50s and the 60s. I have certainly hauled my share of manure from the barns and feed lots to the fields. In the beginning, manure is solid and we shoveled it into a manure spreader and distributed it on the fields to lie dormant all fall and winter. In North Dakota, the 30-below winters, wind, evaporation and sun killed off a lot of the bacteria in the manure. But we were not done with the purification process. In the spring, we plowed the fields and disked and dragged the fields, mixing the fertilizer into the soil. And we never put manure in any form on our vegetable gardens. Indeed, any book on living off the land will warn against using any sort of manure on food crops. In any case, in those days, we didn’t have contamination of onions, lettuce, and vegetables as we have now.

As you might guess, managing manure that way was extremely labor-intensive, but nobody complained. Today, everything has to be easier and faster. Today, the raw manure is liquefied, held in tanks, and sprayed on growing crops by high-pressure hoses. Some of this solution will become runoff from the fields and find its way into water resources, contaminating water as well.

So. when you spray raw manure all over your lettuce leaves, onions and other vegetables, there is bound to be contamination. The surprise is that we don’t have more contamination and more illness than we already have.

So rather than blaming McDonald’s or supermarkets for contaminated food, the FDA and the USDA need to do the jobs they are supposed to be doing. These organizations need to identify the methods of handling raw manure which do not kill bacteria and to prevent the use of raw manure on food crops. That is not the job of McDonald’s, Walmart, or any other restaurant or grocery store. Ensuring public safety in our food products is clearly the job of the FDA and the USDA. Any book on homesteading or living off the grid will clearly provide warnings about not putting raw manure or waste of any kind on vegetable plants and kitchen gardens. It's time that the way today's food producers handle raw manure of any kind be examined by the FDA and the USDA and be revised to avoid spreading bacterial contaminants to our food supply.

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