The Future Has Begun

Government food inspectors cannot keep up. In 2001, for example, the US Food and Drug Administration reported that more than a quarter of the tainted seafood imports it identified were contaminated with salmonella, and more than half of those were shrimp. But the volume of imports is so high that the fda cannot inspect even 1 percent of what comes into the country.

“Salmonella is conventionally an animal organism, in birds or mammals,” says veterinarian and epidemiologist David Waltner-Toews, author of the book Food, Sex and Salmonella. “So what’s this about it showing up in plants? ” He tells of a friend who investigated a place where almonds — whose popularity has grown exponentially in recent years — were being grown. He found that farmers had planted the trees so densely, and the level of organic matter under the trees was so thick, that salmonella was actually growing in the soil.

“Suddenly, we’re all inside the animal,” says the vet in his characteristically vivid manner of speaking. “It’s no longer simply a matter of having the chicken and tomatoes on the counter and there’s cross-contamination; that’s the more conventional stuff. But when it becomes systemic and gets into the soil, and the produce itself, then it’s more problematic. You don’t know where it’s lurking anymore.”

While the problems in the system are certainly grand, the common “solutions” tend to focus narrowly, as Waltner-Toews notes, on “these tomatoes, in these fields.” Technology for identifying the source of contaminants has improved dramatically: particular strains of a disease, for example, can be traced by their dna fingerprints. But that doesn’t mean much if a contaminated crop is distributed across North America. “By the time it gets to the grocery store, you don’t know where it came from,” he says. In fact, your food may well travel thousands of kilometres before it reaches your table.

That frustrates Laura Young, a food advocate raised on a farm her family still owns in the Holland Marsh, a flat, fertile tract of land north of Toronto that produces $50 million worth of produce a year. Grocery stores in the area sell imported vegetables when the same ones are growing literally steps away. This past spring, Young and another food advocate started the Holland Marsh Greenbelt Association, which included establishing a farmers’ market. Now they are focusing on the idea of a national food preparedness program. “Our government asks us to be prepared to feed ourselves for seventy-two hours in case of a disaster,” explains Young. “So why shouldn’t we expect our government to preserve, secure, and organize our food resources to feed us now and in the future?”

Young believes farmers involved in such a program should be treated as emergency personnel. If outside food supplies were suddenly cut off, they would know what was available and what could be set aside for people in their area, including, in this case, Toronto. An emergency transportation plan would also have to be in place. “It would actually be a blueprint or a template for a community to value its food resources and know how to protect them and access them in times of emergency.”

To achieve true security, however, the food system must undergo a massive change, experts say. That means reducing its dependence on cheap fuel, which is fast disappearing anyway, and getting rid of redundancies — the importing of what we export, for example. Most important, it means elevating food to a loftier place on the priority list, and expecting to pay more for something better.

“Cheap food is the problem nobody wants to name,” says Wayne Roberts, acting manager of the Toronto Food Policy Council. “It’s forcing everyone to drive prices down, and it’s totally irrational.” Waltner-Toews agrees: “Rich people want protein, and they don’t want to pay high prices for it. The only way you can really do that is through economies of scale: instead of 500 or 1,000 chickens on a farm, you have 50,000 or 100,000; if you can make these birds grow faster, that also helps the price. You’re just creating epidemic conditions.”

Much of the food in grocery stores, schools, even hospitals, is distributed by just four or five global food service companies. It is cheap because it is bought in mass quantities from as few places as possible — imported from countries where labour costs are low. “Tell me how much Maple Leaf saved by having a centralized system,” says Roberts. “The system has no stability to it, because it violates every principle of nature and economics.”

The solution is painfully obvious and simple, most agree, but not so easy to implement. Many of the food issues of concern in the developed world boil down to the same things: not only do we want food to be cheap, we want it year round, whether it’s in season or not. So, again, we rely on a handful of global sources to bring us food from other countries, often at the expense of the content (the longer the wait between picking and eating a fruit or vegetable, for example, the lower its nutritional value), and often from places where farming practices are riskier. These methods force local, small-scale growers and processors out of business, which only perpetuates the problem.