My obituary’s headline would have read “Food writer killed by flying tomato.”

On a visit to my parents in Naples, Fla., I was driving I-75 when I came up behind one of those gravel trucks that seem to be everywhere in southwest Florida’s rush to convert pine woods and cypress stands into gated communities and shopping malls. As I drew closer, I saw that the tractor trailer was heavy with what seemed to be green apples. When I pulled out to pass, three of them sailed off the truck, narrowly missing my windshield. Every time it hit the slightest bump, more of those orbs would tumble off. At the first stoplight, I got a closer look. The shoulder of the road was littered with green tomatoes so plasticine and so identical they could have been stamped out by a machine. Most looked smooth and unblemished. A few had cracks in their skins. Not one was smashed. A 10-foot drop followed by a 60-mile-per-hour impact with pavement is no big deal to a modern, agribusiness tomato.

If you have ever eaten a fresh tomato from a grocery store or restaurant, chances are good that you have eaten a tomato much like the ones aboard that truck. Florida alone accounts for one-third of the fresh tomatoes raised in the United States, and from October to June, virtually all the fresh-market, field-grown tomatoes in the country come from the Sunshine State, which ships more than 1 billion pounds every year. It takes a tough tomato to stand up to the indignity of such industrial scale farming, so most Florida tomatoes are bred for hardness, picked when still firm and green (the merest trace of pink is taboo), and artificially gassed with ethylene in warehouses until they acquire the rosy red skin tones of a ripe tomato.

Beauty, in this case, is only skin deep. According to figures compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Americans bought $5 billion worth of perfectly round, perfectly red, and, in the opinion of many consumers, perfectly tasteless fresh tomatoes in 2009 — our second most popular vegetable behind lettuce. We buy winter tomatoes, but that doesn’t mean we like them. In survey after survey, fresh tomatoes fall at or near the bottom in rankings of consumer satisfaction. No one will ever be able to duplicate the flavor of garden-grown fruits and vegetables at the supermarket, but there’s a reason you don’t hear consumers bemoaning the taste of supermarket cabbages, onions, or potatoes. Of all the fruits and vegetables we eat, none suffers at the hands of factory farming more than a tomato grown in the wintertime fields of Florida.

Perhaps our taste buds are trying to send us a message. Today’s industrial tomatoes are as bereft of nutrition as they are of flavor. According to analyses conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, fresh tomatoes today have 30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin, 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than they did in the 1960s. But the modern tomato does shame its 1960s counterpart in one area: It contains 14 times as much sodium.

A couple of winters ago, I brought some supermarket tomatoes home. I accidentally nudged one and watched as it rolled off the counter and fell on our newly refinished pine floor with the solid thud of a baking potato. I bowled the fruit through the kitchen door, across the dining room, over a wooden threshold, onto the tile floor of the sunroom, where The Tomato That Would Not Die crashed against the door. No damage done.

The best way to experience true tomato taste is to grow your own. Little wonder that tomatoes are by far the most popular vegetable for home gardeners, found in nearly nine out of 10 backyard plots. Both The Tomato That Would Not Die and the heirloom Brandywines in my Vermont garden are of the species Solanum lycopersicum, and both are red. But the similarity ends there. My Brandywines are downright homely — lumpy, deeply creased, and scarred, they look like badly sunburned Rubens derrieres. Nor are they made for travel. More often than not, one will spontaneously split during the 25-yard stroll from garden to kitchen. But there is no better-tasting tomato than a garden-ripe Brandywine. With sweetness and tartness playing off each other perfectly, and juices that burst into your mouth in a surge that forces you to abandon all pretext of good table manners and to slurp, a real tomato’s taste is the distilled essence of sun, warm soil, and fine summer days.

Not everyone can grow a garden or head out to a neighborhood farmers’ market in search of the ideal tomato. But we all have an alternative to the sad offerings of commercial agriculture. At a lunch spot in the town where I live, a handwritten notation appeared on the blackboard one afternoon. “Dear Customers, we will not be putting tomatoes on our sandwiches until we can obtain ones that meet our standards. Thanks.” With that small insurrection, the restaurant’s proprietor had articulated a philosophy that more of us should embrace: Insist on eating food that meets our standards only, not the standards set by corporate agriculture.

