From the Food and Environment Reporting Network:

Bladder infections affect 60 percent of all American women, with a rising number resistant to antibiotic treatment. Now researchers looking into the cause of the mysterious drug resistance have found evidence that it’s coming from poultry treated with antibiotics, according to a joint investigation by the Food & Environment Reporting Network and ABC News.

Emphasis added. Jaw dropped.

The investigation, which aired on ABC’s Good Morning America, highlights how the overuse of antibiotics in animal agriculture has made it more difficult to treat these painful, long lasting, and recurring infections because one course of antibiotics no longer works. The cost of treating the disease is estimated at $1 billion annually.

Maryn McKenna, author of Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA, has a much longer analysis of the research and its implications.

[R]esearch in the United States, Canada, and Europe (published most recently this month, in June, and in March) has found close genetic matches between resistant E. coli collected from human patients and resistant strains found on chicken or turkey sold in supermarkets or collected from birds being slaughtered. The researchers contend that poultry — especially chicken, the low-cost, low-fat protein that Americans eat more than any other meat — is the bridge that allows resistant bacteria to move to humans, taking up residence in the body and sparking infections when conditions are right. Touching raw meat that contains the resistant bacteria, or coming into environmental contact with it — say, by eating lettuce that was cross-contaminated — are easy ways to become infected.

“The E. coli that is circulating at the same time, and in the same area — from food animal sources, retail meat, and the E. coli that’s causing women’s infections — is very closely related genetically,” said Amee Manges, Ph.D., an associate professor of epidemiology at McGill University in Montreal who has been researching resistant UTIs for a decade. “And the E. coli that you recover from poultry meat tends to have the highest levels of resistance. Of all retail meats, it’s the most problematic that way.”

This is not the first example of a discovered link between antibiotics and a drug-resistant human infection; in February, we reported on a link between pig antibiotics and a resistant strain of staphylococcus. But the connection between a very common food product and a very common type of ailment? Remarkable and disconcerting.

New England town meetings typically include dozens and dozens of proposals for citizens to vote up or down, on quickly forgotten matters like new stop lights and bridge repairs.

But this year, things have been different. The residents in eight small Maine towns have all voted to declare “food sovereignty” — and they won’t be forgetting the issue any time soon. In other words, they’ve passed ordinances that explicitly allow local farmers and ranchers to sell their food — meat, eggs, unpasteurized milk, honey, veggies — directly to consumers within town borders, without state or federal licenses, permits, or regulations.

Towns in Massachusetts, Vermont, and California have all replicated these experiments, which in Vermont have all been based on a single template [PDF]. And while the mainstream media is referring to the ordinances as “symbolic,” it is yet to be seen how the courts will rule.

These votes are the result of work by activists in the food sovereignty moment, who see the ordinances as a response to an ever more intensely regulated food system. On the federal level, the recent Food Safety Modernization Act could require small food producers to complete a sophisticated hazard analysis critical control point (HACCP) plan, which would be both costly and tedious. Meanwhile there has also been an increase in local health department enforcement around the country, in places like school bake sales and kids’ lemonade stands.

Activists see food sovereignty ordinances as a compromise of sorts over the thorny issue of private food distribution. And although many food safety measures and regulations were developed alongside industrial food production — and have a place in protecting consumers — many activists now believe they’ve been used to target small businesses. Food sovereignty activists feel that people have a right to acquire food — such as raw dairy products — privately through membership-based food clubs, outside the parameters of long-standing regulations that require retail, dairy, and other permits.

In a recent AP article, Maine’s state agriculture officials said the ordinances “don’t hold legal muster.” But the state’s so-called “local rule” laws could contradict this view. Via its constitution and legislation, Maine confers significant power on municipalities to enact ordinances that are local in nature, and aren’t denied by state law, like controlling town growth or banning herbicide spraying. “Maine has long been considered a strong ‘home rule’ state,” says the Maine Municipal Association. (Here’s a list of these hyper-local laws.)

While everyone who voted to pass Maine’s food sovereignty ordinances knew they were risking conflict with state and federal authorities, they hadn’t imagined the objections would be as swift, or intense, as they have turned out to be.

“Farmers know whether the milk is bad”

Just months after the first six towns passed the ordinances, the state filed a lawsuit [PDF] against a farmer named Dan Brown of Blue Hill, Maine, for selling unpasteurized milk without a state permit. Brown says losing the suit could put him out of business, since complying with state permit requirements would be so costly as to not justify operating his two-cow dairy. He owns the cows primarily so that he can provide milk for his family, and he sells what’s left. (Activists set up a Facebook page in support of Brown called We Are All Farmer Brown.)

