No One Eats Alone: Food as a Social Enterprise by Michael S. Carolan

Author:Michael S. Carolan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61091-804-6
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2017-02-08T05:00:00+00:00

Food distance is often considered in narrowly Euclidian ways—that is, in the strictly geometric, spatial manner discussed in the previous chapter. We tend to see health in a similar way, separating the “inside” (usually pure, clean) and “outside” (where disease lurks), as opposed to understanding disease as a relationship.21 The former is about borderlines—when did building walls become a solution to so many of our ills?—the latter, about borderlands.22 In walling out “bad” life, conventional foodscapes are harming other lives, such as ours. Bacteria are not the only lives lost in this preemptive antibiotic war. Lest we forget, we ourselves are mostly bacteria—in cellular terms, at least. There are ten times more bacteria cells in our bodies than human cells.23 We all know of our mammalian and even reptilian ancestry—consider, for instance, the reptilian (triune) brain. Yet an ancestry rooted in bacteria? Looks like it. About forty of our genes appear to be bacterial in origin.24 No wonder some microbiologists are suggesting that we rethink the category of human, reimagining ourselves as a “superorganism” of interrelated metabolic processes that include microbes.25 (Gut microbiota, for instance, have recently been linked to brain activity and emotional behavior in humans.26) Thanks to dominant agricultural practices, we have managed to summarily boot many of these companions from our lives, changing us in the process.

If we consider these relationships, it becomes clear that overuse of antibiotics is endangering our lives and those of future generations by hastening antimicrobial resistance. To help myself understand this process, I talked to a science advisor for the World Health Organization, Joyce Markus. She confirmed how the view of health that pits a clean, pure, and safe “inside” against a contaminated “outside” overlooks the complexity of disease, especially in confined-animal-feeding operations (CAFO). “Resistant bacteria that develop in CAFOs are being transferred to the general human population through food.” Did you catch that? The danger lies within CAFOs, due to the ecologies of these spaces, not outside of them. “Government officials and medical health professionals are becoming seriously concerned over food-borne diseases, like those caused by Campylobacter and Salmonella bacteria.” According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are roughly 50 million cases—about one in six Americans—of food-borne illness a year in the United States, 3,000 of which are fatal.27

Joyce again: “We carry Campylobacter right into our homes, our kitchens. Most of the poultry we buy is harboring it, and if you don’t thoroughly cook the meat you are going to get sick—maybe not deathly ill, thank God, but sick nevertheless.” Up to 250 of the 2–4 million Campylobacter infections per year result in deaths in the United States.28 About one in a thousand Campylobacter infections also leads to Guillain-Barré Syndrome, an affliction that can cause paralysis.29 In short, drug-resistant Campylobacter is a real public health concern.

The poultry industry’s use of fluoroquinolones, a class of broad-spectrum antibiotic, has led to the development of resistant Campylobacter strains. Prior to the approval of fluoroquinolone in US agriculture, the only cases of

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