Pastured pork dust-up shows growing biomimicry of sustainable food-system champions

The effort to build a resilient, healthy and biologically sound food system is the economic driver for farming with the same attributes. Threats to one are threats to the other. Perhaps their vulnerabilities can also mirror their strengths. In biologically robust agricultural systems, cultured biodiversity manages pest organisms in the field not by eliminating them, but by suppressing them enough through prey and parasitism to keep around as food in an intricate system of give and take.

The emerging sustainable food movement can’t muster the orchestrated whack-and-smack—or the ever more sophisticated greenwashing—of Corporate Food media campaigns. Rather, we work like the “many little hammers” of biological systems to deconstruct challenges about growing the good food movement from all the legitimate angles that matter, and learn in the process.

I watched this play out in recent days after the New York Times carried an OpEd by University of Texas history professor James E. McWilliams . He questioned the food safety of pasture-raised pork, and wondered whether confinement production can be shown to be healthier alternative, based on one preliminary study and an assortment of anecdotal examples.

Most responses from the sustainable side allowed the salient points McWilliams made, but showed how the piece over-stated the benefits of confinement and the risks of pasture-production. (McWilliams himself asked for a little slack this week in responding to the outpouring of sentiment by saying he was raising a “tough question” on a potential food-safety vulnerability to strengthen a movement he supports. That’s good news. Maybe his future pieces will look more like critiques for improvement than attacks on a system.)

California farmer Rebecca Thistlewaite weighed in on her blog “Honest Meat: Ruminate on this” with the post “Good Science or Political Agenda.” She looks at the preliminary study cited by McWilliams
to find out what it actually says. She says McWilliams wrongly attributes animal health benefits in confinement as a driver for the move to confinement.

McWilliams cited danger from trichinosis as a reason to doubt the safety of grass-based pork production, referring again to a recent scientific article by Ohio State University veterinary professor WB Gabreyes. 

In reality, what the research detected was not the actual presence of the trichina organism, but the blood serum antibodies for Trichinella, points out Ralph Loglisci of Center For a Livable Future in his post titled “Smoked (Bacon)and Mirrors” —in two of 324 free-range pigs tested. The parasites were likely present in these two pigs as well, but that’s not what was recorded. Maybe, Loglisci suggests, the study shows the outdoor pigs have a more robust immune system.

Why does Mr. McWilliams not talk about the growing health threats of antibiotic over-use in the pig industry, or the growing problem of MRSA or other antibiotic-resistant super-bugs?  wonders Thistlewaite.

She also wonders why the NYT used this piece the way they did. I believe the tip-off is that it’s in the OpEd section, and the paper is feeling the pressure to join the regrettable slide within mainstream journalism into covering extreme voices at either end of a topic without helping readers with the critical background to sort out their claims. The Times has had a good run of strong food-system coverage. Maybe an editor felt the paper needed a provocative “factory-farmed pork is good for you” outlier to stir the food-issue pot.

Pointing out how much McWilliams did not say about the systemic human health issues of factory pork was Susan Schneider, writing on the Agricultural Law blog. She cites the known and pervasive health impacts on workers in confined livestock systems, and the growing evidence of how the continued high level of fed antibiotics is spreading methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) beyond the barns.

Big Food following Big Tobacco: For real attacks by people who don’t have sustainability in mind, Tom Laskawy’s piece on Grist details how industries trying to avoid corporate responsibility use “shock and awe” barrages and sophisticated disformation campaigns. Their hired communicators employ what he calls the FUD-factor: “FUD, of course, stands for the bedrock principles of a depressingly large segment of corporations (and politicians)—Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt.”

Making the tobacco-food industry comparison outright are Kelly D. Brownell, a psychologist who is director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, and Kenneth E. Warner, a prominent tobacco researcher who is dean of the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health. They collaborated in the paper published earlier this year in the health policy journal, the Milbank Quarterly: “The Perils of Ignoring History: Big Tobacco Played Dirty and Millions Died. How Similar Is Big Food?”

As Brownell explained in Yale Environment 360, many of the tactics currently being used by Big Food now mirror those used by U.S. tobacco giants to stall effective regulation, with negative health impacts—some fatal—to too many people. According to Brownell and Warner, the common strategies include:

• Dismissing as “junk science” peer-reviewed studies showing a link between their products and disease. 
• Paying scientists to produce pro-industry studies. 
• Sowing doubt in the public’s mind about the harm caused by their products.
• Intensive marketing to children and adolescents. 
• Frequently rolling out supposedly “safer” products and vowing to regulate their own industries.
• Denying the addictive nature of their products. 
• Lobbying with massive resources to thwart regulatory action. 

If these comparisons help you make sense of recent disparagements of sustainable and organic food, they should. The champions of real food—and the farming that grows it—need to be honing our “truthiness” skills. The food world is changing in our direction, so agribiz-industrial food forces now have targets worth worrying about. We’ve got a long way to go in creating the vital, decentralized, ecologically sound and socially dynamic alternative that is so needed to replace the crumbling industrial food paradigm.

While accepting critiques where we need more work and better evidence, we also have to call out cheap shots on real food. Mostly, we need to strengthen the knowledge network of how to grow, minimally process and carefully deliver high-quality, sustainably raised food as close to home as we can, while reaching everyone we can to make food justice a reality.

Where we have work to do and problems getting it right, let’s better focus our diversity of perspectives and knowledge bases to find the answers to float as many boats as possible—without seeming to shoot each other out of the water.