“I have never had any questions from customers saying there was any problem with my milk,” Brown told the Bangor Daily News. “This has been done this way for hundreds of years. Farmers, when they milk a cow, know whether the milk is bad or not.”

Brown says the state has devoted significant investigative resources to making the case against him, and he has led several demonstrations, including one at the capital in Augusta, demanding that the state drop the suit.

While there’s no mention of the food sovereignty ordinances in the suit, and state officials have denied a connection, Brown’s defense lawyers obtained email correspondence that suggest otherwise. For instance, a Maine Dept. of Agriculture program manager sent an email in June 2011 — two months after Blue Hill’s food sovereignty ordinance was enacted — about Brown allegedly selling food at a local farmer’s market without a license. “Sounds like we have our first test case,” he wrote.

The email was one of nearly 700 pages of emails, memos, and other documents obtained by the lawyers under Maine’s Freedom of Access Act, and they provide a window into the intensity of the food sovereignty battle. Activists also found written warnings to a second farmer, Heather Retberg of Quill’s End Farm, who has been active in organizing the residents of several towns in favor of the food sovereignty ordinances. One warning reads: “If you refuse to bring your business into compliance and continue to operate in violation of the laws of the State of Maine we will refer this matter to the Attorney General for enforcement action.”

Regulation or retaliation?

The controversy has extended to the top levels of Maine’s government, including Republican Gov. Paul LePage. Last September, after hearing feedback from constituents in support of the food sovereignty ordinances, LePage wrote a memo [PDF] to the head of the Maine Dept. of Agriculture, Walt Whitcomb, that read:

I am particularly concerned about over-regulating the small farms with large capital investments and costly licensing. In recent weeks I have received letters, emails and constituent visits concerning regulations involving intrastate commerce.

Attached to LePage’s memo was a proposed bill in the Maine legislature that would have allowed the sale of raw milk without a state permit. On the proposed legislation was a note that appears to be from the governor or an aide: “This statute sounds reasonable. Please advise the problem you see with it?”

Also attached was a letter from a Maine farmer, John O’Donnell, who wanted to let the governor know what was behind the food sovereignty movement. In the letter, O’Donnell wrote:

As you may know, several Maine towns passed food sovereignty resolutions last year. This was mainly driven by small farmers experiencing unfair regulations that are barriers to entry, and restraint of trade. Many of these farmers fought for the same Maine bills I did, and saw how the Subcommittee on Agriculture was mainly under the control of the large farm and dairy interests and would never let small farm bills out of committee favorably. We also saw how the Department of Agriculture testified in these hearings that there would be repercussions from the USDA or FDA if we relaxed the standards for selling poultry, milk, and other products in our local communities and state.

Under this paragraph was a hand-written note, presumably also from the governor or an aide. It read: “Why would this concern us, if the products are sold intrastate.”

There is no direct response from the Maine Dept. of Agriculture in all the documents. But the department made its opinions known this February in a form letter from Agriculture Commissioner Whitcomb. The letter was addressed to everyone who “shared … thoughts with the administration regarding local food sovereignty ordinances.” Here’s an excerpt:

Local food sovereignty ordinances leave the false impression that residence in certain towns exempt individuals from food licensure and inspection requirements. … Persons who fail to comply (with state laws) will be subject to the Department’s statutory responsibility to enforce state law, including the removal from sale of products from unlicensed sources and/or the imposition of fines.

The cache of emails show the Dept. of Agriculture having reversed a long-standing agency policy of ignoring unlicensed sellers of raw milk who don’t advertise. It also shows the department deciding to intensively investigate any illnesses reported from people who consumed raw milk, even if the illness were known to be highly unlikely to have originated from raw milk consumption.

As early as the summer of 2010 — just when food sovereignty organizers like Retberg were beginning to discuss their plans to push for local ordinances — agriculture investigators began visiting any farm that sold milk to people who contracted a nasty parasite known as cryptosporidium, or “crypto.” According the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, crypto spreads most often from “drinking water and recreational water” and “is one of the most frequent causes of water-borne disease among humans in the United States.”

Depositions are now being taken and arguments made in the state’s case against Brown and the trial could begin next fall. The state of Maine is hoping to end quickly and absolutely any notions people might have that they can distribute food privately, outside regulatory constraints.