Organic, local, seasonal, fresh, sustainable, fair trade — the words have become platitudes that skeptics associate with foodie elitists who can afford to shop at natural food stores and have kitchens that boast $5,000 ranges. It’s easy to forget that those oft-repeated words do mean something. Florida’s tomato fields provide a stark example of what a food system looks like when all elements of sustainability are violated.

If it were left up to the laws of botany and nature, Florida would be one of the last places in the world where tomatoes grow. Tomato production in the state has everything to do with marketing and nothing to do with biology. Florida is warm when the rest of the East and Midwest — within easy striking distance for a laden produce truck — is cold. But Florida is notoriously humid. Tomatoes’ wild ancestors came from the coastal deserts of northern Peru and southern Ecuador, some of the driest places on Earth. When forced to struggle in the wilting humidity of Florida, tomatoes become vulnerable to all manner of fungal diseases. Hordes of voracious hoppers, beetles, and worms chomp on their roots, stems, leaves, and fruit. And although Florida’s sandy soil makes for great beaches, it is devoid of plant nutrients. To get a successful crop, they pump the sand full of chemical fertilizers and can blast the plants with more than 100 different herbicides and pesticides, including some of the most toxic in agribusiness’s arsenal.

Workers are exposed to these chemicals on a daily basis. The toll includes eye and respiratory ailments, exposure to known carcinogens, and babies born with horrendous birth defects. Not all the chemicals stay behind in the fields once the tomatoes are harvested. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has found residues of 35 pesticides on tomatoes destined for supermarkets.

All of this might have a perverse logic to it if tomato growing were a highly lucrative, healthy business. But it isn’t. As large as most of them are, Florida’s tomato companies are struggling, always one disaster or disappointing year away from insolvency. Cheap tomatoes from Mexico stream across the border during the winter months. Advances in hydroponic technology have enabled greenhouse tomatoes from Canada and the northern states to eat into Florida’s market share during the spring and fall.

An industrial tomato grower has no control over what they spend on fuel, fert
ilizer (which requires enormous quantities of natural gas in its manufacture), and pesticides, but they can control what they pays the men and women who plant, tend, and harvest the crops. This has put a steady downward pressure on the earnings of tomato workers. Those cheap tomatoes that fill produce sections 365 days a year, year in and year out, come at a tremendous human cost. Although there have been recent improvements, a person picking tomatoes receives the same basic rate of pay they received 30 years ago. Adjusted for inflation, a harvester’s wages have actually dropped by half over the same period. Florida tomato workers, mostly Hispanic migrants, toil without union protection and get neither overtime, benefits, nor medical insurance. They are denied basic legal rights that virtually all other laborers enjoy. Lacking their own vehicles, they have to live near the fields, often paying rural slumlords exorbitant rents to be crammed with 10 or a dozen other farm workers in moldering trailers with neither heat nor air-conditioning and which would be condemned outright in any other American jurisdiction.

Paid on a “piece” basis for every bushel-sized basket they gather, tomato pickers are lucky to earn $70 on a good day. But good days are few. Workers can arrive at a field at the appointed time and wait for hours while fog clears or dew dries. If it rains, they don’t pick. If a field ripens more slowly than expected, too bad. And if there is a freeze as there was in 2010, weeks can go by without work and without a penny of income. Unable to pay rent, pickers slept in encampments in the woods. The owners had crop insurance and emergency government aid to offset their losses. The workers had nothing.

And conditions are even worse for some in Florida’s tomato industry. In the chilling words of Douglas Molloy, chief assistant United States attorney in Fort Myers, south Florida’s tomato fields are “ground zero for modern-day slavery.” Molloy is not talking about virtual slavery, or near slavery, or slaverylike conditions, but real slavery. In the last 15 years, Florida law enforcement officials have freed more than 1,000 men and women who had been held and forced to work against their will in the fields of Florida, and that represents only the tip of the iceberg. Most instances of slavery go unreported. Workers were “sold” to crew bosses to pay off bogus debts, beaten if they didn’t work, held in chains, pistol whipped, locked at night into shacks in chain-link enclosures patrolled by armed guards. Escapees who got caught were beaten or worse. Even though police have successfully prosecuted seven major slavery cases in the state in the last 15 years, those brought to justice were low-ranking contract field managers, themselves only one or two shaky rungs up the economic ladder from those they enslaved. The wealthy owners of the vast farms walked away scot-free. They expressed no public regrets, let alone outrage, that such conditions existed on operations they controlled. But we all share the blame. When I asked Molloy if it was safe to assume that a consumer who has eaten a fresh tomato from a grocery store, fast food restaurant, or food-service company in the winter has eaten a fruit picked by the hand of a slave, he corrected my choice of words. “It’s not an assumption. It is a fact.”

