Читать книгу Food, Sex and Salmonella - David Waltner-Toews - Страница 10
ОглавлениеAONE-YEAR-OLD child will put anything into her mouth, just to taste what it is. As we get older, we get more squeamish and more sophisticated; we say, “Let me see what you’ve got,” not “Let me taste what you’ve got.” But we do continue to stick strange and wonderful things into our mouths and to stick our tongues into, and around in, amazing places, well into adulthood. We call it eating. And the more socially unacceptable our chosen food, the more apt we are to call it gourmet food or health food or an acquired taste, as if its acquisition implied a higher plane of evolution.
Eating is one of the great sensual pleasures of life. It is where that fuzzy sense of mystical at-oneness with the world meets, and celebrates hard biological necessity. When we eat we are, quite literally, turning the world outside in. Foods are nothing more or less than pieces of environments: bark, leaves, roots, sap of trees (maple syrup, date palm juice), and animals of all sorts from the land and the sea, even bacteria (think live-culture yogurt), algae. We even eat dirt. I have a report in my files of a woman who habitually ate earth, with its associated beetles and the like, from the graves of priests. She subsequently suffered infection with the cat roundworm Toxocara cati.
Most of us do not eat dirt in that way, of course, although pica (abnormal appetites), which includes the eating of dirt, is more common than we realize. Ever watch a one-year-old child in the sandbox? But even adults are not immune to such behavior, and normality, particularly with regard to food preferences, is very much culturally conditioned. In the end, eating dirt in some African cultures is really no different from eating mineral supplements in North America.
When we eat, we select portions of an environment and bring them into intimate contact with our bodies. They become one with us, and we become one with the earth. What sex is to interpersonal relationships, eating is to the human-environment relationship, a daily consummation of our marriage to the living biosphere.
We have been having this intimate relationship with the planet, sticking our tongues into new and exciting environments, since before we became human, since, as it were, our very first date.
And, like sexual promiscuity and ignorance of our sexual partners, promiscuity in eating habits and ignorance of eating “partners” can carry great risks. When we eat or drink indiscriminately, who knows what a circus of viruses, parasites, and bacteria we are ingesting?
Among the animals of earth, none are more promiscuous, none more deserving of the adjective “omnivorous,” than people. Eating is one of those wonderfully ambiguous activities that put us both a little lower than the angels and a (very) little higher than the dust from which we are made.
North Americans, as well as Australians, New Zealanders, and Europeans, are displaced persons from every continent on earth. Given that eating is such an intimate relationship with the environment, it should not be surprising that we have carried our eating preferences with us to these new lands. It would seem fickle not to do so. As a result, North Americans from rice cultures continue to follow a rice-based diet, immigrants from the Ukraine still want cabbage borscht like Oma made, and those from the Caribbean long for succulent kingfish. Some items, like cabbage, may be grown in our new homes. Others cannot and hence must be imported from environments thousands of miles away.
Although global trade in food products is probably less than 20 percent of total world production, its economic value has increased more than tenfold since the 1960s, and the environmental and public health impacts of these traded foods are huge. The international food trade has greatly influenced our perception of food, the shape of the food industry, and the kinds of food safety issues that plague us. Eating has become for some people a form of nostalgia for another time, another place, and another season, even as, for others, it is an act of adventure and rebellion. These are pretty heavy burdens for carrots, hamburgers, cabbage, and chicken to be carrying around.
When I talk to people about food safety issues and suggest that maybe we should look at alternative ways of producing and distributing food, I sense a deep anxiety, bordering on paranoia, in many of the responses I get. Many in the modern food industries see moves to constrain the distribution of food as veiled attempts to plunge us back into the dark, cold, hungry days of the Middle Ages. They wax sentimental about the simpler days of the 1970s, when intensification of food production and mass distribution were seen simply as effective business responses to a combination of hunger, nostalgia, rebellion, and population growth.