While food sovereignty may stem from local efforts, however, it has arisen in response to a much larger problem — one that’s far from localized.

As Bob St. Peter, farmer and food sovereignty, organizer said to WABI, a local Maine TV news channel, recently, “Seventy-six million people a year get sick from foodborne illness. These are systemic problems … When people come to my farm or they come to Dan Brown’s farm they’re looking for a way out. They’re looking for an alternative to that system.”

The Gulf of Mexico dead zone seems to get all the attention. Yes, the low-oxygen area that forms every year in the waters surrounding the Mississippi Delta is the largest dead zone — currently around the size of Massachusetts — but it’s not the only one in U.S. waters.

The Chesapeake Bay has a dead zone, too. In fact, it covered a third of the Chesapeake last year and continues to grow. And last month, the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science gave the Bay a D+ in its annual “health report card.”

About a year and a half ago, in response to the crisis, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) stepped in to put the states that surround the Chesapeake on a “pollution diet,” meaning the state has to keep its “Total Maximum Daily Load” — whether from agricultural, municipal, or private landowners — down to a minimum.

And where the Gulf dead zone is caused by runoff from the oceans of corn grown in the Midwestern states whose waterways drain into the Mississippi, chicken farms dominate the Chesapeake’s watershed. The Delmarva region (i.e. Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia) has become one of the most intensive poultry farming regions of the country. Industry behemoths Perdue and Tyson contract with operations in the area that add up to tens of millions of birds housed in enormous facilities that generate a lot of chicken crap.

Of course, as MTV taught us Gen-Xers, too much is never enough. Grist reported a couple of years ago on a plan by Perdue to significantly increase its poultry operations in the already taxed region. As a Waterkeepers study of the issue put it at the time:

“Billions of pounds of chicken litter have flowed into the bay in the decades since international poultry conglomerates such as Perdue and Tyson targeted the Delmarva Peninsula for their multi-million-dollar operations.” The industry has been “treating the Chesapeake Bay like an open toilet.”

As you’d expect, Big Ag has reacted badly to the EPA’s attempt to address the pollution problem. The American Farm Bureau filed a lawsuit to stop it. And House Republicans attempted to defund the plan.

But it turns out Big Ag had nothing to worry about. Maryland’s Democratic governor and rising star Martin O’Malley — someone who has a significant say in any Chesapeake Bay cleanup plan — is on Perdue’s side. And it appears that his relationship far exceeds what’s typical between a governor and a large corporation. Or at least one would hope it does.

The advocacy group Food and Water Watch (FWW) has obtained 70 pages of emails [PDF] between O’Malley and Perdue officials — primarily Perdue general counsel Herb Frerichs, with whom FWW says O’Malley went to law school.

Perhaps the most noteworthy exchange between the two men revolves around a statement O’Malley’s press secretary made in an article called “Farmers want Big Chicken held responsible.” In the article he’s quoted as saying:

Industrial-scale chicken houses are a common site in Maryland. (Photo by the Chesapeake Bay Program.)

I think there’s certainly a need from everybody in the industry and on the regulatory side to work together. It certainly doesn’t do anybody any good for poultry farmers to say we own the chickens, but not the manure they produce.

O’Malley sent a series of messages to Frerichs walking back those comments, and letting he and his colleagues know he had “no intention of revisiting co-permitting” — the latter being the state’s attempt to make poultry processing companies responsible for waste management by farmers.

O’Malley then follows up to make sure all is well. He is so deferential to Frerichs, it’s hard to remember who’s the elected official and who’s the constituent. The emails read:

O’Malley -> Frerichs, August 7, 2010 at 7:53 PM

Were you ok with that message I sent to you?

Frerichs -> O’Malley, August 8, 2010 at 6:42 PM

Not sure at this point. I have been witness to some back and forth emails over weekend and need to see how people feel tomorrow and what will work best.

O’Malley -> Frerichs, August 8, 2010 at 7:53 PM

Hmmm. Let me know

O’Malley -> Frerichs, August 9, 2010 at 2:47 PM

How’s my message doing? (It wasn’t that long…)

Frerichs -> O’Malley, August 10, 2010 at 4:24 PM

Sorry for delay. My conclusion is that letter will not be helpful. Jim [Perdue] took this very personally.

O’Malley -> Frerichs, August 10, 2010 at 4:33 PM

So what am I supposed to do? Just leave it alone? Call him, what?

I have to believe this isn’t normal.

