Pesticides, Pathogens, Slave Labor

By Cindy Gomez
Editor

Eric Schlosser started as a writer with the The Atlantic Monthly. He won the National Magazine Award for reporting for his two-part series “Reefer Madness” and “Marijuana and the Law” (August 1994), and the Sidney Hillman Foundation award for “In the Strawberry Fields” (November 1995). His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and The Nation.

His bestselling book “Fast Food Nation” is an exposé of the unsanitary and discriminatory practices of the fast food industry. Schlosser helped adapt his book into a critically acclaimed 2006 film, “Food Inc.” 

Schlosser sat down to talk with HPR while waiting to speak at the Consumer’s Union Third Annual Summit during a viewing of his critically acclaimed documentary, Food Inc. HPR invites you to visit http://tiny.cc/Schlosserpodcast to listen to the full interview with Schlosser as well as the speech he gave following the screening of his film, Food Inc. Here is what he had to say to our readers about food safety, pesticides, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and a variety of agricultural issues:

High Plains Reader: What we know in the F-M area is that universities such as NDSU are frequently used by corporations to do testing and research…

Eric Schlosser: “Food, Inc.” tried to give people a sense of what this food system—in the hands of three, or four, or five different companies—what the consequences might be. But it would be great to do a whole film about the way in which university research is influenced by corporate money…
One of the really disturbing things about GMOs is that when farmers get this seed they have to sign a contract that promises that they won’t hand over the seeds to anyone else for research. So, very little research has been done on GMOs and on these entirely new products by independent university researchers. It has been done by these companies and by the researchers they chose to give the seeds to. And that is a problem.

HPR: And the companies can also withhold information? Even if the study is done at a university?

ES: They are under no obligation to release any study. If a researcher is funded at a university and paid for by a corporation, many times that corporation decides if the study gets published or not.

HPR: Is that part of the reason we don’t know more about the effects of GMOs on people? You alluded to some of the reasons in the film, “Food Inc.,” but I’d like to follow up.

ES: I don’t know that GMOs are harmful to people. I mean, it’s possible they are not. But, what is outrageous is that they were introduced into millions of acres of farmland in the United States without those studies being done.

You could never release a pharmaceutical onto the market without testing it for years in animal studies and human trials. And yet these crops were put into fields within just a few years of them being invented—without any large-scale study.

So the only study that is being done right now is on all of us who are guinea pigs who are eating this food. And we will figure out what is wrong with it.

I mean, I oppose GMOs for all kinds of reasons, but I don’t know that they are harmful for you to eat. I don’t think anyone knows. These companies don’t know. 

HPR: What kind of impact has “Food Inc.” had since it came out? [June 2009] What kind of impact has the film had on organic farming?

ES: What has been influential, I don’t think is necessarily that one documentary. It is just that there is now a movement. On college campuses there is an enormous interest in food issues. There are a lot of really well educated upper middle class and middle class kids who want to be farmers, who want to be chefs, who want to get involved in urban agriculture, who want to support farmer’s markets. The film is just part of this ongoing process. I am really encouraged at where things are right now as opposed to where they were five years ago.

I wouldn’t claim any profound impact for any one book or any one film. But things are changing, and for the better. There is an organic garden at the White House. I mean, that’s insane! Five years ago, that would never have happened. I think the Bushes were privately eating organic in their private dining room, but certainly weren’t promoting it and speaking about it this way.

HPR: What important policy changes or proposals for policy changes have you seen since “Food Inc.” came out?

ES: There is this Food Safety bill that people are talking about; this FDA modernization bill. That really needs to pass the Senate. It passed, I guess, last July in the House—and that was after the film came out, so maybe the film helped in some way.

I just am glad the film was made and that it’s uncompromised, in the sense that we didn’t change it to fit any pressure applied. That’s all I can really think about. I can’t really measure what success is or anything like that. It’s good that it’s being shown in schools. Foundations have bought lots of copies to show in schools.

HPR: We’ve informed our readers of places where you can get foods that are organic; restaurants that serve organic meals, etc. But a lot of people are really stuck by the price point.

ES: That’s a problem.

HPR: It is a problem. What do you have to say about that?

