Opinion: Ag Is Not A Manufactured Food
January 1, 2008 You like home cookin’? Me too. That’s partly because whoever’s doing the cooking knows your family’s likes and dislikes, and partly because it’s different. When I’m traveling, I get sick of the sameness. Unless I’m willing to take the time and shell out the dough for an independent restaurant with fine cuisine, I usually end up eating at one of the chains, and it’s same old, same old. Different is not bad. In fact, especially when it comes to food, different can be very, very good.
I bring this up because I have noticed a disturbing (to me anyway) trend in agriculture lately. There seems to be a general movement to treat agricultural products almost as if they were manufactured. This new movement is well intentioned. It comes partly from the understandable desire to achieve very high-quality standards, and partly from the laudable goal of ensuring fruits and vegetables are absolutely free of any pathogens. Certainly, no one is going to argue against either top quality or food safety. It’s just that I think the end result is not one that will be good for agriculture.
Already, there’s widespread ignorance of agriculture in this country, as each generation has fewer people with a connection to farming. Now I’m not saying I believe that story going around about the FDA employee who visited Salinas, CA, and was stunned to find that spinach isn’t necessarily growing in greenhouses, but outside exposed to all sorts of things! But I do believe that if we pretend to have the same control over agricultural products that we do over manufactured goods, we’re making a serious mistake. First, it’s simply not true. Second, the regulation that could result from our largely urban government representatives might be a nightmare.
Consumers Understand
I was reminded of this recently while attending a seminar on food safety at the annual Almond Industry Conference in Modesto, CA. Almond growers have had a couple of scary bouts with Salmonella in recent years, and as a result have moved, beginning this past Sept. 1, to pasteurize all almonds. It was slightly controversial because some people argue that consumers should have a choice. But I can understand the industry’s position. They can’t afford the risk, particularly when two-thirds of the crop, $1.9 billion worth, is exported.
Industry leaders were concerned about how the pasteurized almonds would go over with consumers, however, so they conducted a study. The overall answer was that consumers were just fine with it, but what most interested me was that consumers don’t have a problem with almonds that taste different. “Being different doesn’t necessarily mean good or bad,” said the Almond Board’s Julie Adams. “One of the examples we used was, ‘What do you prefer, Coke or Pepsi?’”
A consultant the board hired, Gail Civille of the Sensory Spectrum, was even more blunt. “The worst quality-control manager is the good Lord; every apple on every tree is different,” she said. “But consumers will tolerate a lot more variability in apples than they will in Kraft Singles.”
When it comes to agriculture, different is OK. Sure, we should strive for top quality and food safety, but any pretense of perfect uniformity is ridiculous. We can’t legislate or regulate out nature’s variability, and thank God for that.
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