Modern Farming

“As the farmer who won the lottery said when asked what he was going to do with his winnings "Keep farming until it's all gone” - unknown

Farming is a dirty business. Not dirty as in illegal but muddy, messy, hot, stinky, etc.

My paternal grandmother was raised on a farm and hated it. She couldn’t wait to leave. My maternal grandparents were dairy farmers and their son (my uncle) carried on the family tradition. (My mother married a serviceman and left farming forever.) My cousins all fled the farm as soon as they could and got city jobs. But not so long ago one cousin returned and bought my grandparents farm after they had passed away. Now her husband raises hogs and the kids are in 4-H.

So why the history? Years ago I read and loved Michael Pollan book, The Omnivore's Dilemma about the horrible things done to mass-produce food. Recently I learned about a rebuttal by a working farmer, The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals. I recommend it highly, also.

One shot fired against modern farmers is the claim that over crowding and “unhealthy” conditions have led to an increase in food illnesses like the tainted spinach last year. But one writer disagrees with A Food Elitist Strikes Back. He writes,

So how big a problem is foodborne illness? In 2000, researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated that "foodborne diseases cause approximately 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths in the United States each year." That sounds pretty bad. But let's give those numbers a bit of context. In 1900, six years before Upton Sinclair wrote his great muckraking book, The Jungle, about the filthy conditions in the meatpacking industry, the death rate from gastritis, duodentitis, enteritis, and colitis was 142.7 people per 100,000 [this equals nearly 110,000 deaths with a 1900 population of 76 million]. It is likely that most people experienced bouts of intestinal distress several times a year. Today, accepting CDC calculations of 5000 deaths per year implies a hundred-fold reduction, to just 1.4 deaths per 100,000 people. Additional good news is that the incidence of many foodborne illnesses continues to decline according to the CDC's FoodNet surveillance network established in 1996. In its 2005 report, the CDC found that the incidence of O157:H76 infections had fallen by 29 percent from the 1996-98 level.

… Also during the 20th century, the rise of national and regional grocery chains and industrial food processors saw dramatic improvements in overall food safety.

Bottom Line

It can be very difficult to know the truth based on news headlines. I saw two odd statements on the web today – “Pigs kill more people than sharks” and “Diarrhea kills more people in India than Swine flu”. Neither is what you’d expect based on news, TV, movies, etc. In India there was a riot caused by the first Swine flu death there. But no one is rioting over diarrhea.

Likewise food recalls make for good news stories. “Watch our report or you may die.” One gets the impression that bad food is everywhere – peanut butter, spinach, hamburger, etc. So it’s nice to have an historical perspective and learn that food deaths are down by a factor of 100 since 1900. We are doing something right! Yet TV news shows senators and the president calling the FDA a failure that must be changed. But perhaps they just don’t know the all the facts.