But it isn’t just over PR that O’Malley gives Perdue authority. The company apparently also gets to give direction to Maryland’s Department of Agriculture:

O’Malley -> Frerichs, November 5, 2011 at 7:19 PM

What is it about the Secretary of Agriculture’s job performance that you find lacking?

Frerichs -> O’Malley, November 6, 2011 at 7:22 AM

I just feel like I’m trying to push a bunch of stuff and I don’t see him around. He’s not as strong as his counterparts in DE and VA. I work w all three.

O’Malley -> Frerichs, November 6, 2011 at 10:01 AM

I’m guessing you don’t have the personal email of governors of DE or VA, so let me know when Buddy [Earl “Buddy” Hance, Maryland Secretary of Agriculture] can/should be doing more to help you push stuff. I’m serious. I’ll have him call you monday.

It’s not uncommon for state governments to be rife with corruption — both because relationships between representatives and business interests are often very close and because state politics aren’t under the same media microscope that federal politics are.

That said, there’s no indication of financial corruption here — although the Baltimore Sun reports that Perdue did shift its contributions around the time of these emails from the Republican Governor’s Association to the Democratic Governor’s Association, which O’Malley chairs. Still, O’Malley has a good excuse for his frequent interactions with Frerichs: They’re buddies!

But he appears to have lost sight of whose interests he was elected to serve. Because, right now, O’Malley seems to be Governor of the State of Perdue.

So if Maryland becomes a major foot-dragger in implementing the EPA’s Chesapeake Bay cleanup plan, or works to exempt the poultry industry from doing its part, there will be no reason to wonder why. It’s just friends helping friends.

Ok, this is gross. The shrimp coming out of the Gulf of Mexico two years after the BP spill have some seriously nasty stuff wrong with them. They are lacking in eyes. Their gills are full of junked up black stuff. (Not normal!) They have lesions. And yet they are making their way into grocery stores! The picture above is of a shrimp that was being sold to be eaten for dinner.

Now, I don’t personally spend a lot of time looking at the insides of raw shrimp and fish and crabs. But Al Jazeera did an in-depth report on the situation, in which a slew of people who’ve worked in the fishing business for years say that they’ve never seen anything like these deformed creatures:

Darla Rooks, a lifelong fisherperson from Port Sulfur, Louisiana, told Al Jazeera she is finding crabs “with holes in their shells, shells with all the points burned off so all the spikes on their shells and claws are gone, misshapen shells, and crabs that are dying from within … they are still alive, but you open them up and they smell like they’ve been dead for a week”.

Rooks is also finding eyeless shrimp, shrimp with abnormal growths, female shrimp with their babies still attached to them, and shrimp with oiled gills.

“We also seeing eyeless fish, and fish lacking even eye-sockets, and fish with lesions, fish without covers over their gills, and others with large pink masses hanging off their eyes and gills.”

So this isn’t a case where just a few shrimp came out weird. Another fisher reported catching 400 pounds of shrimp without eyes. I mean, shrimp are weird-looking to begin with, but imagine a zombie army of eyeless pigeons flying around. That’s basically what’s happening in the Gulf.

Imagine if your body could tell you where and when a certain chemical is impacting your health. Scientists at the University of Exeter have done just that – with green-glowing zebrafish, that is.

Researchers genetically engineered young zebrafish to produce a fluorescent glow in the presence of hormone-disrupting chemicals like bisphenol-A. By exposing fish to endocrine disruptors and observing when individual body parts light up, researchers can learn exactly how and at what concentrations these chemicals impact various organs and tissues. They can then make certain inferences on how endocrine disruptors impact human health.

For instance, observing the glowing fish confirmed previous findings, such as a link between bisphenol A and heart problems.

“We do see in this fish that the heart glows particularly in response to bisphenol A,” Charles Tyler, the study’s leader, said. “So we can target the heart and try to look at the mechanics of what is happening.”

They’re already finding out new things, too: It’s generally assumed that endocrine disruptors impact specific organs like the liver, ovaries, and testes. But University of Exeter scientists say they’ve observed endocrine disruptors in a variety of tissues, including the eyes and brain.

It’s an important study because endocrine disruptors are quite literally everywhere, from plastics to credit card receipts to household cleaners to the water we drink. It was long assumed that only high levels of exposure to endocrine disruptors would harm humans, but increasing evidence suggests that even low levels of exposure can cause cancer, obesity, diabetes, and other health problems.

Now if only human body parts could give off a glow whenever something was amiss inside …

Hide ya’ lemons, hide ya’ limes — a deadly disease is coming for California’s citrus trees.