After months of crisscrossing Florida, speaking with growers, trade association executives, owners of tomato-packing companies, lawyers, federal prosecutors, county sheriffs, university horticulturalists, plant breeders, farm worker advocates, soup kitchen managers, field workers, field crew leaders, fair housing advocates, one U. S. senator, and one Mexican peasant who came here seeking a better life for his family only to be held for two years as a slave, I began to see that the Florida tomato industry constitutes a parallel world unto itself, a place where many of the assumptions I had taken for granted about living in the United States are turned on their heads.

In this world, slavery is tolerated, or at best ignored. Labor protections for workers predate the Great Depression. Child labor and minimum wage laws are flouted. Basic antitrust measures do not apply. The most minimal housing standards are not enforced. Spanish is the lingua franca. It has its own banking system made up of storefront paycheck-cashing outfits that charge outrageous commissions to migrants who never stay in one place long enough to open bank accounts. Pesticides, so toxic to humans and so bad for the environment that they are banned outright for most crops, are routinely sprayed on virtually every Florida tomato field, and in too many cases, sprayed directly on workers, despite federally mandated periods when fields are supposed to remain empty after chemical application. All of this is happening in plain view, but out of sight, only a half-hour’s drive from one of the wealthiest areas in the United States with its estate homes, beachfront condominiums, and gated golf communities. Meanwhile, tomatoes, once one of the most alluring fruits in our culinary repertoire, have become hard green balls that can easily survive a fall onto an interstate highway. Gassed to an appealing red, they inspire gastronomic fantasies despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s a world we’ve all made, and one we can fix. Welcome to Tomatoland.

When cows kill.

Stuart Levy once kept a flock of chickens on a farm in the rolling countryside west of Boston. No ordinary farmer, Levy is a professor of molecular biology and microbiology and of medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. This was decades ago, and his chickens were taking part in a never-before-conducted study. Half the birds received feed laced with a low dose of antibiotics, which U.S. farmers routinely administer to healthy livestock — not to cure illness, but merely to increase the animals’ rates of growth. The other half of Levy’s flock received drug-free food.

Results started showing up almost instantly. Within two days, the treated animals began excreting feces containing E. coli bacteria that were resistant to tetracycline, the antibiotic in their feed. (E. Coli, most of which are harmless, normally live in the guts of chickens and other warm-blooded animals, including humans.) After three months, the chickens were also excreting bacteria resistant to such potent antibiotics as ampicillin, streptomycin, carbenacillin, and sulfonamides. Even though Levy had added only tetracycline to the feed, his chickens had somehow developed what scientists now call “multi-drug resistance” to a host of antibiotics that play important roles in treating infections in people. More frightening, although none of the members of the farm family tending the flock were taking antibiotics, they, too, soon began excreting drug-resistant strains of E. coli.

When Levy’s study was published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1976, it was met with skepticism. “The other side — industry — could not believe that this would have happened. The mood at the time was that what happens in animals does not happen in people,” said Levy, who serves as president of the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics, in a telephone interview from his office at Tufts. “But we had the data. It was obvious to us even then that using antibiotics this way was an error and should be stopped.”

During the intervening 35 years, study after study has confirmed Levy’s findings and shown that the problem of antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” is even worse than anyone could have imagined. Each year, 70,000 Americans in U.S. hospitals die from bacterial infections that drugs are unable to kill. And even as the number of infectious diseases is on the rise, more antibiotics are administered to livestock than ever before, from 17.8 million pounds per year in 1999 according to the Animal Health Institute (a trade organization of companies, like Bayer, Novartis, and Pfizer, that manufacture livestock drugs) to 29.8 million pounds in 2009, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Fully 80 percent of the antibiotics used in the United States are given to livestock, and the vast majority are administered to promote growth and stave off potential infections, not to treat illness.

From his perspective of more than three decades as a resistant-microbe watcher, Levy sounded almost weary when he said, “Proponents of growth promotion keep asking for more data, and we scientists provide them. But then the findings have never led to removal of the practice.”

