Are Contrarians Helping or Hurting the Food Movement? Pork Op-Ed in NYT a Shill for Big Ag

It is necessary to question our movement. Without a cold, hard look at the snags in implementing a sustainable food system, someone ill-informed will crawl out of the woodwork clinging to their credentials and poke holes in our arguments, whether with valid points or not, possibly shilling for Big Ag or just looking to market themselves as a contrarian.

Today, a free-range dissenter ended up in the op-ed pages of the New York Times, seemingly to defend factory farmed pork. (One wonders if the NYT was attempting to temper the excellent coverage Nicholas Kristof has had of pigs and MRSA of late)

John McWilliams' argument -- that the exposure to disease which brought pigs into the factory farm setting in the first place still exists, and therefore in re-implementing free-range we are no better than we started -- has little to base in reality. This is a classic shill, as the study that he cites (Foodborne Pathogens and Disease) was funded by the National Pork Board, a group that defends the interests of industrial pig operations. If the New York Times had bothered to fact-check, they might have seen that the parasite trichinia found "present" in two of the free-range pigs was actually only antibodies (The Center for a Livable Future goes into more detail), which leaves us uncertain whether they carried the disease or not, and renders McWilliams' argument moot.

Aside from this, though, McWilliams is missing the point. Locavorism isn't about free-range, its about getting closer to the source; shaking the hand that feeds you and thereby knowing, even seeing, where your food comes from. The reason there are no worthy studies cited in McWilliams' piece is because grass-fed farmers often run size-manageable and responsible operations. They don't cut corners precisely because they are held accountable by the community.

I'm thinking about two things here. First, where are the media in this story? And second, can these contrarian attacks help us build the movement, or are they purely a distraction?

In this instance it seems that the New York Times, in its desperation to sell papers, fell into the trap of story building over truth-finding. On Grist, Tom Laskawy wrote a great piece on the counter-productive and even dangerous world of FUD -- the corporate tactic of creating Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt in the consumer so as to sell the status quo. As Laskawy points out, this Times op-ed falls right in line with the tenets of FUD -- a result of the Times' use of false equivalency. In other words, in the interest of creating drama, many newspapers of note have failed to vet stories properly -- creating the false appearance that the arguments on both sides of a story are equal and leaving it up to the reader to make sense of it. What we get then is always a confused and nihilist public, uttering things like, "but didn't you see that piece in the New York Times, free-range is not necessarily better." The question is, then, how do we reclaim the media, and disseminate real information to consumers?

I think its a tough one to answer. What I do know, is that at the farmer's market, the answer lies with the beginning and the end of the food chain. Government needs to step in and lead on food issues with a better food policy agenda. We've seen the beginnings of such a plan, with the White House garden and Kathleen Merrigan's appointment as Under-Secretary of Agriculture -- but these could end up being distractions. We must focus on the decentralization and diversification of the food system -- starting with rethinking farm subsidies and hospital, school and military procurement -- and insist that scientists get public sector funding and freedom to do real scientific studies (For the hell of it, lets start by really testing GMOs). The media also needs to press the reset button (Maybe this will happen on its own with the closure of so many papers) -- this is our press, for goodness sake, not the voice box of industry. In the meantime, every eater has a responsibility to ask where their food is coming from, and when confused, to dig deeper and ask more questions. These changes at the top and bottom are interdependent, and will not occur unless simultaneous.

Finally, I do think it is possible for opposition to make us stronger, and more able to articulate what it is we stand for and why. In his recent book, Getting Green Done, Auden Schendler writes that we must take a long hard look at the bumpy road to implementing sustainability -- and learn from our mistakes -- something that at times we are afraid to do for fear of backlash. In the food movement, for example, we'd ignored food justice issues for a long time. But through criticism that our movement was elitist, and that better food was only for the rich, we have begun to unravel this thinking and work towards building a more inclusive and fair food system.

Of course, we don't always get a fair debate with our detractors. But it is still my hope that we can emerge from these arguments a more steadfast movement.

