gastronomeg.com

(Scallion photo comes from Play with your Food) 

It all started innocently enough.  The week’s CSA pickup had included a small head of intriguingly pointy, wrinkly-leaved Arrowhead Cabbage. I also had some fresh ground lamb and some Chinese-style folded buns that have been in the freezer FOREVER (ever since a party where we roasted a pork butt and made our own pork buns, yum, but which was sort of an embarrassingly long time ago), and which I had finally formed a plan to liberate (thus also liberating some much-needed space in the freezer).  The thought was to brown the meat and add sliced cabbage and sweat it all up with some nice Asian-inspired sauce. The cabbage-y, saucy mix would be great with some steamed buns. All I lacked was a piece of ginger, and maybe some green onions, to make it perfect.

Luckily I had scoped out a small Asian-owned produce stand that lies on the path I travel on the way to my classes at Lehman College, on Bedford Park Blvd. This is a section of the Bronx that, like so many of New York’s largely immigrant neighborhoods, is underserved by grocery stores. There is a big Pioneer all the way over on Webster, but I’m pretty sure that the polystyrene-plated, shrink-wrapped produce horrors that lurk therein are the stuff of my most rant-inducing nightmares. Bedford Park has adapted with a few small local shops – a carniceria, a bakery with a window display of rather alarming pastries, and a little produce shop.  I’d stopped in there for an emergency bottle of water on a very hot day and noticed that the produce there looked green and fresh and the sight of the workers putting up umbrellas to shade the outdoor stands in the morning had become a comforting part of my morning scurry to the indignities of 9 am summer school.  This seemed like an ideal place to pick up the ginger I needed, and it was right on my way.

I picked out one of the smaller pieces of plump-looking ginger (which was still pretty big – this was obviously a store for serious ginger-buyers.  No small shriveled knobs here!) and decided to grab a bunch of scallions as well.  The girl at the counter weighed my ginger and asked me for just over $1 for it and the scallions.  It was cheap enough that I didn’t even have to get out a bill – I had enough money in coins!

There was a time when I would have whistled my way down the street after such a transaction, pleased at my little food bargain. But in fact this is where my discomfort with the poor unsuspecting scallions began. Because this was a little too cheap, in my mind, for a bunch of scallions that were obviously not local.  These scallions, although they looked plump and fresh, were too even in size, and their greenery too tender, to be from around here.  Scallions are in season now, and available at the farmer’s markets (there were to be some in our next week’s CSA pickup). These scallions have more gnarly shapes and tougher green tops than the ones I’d just bought. Like all the produce in the little store (and stores big and small all over New York), they had come from a local produce wholesaler, who may have gotten them from a regional distributor, who had gotten them from an importer or trucker, who had brought them from who knows where (Mexico? California?). The fact remains that these scallions had changed hands several times, and yet they still cost me, the end purchaser, less than a dollar. To be that cheap, they must have started out at five cents a bunch or less. 

Uncomfortable thoughts began to niggle at the back of my mind. Under what circumstances could scallions be grown that were to be sold at five cents a bunch?  What were the lives like of the workers who worked to harvest scallions that could be sold that cheaply?  What kind of environmental damage might have been wrought by the farming systems that allowed scallions to grow fast enough that their tops were still tender when they were big enough to harvest? What was the quality of irrigation water used to keep them growing fast, and the quality of the water that was used to mist them to keep them fresh while they were waiting to be shipped?  As Keith Stewart (a local farmer who has sold his great garlic, among other things, at the Greenmarket in Union Square for years) writes in his essay “The Hidden Costs of Farming,” “It’s hard to argue with inexpensive food – I like a bargain myself.  But before we get too self-congratulatory about our food system, we should take a closer look at it.  Behind it lie some hidden and largely unacknowledged costs that can make our cheap food not such a bargain after all.” (It’s a Long Road to a Tomato. New York, 2006, p. 112).

The other thing that lurked in the back of my mind, even as I picked up the bunch of scallions from their small, refrigerated pile, was the fact of their untraceability. No one, certainly not the owner of the produce store, and probably not even the buyers at the local produce wholesaler, had any idea where they had come from beyond the last stop along the line.  The “farm” (insofar as we can call what is essentially an outdoor factory a farm) that grew them and the workers who picked and boxed them up for sale had no way of knowing where they were going to be eaten.

