What They Are Not Telling You About Food Recalls
I cringe every time I hear an announcement on the evening
news about a food recall, especially one involving produce. Periodically you hear about spinach, lettuce,
cantaloupe, and the like being recalled because of bacterial contamination. The latest recall involved green leafy
vegetables contaminated with listeria. Food
poisoning is real and dangerous but the last thing people need is to be afraid
of produce. These recalls remind me how
disconnected most of us are from the food we eat.
This disconnection prevents us from insisting on meaningful
changes that must happen if we are going to be able to feed all 7 billion of us
over the years to come. Modern
agriculture has been a blessing and a curse.
Without the marvels of modern agriculture, the earth’s population would
have never exploded like it has. 10,000
years ago, before agriculture was developed, hunting and gathering food from
the wild kept the human population on earth low. But agriculture, with its storable grains,
caused the first population explosion.
The next explosion occurred around World War I when artificial
fertilizers were developed. With
artificial nitrogen-based fertilizers, food production surpassed everyone’s wildest
dreams. Countries in the West, like
America and Germany, were some of the first to build large plants dedicated to
producing artificial nitrogen fertilizers.
Countries that lacked such plants, like some in Asia, had significantly
reduced food production capacity. This
meant less grain to support meat and dairy farming. This is one big reason why a plant-based diet
was a way of life during the 1950s in parts of Asia but not so much in parts of
the West. Lots of available artificial
fertilizer meant lots of grain for America which allowed for more animals to be
raised for consumption.
There is naturally tons of nitrogen in the air but very
little in the soil. Plants need nitrogen
to grow. This is why using fertilizers
increases yield. Fertilizers increase
the amount of nitrogen in the soil for the plants to use. But leftover fertilizer in the soil gets
washed away into rivers and oceans. As the number of animals breed for consumption
soared, all being fed on grains grown with lots of artificial nitrogen-based
fertilizers, dealing with their massive amounts of bacterial-laden,
antibiotic-laden, pesticide-laden, and nitrogen-laden excrement, became a
challenge. There are huge manure
management plants spread throughout the country that attempt to contain this
waste. Invariably, this waste leaks out
into the surrounding areas, entering our rivers, oceans, our wells, and
irrigation systems.
A farmer growing cucumbers needs to irrigate his crop and
then wash his produce before shipping.
The water used for this can and is often contaminated by the waste from
manure management plants. Moreover, all
this nitrogen that should normally be in the air, is now in our rivers and
oceans. This leads to an overgrowth of
algae which sucks up all the oxygen, depriving the other organisms in the
rivers and oceans. This is how rivers
suddenly ‘die’. Water contamination by
nitrogen and animal waste is also affecting the amount of drinkable water
available.
The number one thing each and every one of us can do to help
our children and our grandchildren is to eat a plant-based diet. We must decrease our consumption of meat and
dairy so that nitrogen contamination is decreased. If not, the balance of nature will take care of the problem for us but not to our benefit.
www.drpadmagarvey.com
Other articles by Padma Garvey