State ag experts recently found a tree that tested positive for Huanglongbing–and yes, it is way more serious than its sing-songy name suggests. The bacteria, also known as citrus greening or yellow dragon disease, attacks a trees’ vascular system and kills them off within a few years. The disease has no known cure, and it’s had disastrous impacts on citrus trees in China, Brazil, and Florida.

For now scientists have only spotted the infection in a lonely tree, but the situation is understandably sending state officials into full-blown panic mode. California produces 80 percent of America’s citrus fruits and the majority of its fresh-market oranges. Killing citrus trees would wipe out a $2 billion industry in the state.

The diseased tree in Hacienda Heights was removed, and officials are keeping a close watch on 400 to 500 other trees they suspect may have been infected …

State agricultural officials have set up a quarantine area of some 20,700 square miles (53,600 square km) to prevent potentially infected fruit from leaving a region that spans six California counties.

Take a look at what’s happening in Florida and it’s easy to understand why California officials are going to such Contagion-like extremes. Huanglongbing hit Florida’s oranges in 2005. The deadly disease has been racking up billions of dollars in crop losses ever since then.

I know what you’re thinking: “Tom, it’s been ages since you wrote about high-fructose corn syrup.” And you’re right! It has. But as I’m feeling petulantly defiant, I think it’s time to take another look at America’s favorite sweetener. You see, while the HFCS industry still claims there’s no difference between how the body handles HFCS and sugar, a new study has come out suggesting just the opposite. And in a very big way.

The blaring headline version of the new study’s conclusion would read: “High-Fructose Corn Syrup Causes Autism.”

And while that may be a bit of an overstatement, it’s not off by much. In a provocative new peer-reviewed study published in Clinical Epigenetics, researchers led by a former FDA toxicologist purport to have found a very real link between HFCS consumption and autism.

The study’s argument is complicated but deeply disturbing. It pieces together what’s known about the genetic and metabolic factors involved with autism, including the growing evidence of a link between autism and mercury and organophosphate pesticide exposure.

Essentially, HFCS can interfere with the body’s uptake of certain dietary minerals — namely zinc. And that, when combined with other mineral deficiencies common among Americans, can cause susceptible individuals to develop autism.

The basic idea is that the protein that’s in charge of eliminating heavy metals from the human body requires zinc to function. But HFCS interferes with the body’s ability to absorb zinc, which causes the protein to be less effective and may also reduce the amount of that protein in the body. An increased heavy metal load in the body — especially when first experienced at the fetal stage — can start a chain of genetic disturbances that affect development. HFCS also interferes with calcium absorption (and not just because soda is displacing milk as the drink of choice for young kids). Calcium is crucial to elimination of organophosphate pesticides, which are also linked to developmental disorders like autism.

Now, this is just one paper. And a full understanding of it requires far more expertise in biology and genetics than I possess. But I certainly think it shifts the HFCS debate in an unexpected and troubling way. Industry wants to us to believe that if no harm is proven, no harm is done. Yet scientists are discovering ways that highly processed foods, foods we did not evolve eating, may have alarming genetic effects.

The fact is there may never be a smoking gun with HFCS — or with the other techno-foods like GMOs, for that matter. Science might only ever be able to suggest second- or even third-order effects from consuming these substances. As the food industry loves to remind us: No one is dropping dead from acute HFCS poisoning.

Yet, as the authors of a recent study on the links between endocrine disrupting chemicals like BPA and obesity and diabetes observed, it is all but impossible to prove a direct link between chemicals that affect us through chronic, low-level exposure and the health effects they are thought to cause.

Not only is it unethical to construct experiments designed to make humans sick, but the complexity of human metabolism and the tens of thousands of chemicals that we are routinely exposed to complicate the picture beyond science’s ability to deconstruct.

So we’re left with suggestive research that always “requires further study.” And whatever the results, it will likely never be enough to satisfy the food industry — nor the government regulators they lobby. The data will always seem insufficient to justify a ban. An alternative is to move toward a more aggressive use of the “precautionary principle,” as they have in Europe. But that would definitely increase government regulation — and that just isn’t an option in 21st century America.

What the industry is really concerned about, however, is branding. In fact, two years ago the Corn Refiners Association came up with the brilliant idea of dropping high fructose and simply referring to HFCS as “corn sugar.” They filed a name-change petition with the FDA as required by law and figured they were home free. Not so. In fact, the public health community has stepped up in force. USA Today reported just this week that a coalition of 100 consumer groups, including the National Consumers League, Consumers Union, and the Consumer Federation of America, is demanding that the FDA deny the Corn Refiners petition since, as the article puts it, “the new name is just a ploy to confuse consumers who want to avoid it.”