Trade in human foods and animal feeds amounting to billions of dollars annually supports this hunger, nostalgia, and adventurism. Shipping of foods over long distances can cause serious problems of spoilage. Nevertheless, developments in preservation technology since the late nineteenth century, especially refrigeration, have allowed international trade in perishable items such as meat and fish to flourish. It is instructive to look at the food trade figures for Europe and North America, not as an accountant or a financial bookkeeper might, but from an ecologist’s point of view. We trade in fresh, chilled, and frozen meat, dairy products, eggs, honey, fruits, vegetables, and grains with hundreds of countries around the world. North American eaters, who are typical of those in most industrialized countries, are physically married to environments from Burundi to Belize, from New Caledonia to the Netherlands. Globally, this state is not unusual.
In the early years of this millennium, Lisa Deutsch and her colleagues in the Department of Systems Ecology at Stockholm University tried to trace the origins of Swedish foods. They found this task challenging, since foods at point of consumption are not always labeled according to where they came from but rather according to where they were “made”—that is, packaged or reformulated. They found that ecosystems from Southeast Asia, South America, and continental Europe subsidized a large proportion of what the public thought was a sustainable “made in Sweden” agriculture. About 80 percent of manufactured animal feeds for pigs, chickens, and cattle, for instance, depended on imported ingredients. Consumers who are checking out the farms in their own countryside often pay attention to the wrong things; the environmental damage and the trade in bacteria, viruses, and parasites are well out of view. The Salmonella are stowaways on ships and airplanes crisscrossing the globe, feeding the industrialized countries’ frenzy for all the food, all the time. Out of sight, out of mind.
On top of this, more people are traveling than ever before in history, either as economic, environmental, or political refugees or as free-wheeling tourists. International migrants increased from 75 million in 1960 to more than 190 million in 2005, almost 3 percent of the world’s population. International tourist arrivals—the number of tourists arriving at their destinations— increased from about 25 million to 650 million between 1950 and 1999. If the foods cannot come to us, we are going to them.
Not only separated from our ancestral homes, we are increasingly displaced from a rural to an urban environment. Since 1950, the proportion of people living in cities has almost doubled; in 2005, almost half of all people lived in urban areas. By 2030, that proportion will be 60 percent. The students in my class on foodborne diseases, taught at a university that prides itself on its agricultural origins, are typical of students just about everywhere in the world. They have never been on farms. They have no real idea where food comes from. They are thus estranged even from those foods that can be grown nearby. This double displacement means that most of us are, in effect, carrying on intimate relationships with environments of which we have no knowledge; it is like engaging in sex with a blindfold on. Just as reducing individuals with personalities and histories to anonymous sexual objects defined only by physical characteristics can lead to abusive relationships with people, so reducing foods from biological entities with specific ecological histories to tradable commodities defined by price, fiber, fat, or protein content has resulted in an abusive relationship with the environment.
We now have urban economists and developers who can without embarrassment talk about the loss of farmland to urbanization as progress or necessity, or as a matter of esthetic choices, jobs versus environment, or some other nonsensical juxtaposition of options. They can naively speak of food as if it were a simple commodity, like shoes or condoms. I have heard suggestions that agriculture is a tiny part of the national economy and therefore, by implication, unimportant. Under which stones do they find these policymakers and economists? I suggest that they be forced to do without the products of agriculture as they reconsider the importance of agriculture. Maybe a light bulb would go on somewhere. Do you mean food comes from farms?
We even have public health advocates fighting diseases such as avian influenza by promoting economies of scale and high biosecurity (putting all your eggs in one basket and guarding it well) when all the evidence says that every basket, sooner or later, gets dropped. The result of this ignorance will surely be a continued loss of farmland, the loss of the biological food-producing foundation of our civilization, and the degradation of rural environments. It will mean increased intensity and scale in food production and in processing and distribution systems, increased abuse of farm animals, increased levels (because of increased stress-related shedding and increased cross-contamination) and distribution (because of centralization and economies of scale) of foodborne pathogens, increased use of chemicals or high-energy technology to control those pathogens (in response to urban demands), and the undermining of the ability of both farmers and consumers to make free and intelligent decisions about their food.
