The Future Has Begun

Bryan Gilvesy doesn’t appreciate being asked first how much his beef costs. In fact, if you ask him the price before anything else, he might just refuse to sell it to you. It’s not that he’s a particularly grouchy guy; he simply knows what’s involved in producing tender, lean, clean beef — and that level of knowledge and care isn’t without cost.

Gilvesy is a fifty-one-year-old farmer in southwestern Ontario who has worked the land since he was nineteen and has, quite possibly, seen the future. For the past fifteen years, he has been raising Texas longhorn cattle, a genetically diverse breed, which roam as they would in the wild through relatively disease-free lives, eating a wide variety of plants, and calving without human interference. For the former tobacco grower, the longhorns were the first in a long chain of dominoes.

His farm — 100 hectares of arable land and 45 hectares of reforested woodlot — is almost entirely sustainable now. He maintains a pure coldwater stream for trout, using a solar pump to deliver the water to his cattle in the field; 30 birdhouses for the bluebirds that eat the flies off his cows’ backs; and a place for native bees to proliferate. Gilvesy says the tipping point came four years ago, when he planted three hectares of drought-resistant tall grass prairie, a deep-rooting ecosystem that provides nesting habitat for several bird species but has been in decline in Ontario. He doesn’t disturb the grassland until late July, when it’s mature and has served its purpose; then he allows his cattle to feed on the top growth. “We’ve developed a new way of doing business,” he says. “Grocers have spent ca-reers making you think beef is beef is beef — Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, grass fed, corn fed. But beef isn’t beef. My beef costs more because of what goes into it.”

Gilvesy’s timing couldn’t be better. He sells his hormone-free meat directly to his customers, rather than going through meat packers and distributors, and the feedback he’s receiving from these farm-gate transactions tells him that food quality and the environment are becoming big issues. It’s a no-brainer for him: “We believe we’ve made the environment better, we’ve produced a healthier food supply, and we’re getting more rewards from the marketplace. There are a lot of wins in farming this way.”

Maybe we didn’t give it too much thought when eating a medium rare hamburger stopped being an option; after all, no one would think twice about passing on underdone chicken. But in recent years, it seems caution lights are flashing over pretty much everything in North America: carrot juice in Florida and Georgia tainted with botulism, bagged spinach from central California found to contain E. coli, raspberries imported from Guatemala infected with a parasite, cases of E. coli and salmonella traced to alfalfa sprouts in Michigan and Virginia. This past summer, jalapeno and serrano peppers from Mexico were contaminated with salmonella — an outbreak that, according to the US Centers for Disease Control, affected almost 1,500 people in forty-three states and Canada. Then there was polluted cantaloupe from Honduras, and adulterated milk products from China. Of course, last summer belonged to Maple Leaf Foods, whose Toronto plant was infected with the listeria bacterium, subsequently linked to the deaths of at least twenty people across the country.

A bad few years? Maybe. But more likely the tip of the iceberg. “The infrastructure on which our present food system is based is unsustainable at every level, from the seed to the table,” says Herb Barbolet, a food policy researcher at Simon Fraser University and one of North America’s leading food activists. “The premises it’s built on, at least in North America — corporate concentration, export marketing, globalization, heavy reliance on energy — they’re all susceptible to collapse.”

While the threats to global industrialized agriculture are diverse, from the potential of bioterrorism to the reality of extreme weather wiping out crops in a flash, nothing gets people really thinking about the food supply quite as effectively as the topic of food-and water-borne diseases. According to a survey comparing seventeen industrialized countries, released earlier this year by the University of Regina, Canada ranks fifth for food safety, behind the UK, Japan, Denmark, and Australia. Nevertheless, we’re hearing more about tainted food today precisely because more cases are showing up; according to the cdc, one in four Americans a year now gets food poisoning, commonly caused by E. coli, a bacillus found in the intestines of humans and animals and transmitted primarily through fecal matter. When crops and livestock are raised together in tight quarters on an industrial scale, food easily becomes contaminated through direct contact with animals or manure, or as a result of poor hygiene by workers. Then E. coli ends up on your dinner plate.

Globalization amplifies the problem.

Last June, scientists gathered in Boston for a general meeting of the American Society for Microbiology to discuss how cheaper labour costs outside North America will lead to more imports — and more food-borne diseases. In 2004, for the first time, they said, the US imported more than it exported. Two years later, 80 percent of the fish and seafood sold there was shipped in, much of it from Asia, where raw sewage and livestock manure are often used as fertilizer in fish farming.

Government food inspectors cannot keep up. In 2001, for example, the US Food and Drug Administration reported that more than a quarter of the tainted seafood imports it identified were contaminated with salmonella, and more than half of those were shrimp. But the volume of imports is so high that the fda cannot inspect even 1 percent of what comes into the country.