David Waltner-Toews

What is the connection between eating and sex?

In the first place, eating is to the human-environment relationship what sex is between people. You take a piece of the environment (vegetables, animals, and fruits – even dirt – think vitamin supplements) and put it into your body and it literally becomes part of you. Shouldn’t you ask where that piece of the environment was before becoming so intimately connected? As well, just as people don’t have sex only to make babies, they also don’t eat solely for nourishment: people eat in order to share moments with their friends, to celebrate traditions and our place on this planet.

So how does this connect with diseases we get from food?

The environments from which foods are produced and through which they pass on their way into your mouth are rich with bacteria, viruses, parasites, and, in many cases, toxic chemicals. If food is grown under bad conditions (overcrowded barns, chemically overloaded soils) or travels a long way through various environments before it gets to you, it may pick up all kinds of things. In other words, every intimate relationship we enjoy, with food or people, has some baggage attached – could be emotional baggage, could be parasitic baggage!

So how do I avoid this baggage?

There are two main ways to handle this – one is to keep the potential problem microbes and toxins under control at the source of where the food is produced and processed. The other is to try to kill them or remove them once they are in the food.

We seem to be hearing more about foodborne and waterborne diseases. Are they really increasing or do we just have better reporting?

A bit of both, really. We certainly have better methods for detecting various potentially problematic microbes or toxins in our food. On the other hand, there is very good evidence that we are seeing very real and dramatic global increases and spread of various disease causing agents and toxins. Some agents, such as certain kinds of Salmonella, could be considered pandemic.

What are the main causes of these increases in global diseases?

A mixture of economies of scale (large scale farms for plants and animals, large processing plants – all if which create ideal conditions for outbreaks and epidemics), intensification (crowding of plants and animals, which creates richer environments for bacteria to be shed from animals and to grow in the soils and on the plants), and international trade, which spreads bacteria, viruses, parasites and toxins all over the world.

What about global warming? – it seems like everything can be blamed on it.

Global warming makes all these problems worse, as it allows for environments more conducive to bacterial growth. For example the increase in ocean temperatures has changed the kinds of toxins we find in some kinds of seafood.

You mentioned international trade as a factor – but we all love our tomatoes in the winter!

The ultimate driver, the cause, for all this, is that people have come to expect and demand that they spend as little of their income on food as possible: cheap food. But in fact the food isn’t cheap – there are massive subsidies by underpaid farmers, government health and agriculture ministries, and ultimately, subsidies from out children, since we are spending our capital and pretending it’s real income. Cheap food is a big scam.

Are you saying that we should ban international trade? Or go back to small farms with high prices? Or suffer through food shortages?

We need to think very carefully about the trade-offs we are making, and if we still want to make them, we do so explicitly. If we are willing to say that a low cost for food in the grocery store is worth higher rates of disease, loss of farmland, loss of future opportunities, loss of resilience in the face of economic and environmental change then we should admit it openly. Personally, I think it is a lousy trade.

We seem to be seeing old foodborne diseases showing up in strange new places – botulism in carrot juice, E. coli in spinach, Salmonella in almonds.

Some of these are occurring because people like the idea of “organic” chemical-free food, but they don’t want to pay the extra costs involved in producing such food. So we end up with what Michael Pollen called industrial organic. People want cheap organic carrot juice; there is a reason why there are preservatives in foods that are produced in large amounts & distributed widely – it’s to keep the bacteria in check.

Economies of scale in animal agriculture produce huge amounts of feces; under carefully managed, usually smaller-scale conditions, this manure can be excellent fertilizer. But when there’s too much of a good thing, in this case animal manure, it overwhelms our ability to manage it intelligently, in a scientifically and ecologically sound fashion. In the end all the bacteria from this large-scale agriculture is getting into everything – water supplies and food. We are also seeing young people trying to make traditional foods but under conditions that earlier generations never faced. For example, people in arctic coastal regions have some of the highest rates of botulism in the world, in part because they are trying to prepare food quickly, under warm conditions, when the original recipes were intended to undergo a slow, cold fermentation.

Don’t we have technical solutions? What’s wrong with food irradiation? It kills the bugs, doesn’t it?

There’s no condom or penicillin shot for this. The problem with many of our solutions is that they tend to have unintended consequences that may be worse than the original problem. We solved the problem of food shortages by mining nonrenewable oil and going to economies of scale. This led to increases in a wide range of foodborne bacterial diseases, as well as diseases such as bird flu, which now have to be controlled through new technologies – such as irradiation or high bio-security buildings– which DEPEND on economies of scale – so you are reinforcing the system that create the problem.

We solved the problem lack of fresh produce in temperate climates in winter through international trade ¬– and ended up with tropical diseases in temperate climates!

What can we do about any of this?

When you go to the grocery store, ask where the food comes from. Try to buy local as much as possible. This not only reduces the carbon footprint (and actually decreases the likelihood of disease) but it also means that you re buying from people who are growing food according to rules that you have some control over. It is pretty hard to tell farmers in Morocco or Mexico or China how they should be farming, and we can’t test all the foods coming in.

At the same time, when we are trading we should demand that they are grown according to environmental, health, labour & welfare standards that we are happy with. Some might call these non-tariff trade barriers. I call it promoting good global health.

At home, wash your hands, the cutting board and utensils after handling meat. Keep hot things hot (to kill bacteria) and cold things cold (to keep bacteria from growing).

Demand better pay for farmers and farm workers.

Spend more on food, and less on cars.

Get to know your food, take pleasure in his or her company, get their family story, wash your hands, make sure the fridge works, and that supper is good and hot, turn down the lights. Raise a glass (alcohol is protective). Enjoy.