What may save us yet—and it may sound perverse for me to wish this—are the foodborne illnesses that follow us around the world and from the countryside to the city. For microbes and parasites, the invisible travelers through our kitchens, foods we eat are ecosystems unto themselves. Eating, from their viewpoint, is either just another way that humans plunder animals smaller than themselves or, just as often, a form of microbial self-perpetuation and extension into a new environment. In a real sense, we are simply an environment that allows bacteria, parasites, viruses, and chemicals to recycle themselves. The fact that they sometimes make us sick as they pass through is incidental and not to be confused with malicious intent.
These accidental infections are, alas, common. According to the World Health Organization, every year a billion people around the world get sick and about 2 million, mostly children under five years old, die because of infections transmitted to them in their food or water. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States estimates that in the United States 76 million people a year get sick from foodborne diseases and five thousand people die from them. In the early 1980s, Ewen Todd of Health and Welfare Canada suggested that more than 2 million Canadians suffered from foodborne illnesses annually. More recent estimates put the number of foodborne illnesses in Canada at more than 11 million per year.
Nobody knows the real numbers. These estimates are just that. Estimating the magnitude of the risks of acute illness due to food is a bit of a casino game. Only a small fraction of cases—one in a few hundred for bacteria to one in thousands for viruses—ever gets counted. Not everyone with an intestinal problem visits the doctor. Even if one does suspect that the cause of one’s illness is food, one may feel compelled to keep silent in the service of more lofty causes, such as the sanctity of Grandmother’s cooking or a potential romantic liaison. The doctor may not do a suffciently detailed workup to feel comfortable reporting your diarrhea as a case of foodborne disease. Not reporting it saves the doctor some paperwork. If there is a big outbreak following the supper at the church, mosque, temple, synagogue, or community hall, any individual doctor may treat only a few of the people that were affected and so may not be aware of the outbreak. If the doctor thought you were part of a bigger picture, he or she might report. The argument is cyclic; doctors do not report you because they do not know you are part of an epidemic, and they do not know you are part of an epidemic because all the other doctors are similarly ignorant.
Even if the doctor does report, the health agency may fail to conduct thorough investigations. First, for financially conservative governments, which consider public service a necessary evil at best, labor shortages and financial restrictions may be paramount. The government does not provide money or people to do these investigations unless there is a lot of public pressure. Second, local medical officers of health and health agencies may not want to look bad or stir up political trouble by reporting foodborne disease outbreaks. This may be not so much a conspiracy to cover up as a natural tendency not to want to throw indigestible items at a fan next to which one is sitting.
The estimates of millions of sick people from the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or the Public Health Agency of Canada may be accurate. True or not, these estimates are themselves used to estimate how many millions of dollars these diseases cost us as a society through lost income and productivity, loss of leisure time, suffering, and medical costs, as well as child-care costs while you were in bed, death (a minor item in this balance sheet), costs of recalling items and closing restaurants, and loss of international trade. Looked at in this light, a few trips to the toilet can take on cosmic significance. The assumption is that you would have been doing something productive had you gone to work. It overlooks the fact that the way our economy is set up, personal disaster is good for the gross national product. Consider, for instance, all those jobs created in the medical and insurance businesses, all on account of the custard on the counter you stuck your finger into. Personal catastrophe is good for the economy.
Several countries, as well as the World Health Organization, have instituted more active surveillance programs to try to get a clearer picture of what is going on, but overall measurement of the burden of disease from food is likely to remain a guessing game for some time to come. To a certain extent, doing the body counts of how many people get sick from food and water misses the point. We need to find ways to take better care of our food partners; they are the most important members of every economy on earth. We cannot live without food, so we are not in a great bargaining position. We need our food more than our food needs us; our relationship is not a one-night stand. Either we are in this for long-term commitment, or we can kiss the planet good-bye.
Although the exact number of people who get sick may be a good topic for a game of chance, every person who spends the night worshiping at the porcelain throne after the church picnic, every nursing home resident who dies from foodborne vero-toxin-producing Escherichia coli (VTEC), and every woman who aborts from foodborne listeriosis makes a lie of the notion that we are free of the bounds of nature, that we can fornicate with the environment and not bear a cost.