ES: Well, the more people buy organic the more the price drops. There have already been huge decreases in price. The cheap food isn’t really cheap when you factor in the health care costs and the dialysis and the heart problems that come later.

It’s kind of like smoking. I used to love smoking. A pack of cigarettes when I was smoking wasn’t that expensive, but the lung cancer 30 or 40 years later is. It’s one of those health problems where it’s not like riding a motorcycle drunk without a helmet where the consequences can be immediate. The consequences of this food aren’t necessarily apparent for quite a while.

So, the government has to stop subsidizing unhealthy food, which we do enormously, and start subsidizing the foods that we should be having, like fruits and vegetables and things that are produced organically and sustainably.

If someone can’t afford to eat organic, that’s the way it goes. They’ve got to make the choices with the limited amount of money that they have. But if they have kids it is worth spending the extra money to make sure their kids are eating organic, because kids are the most sensitive to these pesticide residues.

HPR: One of the things that impacted me about the movie was eating more healthily for my kids. Once I started buying organic foods I found that it was really not that big a deal. But there is limitation in certain communities in accessing organic foods. What would you say to people in that situation?

ES: To the degree that you can, grow your own. There is just such a tradition of back yard gardeners. Especially if you are in the Dakotas and Minnesota there may be a limited growing season, but things grow nicely there. So, to the degree that you can, produce your own or buy from farmers markets or at the very least be educated about where your food comes from.

You know, for me, I buy organic because I want to support sustainability. I don’t know if the organic food is actually better for me. Some of these pesticide residues may not be harmful to me. I think they are most likely harmful to young children. I’d rather not eat them.

But there is no question the pesticides are bad for the land, for the water table. They are worst for the people who work the land. There are something like twenty or thirty thousand cases of acute pesticide poisoning among farm workers—and the children of farm workers exhibiting all kinds of health effects from the pesticide residues that are brought into the house on clothing as dust.

About 70% of the insecticides are organophosphates. These were invented as part of the Nazi chemical warfare program because of how effective they were at killing people. It was only after the Second World War that it was realized that they were also effective at killing insects. So these are poisons; they are toxins.

Are you familiar with the President’s Cancer Panel’s report on environmental toxins? It really gets into how bad these residues are especially for children. For middle-aged guys like me, who knows? So, buying organic is part of supporting the food production that’s sustainable, as opposed to this modern industrial form which is forty to fifty years old and is already having an incredibly bad health effect.

HPR: Now a bigger picture question. Earlier you mentioned China and things going on in China like children’s toys laced with—

ES: Baby formula laced with toxins. We don’t have to look to China to see that. We can just go over to not that far from The Hill. It [regulation] is not happening because of the corruption of the political system by money. This isn’t an issue like abortion or gun control that has really passionate people on either side. If you look at the American people, the American people will overwhelmingly want safe food. I mean just labeling even. People want GMOs to be labeled; they want cloned meat and milk to be labeled.

But there is very big money spread around in Congress, particularly in the right wing of the Republican party, by the big food processors and the big meat packing companies that have thwarted food safety reform for generations. I was meeting today with a senator who was telling me the argument that was being made against this proposal by someone from the American Meat Institute or AMI, whatever it is, and it was almost verbatim the argument that was made against the first food safety legislation that Teddy Roosevelt proposed in 1906. They don’t want to have to pay a penny more. They don’t want the government in their business and they have found a very effective way to impose their business policy on the rest of society.

What is being sent out from our slaughter houses and processing plants and feed lots is a form of pollution as dangerous and toxic as any oil spill or chemical spill, but these microbes are invisible. And they are being sent out on the workers, in the meat, in the water that comes out of these plants and they are full of pollutants. Those pollutants are deadly pathogens.

So, we need to make these companies responsible for the cost of their pollution. And they are very well connected and powerful… not to end on a bummer note—things are better on these issues now than they’ve been in my memory.

HPR: Have you considered the connection between the exploitation of farm workers and how the fact that we are ignoring that issue altogether is also feeding this problem?

ES: I don’t care if the tomato is organic if it was harvested by slave labor. A lot of the people who are big supporters of sustainability and a lot of the foodies, you know, their concern ends when you start talking about labor. Without farm workers getting a decent wage and safe working conditions, there is no sustainable agriculture.

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