The reporter spent a bit of time explaining that HFCS and table sugar are substantially the same — even quoting nutritionist Marion Nestle, who said: “This isn’t about science, this is about people eating too much sugar.” Nestle went on to say that anything the industry does to hide the sweeteners in processed food is a bad thing. No doubt that’s true.

But maybe, just maybe, the problem with HFCS isn’t just its ubiquity, nor the subsequent role it’s had in the obesity epidemic. Perhaps it’s also an important factor in the worst mental health epidemic of the day. Either way, it doesn’t look like we’ll be taking HFCS off the market — or out of the food kids eat — anytime soon. So if you’ll excuse me, I have some deck chairs to rearrange.

Editor’s Note: The headline originally posted with this story overstated how conclusive the findings of the study described actually are. We’ve changed it. For more of an explanation, see this post. And for another view of the autism-and-HFCS question, see this post.

Okay, nobody panic, but scientists have found a stash of bacteria that have never had contact with humans, but are resistant to antibiotics anyway. If this happened in a movie, this would probably end with everyone becoming dead. But I’m sure it’s fine!

The bacteria in Lechuguilla Cave, in New Mexico’s Carlsbad Cavern National Park, have been isolated from the surface world for 4 to 7 million years. But the majority of the 93 strains isolated by researchers were resistant to multiple antibiotics — some strains were immune to as many as 14 kinds of commercially available drugs. And some of their methods of resistance had never been seen before. The clear implication: Some bacteria evolve the ability to foil human-made antibiotics, even when they’ve never been exposed.

That doesn’t mean we should start giving antibiotics to farm animals willy-nilly, on the theory that resistance was natural all along. (Or, rather, we already do this, but it doesn’t mean we should start feeling good about it.) Long-term, low-level exposure to antibiotics will still breed new superbugs, and will probably still make us all die. It just turns out that we might all die anyway. Even if we bury all our pork in a cave for 4 million years.

Here’s the good news: Scientists theorize that the Lechuguilla bacteria may have evolved novel natural antibiotics in order to outcompete each other, which would account for high levels of resistance in the successful strains. This means it’s possible that the naturally antibiotic-resistant bacteria could give us the tools to defeat strains like MRSA, which have become antibiotic-resistant through overexposure to pharmaceuticals. We might actually be able to put the bacteria’s innate badassery to work.

Until then, though, try to stay away from ancient caves, and modern pig farms, and hospitals, and maybe hang out inside a plastic bubble just to be safe.

A recent New York Times op-ed declared that sustainable meat is a “myth.” Whether pastured, small-scale, large-scale, rotationally grazed, locavore, industrialized, etc., all meat is essentially the same and none of it is sustainable. So says author James McWilliams who points, as many have, to the climate impact of livestock production.

I take issue with some of McWilliams’ figures (for example, here’s the Environmental Working Group’s explanation of pastured meat’s reduced climate footprint), but by and large I agree! Meat production at its current scale — and the scale it’s projected to reach as the developing world increases its consumption — is not sustainable. Period.

New science arises nearly every month that points to the climate impact of meat eating. This week, it’s this study out of Woods Hole that connects the effect of nitrogen fertilizer on the atmosphere (as I mentioned last week, nitrogen turns into nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas that was recently confirmed to be a significant source of climate change). The study concludes that, in order to avoid catastrophic climate change, we need to either cut global meat consumption or the amount of fertilizer we use in half  (we’ll have more on the study on Grist soon). In other words, save this cow or the whole planet gets it!

So while I’m with McWilliams on his main assertion, I object to some of his lesser ones. He offers an extensive scolding to locavores and advocates of pasture-raised animals for missing this larger point. But he conveniently ignores the fact that his argument has much in common with those of Michael Pollan (with his “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants” mantra) and Mark Bittman (who is vegan before 6 p.m.). Both men talk and write extensively about the need to eat less meat while also changing the way we produce the meat we do eat.

Indeed, Bittman himself made that point repeatedly on a recent appearance on MSNBC’s Up with Chris show to debate pink slime — although pink slime has muddied these waters a bit. One of the other panelists on the show, Josh Barro of Forbes magazine, echoed Bittman, while also echoing the industry line that pink slime is part of the solution, rather than the problem. In his view, telling consumers about industrial food products like pink slime encourages them to “focus on the wrong things.”

