Food, Sex and Salmonella. David Waltner-Toews
this book will explain what they are. But, as Beatle George Harrison once said, life goes on within you and without you. In the end, this is a book about enjoying—no, thrilling at—the true meaning of eating. It is about intimacy, love, vomiting, and diarrhea.
This book is about the celebration of ecology through eating and about how foodborne disease can save the world. This book should be kept next to your toilet and also next to the refrigerator. The next time you are doubled over with abdominal pain, feeling like you have never felt before the true revolution within, feeling like your liver is coming up your throat, like you want to die, I want you to understand what is happening to you, why the inner child is having a gaseous tantrum in your guts. I want you to hear Gaia’s, the earth organism’s, whispered love message to you so that your suffering is not in vain. I want you to feel good about yourself, to return to the table with fire in your eyes, laughter in your belly, and hands that have been very thoroughly washed.
This is your mother talking. Did you remember to flush? Read on.
AONE-YEAR-OLD child will put anything into her mouth, just to taste what it is. As we get older, we get more squeamish and more sophisticated; we say, “Let me see what you’ve got,” not “Let me taste what you’ve got.” But we do continue to stick strange and wonderful things into our mouths and to stick our tongues into, and around in, amazing places, well into adulthood. We call it eating. And the more socially unacceptable our chosen food, the more apt we are to call it gourmet food or health food or an acquired taste, as if its acquisition implied a higher plane of evolution.
Eating is one of the great sensual pleasures of life. It is where that fuzzy sense of mystical at-oneness with the world meets, and celebrates hard biological necessity. When we eat we are, quite literally, turning the world outside in. Foods are nothing more or less than pieces of environments: bark, leaves, roots, sap of trees (maple syrup, date palm juice), and animals of all sorts from the land and the sea, even bacteria (think live-culture yogurt), algae. We even eat dirt. I have a report in my files of a woman who habitually ate earth, with its associated beetles and the like, from the graves of priests. She subsequently suffered infection with the cat roundworm Toxocara cati.
Most of us do not eat dirt in that way, of course, although pica (abnormal appetites), which includes the eating of dirt, is more common than we realize. Ever watch a one-year-old child in the sandbox? But even adults are not immune to such behavior, and normality, particularly with regard to food preferences, is very much culturally conditioned. In the end, eating dirt in some African cultures is really no different from eating mineral supplements in North America.
When we eat, we select portions of an environment and bring them into intimate contact with our bodies. They become one with us, and we become one with the earth. What sex is to interpersonal relationships, eating is to the human-environment relationship, a daily consummation of our marriage to the living biosphere.
We have been having this intimate relationship with the planet, sticking our tongues into new and exciting environments, since before we became human, since, as it were, our very first date.
And, like sexual promiscuity and ignorance of our sexual partners, promiscuity in eating habits and ignorance of eating “partners” can carry great risks. When we eat or drink indiscriminately, who knows what a circus of viruses, parasites, and bacteria we are ingesting?
Among the animals of earth, none are more promiscuous, none more deserving of the adjective “omnivorous,” than people. Eating is one of those wonderfully ambiguous activities that put us both a little lower than the angels and a (very) little higher than the dust from which we are made.
North Americans, as well as Australians, New Zealanders, and Europeans, are displaced persons from every continent on earth. Given that eating is such an intimate relationship with the environment, it should not be surprising that we have carried our eating preferences with us to these new lands. It would seem fickle not to do so. As a result, North Americans from rice cultures continue to follow a rice-based diet, immigrants from the Ukraine still want cabbage borscht like Oma made, and those from the Caribbean long for succulent kingfish. Some items, like cabbage, may be grown in our new homes. Others cannot and hence must be imported from environments thousands of miles away.
Although global trade in food products is probably less than 20 percent of total world production, its economic value has increased more than tenfold since the 1960s, and the environmental and public health impacts of these traded foods are huge. The international food trade has greatly influenced our perception of food, the shape of the food industry, and the kinds of food safety issues that plague us. Eating has become for some people a form of nostalgia for another time, another place, and another season, even as, for others, it is an act of adventure and rebellion. These are pretty heavy burdens for carrots, hamburgers, cabbage, and chicken to be carrying around.
When I talk to people about food safety issues and suggest that maybe we should look at alternative ways of producing and distributing food, I sense a deep anxiety, bordering on paranoia, in many of the responses I get. Many in the modern food industries see moves to constrain the distribution of food as veiled attempts to plunge us back into the dark, cold, hungry days of the Middle Ages. They wax sentimental about the simpler days of the 1970s, when intensification of food production and mass distribution were seen simply as effective business responses to a combination of hunger, nostalgia, rebellion, and population growth.
Trade in human foods and animal feeds amounting to billions of dollars annually supports this hunger, nostalgia, and adventurism. Shipping of foods over long distances can cause serious problems of spoilage. Nevertheless, developments in preservation technology since the late nineteenth century, especially refrigeration, have allowed international trade in perishable items such as meat and fish to flourish. It is instructive to look at the food trade figures for Europe and North America, not as an accountant or a financial bookkeeper might, but from an ecologist’s point of view. We trade in fresh, chilled, and frozen meat, dairy products, eggs, honey, fruits, vegetables, and grains with hundreds of countries around the world. North American eaters, who are typical of those in most industrialized countries, are physically married to environments from Burundi to Belize, from New Caledonia to the Netherlands. Globally, this state is not unusual.
In the early years of this millennium, Lisa Deutsch and her colleagues in the Department of Systems Ecology at Stockholm University tried to trace the origins of Swedish foods. They found this task challenging, since foods at point of consumption are not always labeled according to where they came from but rather according to where they were “made”—that is, packaged or reformulated. They found that ecosystems from Southeast Asia, South America, and continental Europe subsidized a large proportion of what the public thought was a sustainable “made in Sweden” agriculture. About 80 percent of manufactured animal feeds for pigs, chickens, and cattle, for instance, depended on imported ingredients. Consumers who are checking out the farms in their own countryside often pay attention to the wrong things; the environmental damage and the trade in bacteria, viruses, and parasites are well out of view.