The Food Ethics Blog

Here’s a take-no-prisoners piece on the whole-milk debate, by Deborah Blum, writing for Slate: The Raw-Milk Deal.

Today, just about 0.5 percent of all the milk consumed in this country is unpasteurized. Yet from 1998 to 2008, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention received reports of 85 infectious disease outbreaks linked to raw milk. In the past few months, physicians have treated salmonella in Utah, brucellosis in Delaware, campylobacter in Colorado and Pennsylvania, and an ugly outbreak of E. coli O157-H7 in Minnesota, which sickened eight people in June. Epidemiologists not only identified a rare strain of the bacteria but matched its DNA to those stricken, the cows on the farm that supplied them with raw milk, and manure smearing the milking equipment and even the animals themselves. When regulators shut down the dairy farm, supporters promptly charged them with belonging to a government conspiracy to smear the reputation of a hallowed food….

The standard reply (and perhaps the least-wrongheaded one) from whole-milk advocates (see the comments section under Blum’s article) is that whole milk is only dangerous when it comes from dirty farms where animals aren’t properly cared for, etc. The problem, of course, is that there are always going to be some dirty farms where animals aren’t properly cared for, etc. So clearly the public dairy system (the one that supplies most milk consumers) needs pasteurization. The question then becomes one of whether that’s consistent with allowing a subset of milk producers and consumers to exist outside of that regulated system. In essence, forcing pasteurization means forcing people to avoid risks that they’re willing to take in return for improved flavour (which is entirely subjective) and mostly-imaginary health benefits. Whether that makes sense depends on the answers to 2 questions:

• 1. Social well-being: Are the diseases that result from pathogens found in unpasteurized milke diseases that are limited to people who actually drink such milk, or are they communicable diseases such that the general public should care about whether their neighbours are consuming such milk?
• 2. Individual well-being: Are all (or enough of) the people who consume raw milk well-enough informed about the risks and benefits to make good decisions?

The Centre for Science in the Public Interest has just released a report on the dangers of food dyes. Here’s the press release CSPI Says Food Dyes Pose Rainbow of Risks (and here’s a direct link to the PDF version of the report, Food Dyes: A Rainbow of Risk).

I’ll just make two quick points, here. One is that (though I haven’t read the report thoroughly yet) there doesn’t seem to be much that’s new, here. It’s worth noting that in eight and a half pages of citations, only 5 studies are from the last decade. Not that that entirely undercuts the significance of this report. But it’s not like there are going to be stunning new bits of science revealed here.

The second point is that food dyes are pretty clearly among the low-lying fruit, so to speak, if you’re looking for food additives to reduce or eliminate from your diet or from your products. As the SCPI press release rightly points out, dyes “do absolutely nothing to improve the nutritional quality or safety of foods”. Nor, I should add, do they do anything (directly) to improve the taste, though it’s pretty likely that they do improve consumer experience (including very likely affecting flavour indirectly). We can’t expect 100% certainty about the safety of every ingredient of every food product. But it seems reasonable to keep to a minimum any additive that is subject to any reasonable scientific suspicion and that is of dubious value in improving food quality.

From the NY Times: Antibiotics in Animals Need Limits, F.D.A. Says

The F.D.A. released a policy document stating that agricultural uses of antibiotics should be limited to assuring animal health, and that veterinarians should be involved in the drugs’ uses.

While doing nothing to change the present oversight of antibiotics, the document is the first signal in years that the agency intends to rejoin the battle to crack down on agricultural uses of antibiotics that many infectious disease experts oppose.

How big is the danger, you might ask?

How many deaths can be attributed to agricultural uses of antibiotics?

“I don’t think anyone knows that number,” said Dr. James Johnson, a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota, “but I think it’s substantial.”

Overuse of antibiotics is interesting in a couple of ways. One is that it’s a great example of the category of problems known as “social dilemmas“. (Those are situations, very roughly, in which everyone recognizes a problem at the social level, but at the individual level no one is motivated to take action, and there may actually be strong disincentives to take action.) Strong external pressure of some sort is usually required in order to remedy such situations. It’s worth noting that in the case of agricultural antibiotics, as in many other social dilemmas, part of the reason it’s hard to convince any individual farmer/rancher to reduce use of antibiotics is because he or she is likely rightly to realize that his/her restraint simply won’t help in any appreciable way. Only collective action across a significant portion of the industry will do that. That, of course, is precisely what we have the FDA for.

Of course, ag industry folks might also contest the FDA’s claims about just how much danger overuse of antibiotics actually poses. But in a situation like this, we have every reason not to expect industry to be attempting to influence public policy in anything like a fair and unbiased way.

Over at his blog Authenticity Hoax, my pal Andrew Potter has some interesting comments about the multiple supposed-reasons for organic agriculture:

Why is organic so important? Ask its adherents, and you’ll get anyone of half a dozen or so answers: Organic farming is more sustainable. It is smaller scale. The produce is more nutritious. It has a smaller carbon footprint. It tastes better.

Having a scattershot of moral justifications for what amounts to yuppie salad is helpful, because it means that when one argument fails, you can always point to one of the other ones as the one you really care about….

And when the above justifications fail (or seem to)? Then, as Andrew Points out, the only solution is to define what’s so great about organic in terms of something that, well, no one can measure — which makes for a reason no one can defeat, namely culture. Quoting a story from the Globe & Mail: “The culture and approach of organic farming is what distinguishes it from conventional farming, organic farmer David Cohlmeyer said.”