If you haven't heard yet, we're in the middle of a massive egg recall. The FDA announcement is here.
500 million salmonella tainted eggs. 500 million. Wow. That should blow your mind. More disturbing is that Jack DeCoster, the man behind these bad eggs, has a long history of health and environmental standard violations.
(For more on DeCoster, you can read the Grist article here.)
The whole situation is disturbing and profoundly sad. It speaks to everything that is wrong with our industrial food system, CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations), environmental regulations and enforcement, and farm policy. We should be asking ourselves some fundamental questions about how we got here.
The easy path is to look at scumbags like DeCoster and lay all the blame at his feet. His big agribusiness pals probably deserve some too. And what about those lobbyists? They're all evil, right?
Wrong.
The real culprit is me. Yes, me. It's all my fault. I allow this system to continue every day. In my relative silence, I implicitly endorse the values that have allowed this tragedy to happen. And here's the bitter pill - it's your fault too.
Idiots they may be, but I highly doubt DeCoster and his ilk spend their days in an underground lair plotting and scheming on the best ways to poison 500 million people. They plot and scheme about the best way to make large amounts of money, because that is what our culture incentivizes and rewards.
This was Lesson 1 of Business School: You get the behavior you incentivize, not necessarily the behavior you want. A great case study on this point is as follows:
A vegetable canning company received some complaints from customers who found bugs in their cans of peas. The company decided to incentivize their plant workers to remove bugs by offering bonus cash for each bug a worker plucked from the peas. A few weeks later, complaints about bugs in the peas skyrocketed. The company execs couldn't understand, until they visited the canning plant. The workers had taken to dumping buckets of bugs into the peas in order to maximize their cash bonus. The company had unintentionally incentivized the addition of bugs to the peas and, Lesson 1, we always get the behavior we incentivize.
In this country we demand cheap food. The percentage of our paychecks we spend on food has plummeted in the past 50 years. I hear lots of people complaining about how expensive organic food is, but not questioning the hundreds they spend on cable TV each month, or all the new clothes they feel they must buy.
At the same time, we are increasingly losing our connection to the land. We operate under the assumption that a superior, elevated life is one that involves as little dirt as possible. Farming is for poor people. We have too much to do to pay attention to where our food comes from - making it appear in our restaurants and on our supermarket shelves is someone else's problem.
Add in our blind materialism and is it any wonder that we've got problems like DeCoster and his poisonous eggs?
So what do we do? How do we fix it? I think it is lazy to suggest we don't have any power or that the country is run by business interests and we can't make a difference. We do have power. If you don't want to wade into the muck of federal policy, work with your local community government. At the very least, vote with your fork. Find high quality local farms and support them. Join CSAs.
If we demonstrate that we value the preservation of our land and the quality of our food we will create a new set of incentives that agribusiness will have to adapt to. The people behind our current food system aren't evil - they're greedy. And we can use that to our advantage.
Colin Pistell 