The American burger is unsafe to eat. Unless we get our food system in Europe under control we're heading the same direction

[This post is based on an Opinion piece I wrote in the Irish Independent on Saturday, it has been updated to include the latest updates on horsemeat] 

As Irish horse slaughterer B&F Meats was announced on Friday to be re-packaging horsemeat for export as beef, it seems the crisis is back on our doorstep here in Ireland. What we feared might be the case - Irish equines going illegally into the food chain has proved to be true, and there will be further  resulting ramifications for the food sector, let alone legal and perhaps criminal fallout. 

Foods sold in Ikea and Birds Eye are the latest big name brands to find horsemeat in their products. As we are drip fed more information about the scale of the horsemeat problem, Irish consumers feel unsure about what other nasties may lurk in our shopping trolleys.

At the heart the horsemeat issue is the real cost of cheap food. Much of the comment has centred around “if you eat cheap food, well what do you expect?” But

research shows value ranges and cheap food are not just purchased by the 10% of Irish people living in food poverty (Dept of Social Protection). They are bought by ordinary families whose pattern of shopping is based on value and are now worth 46% of our €8.9 billion grocery market.

Food itself has become cheap, and Irish consumers across many income brackets buy own brand or discounted value ranges. This scandal has revealed that it’s becoming harder to pin the problem on simply cheap burgers and consumers are listening to contradictory advice. In between refuting the FSAI’s claims that his burgers tested positive for horsemeat, Malcolm Walker head of retail chain Iceland told BBC this week that he wouldn’t eat other UK supermarket’s value lines as “there’d be other things in there”.

Dumped meat products

The pressure on food to be cheap across the board and moves towards less regulation and testing are at the heart of the problem. As we’re drip fed more brands containing horsemeat, farm ministers in Brussels were wrangling with the CAP budget which pays farmers to produce for retailers at knockdown prices. The EU’s cheap food policy has worked to a fashion – to deliver affordable food to consumers, but how can we say it’s a success when the player closest to the consumer – the supermarkets, are the ones taking the most margin?  Subsidising farmers and paying for proper regulation at least ensures good food quality at farm level. Farmers and farming programmes currently get 42% of the EU budget. It will be less this year and by 2020 set to be reduced to 33%. So as we reduce subsidy, and food gets more expensive to produce, how on earth do we think quality or food safety is going to improve?

As has been asked many times “Why have CAP? Why pay farmers for producing food whatsoever?” Well let’s look at the US, where subsidy exist only for particular foodstuffs like fructose corn syrup which strangely dominates snack foods, food manufacturing and is blamed for America’s obesity epidemic. US is the free market unregulated end of the model. It is also the model with the most problems for those who eat its food.

Tyson Foods

The involvement of American beef giant JBS in the horsemeat crisis is hardly a surprise. Last year one of their biggest beef processors Tyson Foods was found guilty of using false books and bribing meat plant inspectors. US beef contains antibiotics and steroids, and in the opinion of most American food writers the iconic American burger is unsafe to eat.

Massive recalls of beef for ecoli and chicken and salmonella tainted eggs characterise a regular year in the US food chain. Recent research by the University of Minnesota found evidence of fecal contamination in 69% of the pork and beef and 92% of the poultry samples in retail outlets. Factory farming is blamed for large scale antibiotic resistance in the human population while the use of “pink slime" in burgers - mechanically recovered meat treated with ammonia was recently dropped by MacDonald’s in the US after public outcry. 

pink slime filler

Liberalisation of farming and food manufacture has been a disaster for US consumers.  Americans get sicker and die younger than people in any other wealthy nation. Even the best-off Americans – those who have health insurance, a college education, a high income and healthy behaviour are sicker than their peers in comparable countries, says a report by the US National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine.

Light touch regulation doesn’t work in food. Under the Tory Government the UK’s Food Standards Agency’s budget has been slashed and food testing fallen in some areas by up to a third. In Ireland we have maintained rigorous tests on farms by the FSAI and EHOs. As food companies become more vertically integrated and dominant, it’s crucial that budget for food regulation and standards in production and manufacture are not only maintained but scaled up in Ireland and the EU.

