The Senate just passed an overhaul of the country's food-safety laws, a long-overdue modernization that, perhaps most important, increases inspections and gives the FDA the power to enforce recalls instead of relying on companies to do them voluntarily. But the safety legislation still takes as a given a large-scale agribusiness industry and doesn't deal with the problem caused by the fact that oversight of meat and non-meat foods are conducted at separate agencies, even though the problems of food contamination often overlap.
It also doesn't deal with the whole, broken system of the way we produce food in this country, neatly illustrated by a map released today by a nonprofit group, Food and Water Watch, which shows the concentration of factory farms in the country. The data, gathered from the USDA most recently in 2007, show that factory farms are spread throughout the United States with concentrations in the farm belt in the country's middle, California, and North Carolina.
But filtering for different products -- cattle, dairy, hogs, broiler chickens, and laying chickens -- shows just how concentrated each market is. Over time, there's been a move toward fewer and more dense farms in select areas. For example, hog production has moved to Iowa, and the concentration of hogs raised in and near the state has increased. A filter that shows the concentration of egg-laying chicken farms gives another striking picture as well: Very few, highly concentrated farms produce eggs for the entire country (that map is below):
The problems caused by one or two of these few egg producers, as we saw over the summer, spread around the country quickly. This is the opposite of what food-safety advocates want -- a small-scale, localized farming system that's diversified, provides local food, and prevents food-borne illnesses from spreading rapidly. It just shows what an uphill battle unwinding the current system would be, since the trend has only accelerated over the last 10 years.
-- Monica Potts
