Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety (47 page)

If you believe, as some commentators do, that this is an impressive or even meaningful operation, I urge you to conduct a simple calculation. The United Nations estimates that there are 7.5 [million] hungry people in Afghanistan. If every ration pack reached a starving person, then one two hundredth of the vulnerable were fed by the humanitarian effort on Sunday. . . . But the purpose of the food drops is not to feed the starving but to tell them they are being fed. President Bush explained on Sunday that by means of these packages, “the oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America and our allies.
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Even with a possible exaggeration of the extent of food insecurity, this comment suggests that food aid is a complicated business, and at best a temporary expedient. One problem is getting dropped food to the people who need it most.
Figure 29
illustrates the fate of some of the food aid packages. As often happens, enterprising people collect the packages and sell them on the open market; this gets the food into public circulation, but at a price. In this instance, the packages also encountered unexpected safety hazards. The Pentagon warned that the Taliban might try to poison the packages or spread rumors of poisoning as a means of propaganda against the United States, but Taliban leaders denied this accusation: “No one can be that brutal and ignorant as to poison his own people.”
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The packages themselves presented hazards. They were packed in specially designed plywood containers that could be dropped from 30,000 feet without breaking, but several landed in the wrong place and destroyed people’s homes. Children sent to collect the food packages died or lost limbs when they ran across fields planted with land mines. While the food drop was in progress, the political situation made it impossible for food aid to get into the country through conventional routes. Later, warlords stole shipments, and riots broke out when supplies ran out.
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Political stability depends on food security, and food security is inextricably linked to political stability. Without such stability, food aid alleviates a small part of the humanitarian crisis—better than nothing, but never a long-term solution.
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Would increasing the amount of food aid alleviate the crisis? Former Senator George McGovern, U.S. ambassador to the World Food Programme said, “If these people have nourishment for healthy lives, this is less fertile territory for cultivation by terrorist leaders.” Bringing in another issue germane to this book, he said that the war on hunger in
Afghanistan and elsewhere cannot be waged without
biotechnology:
“It is probably true that affluent countries can afford to reject scientific agriculture and pay more for food produced by so-called natural methods. But the 800 million poor, chronically hungry people of Asia, Africa and Latin America cannot afford such foods.”
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As we have seen, biotechnology is still a remote solution to food security problems, and it is difficult to imagine how it might have alleviated immediate food shortages in Afghanistan.

FIGURE 29
. On October 13, 2001,
New York Times
photographer James Hill took this photograph of U.S. “Humanitarian Daily Rations” dropped over Afghanistan. The photograph appeared in the Week in Review section on October 21. Mr. Hill said the food packets were available in local markets for the equivalent of 60 cents each. (
Photographer’s Journal: War Is a Way of Life
, November 19, 2001. Online:
www.nytimes.com/photojournal
. © 2001 New York Times Photo Archive. Used with permission.)

While aid agencies were attempting to deal with that situation, food security in the United States shifted to another aspect of its broader meaning: protecting the food supply against terrorists. Officials soon identified safe food and water as key components of “homeland security,” as indicated by the rather frightening chart that appeared soon after the attacks (see
figure 30
). The chart demonstrates that security in this sense is no simple matter, as it requires the cooperation of nearly four-dozen federal bureaucracies to protect the nation’s borders, nuclear power plants, and public facilities; fight bioterrorism; obtain intelligence; and protect food and water supplies. Whether this chart demonstrates the need for coordination—or its impossibility—is a matter of interpretation, but one aspect is striking: the minimal role allotted to the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). Although the DHHS secretary announced that his agency “was more fearful about the safety of the American food supply than anything else,” one critical piece of his domain is noticeably missing: the FDA—the agency responsible for the safety of 75% of foods, domestic and imported. In contrast, the USDA receives detailed attention, perhaps indicating the relative degree to which the two agencies command the respect of Congress.
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FIGURE 30
. The byzantine organization of government units participating in the Office of Homeland Security. Agencies of the Department of Health and Human Services (shown here as HHS) appear immediately above those of the Agriculture Department (USDA) on the left side of the diagram. The Food and Drug Administration (of DHHS) is conspicuously absent as a separate entity on this chart, despite its responsibility for the safety of three-fourths of the food supply, domestic and imported. (© 2001 Dr. Jay Jakub & The Monterey Institute of International Studies. Used with permission.)

