In the articles "The illusion of control: industrialized agriculture, nature, and food safety" by Stuart, D and "E. Coli Path Shows Flaws in Beef Inspection" by Moss, M, both authors expose the flaws with the American Meat Processing Industry. As a result of a lack of attention to safety procedures and the desire to use technology to "solve" nature's problems, eating meat no longer is only a past time; it has become a source of concern for many Americans, such that many are becoming vegans simply to avoid this problem.
Although this is indeed unacceptable, from a business perspective, many of these firms have little resources to improve this situation. Rough competition from fellow competitors in addition to a collapsed economy have caused many of these meat processing companies to abandon costly safety procedures purely to cut back on costs and survive in the industry.
Nevertheless, although the development of technology is a problem in that it is encouraging us to abandon examination of the meat in preference of engineering it, future advancements and discoveries, particularly in the chemical field, may be developed in the near future to eliminate E-coli.
Questions I have based on these readings include:
- Is it possible for the USDA to inject more funding into the industry so that firms have more resources to conduct safety tests with?
- How long can E-coli survive on meat for?
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You raise an important question about the role of technology and whether we can rely on it to solve the problems that arise out of our attempts at "controlling nature," as Stuart discusses. For example, how do (or should) people feel about consuming meat that's been washed in ammonia or irradiated?
ReplyDeleteRegarding your comment about firms having little resources to improve the food safety situation, keep in mind that Cargill (which processed the meat that contained e. coli in the NY Times story) is the largest privately-held company in the United States and has annual earnings of over 3 billion dollars. Although economic limitations are a reality for many smaller producers (Such as Joel Salatin), this isn't usually the argument for the large corporations that have been found with contaminated meat coming from their facilities.