Getting serious

Last month, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Center for Science in the Public Interest, Food Animal Concerns Trust, Public Citizen, and the Union of Concerned Scientists joined forces to file a lawsuit against the FDA. The groups want the agency to withdraw its approval for most non-therapeutic uses of penicillin and tetracycline in animal feed. They say that it’s something regulators should have done decades ago.

The FDA first approved the use of low-dose antibiotics in the 1950s. Concerns about the drugs began appearing within a decade, and by the time Levy’s paper was published, the FDA was aware the practice posed a serious risk to human health. The agency proposed to withdraw its approval in 1977, saying that new evidence showed that penicillin- and tetracycline-containing products had not been “shown safe for widespread, sub-therapeutic use.”

The proposal drew howls of outrage from two of the most powerful lobbying groups in Washington, agribusinesses and drug manufacturers. Both the House and Senate ordered the FDA to “hold in abeyance any and all implementation of the proposal” until further studies had been conducted. “It was the power of the lobby and the money behind that lobby,” Levy recalled.

As requested by Congress, the FDA commissioned three studies during the 1980s, all of which supported initial concerns about the risks of feeding farm animals antibiotics on a daily basis. The FDA received petitions urging it to act from coalitions of scientific and environmental groups in 1999 and 2005. Such respected bodies as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the World Health Organization all identified low-dose antibiotics as the reason antibiotic-resistant bacteria were proliferating in humans and animals. And the FDA — which is charged with protecting the health of Americans — failed to act, only going so far as to issue a “Draft Guidance” [PDF] report and a draft “Action Plan” proposing voluntary guidelines. These suggestions have done nothing to stem the deluge of unnecessary antibiotics through the spigot of agribusiness.

“We’ve been fighting the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in livestock for more than 30 years,” Margaret Mellon, director of the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a press release announcing the lawsuit. “And over those decades the problem has steadily worsened. We hope this lawsuit will finally compel the FDA to act with an urgency commensurate with the magnitude of the problem.” (Siobhan Delancey, a spokeswoman for the FDA, declined to comment on the suit.)

The trouble with antibiotics

Bacteria are evolutionary dynamos. Untold trillions of them can live in one confined animal feeding operation, or CAFO — the technical term for a factory farm. They breed rapidly and mutate readily. Exposure to even miniscule levels of drugs equips bacteria with the genetic resilience to fend off higher levels of the same drugs.

From the dawn of modern antibiotics, researchers have been aware that the seeds of the wonder drugs’ destruction had already been sown. In his 1945 Nobel acceptance speech for his discoveries related to penicillin, Sir Alexander Fleming said, “There is a danger that the ignorant man may easily under-dose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant.” Fleming’s prediction was prescient — except the problem wasn’t an “ignorant man” but politicians and business executives whose priorities lay elsewhere.

During the decades that the FDA dithered, a mountain of scientific research accumulated showing that antibiotic-resistant bacteria can not only evolve in the guts of farm animals, but can spread from animals to the humans who tend them, and then be passed on to people who have never been anywhere near a chicken house or hog barn.

In 2004, Dutch doctors discovered a strain of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in a 6-month-old baby. Often fatal, MRSA is the original “superbug” because it can survive treatment by the most powerful antibiotics in modern medicine’s arsenal. At first, the doctors were puzzled. MRSA was primarily known as a hospital-acquired infection. But the child, who carried the germs but never became sick, as is often the case with the asymptomatic carriers of bacteria, had never been in a hospital. Her parents were pig farmers, and subsequent investigations showed that the MRSA had been passed from the pigs to the parents and on to the baby. (Most bacteria are non-infectious, although they may carry resistance genes. The problem is that they can pass their resistance traits to infectious bacteria.)

Three years later, J. Scott Weese, a professor at the Ontario Veterinary College at the University of Guelph near Toronto, found an identical strain of MRSA in Canadian pigs and their owners. The superbug had somehow leapt over the Atlantic Ocean. Further research by Weese revealed that the swapping of resistant bacteria between animals and humans can be a two-way street. Not only were the farmers affected by MRSA that had originated in pigs, but the pigs carried MRSA that until then had only been found in humans.

For a year or so, American agribusiness continued to claim that MRSA was a problem that couldn’t happen here — a myth they were able to perpetrate because no government agency was routinely testing hogs for MRSA. But during the summer of 2008, Tara Smith, a microbiologist at the University of Iowa and the deputy director of the university’s Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases, found that seven out of 10 pigs she and her students tested on farms in Illinois and Iowa carried MRSA.