In recent years the Department of Agriculture insisted in there was plenty of legislation in place for the identification of horses going into the food chain. In the wake of the present crisis I asked if they have plans or budget for more checks at factories and putting vets back on ports? The answer was no.

Regulation and upholding standards on farms, subsidising farmers properly to produce food above the cost of production are essential to maintain a food chain that’s safe. We may not like where we’ve got in our food picture but by further letting go of the reins we will pay for it, in the realm of our own health. 

Inhumane, poorly regulated and bad for human health. How did horsemeat end up in Irish burgers?

Irish agriculture hit the news worldwide this week with the discovery of horse DNA in supermarket burgers. The affair began on Tuesday when the Food Safety Authority here released results on tests for porcine and equine DNA in 27 Irish supermarket burgers. 13 tested positive for horse DNA.  The product with the highest level (29 per cent) of equine DNA was Tesco Everyday Value burgers. They cost 1.41 for eight burgers but have now been removed from the marketplace. 

These particular burgers contained 17 ingredients: meat content (63 per cent), onion (10 per cent),wheat flour, water, beef fat, soya protein isolate, salt, onion powder, yeast, sugar, barley malt extract, garlic powder, white pepper extract, celery extract and onion extract. One of these ingredients contained horse DNA via what is now identified as a supply chain in the Netherlands or Spain. It was most likely some kind of protein powder filler which are common in burger manufacture. This things go largely under our food radar. All week I've been writing and researching this topic with the discovery  that horse meat could in fact be endemic in the European food chain.

Not only that but horsemeat itself may not be safe to eat. Irish farmers have to jump through hoops to ensure the traceability of their cattle, but the horse trade is subject to little or no regulation and forged documents and passports are common, especially with horses coming from North America and killed in Canadian or Mexican slaughter plants. In Ireland horses are stolen and shipped live as far as Italy where they go into the European food chain, some having been treated with bute or other drugs which are banned substances. 

Ingredient suppliers who may be buying this meat are not subject to the same safeguards as farmers, especially when it comes to low-grade animal protein. That's how horse DNA ended up in Irish burgers. What else it is an ingredient of we will have to wait and see. 

Today I published an analysis of this mess in The Irish Times. You can read it at the link below. In the meantime remember buy local where you can, keep your supply chain short and keep away from processed food. My feeling is that the FSAI's tests on burger meat is only the beginning and authorities must investigate the horsemeat and ingredient trade at large to get to the bottom of what could potentially be an enormous case of food fraud. 

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2013/0119/1224329033672.html

Is being a foodie just another kind of elitism?

I rarely publish other material here but this piece from American farmer and local food campaigner Joel Salatin was just too good not to draw attention to. He asks the question - if you're interested in good food, how should you reply when you're labelled an elitist?

His responds to the "elitist" charge with an analysis of why good food is more expensive than commercial, subsidy-aided manufactured produce. His arguments are arresting, and form what's basically a synopsis of the pressures many Irish food producers and farmers are under continually to compete with the food giants of America and Europe.

Joel writes from an American perspective where things are pretty bad for small farmers, it makes me think again how impossible it is to survive in America if you're not one of the food conglomerates, and makes it all the more remarkable that anyone even tries. People like this make us here in Ireland look very lucky indeed. See what you think and let me know your views.

The full piece can be found at http://flavormagazinevirginia.com/foodie-elitism/ here's a synopsis -

Rebel with a cause- food elitism?

Because high-quality local food often carries a higher price tag than food generated by the industrial system, the charge of elitism coming from fans of industrial food is often vitriolic, and embarrassed foodies agonise over it. For all their positive energy surrounding food, I’ve found latent guilt among this group — guilt for paying more for local food when others are starving, guilt for caring about taste when others would happily eat anything. Instead of cowering in self-guilt, let’s confront the issue of prices head on.