In the long run, the risks associated with eating are considerably fewer than those associated with starvation. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), there were more than 820 million undernourished people in the world in 2006. On the one hand, after some gains were made in improving the food supply in the 1970s and 1980s, the human race seems, at best, to be barely holding on. On the other, morally and physically gross, hand, in industrialized regions of the world, people are dying from eating too much; if I were in my (non–politically correct) veterinary frame of mind, I would say these people are fat and are dying from being fat, all the while complaining that the airplane seats are too small and the fast food has the wrong kinds of fat in it. The World Health Organization estimates that a billion adults worldwide are overweight and 300 million of them are clinically obese.
So all in all, the diseases described in this book are not catastrophic. Nevertheless, there are risks. In 2006, the week before my class lecture on E. coli, there was an outbreak of E. coli from spinach. The week before my lecture on botulism, half a dozen people were in hospitals across North America because they had chugged back all-natural carrot juice laced with all-natural botulism toxin. The week before my lecture on foodborne viruses, a couple of hundred students at a Canadian university ran for the stalls down the hall as part of an outbreak of Norwalk-like virus. My friends at the Public Health Agency of Canada were consulting my syllabus to see what illness they should prepare for next.
There is strong scientific evidence that the rates of foodborne disease in industrialized countries have been increasing as the result of global warming in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century; the patterns of those diseases have also been altered by trade, cultural, political, and environmental changes which I shall discuss in this book. The industrial methods developed to control foodborne diseases are, at best, pushing the rates down slightly for some diseases, but overall keeping them in a holding pattern. These diseases are not going away, and consumers (at last, a context in which it makes sense to describe people as consumers) should educate themselves about them, learn from them, and seek ways to reduce them. For me, the most convincing reason to pay attention to foodborne diseases is that they are part of our most intimate lifelong relationship. These diseases tell us as much about our complex relationships with the planet as STDs tell us about our contradictory relationships with each other. I have as much fun thinking about food as I do about sex. I hope you do as well.
This book is about understanding intimacy, about self-fulfillment, about you and your food partners. The next time you take a forkful of meat or rice or peas, ponder for a moment the environment with which you are about to become intimate. You may find that you wish to ask a few questions of it. You may want to know if she is a local girl, or if she just flew in from some exploited foreign environment. You may suddenly find yourself interested in the agricultural practices of Mexico, Spain, California, British Columbia, and Ontario. Good. This interest in your life’s most intimate partner could be the start of something beautiful.
We may decide, like the good burghers of nineteenth-century Paris, that we do not wish to risk death for tasty bread. The following, quoted by noted microbiologist Theodor Rosebury in a wonderful, classic, must-read book, Life on Man, first appeared in “The Last Cholera Epidemic in Paris,” in the General Homeopathic Journal, vol. 113, p. 15 (1886):
The neighbours of the establishment famous for excellent bread, pastry, and similar products of luxury, complained again and again of the disgusting smells which prevailed therein and which penetrated into their dwellings. The appearance of cholera finally lent force to these complaints, and the sanitary inspectors who were sent to investigate the matter found that there was a connection between the water-closets of those dwellings and the reservoir containing water used in the preparation of the bread. The connection was cut off at once, but the immediate result thereof was a perceptible deterioration of the quality of the bread. Chemists have evidently no difficulty in demonstrating that water impregnated with “extract of water closet” has the peculiar property of causing dough to rise particularly fine, thereby imparting to bread the nice appearance and pleasant flavor which is the principal quality of luxurious bread.
Or we may, like many modern Japanese (and a few California chefs), decide that the risk of instant death that may come from an improperly cleaned puffer fish or the hole bored in one’s stomach by Anasakid worms from parasitized salmon only adds spice to the delicate temptations of the flesh.
What is important is to know that we have choices, and that we own those choices, and to make them intelligently. The unexamined food, I would say, if I may be so bold as to take some license with Aristotle, is a risk not worth eating.