A graduate student working with Smith recently uncovered a strain of S. aureus associated with hogs and the people who tend them in a day-care worker who had never been near a hog farm. Fortunately, that particular strain was not antibiotic resistant. But the discovery showed that humans do not have to work with infected animals to pick up the bacteria they carry. “Whether the pig bacterium was passed on via another human or via contaminated food products, we can’t tell right now,” Smith said in an email.

Making the case

In fact, there are any number of ways antibiotic-resistant bacteria can spread from farm to fork. A recently published study in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases found that 47 percent of the beef, chicken, pork, and turkey sampled from grocery stores in five U.S. cities carried drug-resistant S. aureus. Superbugs are literally blowing in the wind. According to a 2006 report in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, multi-drug-resistant bacteria were found in the air downwind of a confined hog operation. Nearly 90 percent of the E. coli in liquid manure pits associated with pig farms are resistant to drugs, according to Kellogg Schwab, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Water and Health. Manure ponds frequently burst their banks and contaminate nearby streams, rivers, and wells.

Pharmaceutical companies dispute the assertion that treating animals with low-dose antibiotics is dangerous to humans. “A lot of people want to talk about antibiotic resistance as if it is a big amorphous issue,” said Ron Phillips of the Animal Health Institute, in an interview. “It is, in fact, a series of discrete issues where you have to look at specific bug/drug combinations and figure out what are the potential pathways for antibiotic-resistant material to transfer from animals to humans. Studies have been done, and have come to the conclusion that there is a vanishingly small level of risk.”

Smith of the University of Iowa says that the specific studies that the industry suggests are necessary simply cannot be done — it would be the equivalent of having to have an eyewitness to prosecute any crime. “But we have DNA from the crime scene that matches that of the suspect. At some point you have to accept that he is responsible. The bulk of evidence is overwhelming.”

One area where solid scientific evidence is lacking, astonishingly, is on whether changing the industry-wide practice of giving low doses of antibiotics to livestock would actually make that much of a difference. The experience of farmers in the European Union, where dosing animals with sub-therapeutic levels of antibiotics was banned in 1998, suggests otherwise. Denmark is the world’s largest pork exporting country, and most of its hogs are raised in large confined operations much like those used by the U.S. pork industry. In that country, the overall use of antibiotics fell by 37 percent [PDF] between 1994 and 2009, according to a study by Denmark’s National Food Institute. Correspondingly, levels of resistant bacteria in animals and people plummeted, but production levels of meat either stayed the same or increased: The average daily weight gain per pig was actually higher in 2008 than in 1992 when antibiotics were routinely administered.

It’s easy to understand why drug companies react so forcefully to any attempts to cut back on sub-therapeutic antibiotic use — FDA figures show that 60 percent of the antimicrobial drugs they sell are fed to farm animals to promote growth, an enormous chunk of their business — but given the success of farmers in Europe who’ve stopped using antibiotics to promote growth, why is the farm lobby so vehemently against change? Would it spell the end of the huge CAFOs upon which American agribusiness has come to depend? Steven Roach, the public health program director for the Food Animal Concerns Trust (FACT), one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the FDA, has a straightforward answer to that question: No, CAFOs would not go away. European pig farms are as large as those in the U.S., according to Roach. Some of the E.U.’s chicken operations are even larger than those in this country. (And if American farmers feel uncomfortable with examples from foreign countries, he suggests that they look at Tyson, one of the United States’ largest poultry producers, which had no problems raising chickens without antibiotics in ways that the suit aims to stop.)

“There are two parts of production where there are small economic benefits to using low-dose antibiotics,” Roach said in an interview. “Particularly on young pigs. The challenge for the beef cattle industry is that when you feed a high-corn diet, cattle have some heath problems, and one way they manage that is using the antibiotics in the feed. But even so, some producers are raising them without antibiotics in feedlots now.” Roach said that European farmers have gotten around these problem areas by weaning piglets later. Barns are kept cleaner for all animals. And altering diets allows CAFOs to raise cattle without antibiotics. Of course, says Roach, some farmers simply won’t want to change. He believes they are afraid that if they allow outside forces to impose even small changes, then other changes are bound to come.

After 35 years on the frontlines in the battle to keep antibiotics effective, though, Levy believes there’s cause for optimism. “The mood is now 180 degrees better than it was for getting rid of this practice,” he said. “There are more and more scientists and lay people who are urgently asking for an end to this use of antibiotics.”

