Sterilizing the World Will Not Make Us Safe

by Heidi Stevenson

15 July 2009

Agribusiness is trying to sterilize the world. This is, of course, a business decision. If the goal were to improve health, then they would long ago have focused on growing healthier foods—but they don't. It's all about profits. When their bottom line was hurt by food poisoning outbreaks, they had to find a way to capitalize on it. So, the next wave of advertising will be centered on safety, with claims like, "Our tomatoes were grown in fields with buffer zones around them, so that you don't have to worry about contamination in our spaghetti sauce."

Growers are being forced to do insane things to continue selling to major markets. Sterile buffer zones around crops are happening now. Organic farmer Rick Peixoto in California used to grow cilantro and fennel on the borders of his crops. They supported beneficial insects, thus avoiding the need for pesticides—a perfect, earth and human friendly solution. But he's been forced to stop. His customers have demanded that he tear the buffer zone plants out, insisting that it be virtually sterile—no wildlife, no plants, not even water, just bare ground.

If any animal goes into a field, he's required to tear out all plants within 30 feet of it. A chipmunk making a dash across a field means that a strip of healthy plants 60 feet wide must be torn out. Frogs, which have never been associated with food poisoning, are banned.

It gets worse. Ponds for recycling crop water are banned as unclean—in California, where the aquifers are being depleted to the point of land sinking, creating hills in former flatland. Children under the age of five are not permitted on a farm. Whoops! There goes the family farm, assuming it still exists. Trees in border areas are bulldozed. Poisons are used in fields to kill rodents, thus killing the raptors that prey on them, and wiping out nature's means of control.

The extent of all these new rules is anybody's guess. The corporations, like Chiquita, that require them are refusing to tell even California's air, water, and wildlife agencies what they are, saying that they're proprietary.

Science?

There is no science to back these earth-hating rules. They are, in fact, counterproductive. It is likely that the very existence of the virulent E. coli pathogens is a result of Big Agra practices.⁽¹⁾ This particular pathogen was unknown before 1982, and there is good reason to believe that it developed as a result of the wholesale treatment of food animals with antibiotics to increase their growth—thus increasing the ever-sacrosanct profits of agribusiness.

Roots of Problem Contained Within Big Agra Methods

The problem lies within Big Agra itself—within its systems of growing, processing, storing, and transporting the stuff that starts out as food, but ends up as processed foodstuff. Food is removed from its source. In the effort to make foodstuffs that look good and provide bigger profits to industry, it was necessary to separate the fact of eating from its origins. What now passes as food comes from huge buildings with bright lights, a dazzling and dizzying array of come-ons, carefully placed products to assure they attract the right eyes, and techniques to keep people moving towards the highest-profit and lowest value foodstuff. Reality has been displaced by marketing.

Hidden from the eyes of people—now transformed into consumers—is the truth of what they're buying. That big fat chicken is full of antibiotics and water. The beautiful apple is that and nothing more; beauty has replaced taste, texture, and nutrition.

As might be expected when reality is denied, the system itself is flawed. The mathematician Gödel proved that any closed system contains paradoxes and contradictions. Ultimately, these contradictions will destroy the system. Nature cannot be permanently blocked.

Big Agra is now trying to sterilize the earth in its attempts to control what it has wrought. They pack animals into smaller and smaller spaces, often without room to turn around. They've engineered them to the point of destroying their nature. Picture the wild turkey, the wily forest fowl so impressive to Benjamin Franklin that he thought it should be the national bird, and compare that with the nearly mindless turkey of today, with breasts so big its legs cannot support it.

Then, stuff these creatures with antibiotics to stave off disease that must be rampant in such weakened and crammed animals, and worse, to make them grow faster and become edemic, so their tissues are soaked and fattened with water. Bacteria are bound to mutate in such an environment—and mutate they did, with a vengeance. Now, we have disease-bearing forms of E. coli so virulent that they infect massive arrays of foodstuff.

Big Agra's Solution

So now, Big Agra wants to sterilize the earth—not because they care about the harm done to people. After all, what do they care about the harm they've already done to animals, plants, environment, and people's health? What concerns them is profits. To that end, there is no end to what they're willing to do. Including sterilizing the earth. And that's exactly what they're doing. It will, of course, be sold to people, that is, consumers, in terms of safety.

When you see these products and their ads, please shun them. They will not make you safe. The end of such insanity can only be destruction of the system that truly provides food: the earth's ecology. When that has been well and truly subverted, it will strike back in the greatest passive-aggressive display ever seen. The earth will simply stop providing.