Paul Roberts - The End of Food

First Mariner Books edition 2009

Copyright 2008 by Paul Roberts
All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Roberts, Paul, date.
The end of food / Paul Roberts.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-618-60623-8
1. Food supply. 2. Nutrition. 3. Food industry and trade
Environmental aspects. 4. Food industry and trade
Social aspects. 5. Nutrition policy. I. Title.
HD 9000.5. R 578 2007
363.8 dc22 2007036031

ISBN 978-0-547-08597-5 (pbk.)

Printed in the United States of America

DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Hannah and Isaac

I N LATE OCTOBER of 2006, seven weeks after the first reports that E. coli O157:H7 had been found in bags of fresh spinach, investigators working the farms in California's Salinas Valley got a break. On a cattle ranch near Highway 101, authorities shot a wild boar and found in its guts the same strain of E. coli that had killed three people and sickened some two hundred others. The ranch was nearly a mile from the suspect spinach farm, but the evidence of a connection was compelling; that same E. coli strain had also been found in cattle manure and in streams on the ranch. The fence around the spinach farm had been trampled down by wild boars, and boar tracks had been spied among the spinach plants. While refusing to label the pigs the sole culprits, Dr. Kevin Reilly, with the California Department of Health Services, told reporters that the animals presented a "real clear vehicle" by which the E. coli bacteria could have moved from ranch to farm. Noting that no one had been sickened by tainted spinach since late September, when the Food and Drug Administration had lifted its ban on spinach, Reilly told reporters that "all evidence points to this outbreak having concluded."

As reassuring as Reilly's words may have seemed, anyone with even a passing knowledge of the modern food system knew the story was far from over. As Reilly himself cautioned, there were plenty of other plausible sources for the contaminationirrigation water, farm runoff, and fertilizer, to name a fewand thus plenty of reasons to worry that other outbreaks were simply waiting to happen. And in fact, just as the spinach crisis was winding down, another E. coli outbreak, this one among customers of Taco Bell, was traced back to lettuce from the Salinas Valley. Nor would these outbreaks be the last bad news for the food industry. Over the next twelve months, consumers would lurch from one food-safety debacle to the next, among them, a massive salmonella outbreak from tainted peanut butter, the unfolding Chinese import scandal, and, in October 2007, an outbreak of E. coli in hamburger so widespread that the recall effort bankrupted the nation's largest seller of ground beef.

In other words, there would no longer be even the implicit guarantees that fresh produce was safe from contamination.

Corporate candor of this kind is generally either accidental or purely tactical, and clearly, food retailers have been trying to push as much responsibility for food-borne illnesses and contamination onto their suppliers as they possibly canjust as retailers have always done with costs they do not wish to pay. Yet the letter also underlines the powerlessness felt by both the food companies and the agencies that regulate them; the safety problem was moving beyond the industry's capacity to manage, or even fully understand. It took Taco Bell weeks before it realized the pathogen had entered the food chain on lettuce, not green onions, and even after six months of study, federal and state investigators admitted that "no definitive determination could be made" as to how E. coli O157:H7 had gotten into the spinach.

After decades of hearing that our food system is the best, it almost seemed as if a curtain had been drawn back and we'd been allowed a glimpse of the shadowy structures behind the food systemthe huge networks of production and distribution and retailing that convey millions of tons of food to the hundreds of millions of consumersonly to find those structures broken or derailed. As successive food-safety stories began to blur into a single narrative of incompetence and uncertainty, as admissions and equivocations poured forth from investigators, policymakers, and industry executives, the impression grew stronger that these enormous food companies and powerful agencies were conceding not only that the modern food system was in trouble but also that there was little they or anyone else could do about it. For the first time, we were acknowledging the widening gap between the modern food economy and the billions of people it was ostensibly built to serve.

This is not the food narrative that most of us grew up with. Until late in the twentieth century, the modern food system was celebrated as a monument to humanity's greatest triumph. We were producing more foodmore grain, more meat, more fruits and vegetablesthan ever before, more cheaply than ever before, and with a degree of variety, safety, quality, and convenience that preceding generations would have found bewildering. Critics and malcontents might complain about farm chemicals or exploited migrant workers or certainly the blandness of much of our processed food. But for the rest of a grateful world, these were trivial costs to pay for a superabundance that had liberated humankind from a long night of hunger and drudgery.

Today, it's becoming ever more obvious that our triumph was never complete. The same supply chains that undergird our global supermarket, making fresh produce and meat available in every hemisphere and every season, have also created perfect opportunities for both familiar food-borne pathogens, such as E. coli and salmonella, as well as emerging varieties, such as avian flu, the rapidly mutating virus that may well be the basis of the next global pandemic. And for all our miraculous productivity, nearly a billion peopleone in sevenremain "food insecure," to use Washington's sanitized term, and their ranks swell by about 7.5 million a year. Where hunger has been banished, populations now struggle with the less desirable consequences of the modern diet, such as obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. Worse, many of the same methods that unleashed such abundance, such as large-scale livestock operations and chemically intensive farming, have so degraded the productive capacities of our natural systems that it's not clear how we'll feed the nearly ten billion people expected by midcentury, or even how long current food production levels can be maintained.

In the meantime, the very act of eating, the basis of many of our social, family, and spiritual traditionsnot to mention the one cheap pleasure that could ever rival sexhas for many devolved into an exercise in irritation, confusion, and guilt. In North America, Europe, and even emerging Asia, hundreds of millions of anxious consumers flit from one diet to the next, obsessing over bad carbs and good fats, additives and allergies, worrying over food as if we were hunter-gatherers on some primeval veldt instead of citizens in the wealthiest, most sophisticated cultures in human history. The very meaning of food is being transformed: food cultures that once treated cooking and eating as central elements in maintaining social structure and tradition are slowly being usurped by a global food culture, where cost and convenience are dominant, the social meal is obsolete, and the art of cooking is fetishized in coffee-table cookbooks and on television shows.

On nearly every level, we are reaching the end of what may one day be called the "golden age" of food, a brief, near-miraculous period during which the things we ate seemed to grow only more plentiful, more secure, more nutritious, and simply