A second result of the events of fall 2001 is heightened awareness of the possibility that terrorists might deliberately poison food and water supplies. Protection against food bioterrorism is difficult because of the long list of agents that can be used as bioweapons and the vast number of possibilities for delivering them. Experts point to the increasing centralization of the food supply as a factor increasing its vulnerability to sabotage. If, as mentioned in
chapter 1
, an accidental contamination of ice cream with
Salmonella
can make hundreds of thousands of people ill, it is easy to imagine the damage that could be caused by deliberate tampering.
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The low rate of inspection of imported foods is an especially weak link in the chain of protection. Well before he was appointed director of the Office of Public Health Preparedness, Dr. Donald Henderson, an expert on infectious diseases, smallpox eradication, and now bioterrorism, wrote: “Of the weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical, and biological), the biological ones are the most greatly feared, but the country is least well prepared to deal with them.”
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Of particular concern is the role of biotechnology in developing weapons of bioterrorism. The research methods used to transmit desired genes into plants could easily be adapted for nefarious purposes: creating pathogenic bacteria resistant to multiple antibiotics or able to synthesize lethal toxins, or superweeds resistant to herbicides. As half the nation’s soybeans resist Roundup, genetic mischief could do a great deal of damage. On this point, Dr. Henderson commented, “At least 10 countries are now engaged in developing and producing biological weapons. What with the growing power of biotechnology, one has to anticipate that this technology, like all others before it, will eventually be misused.”
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Public health experts concerned about such possibilities cite precedents, ancient and modern, for the use of poisoned food and drink to achieve political ends. The Athenians forced Socrates to drink hemlock; Shakespeare’s Queen Gertrude succumbed to poisoned wine intended for Hamlet; the Borgias were notorious for their deft poisoning of political opponents. Medieval leaders of church and state employed tasters to protect against precisely such activities. As such examples demonstrate, food-borne biological weapons do not need to be confined to wartime but can be used to achieve more personal political objectives.
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Modern instances also abound. In 1997, an evidently disgruntled U.S. laboratory employee sent electronic mail messages inviting coworkers to partake of doughnuts; his message failed to mention that he had laced his treats with a particularly virulent type of
Shigella
, and 45 people became ill. Also in the U.S., during the 2001 December holidays, nearly 300,000 pounds of ham products had to be recalled because an angry employee spiked them with nails, screws, and other nonfood materials.
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A review of such episodes, published early in 2001, describes poisonings of water at German prisoner-of-war camps with arsenic, Israeli citrus fruit with mercury, and Chilean grapes with cyanide, suggesting that no food or drink is invulnerable to such contamination.
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Far-fetched as it may seem, the single known case of food terrorism designed to achieve political goals in the United States involved the deliberate poisoning of salad bars with
Salmonella
. This widely cited incident occurred in 1984 soon after followers of the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh established communal headquarters in a small rural town in Oregon. Followers were easily identifiable by their red clothing, red beads, and aggressive interactions with neighbors, and they soon came into conflict over issues related to land use and building permits. To keep local residents from voting in an election for county commissioners who might enforce zoning laws, members of the commune sprinkled
Salmonella
over salad bars and into cream pitchers at 10 restaurants, thereby making at least 750 people sick.

This incident taught many lessons, not least that biological agents are easy to use and to obtain: the commune clinic merely ordered them from a biological supply house. Investigators had serious problems tracing the source of contamination, however. For one thing, they could not imagine that the poisonings were deliberate; nobody claimed responsibility, no motive was evident, and no such incident had been reported previously. They only were able to identify the perpetrators when one confessed. Officials also decided that publicity about the outbreak might incite
copycat behavior and did not publish their findings until 1997. The incident became a classic example of how bioterrorism—even when causing no loss of life—can induce havoc. Although none of the victims died, 45 were hospitalized, and all but one of the affected restaurants soon went out of business.
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Beyond this example, the threat of food bioterrorism for political purposes remains theoretical. Nevertheless, fears of that possibility induce a wide range of responses, among them exploitation—the promotion and sale of unproved remedies. One practitioner, for example, suggests vitamin C as an alternative to vaccinations and antibiotics for bioterrorist-induced smallpox or anthrax: “Vitamin C . . . should prove highly effective against both of these conditions. I say ‘should’ only because their rareness has prevented any single vitamin C researcher from encountering enough cases to conduct a meaningful study and publish it. However, the likelihood that both of these conditions could be completely cured, even in their advanced stages, is compelling.”
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Largely as a result of such misleading suggestions, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine informs visitors to its Web site that no herbal or vitamin products can protect against bioterrorism, and the Federal Trade Commission sends warning letters to Web sites that make unsupportable claims that products such as oregano oil, coconut oil, or zinc mineral water protect against bioweapons.
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Although experts agree that such products are ineffective, they profoundly disagree about the degree of danger posed by food bioterrorism and the extent to which the country should devote resources to guard against it. Some believe that the food supply remains too diffuse to permit terrorists to harm very many people at one time, and that the water supply is even less vulnerable—for reasons of dilution, chlorination, sunlight, and filtration. They prefer to approach the problem from a public health standpoint and to determine the most important food safety risks and the ways those can best be addressed. They emphasize the vastly greater harm caused by foodborne microbes, tobacco, and inappropriate use of antibiotics in animal agriculture, and suggest that applying scarce resources to these problems—rather than to the frightening but much smaller risk of bioterrorism—will ultimately save more lives. As one group puts the matter, “Our security will be better enhanced by primary prevention of war and terrorism than by military counterattacks and reactive preparedness efforts. Instead of engendering fear of bioterrorism, let’s build a health care system that can handle the real health crises that we face.”
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In this view, national preparedness against food
bioterrorism inappropriately diverts resources from seeking solutions to more compelling food safety problems. Such perspectives are grounded in studies of risk communication. In their 1982 analysis of risk and culture referred to in the introductory chapter, Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky said: “Risk aversion is a preoccupation with anticipating danger that leads to large-scale organization and centralization of power in order to mobilize massive resources against possible evils. The probability that any known danger will occur declines because of anticipatory measures. But the probability that if the unexpected happens it will prove catastrophic increases, because resources required for response have been used up in anticipation.”
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