CENTRE, Pa. -- If you had breakfast this morning, stop for a moment and think about what you ate. Where was the cereal grown? How? Were pesticides applied? What kind? Was the grain genetically altered?
Was the cow that provided the milk juiced on synthetic growth hormones? Does the hen that laid your eggs ever see the light of day? Was your bacon irradiated? Preserved with nitrites? How was the pig -- if it was real bacon -- raised?
Now, what's for lunch? How about a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or a spinach and mushroom salad?
Peanut butter is out for at least 550 reasons -- that's how many people have been sickened by salmonella-laced food products traced to a Georgia processing plant. And mushrooms may be hard to find after a southeastern Pennsylvania producer recalled theirs because they may be contaminated with a bacterial pathogen that can be fatal to people -- infants and the elderly, for example who have weakened immune systems. Still hungry?
Just three generations off the farm, most Americans have no idea where their food comes from or what is in it. And relying on the government, specifically the Food and Drug Administration, for protection has proved to be a disaster.
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Food-safety activists have been calling for a beefed-up FDA, asking Congress to give the agency power to order food recalls, require annual inspections of food-processing facilities and require processors to disclose when their own tests find tainted products.
That will take money, of course, and probably a split from the "drug" side of the rather tame and toothless watchdog.
Others have advocated the creation of a Cabinet-level Department of Food.
Meantime, there is something you can do to help ensure the quality and safety of food you eat and you've no doubt read it here several times previously: Buy fresh, buy local.
Knowing your farmer and how he or she grows vegetables and raises animals provides more peace of mind than wondering which items and brands are among the more than 800 products that have been recalled belatedly since the most recent salmonella outbreak at the Georgia peanut-processing plant.
Brian Snyder, executive director of the Millheim, Pa.-based Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, and Scott Exo, who holds a similar position with the nonprofit, sustainability-certification organization Food Alliance, of Portland, Ore., suggest a total redesign of our food system, so our food and all its ingredients would carry into the marketplace the identities and reputations of those who produced it; the companies that bring us our food would be transparent about their management standards, practices and outcomes; and there would be accountability and systems to assure buyers that the claims made about particular food products are true. Nothing hard to swallow there.
That proposal was among the many topics discussed at the recent PASA-sponsored Farming for the Future conference, along with peanut butter, mushrooms and where the items on the dinner menu came from.
Eat safely. And get to know your farmer in the process.
