Faith in Science Isn’t Going to Win This One for Us
October 18, 2002
More than 40 years of research has yet to document a single case in which antibiotic use in food animals has caused human disease due to antibiotic resistance. That scientific stamp of approval by default should reassure us. Yet, the FDA is poised to pull flouroquinolines from already limited and closely monitored use in poultry with no good evidence that it poses a threat. Meanwhile, we find ourselves a couple of congressional votes away from a near total ban on subtherapeutic feeding. Plus, food vendors are voicing growing impatience with holding back a rising tide of consumer unease about antibiotics in their food.
Science may be on our side, but it’s not going to win this fight.
How can this be? We’ve been told for years and reminded customers repeatedly that the U.S. drug-approval process is the strictest in the world. It subjects any food additive to a scientific trial by fire so intense that any mother can be sure the parts per billion contained in that food pose essentially zero risk to her child. Yet that same consumer is willing, almost happy, to turn a deaf ear to that science.
Case in point: organic food. Organic foods are the fastest growing segment of the food industry and environmental and consumer groups promoting organic continue to gain prominence. According to a recent poll, two-thirds of average citizens erroneously believe organic food is better and healthier. This in spite of the fact that nearly the same proportion couldn’t correctly cite the USDA’s definition of organic. An even higher proportion of consumers incorrectly believe organic and all-natural mean the same thing or that organic means “pesticide-free.” Meanwhile, science demonstrates that in exchange for a double or triple price premium on organic food, consumers actually get a higher food poisoning risk, less environmental sustainability because organic food takes twice as much land to produce, and a nutritional mirror image of cheaper, safer conventionally produced foods.
To keep the consumer’s trust in the antibiotic issue, we have to recognize that we are in a battle not so much for their minds as for their hearts. Today’s anti-technology, anti-”factory farming” movement attacks antibiotic use not necessarily because it doubts the science. Instead, the science is ignored. Modern agriculture as a whole is under attack for two less logical reasons:
- It’s a victim of its own technological success. The Green Revolution has been so successful in feeding the world’s hungry that, ironically, it now faces criticism by the increasingly vocal segment of the population that sees technology as a threat to human freedom and individuality. The generation raised during the poverty of the Great Depression was taught to put its faith in science as the engine of progress. People in that generation saw the tangible results of innovations that improved the quality of life for all.
By contrast, their children who came of age during the revisionist 1960s and never experienced much scarcity were afforded the luxury a full stomach provides to revise those earlier beliefs toward the generosity of science. It opened the gate for today’s anti-technology ideology that views science and technology as oppressive, dehumanizing and out of touch with nature. That artificial high moral ground is the foundation upon which today’s anti-technological farming movement boosts itself among the general public. Examples of practicality taking a back seat to ideological purity now surround us today. Consider anti-logging environmentalism that actually destroys forests via unchecked wildfire. Look at the absurdity of African heads-of-state refusing U.S. food aid while millions of their citizens starve on the basis of unknown long-term human health risks from “genetically engineered food” (advanced by anti-biotech activists).
- Farmers control much of the land and water. Private-property in the hands of farmers and ranchers resources that the environmentalists desperately want control over make it a target for today’s environmental movement.
That movement plays upon the politics of resentment, says Danish statistics professor and Greenpeace turncoat Bjorn Lomborg. It envisions a system of “managed scarcity,” which demands limits on the freedom to use private property by individual owners in order to preserve those uses for an increasingly nature- and recreation-hungry urban public. When the majority of consumers were only a generation removed from the countryside and farm life, it was tougher to make the case that they were missing out on a connection with the environment. Now that entire portions of the population are living out their urban lives with almost zero connection to the land, they are less immune to arguments that the community, not the individual, has the right to control that relatively scarce land and water. And they are infinitely more susceptible to notions that certain types of farming and farm technologies are environmentally destructive, unsustainable, and pose unnecessary health risks. It’s no accident the opponents of antibiotic use paint it as a tool for sloppy management on faceless corporate factory farmsthe New Age rural robber barons who are crowding out small “natural” family farms.
Scientific data to support the safety and effectiveness of antibiotic use is merely the table stakes in this issue. To win, the food industry will have to learn to communicate the benefits of modern farming technologies in terms of animal welfare, human health, and environmental sensitivity — in the new consumer’s language.
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