It helps that one of those “science people” is also a representative. Louise Slaughter, a Democrat who represents upstate New York, was a microbiologist before going into politics. In 2009, she introduced a bill called the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act, which calls for the FDA to withdraw its approval of the practice within two years unless there is reasonable certainty that the low-dose antibiotics cause no harm to human health. “We are witnessing a looming public health crisis that is moving from farms to grocery stores to dinner tables around the country,” she said in an email. “As the only microbiologist in Congress, I feel it’s my duty to bring public attention to this.”

Although Slaughter’s bill has yet to pass, it had 127 cosponsors in the last congressional session, more than double its support in the previous Congress. It looks as though even more legislators will sign on this time, and many are hopeful that the combined forces of looming legislation and an active lawsuit will finally lead the FDA to act. ”If we don’t address it,” Slaughter continued, “we risk setting ourselves back to the time before antibiotics, when even common infections could kill a person. That’s not any kind of world I want my children and their children to inherit.”

Photo: Gilt Taste

This story originally appeared on Gilt Taste.

There’s a stunning moment in the Academy Award-nominated documentary Gasland, where a man touches a match to his running faucet — to have it explode in a ball of fire. This is what hydraulic fracturing, a process of drilling for natural gas known as “fracking,” is doing to many drinking water supplies across the country. But the other side of fracking — what it might do to the food eaten by people living hundreds of miles from the nearest gas well — has received little attention.

Unlike many in agriculture, cattle farmer Ken Jaffe has had a good decade. But lately he’s been nervous, worried fracking will destroy his business. Jaffe’s been good to his soil, and the land has been good to him. By rotating his herd of cattle to different pastures on his Catskills farm every day, he has restored the once-eroded land and built a successful business with his grass-fed and -finished beef. His Slope Farms sells meat to food co-ops, specialty meat markets, and high-end restaurants in New York City, about 160 miles to the southeast. “If you feed your micro-herd — the bacteria and fungi in the soil — then your big herd will do well, too,” he said when I visited him recently on a cool, sunny afternoon.

A fracking well in Pennsylvania.Photo: RiverkeeperBut a seam of black rock lies nearly a mile beneath the topsoil he has so scrupulously nurtured, and the deposit contains enormous quantities of natural gas. Profit-hungry energy companies — and the politicians that their campaign donations support — are determined to exploit that resource, even though it could destroy the livelihoods of thousands of small farmers like Jaffe who have sprung up in New York City’s vibrant, alternative food shed.

Energy companies liberate the gas, which is trapped in tiny bubble-like pockets in the rock, by forcefully injecting chemicals diluted with millions of gallons of water into the rock. This fracking ruptures the earth, creating fissures through which the gas passes — along with a witch’s brew of carcinogens, acutely poisonous heavy metals, and radioactive elements.

“For sustainable agriculture, fracking is a disaster,” says Jaffe. The gas rush started in the South and West, but has spread to the East and now affects 34 states. Under much of West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York lies a 400-million-year-old geographic formation called the Marcellus Shale. Although estimates vary, the shale may hold 50 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas, enough to meet New York state’s needs for 50 years. To see what fracking can do to food production, Jaffe has only to look at what has happened to some of his colleagues in nearby Pennsylvania, where the first fracked well came into production in 2005, and where there are now more than 1,500.

Last year, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture quarantined 28 cattle belonging to Don and Carol Johnson, who farm about 175 miles southwest of Jaffe. The animals had come into wastewater that leaked from a nearby well that showed concentrations of chlorine, barium, magnesium, potassium, and radioactive strontium. In Louisiana, 16 cows that drank fluid from a fracked well began bellowing, foaming and bleeding at the mouth, then dropped dead. Homeowners near fracked sites complain about a host of frightening consequences, from poisoned wells to sickened pets to debilitating illnesses.

