Food contamination is a tricky subject, particularly for advocates of nutritious, real food.  This is because the problems of food safety always come down to a problem of unmanageable scale. Due to our nation’s belief in the economics of growth, proponents of the current food system are not receptive to alternatives, such as Michael Pollan’s recent suggestion to decentralize.

An increasing amount of our food is sourced from around the globe and sent to processing plants too big to keep clean. But the world is not a sterile environment and neither is the human body nor the foods we need to live. Attention and care is needed to establish an equilibrium between the necessary helpful bacteria and those that are harmful. Because this balance cannot be maintained in giant processing plants, ad-hoc solutions are used just to keep food from being lethal. Lucky for the food manufacturers, the additional steps needed to maintain a food system of such magnitude are just as profitable as the system itself.

Moving food around, applying sterilization mechanisms, producing dietary supplements to make up for nutrient loss from processing, pasteurization, and even irradiation, all are primarily economic activities, encouraging a chain of fixes during the production process rather than getting at the root of the problem: industrial food.

Why else would we be exporting the same or similar goods to China that we import? The costs of such an irrational system are often justified by the profits gained by the huge amounts of food sold. For example, the Mars Co. can sell a candy bar, whose ingredients are as well traveled as Rick Steves, for roughly 65 cents and still earn a 2 billion dollar profit. There is no question that scale pays.

This scale of operation has led to our food being exposed to many processes never before seen in the history of man.  There is food that contains harmful chemicals added through cutting corners in production practices to make a profit — such as  Melamine in milk and other processed products from China (including feed for farmed fish) and antibiotics in meat that makes its way into vegetables through cheap CAFO manure. One could also argue that the use of pesticides is a short-cut by design, leaving behind potentially harmful residues.  There are also foods which, due to the convoluted process of large scale production and distribution methods, have a lot of harmful microbes and make people sick.  Related, but not as acutely dangerous, are foods that contain lower levels of harmful substances due the nature of industrial processing (melamine is found in infant formula produced in the US via inherent contamination in the processing plant or user-end packaging, for example).

The problem of antibiotics absorption by crops is alarming — not least because the study found that some organic produce was affected — but also because it is difficult to determine if the vegetables you buy are contaminated.

While organic farms are not free from contamination, compost and manure come from the produce and animals living on the farm, creating a closed system that could be arguably safer, and builds nutrient rich soil that is also filled with living organisms.  As small-scale farmer Allen Balliett describes it, “The basis of all good organic farming is promoting the diversity of the beneficial microbial community which inevitably leads to the suppression of pathological organisms.”