Journalist and Author
There’s a project I’ve been watching on Kickstarter and I’m a little surprised it hasn’t gotten more traction, so I thought I’d call it out. TL;DR: You know those wallet cards and apps that help you make good choices about buying seafood: what’s endangered, what’s overfished, what’s responsible to eat? This effort, BuyingPoultry.com, hopes to do the same for chicken — but it’s only halfway to its goal.
In the past months, there have been several troubling research reports, from different parts of the world, exploring aspects of the same problem: Multi-drug resistant bacteria are present in chicken, apparently because of the use of antibiotics in poultry production, and are passing to people who work with, prepare or eat chicken, at some risk to their health.
Here are a few of the publications:
Happy New Year, constant readers. For the second year in a row, here’s my list of which of my posts (91 in 2012!) most moved you to react. Last year (find that list here), I counted down based on which posts provoked the most comments. This year, Wired installed a tweet-counter — which registers only if someone clicks through from Twitter, but not if the post’s URL is mentioned or RT’d — so I thought it would be amusing to score posts that way this year.
And the verdict is: You care enormously about food policy, but you continue to be fascinated by the emergence of scary diseases — and, to my surprise and pleasure, you care about public understanding of science as well.
A close look at the interior of a McDonald’s McNugget. Bought, sliced open, shot by me. CC 3.0 attrib-noncomm.
There are things in your life that are so ubiquitous, you never stop to consider them. Traffic signals. Magnets. For me, chicken nuggets. They seem to be everywhere: every fast-food chain, every kids’ menu, every supermarket freezer aisle. I don’t particularly care for them, but I never stopped to wonder where they came from. I assumed, as with so much else in our food culture, McDonald’s was responsible, and other food producers had followed the McNugget’s market-devouring lead.
Well, yes, and no. As part of my reporting on food policy, I’ve been looking into the history of poultry production — and reading up on what drove its vast post-war expansion, I stumbled across the lost history of the nugget. It appears to have been invented — or at least, originally proposed — by a Cornell professor, 17 years before McDonald’s had essentially the same idea.
A quick post today, because I have deadlines, and because this Kickstarter closes tomorrow and you should take a look at it while you can.
In February of 2006, when he was 16 years old, Sam Spitz went out for lunch with his high school pals. They were athletes, and looking for a big meal, so they went to a pizza-pasta place. Sam, though, had an inkling of healthy eating from his mother, Jennifer Amdur Spitz, who liked to shop at farmers’ markets. He chose a chicken Caesar salad instead.
By the end of the school day, it seemed like a bad choice. He developed diarrhea so severe that Jennifer and his dad, Jeff Spitz, had to tape an adult diaper on him to get him to the emergency room. The ER staff assumed it was a foodborne illness, took a culture, and sent them home with a broad-spectrum antibiotic.
It had no effect. It took weeks, along with visits to specialists and more tests and more drugs and eventually a colonoscopy, before the family discovered that what had felled the strapping young athlete was an antibiotic-resistant foodborne illness: Campylobacter, a bug that frequently travels on chicken.
Sam Spitz was seriously sick for a month and recovering for many more. He was a pitcher, but missed his entire baseball season, along with the chance to be inspected by college recruiters. He was still on restricted activity when the football recruiters came around the following fall. He eventually recovered (and played football for University of Wisconsin) — but his family’s attitude toward food and food safety was forever changed.
The Spitzes, who are award-winning filmmakers, have documented their journey to a better understanding of our food system in a new film that they are now polishing, called “Food Patriots.” In it, they talk not only about their own dawning understanding of how our food is produced, but also about many other people who are trying to get food grown and distributed in a healthier, more equitable way.
“We were really insulated, as a family, from knowing where our food comes from, and from having the awareness that allows you to make healthy choices,” Jennifer told me. “But this film has a much bigger footprint than just our journey. We’re in it to provide a narrative, and some humor — but what we do is look at people who are inspiring us to think about, buy and eat food differently.”
The Spitzes are in their last 24 hours on their Kickstarter. They have made their initial goal, which was to fund post-production — but in the last day, they’ve been offered a match by a major donor. Anything they receive today will be doubled by the donor, and those funds will be spent getting the film out to communities for screenings.
Jennifer described the film to me as “zero-depth” — like the kind of public pool where you can stand at the end with just your toes wet, and move deeper at your own pace. “There have been a lot of scary, hit-you-over-the-head food films already, and people have already responded to that approach,” she said. “We don’t preach. We want to get people into conversation.”
Take a look.
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Footnote: If antibiotic-resistant Campylobacter sounds at all familiar, it may be because I wrote about it in my two-year investigation of foodborne illness for SELF Magazine last summer. Here’s that story and my post about it.
So, there’s this thing. A big project. An investigative project, actually. I’ve been working on it for months, and finally I can tell you about it, because it all just published, in various venues, today.
I’ve been working with a great new group, the Food and Environment Reporting Network — one of the grant-funded journalism organizations that have arisen in the wake of the collapse of mainstream journalism — on an important, under-reported topic. Which is: Over the past decade, a group of researchers in several countries have been uncovering links between the use of antibiotics in chicken production and the rising occurrence of resistance in one of the most common bacterial infections in the world.
I get this a lot: “I understand that the things you write about are important — but they’re so depressing. Couldn’t you write some, you know, good news, for a change?”
So here you go: a solutions post for once, instead of another problem. (But I can’t promise to make a habit of it.)
It’s astonishing what you can not know about the place where you live. Me, for instance: I live mostly in Atlanta. I’ve lived here twice, once for 10 years as a newspaper reporter, and now — after a four-year break — for 15 months so far as a writer (and trailing spouse, which is how I got back here). Between working for one of the (formerly) largest papers in the country, liking long drives, and regularly indulging my ungovernable curiosity, I thought I knew Georgia pretty well.
I was wrong. Here’s what I learned about Georgia on Thursday:
There’s a new paper out in the CDC’s journal Emerging Infectious Diseases that makes a provocative claim: There is enough similarity between drug-resistance genes in E. coli carried by chickens and E. coli infecting humans that the chickens may be the source of it.
If it is correct — and it seems plausible and is backed by past research — the claim provides another piece of evidence that antibiotic use in agriculture has a direct effect on human health.
