Drugs in the Farm Animals, Collapsing Bees, and a Sad Arrest

Short and sweet, but very important items to highlight here.

First, a writer who is doing amazing work at the moment is Maryn McKenna, whose book Superbug I hope to read fairly soon. McKenna has a great post on Wired about the link between antibiotic use in farm animals meant for human consumption and antibiotic resistance in humans. It's about a study showing that....

Chickens, chicken meat and humans in the Netherlands are carrying identical, highly drug-resistant E. coli — resistance that is apparently moving from poultry raised with antibiotics, to humans, via food.

At least one member of Congress is taking the issue seriously, microbiologist and House representative from Connecticut, Louise Slaughter, who reintroduced legislation that would ban the practice of giving healthy farm animals antibiotics.

In related news, Smithfield, #1 pork purveyor and factory farm trend setter, has apparently produced a series of videos aimed at countering the intense criticism the company has come under from some quarters. The videos are, to nobody's surprise (and certainly not to BNET's Melanie Warner), full of s@#$...

Do go read. And here's a picture to whet your... well, I guess that's not the best phrase to use here...

And an issue that sort of fell off the public radar but is still as dangerous as ever, honey bee colony collapse.

The authors, who include some of the world's leading honey-bee experts, issue a stark warning about the disappearance of bees, which are increasingly important as crop pollinators around the globe.

In short, honey bees = major pollinators. No honey bees, crops don't grow = no food.

Finally, for fans of (the best show ever) The Wire, this is sad news. Seems that old habits are hard to break.

Felicia "Snoop" Pearson, 30, is among 64 people charged in a joint state-federal prosecution of a large east Baltimore drug gang. She is charged in state court with conspiring with two men to distribute heroin and aiding and abetting.

Pearson also played "Snoop" in The Wire, serving as a right-hand man... er, woman... for a drug kingpin. I believe she was one of several recurring characters on the show who, in the real world, had lived the life they was portraying on screen. Sad.

Scrapin' Up the Bits... Antibiotic style

A few interesting things happening out there. To begin with...

CBS News actually does a good job reporting on the extreme overuse of antibiotics on factory farm animals. It was a two-part series, part 1, on the situation in the U.S., here and part 2, which covers the situation in Denmark, where this practice is now banned, here.

Although, it's hard not to gag a little when, Katie Couric, back in the U.S. with an American turkey farmer who doesn' t use antibiotics, is walking through a huge barn packed with turkeys and is asking about why it's so important to also give the birds "more space."

Jamie Oliver continues in his efforts to get Americans (and his mates in the U.K.) to eat better. He even won a $100,000 award to help further his efforts from this organization called TED that, I have to admit, I really don't understand.

UPDATE: Jamie Oliver's talk at TED. Great quote right off the bat.

"I profoundly believe that the power of food has a primal place in our homes that binds us to the best things in life."

My take on genetically modified food is pretty simple: I know that for a mighty long time farmers have been cross-breeding different varieties of the same crops to produce more prolific or more tasty or more pest- or drought-resistant crops. But that's different than inserting foreign, non-plant genes into crops, planting them all over the place, and selling them for consumption, without a ton of research to show that these products are safe for human consumption, among other things. I am all for the appropriate use of biotechnology. It's produced some very good (and expensive) drugs in the past decade or so. But that doesn't mean it's necessarily appropriate to use in our food supply -- again, at least without much, much more research.

I say all this because the USDA wants to know what you think about the subject. You can do so easily via SlowFood USA. For some very detailed background, there are also some work published last year that called into serious question the underlying science and value of GMOs.

Some experience-based cooking advice: If you want to jazz up a roasted cauliflower soup with some dried porcinis you find in your cupboard, you don't need very much of the porcini (reconstituted in water, that is). Otherwise your cauliflower soup might become a mighty potent porcini soup. In theory, that sounds good. In practice, it was a bit overwhelming.

In other local food news, Michael Pollan will be speaking at Allegheny College on February 25. Details here (scroll down).

Finally, the South Side Soup Contest is on the horizon, February 20. I've never been to this, but have purchased tickets. Looking forward to some delicious soups from places like Cafe Du Jour, Yo Rita, Big Dog Coffee, and others.

Too Many Drugs, Too Much Safety

I don't know if this has legs, but I'm amazed that it was even introduced in the first place:

The Obama administration announced Monday that it would seek to ban many routine uses of antibiotics in farm animals in hopes of reducing the spread of dangerous bacteria in humans. In written testimony to the House Rules Committee, Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, principal deputy commissioner of food and drugs, said feeding antibiotics to healthy chickens, pigs and cattle — done to encourage rapid growth — should cease.

The reason: giving antibiotics to healthy animals so that they grow faster can promote antibiotic resistance. As Dr. Kellog Schwab, director of Johns Hopkins' Center for Water and Health explains it:

"This development of drug resistance scares the hell out of me. If we continue on and we lose the ability to fight these microorganisms, a robust, healthy individual has a chance of dying, where before we would be able to prevent that death." Schwab says that if he tried, he could not build a better incubator of resistant pathogens than a factory farm. He, Silbergeld, and others assert that the level of danger has yet to be widely acknowledged. Says Schwab, "It's not appreciated until it's your mother, or your son, or you trying to fight off an infection that will not go away because the last mechanism to fight it has been usurped by someone putting it into a pig or a chicken."

Next, although the article is somewhat hard to follow if you're not familiar with the broader topic of food safety, it still paints a scary picture:

Dick Peixoto planted hedges of fennel and flowering cilantro around his organic vegetable fields in the Pajaro Valley near Watsonville to harbor beneficial insects, an alternative to pesticides.

He has since ripped out such plants in the name of food safety, because his big customers demand sterile buffers around his crops. No vegetation. No water. No wildlife of any kind.

"I was driving by a field where a squirrel fed off the end of the field, and so 30 feet in we had to destroy the crop," he said. "On one field where a deer walked through, didn't eat anything, just walked through and you could see the tracks, we had to take out 30 feet on each side of the tracks and annihilate the crop."

Basically, you have food safety measures being taken, much of it done in a proprietary fashion, to address problems being created by factory farming operations, not many of the little guys who actually do things like, you know, plant other plants to protect their products from bugs, instead of bombarding it with pesticides. And many of these safety practices are, according to this article, being proposed for use on national level.