Why It’s Worth It

First, it’s better food. It tastes better. It handles better. And it’s safer: Anyone buying chemicalized, drug-infused food is engaging in risky behavior. It’s also nutritionally superior. For those willing to see, scientific data shows fresh foods’ conjugated linoleic acid, vitamins, minerals, brix readings, omega 3–omega 6 ratios, and polyunsaturated fat profiles are empirically superior. Better stuff is worth more.

Second, economies of scale will continue to progress as more people buy local food, which will bring prices down. The collaborative aggregation and distribution networks that have been fine-tuned by mega-food companies can and will be duplicated locally as volume increases and regional food systems get more creative.

Third, eating unprocessed foods is the best way to bring down your grocery bill, regardless of where the food originated. A 10-pound bag of potatoes costs the same as a 1-pound bag of potato chips. Cultivating domestic culinary arts and actually reinhabiting our kitchens—which we’ve remodeled and gadgetised at great cost—can wean all of us away from expensive processed food. A whole pound of our farm’s grass-finished ground beef, which can feed four adults, costs about the same as a Happy Meal. (And guess which one is more healthy?)

Fourth, non-scalable government regulations—which are designed to protect eaters from the dangers inherent in the industrial food complex but are not relevant in a transparent, regional food system—inordinately discriminate against smaller processing businesses like abattoirs, kitchens, and canneries, because the costs of complying with the (inappropriate) paperwork and infrastructure requirements cannot be spread out over a large volume of product. These regulations lead to price prejudice at the community-based scale: Small processors are at a disadvantage because they must pass those costs on to consumers, making their products more expensive than the mass-produced ones. These burdensome regulations also discourage entrepreneurs from entering local food commerce.

Fifth, unlike huge, single-crop or single-animal farms, diversified farms like ours do not receive government subsidies. Nor do the production, processing, and marketing of our food create collateral damage like that caused by factory farming—damage left for taxpayers to fix. Subsidies and government clean-up measures are not included in the price you pay for processed food at the grocery store, but if they were, local food would not seem so expensive in comparison.

Consider the Rhode Island–sized area in the Gulf of Mexico now known as a “dead zone” because nothing can survive in the oxygen-starved water, a result of manure and pesticide runoff. Who pays for the clean up and the reversal efforts? Who pays to address antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria like MRSA, caused by the overuse of antibiotics in CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations)? Who pays to treat people with Type II diabetes, which they get from consuming processed food that is sold cheaply because the corporations making it have received subsidies? Who pays to clean up stinky rural neighborhoods with densely populated poultry and livestock compounds? And what is the value of the land irreversibly damaged by bad farming practices?

Sixth—and this is where I wanted to head with this discussion—plenty of money already exists in our economic system to pay for good food. Can you think of anything people buy that they don’t need? Tobacco products, $100 designer jeans with holes already in the knees, KFC, soft drinks made with high fructose corn syrup, Disney vacations, large-screen TVs, jarred baby food? America spends more on veterinary care for pets than the entire continent of Africa spends on medical care for humans.

I won’t labour the point, but if you took all the money people spend on unnecessary baubles and junk food, it would be enough for everyone to eat like kings. We could all be elitists.
With that money, we could create a world where all the people eat food that is above average. Almost everyone I know who owns a community supported agriculture (CSA) share could afford to purchase an extra one for an impoverished family. And if you had to give up a few $4 lattes to do it? What a pity.

Spare Change?

At the risk of sounding uncharitable, I think we need to quit being victims and bring about change ourselves. Don’t complain about being unable to afford high-quality local food when your grocery cart is full of beer, cigarettes, and People magazine. Most people are more connected to the celebrities in People than the food that will become flesh of their flesh and bone of their bones at the next meal.

The other day I saw precooked bacon in a box at the supermarket—for $30 a pound. Do we really have to buy precooked bacon? If you took the average shopping cart in the checkout line and tossed out all the processed food—everything with an ingredient you can’t pronounce, everything you can’t re-create in your kitchen, and everything that won’t rot—and substituted instead locally sourced, fresh items, you would be dollars ahead and immensely healthier.
We can all do better. If we can find money for movies, ski trips, and recreational cruises, surely we can find the money to purchase integrity food. The fact is that most of us scrounge together enough pennies to fund the passion of our hearts. If we would cultivate a passion for food like the one we’ve cultivated for clothes, cars, and entertainment, perhaps we would ultimately live healthier, happier lives.

