newsroom

TODAY Friday 22 August 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Our Friend Escerichia 0157:H7

"There's a lot of worry in the market," a livestock trader said yesterday, quoted in this morning's Wall Street Journal. He was, of course, referring to the fretting caused by the recall of 25 million pounds of ground beef. The trader was not talking about the capacity of the industry to make good the loss on the supply side -- 25 million pounds represent only a couple of days' worth of national aggregate burger production -- but about anxieties about anxieties on the demand side. What if nervous consumers buy less beef?

That's precisely the fear that drove Agriculture Secretary Glickman to order the shutdown of the Hudson processing plant in Nebraska and the recall of all that ground meat. At least fifteen people were made seriously ill by Hudson beef patties contaminated with a strain of the E. coli bacterium numbered 0157:H7. Public confidence had to be restored, and fast. It turns out that the meat in question was not contaminated at the Hudson plant after all; one of the slaughterhouses that supply it with "trimmings" seems to be the culprit. But usefully enough, Hudson was running a slack, negligent operation anyway, and so Secretary Glickman was given an excellent opportunity to impale a head on a pike for all the red-meat world to see.

For reasons that could fill a tome, Americans love to worry about tainted food. When Upton Sinclair wrote "The Jungle," his novel of immigrant meatpackers in fetid Chicago slaughterhouses, he hoped the book would rally public opinion to the socialist standard. Instead it ushered in federal meat inspections which, though initially opposed by industry, ended up enriching private investors because they assured an unanxious and therefore expanding market. In more recent times, we've had a series of food-and-drug frights, based on varying degrees of reality. There was the Tylenol-tampering scare (based on a true but singular event), the Halloween candy-poisoning scare (based on false rumors), and the Jack-in-the-Box scare of 1993 (based on a real outburst of E. coli-contaminated hamburgers which killed four and sickened 700).

Smart environmentalists make sure that food safety remains an issue identified with our cause. The number one environmental challenge for most Americans is the protection of family health. Focus groups tell you that people expect enviros to stand up to, and expose, the "special interests" that "put profit above the public." Two years ago, when the Contract-with-America juggernaut was poised to steamroller environmental regulatory law, it was the food safety issue which threw a wrench in the works. Bob Dole was on the verge of passing a self-described regulatory reform bill when Phil Clapp and the American Community Protection Association blindsided him with a brilliant campaign which highlighted the fact that a minor provision in the law exempted small rural slaughterhouses from the same safety standards that applied to large operations. Suddenly a bill which had been sold as an efficiency measure became a bill which threatened the health and safety of American kids (luckily, for propaganda purposes, the four Jack-in-the-Box fatalities were all children). The bill failed, barely. The enviros had their first victory of the 104th Congress and the anti-greens were never again to regain such a level of influence.

It's important, therefore, that significant fractions of environmentalist time and money stay focused on public health and threats to public health emanating from contaminated food, air, and water. In climate change, for example, investigation of the medical consequences of global warming is a crucial element of an overall strategy. But from the heartless perspective of risk analysis -- a perspective easily shared by business-school professors and deep ecologists but almost always unpopular in a democratic society -- this E. Coli scare is not much of anything. As a threat to health, it's got nothing on driving cars or smoking Marlboros. As a threat to biodiversity, it may be worse than nothing. You could argue, for example, that the maintenance of small rural slaughterhouses and decentralized means of production and processing is useful for the long-time preservation of species although counter-indicated for the vigilant protection of consumer safety.

But not in public, please, or at least not where too many people can hear you.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE:

Speaking of health, you may want to look into Michelle Gottlieb's recommendations for Websites pertinent to Women's Health and Dr. Paul Epstein's review of Internet resources on Health and Global Change. Not to mention Carolyn Strange's big review on Endocrine Disrupters in our In The Trenches section.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

8/21: Free the Greenpeace One Million!
8/20: Cattle and Jet Skis
8/19: Not Dirty, but Bad
8/18: Thirty Glorious Years
8/15: We Span the Energy Globe
8/14: Up in Flames
8/13: Environmentalism for Grown-Ups
8/12: Right to No
8/11: Cleavage
8/08: The Monsters from 12,000 BC
8/07: A Little More Room
8/06: Big Victory, I Guess
8/05: Necessary Vulgarization

To access more "Today" columns, click "Archives" below.