Barro observed that consumers learn about pink slime and say, “Ew, that’s gross,” when the real problem is that “we’re eating too much meat.” He later said that consumers confront the realities of industrial agriculture and incorrectly ask, “Does this sound gross? And if it sounds gross then that’s a problem.”

Along those lines, host Chris Hayes opined that sausage is gross but “if you’re going to eat meat you should waste not want not, so we should distinguish between visceral revulsion and moral revulsion.” He went on to say that he sees moral revulsion being a better basis for drawing conclusions about the food system. They both make interesting points, but I would argue — since this is food we’re talking about — that it’s nearly impossible to separate the two. Because who wants to be grossed out by what you’re going to eat?

And yes, Americans are notorious for an unwillingness to eat anything but the choice cuts of meat — at least, when they know what they are. Most show little or no reluctance if it’s been ground, highly processed, and/or deep fried. But this tendency to flinch once you’ve seen the raw ingredients should not be confused with what is truly gross about pink slime — and that’s not just that it comes from the parts that would make people squeamish if they ate them straight off the animal.

No, what’s gross about pink slime is the fact that it’s a process that was developed to repurpose meat that was previously considered unfit for human consumption because of its high rate of pathogens. What they do to it is gross, yes — but it’s not the ammonia alone that’s the problem, either. It’s why they have to add ammonia that should make it unappetizing, particularly because they failed to tell us they were putting it in our burgers.

The huge error the industry made was trying to pass it off as true ground beef. In fact, the USDA whistleblower who coined the term pink slime observed that it technically fits the definition of something known as “beef-patty mix” — a meat additive. I think what kicked off the outrage wasn’t just pink slime itself (although the visceral gross-out factor is big), but the clear indication that the industry was trying to pull a fast one. We all know what ground beef is — and pink slime just isn’t ground beef.

But it’s also true that the broad use of pink slime lowered the cost of meat and resulted in fewer cows required to make a hamburger (by exactly how much and how many fewer is difficult to measure). For the record, industrial agriculture is very good at using the whole animal — the pork industry used to say they used “every part of the pig but the oink” — though this is less true in the age of diseases like Mad Cow, which have made cow and pig brains off-limits.

Because after all, if the animal is raised in an inhumane, pathogen-filled manner, eating every last ounce of it won’t solve our problems. Yes, eating meat efficiently is important — but so is eating a whole lot less of it.

In my view, the main positive impact of all of this attention pink slime has gotten is that it has made people think more critically about their meat consumption. Not that it’s enough, mind you, but it’s a start. And if it makes a few people nauseous along the way, well, I’m okay with that, too.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, the courts have recently told the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) it has to regulate several commonly used antibiotics if they can’t be proven safe. The ruling was the result of a long-running lawsuit by a group of environmental and public health advocates lead by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and gave many in the food movement a reason to feel cautiously optimistic.

Meanwhile, the FDA has been moving at a glacial pace on its expressed intention to put a voluntary control on antibiotics in place. And this week it finally put the rubber to the road, in the form of a major press effort and the release of a new set of guidelines for cooperating companies. (The two events are supposedly unrelated, but it’s not hard to see how FDA may want to distract attention away from a court order that requires it to play the bad cop, if it can play up and formalize its role as good cop.)

The agency’s press release is even called “FDA takes steps to protect public health,” and in it the agency promises to “promote the judicious use of medically important antibiotics in food-producing animals” [emphasis mine]. FDA also comes right out and acknowledges that “antimicrobial resistance occurs when bacteria or other microbes develop the ability to resist the effects of a drug. Once this occurs, a drug may no longer be as effective in treating various illnesses or infections.” In other words, the agency is talking. Whether it’ll do any walking to go along with it is yet to be seen.

At the center of the FDA’s narrative is the role of the veterinarian — who, the agency says, will “supervise” the use of antibiotics to “prevent, control and treat illness.” As The New York Times put it: “Farmers and ranchers will for the first time need a prescription from a veterinarian before using antibiotics in farm animals.”

But just how hard such a prescription would be to get raises big questions. You see, livestock producers already often work with veterinarians to help craft their regimens of “subtherapeutic” antibiotics. And just because those veterinarians must now cut through more red tape doesn’t mean they’ll ultimately authorize fewer drugs in the animals’ feed.

