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Misinformation Machine Media: An apology to Joe Mendelson for thinking he lied to an audience at the National Academy of Sciences
By Alex Avery
At a lunch seminar on food safety and irradiation held March 7 at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, the director of an anti-technology activist group erroneously told attendees that last fall’s E. coli outbreak in spinach was caused by a “CAFO,” or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation.
Joe Mendelson, “legal director” and cofounder of the Center for Food Safety, told the audience the Food and Drug Administration should not allow fresh produce to be cold-pasteurized with irradiation because less costly methods could reduce foodborne illness risks. One of his primary recommendations was to rely on grass-fed cattle raised in open pastures rather than grain-based feedlots, claiming that there is significantly less E. coli O157:H7 in grass-fed animals.
Yet last fall’s spinach outbreak was traced back to grass-fed cattle.. If you haven’t been following the investigation, the contaminated spinach came from an organically-managed 50-acre field located on a ranch that raises 100% grass-fed beef (and some quarter horses). Investigators found the same strain of E. coli in seven grass-fed cattle on the same ranch, pastured roughly a half mile from the tainted spinach field.
The FDA told reporters that they found the E. coli in the grass-fed cattle way back in October. I blogged about it on October 30th here.
When questioned about his erroneous CAFO accusation, Mr. Mendelson claimed not to have known this critically important fact. But if that is so, how did he conclude that the E. coli came from a CAFO?
At first I wanted to believe that Mr. Mendelson was deliberately misinforming the audience. His filling of the factual void with an assumed CAFO source suggests at least over-exuberance in pushing his anti-big-farm agenda. But I really can go no further than over-exuberance because in preparing to write this, I could not find a single wire service report or mainstream media piece informing readers that the spinach outbreak was traced back to grass-fed cattle. There were no AP stories mentioning this, no Reuters, no LA Times, not even the organic-food-centric New York Times. Only my own October 30th blog and a self-posted op-ed (no major outlet accepted it) that almost my whole family read.
Similarly, there have been only a handful of stories reporting the February 27th revelation by California regulators that the 50-acre spinach field was transitioning to “certified” organic status and that the tainted spinach was, thus, “organically grown.”
These facts were even news to David Schmidt, the head of the International Food Information Council who followed Mendelson at the NAS lunch symposium. Schmidt otherwise gave an excellent scientific rebuttal to Mendelson’s litany of mostly decades-old papers raising questions that have largely been answered by more recent scientific studies referenced by Schmidt.
Nor is Mendelson responsible for the hundreds of stories, blogs, and webpages claiming essentially that grass-fed cattle are immune to O157:H7 and “feedlot” cattle are to blame.
The uber-elite food writer Michael Pollan wrote in a 2002 cover story in the New York Times Magazine that:
Escherichia coli 0157 is a relatively new strain of a common intestinal bacteria (it was first isolated in the 1980's) that is common in feedlot cattle, more than half of whom carry it in their guts. Ingesting as few as 10 of these microbes can cause a fatal infection.
_Most of the microbes that reside in the gut of a cow and find their way into our food get killed off by the acids in our stomachs, since they originally adapted to live in a neutral-pH environment. The digestive tract of the modern feedlot cow is closer in acidity to our own, and in this new, manmade environment acid-resistant strains of E. coli have developed that can survive our stomach acids—and go on to kill us. By acidifying a cow's gut with corn, we have broken down one of our food chain's barriers to infection.
Never mind that genetic studies indicate E. coli O157:H7 is likely thousands of years old and has been found in every cattle herd tested by the USDA, including 100% grass-fed, pastured cows. The bogus theory that cattle feedlots feeding grain “created” O157:H7 (or at least the O157 problem) is alive and kicking vigorously.
So, I’m sorry to Mr. Mendelson for believing he was that mendacious and a pox on the reporting establishment who are supposed to pass along key facts but don’t. Instead we get an endless repetition of left-wing eco-dogma cloaked in the thin frame of a few selected “facts”. ----
Alex Avery is director of food issues research at the Hudson Institute and author of The Truth About Organic Foods.
Diane Reifschneider (March 15, 2007)
"Never mind that genetic studies indicate E. coli O157:H7 is likely thousands of years old and has been found in every cattle herd tested by the USDA, including 100% grass-fed, pastured cows. The bogus theory that cattle feedlots feeding grain “created” O157:H7 (or at least the O157 problem) is alive and kicking vigorously."
This statement contained within your apology to Joe Mendelson is truly news to me as well. Please provide supporting references refuting the prevailing scientific "bogus" theory (which, if I remember correctly, I read in a Cornell University press release) that the acid-loving E. coli O157:H7 strain is a direct consequence of modern grain-based CAFO's.
Given that something like over 85% of U.S. corn grown is GMO, it is also important to document any effects caused to ruminant digestive tracts by GMO grain-based feeds and to separate out those effects from, e.g., organically grown heirloom wheat varieties fed to cattle, and to measure specific digestive effects as a function of % grain in total daily feed ration.
Diane Reifschneider (March 17, 2007)
UPDATE: The Salinas Californian newspaper today reports the key fact that DOLE--NOT a California organic grower named Otto Kramm, who is transitioning to certified organic status--was the source of every single bag of E.coli O157:H7-contaminated spinach recovered from infected people!
http://thecalifornian.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070317/NEWS01/703170332/1002
So, where does this latest revelation about Dole--whose Fresh Vegetables division "leads the industry in packaged salads"--lead us now? To the "left-wing" reporting establishment? Or have we once again discovered that it was really the FDA and the California Department of Food & Agriculture (CDFA) who have actually earned Mr. Avery's use of the adjective "mendacious" for deploying their intentional Misinformation Machine at the expense of human lives and health?
Alex Avery (March 20, 2007)
Ms. Reifschneider insinuates that the FDA and California DHS are attempting to shift blame onto innocent organic farmers because, in her words, "DOLE--NOT a California organic grower named Otto Kramm, who is transitioning to certified organic status--was the source of every single bag of E.coli O157:H7-contaminated spinach recovered from infected people!" Ms. Reifschneider has confused brand with grower. In this case, as the article noted by Ms. Reifschneider makes clear, 16,000 lbs of spinach from a transitional 50-acre organic field managed by Mr. Kramm’s on the pasture-based Paicines Ranch was processed at a Natural Selections Foods plant with spinach from 3 other farms and sold under the Dole brand. According to the CDHS, the ranch on which Mr. Kramm’s spinach field is located is the only farm of those four that contained E. coli genetically matching the strain that sickened over 200 and killed 3. Most interesting is the article’s revelations about Mr. Kramm. Ms. Reifschneider describes Kramm innocuously as "a California organic grower . . . who is transitioning to organic status." Not quite. Kramm’s company, Mission Organics, is co-owned by Earthbound Farm/Natural Selection Foods and manages over 6,000 acres of organic and transitional organic crops. In short, this is perhaps the largest organic veggie company in the U.S. and it was their spinach that was responsible for this outbreak. So rather than just a small, transitioning organic farmer getting singled out by a "mendacious" FDA and CDHS, we find that the whole thing comes back to land in a field located on a natural grass-beef ranch and managed by a mega-grower company co-founded by the largest organic label in the United States. Far from being "responsible" for this sad saga, Dole merely had the misfortune of being "allocated" spinach from the contaminated, organically managed field by the company that truly is responsible.
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