Spinach

Brines Farm spinach (in foreground), fall 2005
I love my spinach. Judging by recurring sales last winter and spring, so do market-goers. Particularly, during fall, winter, and spring. The cooler air temperatures before its harvested really brings out the true spinach taste. Fresh spinach is really the only way to go in terms of spinach purely based on taste (not to mention nutrition in all likelihood). Often as I harvest I have to admit I'll pop a leaf in my mouth every so often. It's impossible to resist. Popeye would have been blown away with fresh spinach. I wish everyone could try fresh spinach (and fresh greens, salads... all produce). Fresh, great-tasting spinach pretty much means local spinach. That's why I envision a decentralized distributed network of small local farms providing fresh spinach and hardy greens to the their local consumers. Central to this vision is that the local products are just going to be better products. That's certainly what I strive for with the products from my small farm operation.

There are additional bonuses that make such a decentralized distributed local network of producers a win-win scenario. Such a food system is more safe and secure, and in my opinion more sustainable. These bonuses were at the core of my motivation and drive over the last 5 years to create a small hoophouse farm operation that would produce food of the highest quality, as well as demonstrate the method was viable technically and economically. It use to be moderately easy to present my ideas to people for this win-win local producer scenario based on logic as I see it, some public health literature, and past national foodborne illness scares. Now it is a cake-walk thanks to the extremely unfortunate "spinach crisis of September 2006." Or at least it should be. The problem with situations like this is that they can lead to misguided legislation from presumably well-intentioned politicians who sometimes end up treating the symptom instead of the cause. Michael Pollan develops this worry in superb fashion in his October 15th 2006 New York Times Magazine article The Vegetable-Industrial Complex which I highly recommend and excerpt below.

But these days, the way we farm and the way we process our food, both of which have been industrialized and centralized over the last few decades, are endangering our health. ... The lethal strain of E. coli known as 0157:H7, responsible for this latest outbreak of food poisoning, was unknown before 1982; it is believed to have evolved in the gut of feedlot cattle. These are animals that stand around in their manure all day long, eating a diet of grain that happens to turn a cow’s rumen into an ideal habitat for E. coli 0157:H7. (The bug can’t survive long in cattle living on grass.) Industrial animal agriculture produces more than a billion tons of manure every year, manure that, besides being full of nasty microbes like E. coli 0157:H7 (not to mention high concentrations of the pharmaceuticals animals must receive so they can tolerate the feedlot lifestyle), often ends up in places it shouldn’t be, rather than in pastures, where it would not only be harmless but also actually do some good. To think of animal manure as pollution rather than fertility is a relatively new (and industrial) idea.
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But if industrial farming gave us this bug, it is industrial eating that has spread it far and wide. We don’t yet know exactly what happened in the case of the spinach washed and packed by Natural Selection Foods, whether it was contaminated in the field or in the processing plant or if perhaps the sealed bags made a trivial contamination worse. But we do know that a great deal of spinach from a great many fields gets mixed together in the water at that plant, giving microbes from a single field an opportunity to contaminate a vast amount of food. The plant in question washes 26 million servings of salad every week. In effect, we’re washing the whole nation’s salad in one big sink.
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Fortunately, this is not the only food chain we have. The week of the E. coli outbreak, washed spinach was on sale at my local farmers’ market, and at the Blue Heron Farms stand, where I usually buy my greens, the spinach appeared to be moving briskly. I tasted a leaf and wondered why I didn’t think twice about it. I guess it’s because I’ve just always trusted these guys; I buy from them every week. The spinach was probably cut and washed that morning or the night before — it hasn’t been sitting around in a bag on a truck for a week. And if there ever is any sort of problem, I know exactly who is responsible. Whatever the risk, and I’m sure there is some, it seems manageable.

These days, when people make the case for buying local food, they often talk about things like keeping farmers in our communities and eating fresh food in season, at the peak of its flavor. We like what’s going on at the farmers’ market — how country meets city, how children learn that a carrot is not a glossy orange bullet that comes in a bag but is actually a root; how we get to taste unfamiliar flavors and even, in some sense, reconnect through these foods and their growers to the natural world. Stack all this up against the convenience and price of supermarket food, though, and it can sound a little. . .sentimental.

But there’s nothing sentimental about local food — indeed, the reasons to support local food economies could not be any more hardheaded or pragmatic. Our highly centralized food economy is a dangerously precarious system, vulnerable to accidental — and deliberate — contamination. This is something the government understands better than most of us eaters. When Tommy Thompson retired from the Department of Health and Human Services in 2004, he said something chilling at his farewell news conference: “For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do.” The reason it is so easy to do was laid out in a 2003 G.A.O. report to Congress on bioterrorism. “The high concentration of our livestock industry and the centralized nature of our food-processing industry” make them “vulnerable to terrorist attack.” Today 80 percent of America’s beef is slaughtered by four companies, 75 percent of the precut salads are processed by two and 30 percent of the milk by just one company. Keeping local food economies healthy — and at the moment they are thriving — is a matter not of sentiment but of critical importance to the national security and the public health, as well as to reducing our dependence on foreign sources of energy.

Yet perhaps the gravest threat now to local food economies — to the farmer selling me my spinach, to the rancher who sells me my grass-fed beef — is, of all things, the government’s own well-intentioned efforts to clean up the industrial food supply.
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So what happens to the spinach grower at my farmers’ market when the F.D.A. starts demanding a Haccp plan — daily testing of the irrigation water, say, or some newfangled veggie-irradiation technology? When we start requiring that all farms be federally inspected? Heavy burdens of regulation always fall heaviest on the smallest operations and invariably wind up benefiting the biggest players in an industry, the ones who can spread the costs over a larger output of goods. A result is that regulating food safety tends to accelerate the sort of industrialization that made food safety a problem in the first place. We end up putting our faith in RadSafe rather than in Blue Heron Farms — in technologies rather than relationships.

It’s easy to imagine the F.D.A. announcing a new rule banning animals from farms that produce plant crops. In light of the threat from E. coli, such a rule would make a certain kind of sense. But it is an industrial, not an ecological, sense. For the practice of keeping animals on farms used to be, as Wendell Berry pointed out, a solution; only when cows moved onto feedlots did it become a problem. Local farmers and local food economies represent much the same sort of pre-problem solution — elegant, low-tech and redundant. But the logic of industry, apparently ineluctable, has other ideas, ideas that not only leave our centralized food system undisturbed but also imperil its most promising, and safer, alternatives.

I encourage everyone to stay tuned in to and active in this national discourse. I also would like to thank all of you for continuing to vote for local food economies when possible with the food dollars you spend. Remember to pleasantly advocate to your friends and families the benefits of doing likewise (perhaps over a local Thanksgiving dinner).

Meanwhile, back at Brines Farm, rest assured new beds of baby spinach are happily preparing themselves for debut at the farmers market in time for Thanksgiving. Enjoy!