Notice that I did not say, here, that the store owners, produce buyers, and scallion-processing workers simply “didn’t know” where the scallions had come from or were going to.  That would imply some sort of willful or deliberate ignorance on their part. Instead, they simply had no way of knowing.  If I had asked the store owner where she had gotten the scallions, she would probably have been able to tell me the name of the local produce company who sold them to her.  If I showed the produce wholesaler a dated invoice, they might have been able to get me one step closer. But even then, the ultimate origin of my exact scallions would probably have been unclear. As Marion Nestle points out, “Food suppliers do not want you to know how commonly food from different places is commingled.  The foods in any one bin might come from anywhere.” (What to Eat. New York, 2006, p. 30). 

Discomfort with, or at least a dawning awareness of, the opaqueness of our produce distribution system fortunately seems to be coming to the forefront of public consciousness (perhaps due to the fact that there have been two widespread and highly publicized outbreaks of food poisoning attributable to produce in the last year?).  Just as my musing on the troubling scallions was going on, I was interested to hear this piece a few days ago on Morning Edition.  Here’s a telling excerpt:

 Supermarket co-owner John Garcia was surprised when asked whether he sells Chinese shiitakes in his store, which is locally owned. He said he thought his supply was all domestically grown and that he wasn’t sure there was a difference.

“There’s definitely not anyone on our staff who knows that,” Garcia said. “If they knew, I would know.”

But Garcia was curious, so he went to his office to look more closely at records from his supplier.

“I have an invoice that says I got some shiitake jumbos that were imported, it doesn’t say from where,” Garcia said.

When asked whether that was a problem, he said, “Yeah, I would like to know where it’s coming from, because I never knew this was an issue.”

Notice that Garcia was not even aware that lack of transparency about the origins of the produce in his store was an issue.  It is telling that he is surprised to find out that he could be selling mushrooms imported from countries such as China, where overuse of pesticides (not to mention use of pesticides like DDT, which are no longer legal in the US) is a known and well-documented problem. So easy to find out about, in fact, that it is as easy as typing “pesticide use in China” into a Google search. Try it and you’ll come up with these two links and many more.

We can take comfort in the fact that there’s a pretty good chance that, once the long-delayed implementation of Country of Origin Labeling takes effect, many consumers will vote out Chinese mushrooms and Mexican scallions with their wallets. (While Mexico succeeded in eliminating DDT use ahead of schedule, they still have a rather large problem with untreated irrigation water.  Granted this is from 2006, but I doubt the situation has dramatically changed. Here’s just one quote: “For example, less than 10% of waste water from Mexico City, with a population of greater than 25 million is treated, hence more than 90% of the city’s untreated waste water is sent into rivers that irrigate farmland to the north.”)

But let’s not get off-topic here. I’m not in the business of trying to put the blame for problems with our food supply on foreign countries’ growing practices. Take the recent Tomato/Salmonella outbreak (or, as Marion Nestle so aptly renames it, THE TOMATO (MAYBE?) SAGA.  What is most troubling to me (and, I’m sure everyone else who has a brain and eats fresh food) is the difficulty inspectors have been having in ascertaining where exactly the tainted tomatoes may have come from (or even if tomatoes were the cause of the outbreak).  The FDA and CDC have done a fair amount of hemming and hawing and trying to put as much blame as possible for their delay in targeting the source on the faulty memories of the sickened eaters. For example, here is an LA Times article, which notes that “Consumers and farmers have criticized health officials for the slow pace of the probe, which the FDA says is unavoidable because of the wide scope of the outbreak, the shaky memories of victims and the difficulties of tracing tomatoes.” (Emphasis mine.) Note how the shaky memory of victims comes strategically before the difficulty in tracing tomatoes.

But it is clear that the problem lies much deeper than just faulty memories, and tomatoes aren’t the only culprit. Marion Nestle’s ongoing coverage of the tomato crisis will give you about all you need to know (see link above), but I she succinctly sums up one possible solution in her July 2 update where she notes that, rather than showing the need for better “cooperation” between various US food agencies, “it shows the need for a single food agency!”

This type of thinking plays right into the tenets of what is called “Normal Accident Theory,” which deals with complex systems and how large-scale accidents come about within them. This thinking has commonly been applied to nuclear accidents, but the theory has also been applied to commercial plane crashes (many thanks to my aviator husband for directing me to William Langewieshe’s commentary on the 1996 Valujet crash, which you can find in the last chapter of his book Inside the Sky (New York, 1998)). I was also reminded of the incident that Wendell Berry relates in the essay “Margins” in his 1977 book The Unsettling of America:

In Michigan in the fall of 1975, a fire-retarding chemical known a PBB was mistaken for a trace mineral and mixed into a large order of livestock feed.  This feed was sent to four Michigan mills run by the Farm Bureau, and from there it went to farms and to the stock troughs.  The resulting contamination of meat, milk, and eggs produced a disaster which is still continuing after three-and-a-half years and the limits of which are not known.

