Underlying Issues of the Pet Food Recall
By now, I’m sure that everyone has heard about the pet food recall. It’s a sad thing that some folks lost their pets from the very food that was supposed to nourish them.
I think that this recall highlights an increasing problem with the food supply, not just for pets, but for us as well. That problem is the large-scale centralized processing of the food that we all eat.
As few as 20 years ago, much of the food an individual might eat was raised/grown and processed within a few miles of where he or she lived. Today, as evidenced by large-scale farming and meat processing corporations, our food is produced and processed in fewer and more centralized places. Look at the number of brands that Menu Foods, the company involved with today’s recall, produces: dog food products and cat food products.
This is not just a threat to our health because of accidental contamination, but makes it that much easier for an intentional attack on our food supply to affect a larger number of people. Accidental contamination has proven to be a bad enough issue. Remember the bad spinach and the bad peanut butter? That’s just this year.
What happens when someone or some group decides to intentionally infect all the apples with anthrax? Or else lace all the milk with botulism? They merely have to visit one or two dairies or slaughterhouses and their nefarious intent could affect tens of millions. With the smaller scales of yesteryear, they might have only reached a small regional group of people with a similar attack.
Another detriment from this large-scale factory farming comes the effect it has on the small, family farms which used to be the backbone of this country. Simply put, it is now impossible for those small farmers to compete on price or scale. They have been pushed out of the market. In addition, communities are hurt in an intangible way because they have lost contact with the source of their food. Kids these days don’t even realize that ground beef comes from a cow. A chicken is the skinless, boneless, grilled piece of teriyaki-flavored meat on their plate, not the living breathing clucking pecker.
What’s the solution? I don’t know. We seem to have reached an intractable situation where we obviously can’t go back to “the way it was” but the way forward is even cloudier. There’’s the price pressure from the consumer. There’’s the government subsidies which are in collusion with the pressure from foreign farmers and food suppliers.
Some indication of how to make progress may be found in the European system of small markets that specialize in only one or two products. There are the benefits of the growth of small business while at the same time having less capacity for cross-contamination. This is just a guess, though.
The only absolute truth here is that our food system is dangerously fragile.