The meat industry will always argue for the right to treat sick animals with antibiotics. Of course, the mere fact that those animals are kept in confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) means that if they don’t get a preventative course of antibiotics, they’re likely to need them later, when the pathogen-filled living conditions do eventually make them sick. And in the eyes of most industrial-scale farmers, there really is no difference between “preventative” dosing and dosing to make the animals grow faster.

As Tom Philpott has been pointing out over at Mother Jones, this gray area provides the industry with a “bull-size loophole.” He also points to a statement from a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists who warns ominously:

The outlined process appears to give the companies the opportunity to relabel drugs currently slated for growth promotion for disease prevention instead. Such relabeling could allow them to sell the exact same drugs in the very same amounts.

Oh, and did we mention that the industry even has a full three years to do this relabeling? Not to sound too skeptical, but this might be more of a distraction tactic than meets the eye.

2. Another big egg factory gets cracked wide open

Still haven’t phased those really cheap eggs out of your diet yet? Well, the Humane Society of the U.S. (HSUS) is working hard to ensure that the conditions inside America’s industrial egg farms stays on your radar. This week, HSUS released gruesome footage of hens in cramped, dark battery cages captured over a six-week period inside Pennsylvania’s Kreider Farms. The story got the attention of The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof, as a convenient follow-up to his arsenic-in-chicken piece from the week before.

And we should probably watch video footage from inside CAFOs while it’s still being made, since the “ag-gag” bills (or bills that would make it illegal to capture such footage) appear to be coming back with a vengeance in farm states. But really — after years of this kind footage popping up, and the resulting attitude of business owners like Ron Kreider (who actually had the nerve to tell a reporter this week that “more than 80 percent of our chickens are housed in larger, modern cages”), it’s getting harder and harder not to generalize. In other words, if a farmer (or any other food production business for that matter) doesn’t want you to see what they’re doing, they’re probably not making anything you’d want to eat.

Algae bloom. (Photo by Grant Hutchinson.)

3. The wrong kind of spring blooms: Pollution from farms causing multi-billion-dollar algae problem

From the kind-of-boring-sounding-but-actually-very-important department, this week the Environmental Working Group (EWG) released a report on “nutrient overload” — the phenomenon that occurs when too much nitrogen from the synthetic fertilizer on large farms enters surrounding waterways. The report, which is titled “Troubled Waters,” focuses on the four states in the core of the Midwestern corn belt — Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin — and calculates that removing nitrate alone from drinking water costs taxpayers more than $4.8 billion a year.

Writing on their Farm Plate blog, EWG staffer Don Carr describes the impact on water in the area, saying:

The city of Des Moines, Iowa has one of the largest water treatment plants in the world to clean agricultural pollution. Toledo, Ohio, estimates that it costs an extra $2,000-to-$3,000 a day just to deal with agricultural pollutants in the city’s water.

He suggests that the answer is to tackle the problem at the source, literally, by ensuring that today’s farm subsidies are tied to conservation efforts (i.e. making sure big farms only get paid if they agree to do things like reduce fertilizer use or filter water through wetlands). Otherwise, Carr adds:

Taxpayers end up paying twice, once for the subsidies that encourage all-out production and again for the cleanup. Meanwhile, farm businesses reap year after year of high income and federal subsidies whether they are protecting or polluting drinking water.

An industrial corn planter. (Photo by Minnemom.)

4. EPA refuses to take a critical look at 2,4-D, Monsanto’s new favorite herbicide

A few months back, we reported on 2,4-D, the pesticide that sounds a little like a Star Wars character. The herbicide — which was used in Agent Orange — is generally sprayed on lawns and has been around since World War II. But the NRDC has been raising concern about the toxicity of 2,4-D, ever since Monsanto announced it was developing a new round of GMO seeds that would be bred to be resistant to the chemical. (Just to review, plants grown from resistant seeds can stay alive under near-biblical floods of pesticides while, in theory at least, everything else dies).

It’s also noteworthy that 2,4-D hasn’t often been used on corn fields. (Perhaps the plants weren’t quite resistant enough?)

Anyhow, the NRDC sued the EPA, in part to get a response to a 2008 petition to re-examine the chemical’s safety. The Center for Food Safety — which appears to be working closely with the NRDC — cites a scientist on its website who says that the use of the new GE 2,4-D corn “will trigger an astounding 30-fold increase in 2,4-D use on corn by the end of the decade, assuming widespread planting.”

On Monday, The New York Times reported that the EPA has decided the herbicide will remain on the market for now, saying it “found no cause for concern.” Meanwhile, the USDA is still taking comments until April 27 on the GE seeds.