“Normal Accident Theory,” as described by its author and long-time expounder Charles Perrow, states that in highly complex systems “serious accidents are inevitable, no matter how hard we try to avoid them” (Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies.  Princeton, 1984/1999, p. 3).  This is directly in opposition to the competing “High Responsibility Theory,” which states that decentralization of decision making, redundancy, and the ability of complex organizations to learn from mistakes will lead to safety in complex systems. Even if you don’t happen to work for a large corporation, a fairly cursory look at the response of the CDC and the FDA to the tomato/salmonella outbreak will serve to decrease your confidence in the “High Responsibility Theory.”  (Incidentally the best thinking I’ve seen on the tenets of High Responsibility Theory vs. Normal Accident Theory appear in Scott Sagan’s 1993 book on nuclear technology, The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons. The first couple of chapters are worth a read for the cogent and detailed analysis of the two theories, even if you may not sleep well at night after finishing the book, especially if you grew up during the Cold War.) 

Given the convincing tenets of Normal Accident Theory, in any system that is as price-driven as our food supply currently is, and in which distribution systems have become concentrated at the same time regulation and oversight have become decentralized, widespread outbreaks of food poisoning are not only more likely but in fact inevitable.  And as Berry points out, “In a highly centralized and industrialized food-supply system there can be no small disaster” (Unsettling of America p. 223). There is an oft-cited study by Lawrence Wein (I have read about it in Perrow’s recent The Next Catastrophe as well as Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy), which basically found that it would be possible to poison 500,000 people by tainting a single milk silo with botulism. (McKibben, p. 61; Perrow, p. 299).  In a situation like this, the distribution system, which removes producers and consumers from direct access to one another in the chain of supply, would be to blame rather than the milk producers themselves.  Similarly, in the case of the tomato/salmonella (maybe) outbreak, the blame lies less on where the produce came from than on the fact that the source of the contamination has become virtually untraceable by the time someone (or in this case, 869 someones – and those are just the reported cases) gets sick.

It is, of course, possible for consumers and producers to regain contact with one another – the rate at which farmer’s markets, CSA’s, and buying clubs have exploded in the past few years is well documented and encouraging.  But the fact remains that this way of eating requires flexibility and a fair amount of commitment. I regularly take the subway 45 minutes each way to get to the farmer’s market in Union Square, and there was a mini-crisis the other night when neither my husband nor I was going to be able to pick up our weekly CSA share (we rearranged the schedule.) Processing the majority of your own food (I make bread, granola bars, and granola, although I confess that crackers will probably remain beyond my ability or interest) doesn’t cost much more than shopping at the supermarket, but it takes time, commitment, and a supportive partner who will make the CSA run and do the dishes. To keep the costs down, it requires modifying your diet to include much less meat. But this kind of commitment just isn’t possible for everyone, and even the committed are still to some extent vulnerable (for example we feel we can’t afford to buy the milk available at markets in New York, as much as we would like to and would do so in an ideal world. I’ve just cut milk to a bare minimum, too. When we have kids it will be different – something else will probably have to go). Country of Origin Labeling will go a long way towards giving people for whom shopping at the supermarket is their only or best option at least some sort of choice about what to buy (and I hope it will encourage more produce wholesalers to consider buying more local produce).

But where does this all leave the hapless bunch of scallions that launched so many lines of investigation? As it happened, when I bought the scallions I was on my way to the New York Botanical Gardens for a Soil Science class. By the time I got there, the scallions were already disturbing enough that I was quite relieved to discover that there is now a Farmer’s Market at NYBG for a couple of hours on Wednesday afternoons!  I bought a bunch of plump young red onions with greens attached from Migliorelli Farm two dollars, figuring I would rather use those for my cabbage buns. However, I hate to waste food, even food that makes me uncomfortable. Heartened by the quality of the ginger (the freshest, juiciest ginger I’d seen in a long time!) that had come from the little store in the Bronx via who knows where, I ended up using the scallions in a broccoli-chicken stir fry a few days later. Through no fault of the scallions, which turned out to be perfectly respectable if a bit bland, it wasn’t my best meal ever. But I felt somehow better having eaten the evidence and survived, none the worse for wear.