The Marcellus Shale itself contains ethane, propane, butane, arsenic, cobalt, lead, chromium — toxins all. Uranium, radium, and radon make the shale so radioactive that companies sometimes drop Geiger counters into wells to determine whether they have reached the gas-rich deposits. But those compounds are almost benign compared to the fracking fluids that drillers inject into the wells. At least 596 chemicals are used in fracking, but the companies are not required by law to divulge the ingredients, which are considered trade secrets. According to a report prepared for the Ground Water Protection Council, a national association of state agencies charged with protecting the water supply, a typical recipe [PDF] might include hydrochloric acid (which can damage respiratory organs, eyes, skin, and intestines), glutaraldehyde (normally used to sterilize medical equipment and linked to asthma, breathing difficulties, respiratory irritation, and skin rashes), N,N-dimethyl formamide (a solvent that can cause birth defects and cancer), ethylene glycol (a lethal toxin), and benzene (a potent carcinogen). Some of these chemicals stay in the ground. Others are vented into the air. Many enter the water table or leach into ponds, streams, and rivers.

For the most part, state and federal governments have turned a blind eye to the problems brought about by fracking. The Environmental Protection Agency claims that it has no jurisdiction to investigate matters related to food production, a contention disputed by Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-N.Y.), who wrote a report urging the EPA to study all issues associated with fracking. A concerned farmer who prefers not to be identified forwarded me an email written to him by Jim Riviere, the director of the Food Animal Residue Avoidance Databank, a group of animal science professors that tracks incidents of chemical contamination in livestock. Riviere wrote that his group receives up to 10 requests per day from veterinarians dealing with exposures to contaminants, including the byproducts of fracking. Nonetheless, the United States Department of Agriculture has slashed funding to his group. “We are told by the newly reorganized USDA that chemical contamination is not their priority,” Riviere wrote.

“The dangers of fracking to the food supply are not something that’s been investigated very much,” said Emily Wurgh of Food and Water Watch, an environmental group based in Washington, D.C. “We have been trying to get members of Congress to request studies into effects of fracking on agriculture, but we haven’t gotten much traction.”

Fracking is not a new technology. It was first put into commercial use in 1949 by Halliburton, and that company has made billions from employing the extraction method. But it really wasn’t until 2004 that fracking really took off, the year that the EPA declared that fracking “posed little or no threat” to drinking water. Weston Wilson, a scientist and 30-year veteran of the agency, who sought whistleblower protection, emphatically disagreed, saying that the agency’s official conclusions were “unsupportable” and that five of seven members of the review panel that made the decision had conflicts of interest. (Wilson has continued to work at the EPA, and continues to be publicly critical of fracking.)

A year later, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act with a “Halliburton loophole,” a clause inserted at the request of Dick Cheney, who had been Halliburton’s CEO before becoming vice president. The loophole specifically exempts fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Water Act, the CLEAR Act, and from regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency, and it unleashed the largest and most extensive drilling program in history, according to Josh Fox, the creator of the film Gasland.

In 2010, New York state imposed a moratorium on gas drilling, but if that were to be lifted, fracking would deal a triple whammy to Ken Jaffe’s farm, and thousands more like it. (Compare a map of the Marcellus Shale with one of small organic farms.)  

Back on his pasture, Jaffe gestured to a pond in a bowl-like valley surrounded by sloping pastures and hillsides of maples, white pines, and blossoming wild cherries and apple trees, that, along with wells on the property, provides water for his animals. Given the geography of the land, any chemical contamination seeping from the rock would go directly into Jaffe’s water supply, poisoning his cattle.

And it’s not just his herd that’s vulnerable; all the plant life on his property would also be in danger. According to Jaffe, ozone is more lethal to crops than all other airborne pollutants combined, and of all crops, few are more susceptible to it than clover, a nutrient-rich feed that is critical to his method of sustainable cattle raising. While ozone is normally associated with automobile exhaust, fracking generates so much of it that Sublette Country, Wyo., has ozone levels as high as Los Angeles. This, despite the fact that it has fewer than 9,000 residents spread out over an area the size of Connecticut. What it does have is gas wells.

Even if his cows and his land would somehow remain unaffected by nearby wells, Jaffe’s business would still likely suffer. Joe Holtz is manager of Brooklyn’s Park Slope Food Co-op, which buys a cow a week from Jaffe (and upwards of $3 million products from other New York area farms). He says that his environmentally conscious organization would be forced to seek alternatives to New York meat and produce if fracking becomes commonplace. “If the air is fouled and the animals are drinking water that contains poisonous fracking chemicals, then products from those animals are going to have poisons,” he told me. Given the progress that small, local farms have made in the region, he says, the decision to stop dealing with long-term suppliers would be hard. But he adds, “We would have to stop buying from them. There is no doubt in my mind.”