Originally published on Civil Eats

Comments

[sally forth]

Buying free-range, organic and/or local meat doesn't mean the consumer can throw safe food-handling techniques out the window. You still need clean cutting surfaces and clean utensils. You still need to cook meat to recommended internal temperatures. Everything you learned in Home Ec class (and for a fortunate few of us, as kids in 4-H clubs) still applies.

Trichinosis comes from eating the undercooked meat of infected pigs. Those pigs get infected by eating infected meat, especially infected rodents--not by simply being outside, as McWilliams implied in his NY Times article. I support local food in part because it builds face-to-face relationships between farmers and consumers. Consumers that visit their food-source farmers occasionally can judge for themselves whether their food is being raised in a clean setting.

McWilliams' point of view reminds me of the pro food-irradiation argument. Yes, we'd get pathogen-free food that way, but the mind-boggling thing is how it would then be no problem for food going IN to the plant to be dirty, since the process of irradiating it on the way OUT of the plant would theoretically resolve that issue. The only problem: why in the world would consumers then bother to follow safe food-handling techniques? A wholesale shrugging-off of food-safety basics in kitchens across this country is a much scarier scenario than the one McWilliams concocts as a means to herd grocery shoppers towards factory farm meat.

[Whatevah]

Good grief. Everytime the NYT publishes anything we disagree with, we immediately blame it on their "desperation to sell papers." For gawd's sake, it's a newspaper! It is supposed to publish a range of opinions!

This kind of crybaby nonsense is part of the reason that folks like us have a reputation as soft-headed bleeding hearts. The way to respond to essays like the one by Williams is to challenge the facts, not attack Williams as a propagandist or the NYT as desperate. Do we ever want to be taken seriously?

[huffkat]

The issue here is not that the Times publishes "a range of opinions"--it's about the Times giving a veneer of credibility to disingenuous editorials written by individuals whose agendas are not made sufficiently clear to unsuspecting readers. There's more evidence of the Times' carelessness in this regard in Sunday's Times, ( http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/opinion/12pubed.html?ref=todayspaper ) in the Public Editor column by Clark Hoyt, which acknowledges that the Times exhibited a lack of judgment when it published Daphne Merkin's op-ed about the Madoff scandal without notifying readers of the extent to which Merkin's brother was involved with Madoff's business.

For sheer hilarity, though, see the Onion-esque correction the Times was obliged to run in the Magazine today, admitting that it failed to fact check a piece about '"a vending machine for crows" that would enable the birds to exchange coins for peanuts.' ( http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/magazine/12letters-t-CORRECTIONS-1.html?scp=1&sq=josh%20klein&st=cse ) Talk about soft-headed!

[JScott]

Isn't this another method of swiftboating?

[huffkat]

The NY Times does seem to have this passive/aggressive thing going on with the agri-culture wars--every great op-ed from Kristof condemning factory farms is followed by some disingenuous drivel from a biostitute or industry shill intended to deliberately confuse consumers with disinformation and flagrant lies. And, as you note, this tactic is quite effective--who knows how many shoppers at the farmers' markets will hesitate to buy free-range pork, now, for fear of trichinosis? Meanwhile, MRSA--which has been linked to industrial hog production, as Kristof documented--is killing more people in the US than AIDS.

It's frustrating to see the Times give precious real estate to this propaganda. There are so many distortions and bogus claims in this piece that it's hard to know where to begin. We have to redouble our efforts to counter these attacks on sustainable ag. Thanks for exposing the Times' unfortunate and all-too-frequent use of false equivalency and taking them to task for providing a platform for industry shills.

[Melanie DuPuis]

There are two types of critical analysis of the food movement: the kind that seeks to destroy the movement and what it stands for, and the kind that seeks to make the movement more effective. Yesterday's NYT's op-ed on free-range pigs was the former, this piece from the Huffington Post (and my own work, I hope) is the latter.