Embracing Elitism
To suggest that advocating for such a change makes me an elitist is to disparage positive decision making and behaviour. Indeed, if that’s elitism, I want it. The victim mentality our culture encourages actually induces guilt among people making progress. That’s crazy. We should applaud positive behavior and encourage others to follow suit, not demonize and discourage it. Would it be better to applaud people who buy amalgamated, reconstituted, fumigated, irradiated, genetically modified industrial garbage?

The charge of elitism is both unfair and silly. We foodies are cultural change agents, positive innovators, integrity seekers. So hold your head high and don’t apologize for making noble decisions.

Food poisioning, animal cruelty and rape of employees - the real nice side to America's factory farms

US agriculture is reeling from a salmonella outbreak which has left more than 1500 Americans ill with food poisioning and lead to the recall of more than half a billion eggs. The food firm at the centre of this outbreak had already been named a "habitual violator" of regulations and has been breaking the law since 1994. If there was an ugly face to factory farming, and an example of how loose food regulation is in the US, this is clearly it.

The DeCosters plant in Iowa which is the focus of the outbreak produces 2.3 million dozen eggs a week and has also been sued by neighbours for noxious gases, millions of gallons of uncovered manure and putrid animal carcasses left on roadways,

Not only has Mr. Austin DeCoster habitually broken food and environment regulations, in 2002 he paid a settlement to eleven female workers at his plant. Most of the women were Mexican, and the payment was made for sexual harassment and assault charges, including rapes by supervisors.

Notwithstanding the current salmonella outbreak, here's a quick run down of DeCosters adventures so far -

In 1997, he agreed to pay $2 million in fines for health and safety violations. The US labour secretary at the time, Robert Reich, said conditions on his farm in Maine were "as dangerous and oppressive as any sweatshop." Reich's successor, called the farms "simply atrocious," citing unguarded machinery, electrical hazards, exposure to harmful bacteria and unsanitary conditions.

In 2000, the state of Iowa designated DeCoster a "habitual violator" of environmental regulations for problems that included run-off of pig manure into local waterways.

In 2002, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced the $1.5-million settlement of the lawsuit against DeCoster Farms on behalf of the employees who reported sexual harassment, rape, abuse and retaliation by supervising staff at DeCoster's Wright County plants.

In 2007, 51 workers were arrested during an immigration raid at his farms. This was the fourth illegal immigration raid carried out by authorities.

In June 2010, Maine Contract Farming, the successor company to DeCoster Egg Farms, agreed to pay $25,000 in penalties and to make a one-off payment of $100,000 to the Maine Department of Agriculture over animal cruelty allegations that were spurred by a hidden-camera investigation by an animal welfare organization.

Why does America continually turn its back on the catastrophic problems evident in their factory farms, if anything, surely their risk to human health should at least prompt a re-think. The Department of Agriculture and the FDA in the US have so far shown little regard for cleaning up anything other than food crises long after they've happened and public health has already been put at risk, let alone the issues surrounding animal cruelty and the monopolies operating food production in the US.

"Light touch" regulation in the US is the order of the day. After all, the FDA still allows growth hormones in cows despite their link with tumours, they also permit the routine feeding of antibiotics to healthy livestock to promote their growth, a practice which allegedly contributes to the evolution of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria and they also allow cloned animals be be sold without special labelling.

On top of this the Department of Agriculture has just announced a recall of 8,500 pounds of ground beef for possible E. coli contamination. It's sad that we know of food horrors in the US only come to light when it's too late. If you really want to know what does on on American farms read Johnathon Safran Foer's "Eating Animals". It'll tell you not just what's behind the label but also behind the farm, read it. It ain't pretty.

For more on the salmonella outbreak and the incredible flouting of regulations by the DeCosters http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/us/27eggs.html