Modern industrial practices help make food saferModern industrial practices help make food safer

Richard
Berman

The Amish may not Tweet, but one farmer from Lancaster County, Pa., is making online waves following his arrest for allegedly selling illicit unpasteurized, raw milk. While he’s being held up by activists as a symbol of food freedom, his case demonstrates how the modern “foodie” movement is full of logic as backward as a horse and buggy.


By foodie, I don’t mean your average organic buyer. I mean the taste trendsetters, the “beyond organic” avant garde who tally how many miles their food traveled to get to them while dismissing non-heirloom vegetables as dog food.


Let’s start with the raw milk that some food elitists are swearing by. Milk sold at the grocery store is pasteurized — heated to high temperatures — in order to eliminate bacteria that can sicken or kill, including Campylobacter, Escherichia, Listeria, Salmonella, Yersinia and Brucella.


In fact, 82 percent of dairy-product-associated outbreaks between 1973 and 2008 were tied to raw milk or cheese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, despite such products occupying a small minority of the marketplace. A Food and Drug Administration official has warned that drinking raw milk is “like playing Russian roulette with your health.”


Yet raw milk has achieved something of a cult status within the modern foodie movement. Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver says: “If you can get a hold of it, then you should get it. … It’s better for you.”


That’s ironic considering Oliver is leading the charge against flavored milk in schools, on the grounds that it’s contributing to childhood obesity. Of course, if our kids all drank raw milk instead of sweetened skim milk, they’d be consuming 20 percent more calories per glass. And they might get E. coli, to boot.


And foodie author Michael Pollan argues that people should be free to drink raw milk if they choose, despite a raw-milk consumer having 51 times the risk of getting a kind of Salmonella, according to one official estimate.


Freedom of choice certainly has appeal. But let’s imagine that a large corporation produced a food that had 51 times the risk of sickening consumers than an organic alternative.


Would foodies support freedom of choice? Quite the opposite — they’d be tripping over each other to be the first to loudly denounce so-called “Big Ag” or “factory farms.”


That’s certainly true of Pollan, who, following an egg recall over Salmonella fears, last year took to the airwaves to push for his organic, small-farm point of view. But the USDA estimates that just one in 25,000 eggs from conventional farms may have Salmonella — which is killed in the cooking process, anyway. And research in the United States and Europe has found that free-range organic eggs have a higher risk of environmental contaminants.


Here’s the irony: The risks associated with foodies’ favored foods are real. But too often the risks that foodies attribute to the regular food system are completely hypothetical.


To the foodie crowd, biotech crops, which are genetically modified to create traits like natural bug-killing-toxin production, deserve mandatory Scarlet Letter-esque labels. But foodie-favored “organic” agriculture uses plenty of toxins itself — just different ones. Rotenone, for instance, is an organic pesticide that’s extracted from a tropical plant. And feces and fermented urine are fair game for organic fertilizer and fungicide.


To foodies, smaller-scale, less-regulated food products are “artisanal.” But produce is pretty much the same food on a larger, more-regulated scale, and they call it “industrial.”


The industrialization — more accurately, modernization — of food is not a negative thing. Would we want doctors to revert to 19th-century medical practices? Yet food elitism is in large part built around such primitivism. When did it become trendy to stop trusting science?

Richard Berman is president of Berman & Co., a Washington, D.C.-based lobbying firm.