Wednesday, November 5, 2008

How did I not know about Ableman??

A friend of mine mentioned Michael Ableman in an email so I promptly googled him and came across something he wrote regarding E. Coli tainted spinach back in 2006. We seem to see through the same eyes. From Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food:

Not long ago lettuce came only in heads and spinach in bunches. For a salad, someone else might do the growing, but you still did the trimming and washing. You had some control -- and responsibility -- over the process. Now salad comes prewashed and bagged. You just pour it on a plate, dress it, put it in your mouth and chew.

This convenience adds risk. You give one more job over to someone somewhere else, trusting that they are concerned as much about product quality and your health as about the bottom line on the quarterly report.

But the business of food is now big business, and it might be making us sick. Witness the spinach tainted with E. coli bacteria that is blamed for more than 180 people infected in 26 states and Ontario, Canada, including one death.

The first mixed salad greens and loose spinach were from small, local growers who hand-cut the young greens and rushed them to market, organ-transplant style. Now we have a multimillion-dollar salad industry that consolidates raw ingredients from many big producers and has little control over growing methods. Washing salad ingredients on this scale requires facilities more like municipal swimming pools or public bathhouses than where our food should come from. And if you remember sixth-grade biology, you know that stuffing fresh, green leaves into sealed plastic bags is a great way to breed bacteria.

The spinach scare has prompted cries for better regulation and inspection. But the drama over one microorganism distracts us from something much bigger: a vast industrial food system built on cheap, empty calories -- from government-subsidized corn, for example -- that feed epidemic levels of obesity and diabetes. Sometimes it seems a system more interested in finding ways to pump more high-fructose corn syrup into kids' breakfast cereals than in providing fresh, whole foods to nourish their growing bodies. Click here to continue reading.

So some new suggested reading (for myself and others):

Fields of Plenty: A Farmer's Journey in Search of Real Food and the People Who Grow It by Michael Ableman

On Good Land: The Autobiography of an Urban Farm by Michael Ableman

From the Good Earth: A Celebration of Growing Food Around the World by Michael Ableman

A few Michael Ableman articles that appeared in the LA Times

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