NICHOLAS KRISTOF
My Thursday column is about the cost of industrial farming practices. I’m thinking not so much the price we pay in the store but the price we pay in pollution, in antibiotic-resistant diseases and in food poisonings such as the salmonella outbreak now in the headlines. It’s not so much eggs that sicken people with salmonella — it’s industrial farming models.
As a kid who grew up on a farm and was very active in the FFA, let me say right off the bat that the problem isn’t the typical farmers. It’s these industrial operations that turn farms into meat factories. For example, United Egg Producers (the egg lobby) says that there are now a dozen companies with more than 5 million laying hens. Those are to the family farm what Wal-Mart is to a Mom-and-Pop store. This kind of intensive concentration is also harmful for rural America, creating a kind of modern feudalism (small number of rich proprietors and large number of much poorer workers) that are the end of small town America.
It’s true that there are problems with all approaches to farming. Even cage-free operations, for example, find that they need to debeak hens because they cluster together. And free range operations in which chickens actually scratch around the grass for food take up vast amounts of space. United Egg Producers calculates that the land for such poultry operations (at 400 birds per acre) would add up to 740,000 acres, an area larger than Rhode Island.
In practice, many producers that call themselves “free range” really aren’t. They may in theory offer birds a fenced run outside, but in practice the barn is structured so that most of the birds never go outside. Or the “free range” may consist of a bit of fenced concrete.
In the old days, salmonella often came from contamination on the outside of the egg. These days, egg washing has improved and that isn’t the problem. The problem is that the hen, who seems healthy, is infected with salmonella in her ovaries, and so the egg has salmonella inside the shell. This is what seems far more common today in industrial egg operations than in traditional farms. The Humane Society of the United States, in an extensive report called “Food Safety and Cage Egg Production,” suggests that in the 1940’s, salmonella sickened only a few hundred Americans a year and that its spread was caused by the rise of industrial farming. The report also suggests that the egg industry’s eradication of salmonella gallinarum (a kind that affects birds but not people) permitted the spread of salmonella enteritidis, the kind that affects humans but not birds — the kind in today’s outbreak.
United Egg Producers will push back of course. It will say that 1 death a week is nothing in a country as big as the United States, and that cheap food is what consumers want. It will argue that moving to cage-free production will significantly add to costs. In fact, the industry’s own estimate is that cage-free adds about 11.5 cents per dozen to costs, or a bit less than a penny per egg. My hunch is that that’s a price worth paying, especially if it means less salmonella. In fact, the industry has pushed back at other safety measures, such as vaccination of hens — and that’s why it’s in this mess.
The CDC estimates that 2 percent of consumers eat a salmonella-tainted egg each year, but most don’t get sick because the egg was fully cooked. The industry emphasizes, rightly, that consumers have to be educated to cook eggs thoroughly, and to wash hands after they have touched raw eggs. True. But as the Humane Society notes, Patricia Griffin of CDC offered the best retort to this blame-the-victim approach in the context of e. coli. She asked: “Is it reasonable that if a consumer undercooks a hamburger…their three-year-old dies?”
I welcome your comments
kristof.blogs.nytimes.com
My Thursday column is about the cost of industrial farming practices. I’m thinking not so much the price we pay in the store but the price we pay in pollution, in antibiotic-resistant diseases and in food poisonings such as the salmonella outbreak now in the headlines. It’s not so much eggs that sicken people with salmonella — it’s industrial farming models.
As a kid who grew up on a farm and was very active in the FFA, let me say right off the bat that the problem isn’t the typical farmers. It’s these industrial operations that turn farms into meat factories. For example, United Egg Producers (the egg lobby) says that there are now a dozen companies with more than 5 million laying hens. Those are to the family farm what Wal-Mart is to a Mom-and-Pop store. This kind of intensive concentration is also harmful for rural America, creating a kind of modern feudalism (small number of rich proprietors and large number of much poorer workers) that are the end of small town America.
It’s true that there are problems with all approaches to farming. Even cage-free operations, for example, find that they need to debeak hens because they cluster together. And free range operations in which chickens actually scratch around the grass for food take up vast amounts of space. United Egg Producers calculates that the land for such poultry operations (at 400 birds per acre) would add up to 740,000 acres, an area larger than Rhode Island.
In practice, many producers that call themselves “free range” really aren’t. They may in theory offer birds a fenced run outside, but in practice the barn is structured so that most of the birds never go outside. Or the “free range” may consist of a bit of fenced concrete.
In the old days, salmonella often came from contamination on the outside of the egg. These days, egg washing has improved and that isn’t the problem. The problem is that the hen, who seems healthy, is infected with salmonella in her ovaries, and so the egg has salmonella inside the shell. This is what seems far more common today in industrial egg operations than in traditional farms. The Humane Society of the United States, in an extensive report called “Food Safety and Cage Egg Production,” suggests that in the 1940’s, salmonella sickened only a few hundred Americans a year and that its spread was caused by the rise of industrial farming. The report also suggests that the egg industry’s eradication of salmonella gallinarum (a kind that affects birds but not people) permitted the spread of salmonella enteritidis, the kind that affects humans but not birds — the kind in today’s outbreak.
United Egg Producers will push back of course. It will say that 1 death a week is nothing in a country as big as the United States, and that cheap food is what consumers want. It will argue that moving to cage-free production will significantly add to costs. In fact, the industry’s own estimate is that cage-free adds about 11.5 cents per dozen to costs, or a bit less than a penny per egg. My hunch is that that’s a price worth paying, especially if it means less salmonella. In fact, the industry has pushed back at other safety measures, such as vaccination of hens — and that’s why it’s in this mess.
The CDC estimates that 2 percent of consumers eat a salmonella-tainted egg each year, but most don’t get sick because the egg was fully cooked. The industry emphasizes, rightly, that consumers have to be educated to cook eggs thoroughly, and to wash hands after they have touched raw eggs. True. But as the Humane Society notes, Patricia Griffin of CDC offered the best retort to this blame-the-victim approach in the context of e. coli. She asked: “Is it reasonable that if a consumer undercooks a hamburger…their three-year-old dies?”
I welcome your comments
kristof.blogs.nytimes.com
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