Sowing the Seeds of Self-Reliance for Forty Years
Are There "Pound Cake
Days" In Your Future?
13 Sep 97
by Geri Guidetti
All contents copyright © 1997, Geri Guidetti. All rights reserved.
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Dugan’s was a company that used to deliver fresh baked goods, door-to-door, to housewives every morning in the ‘30s ,‘40s and ‘50s. They would knock on your door and tempt your mom and grandma with a big tray of fresh, sweet-smelling pound cakes, rolls, muffins and iced coffee rings wrapped in glossy cellophane. It was more than most mortals could resist—until the Great Depression hit. Then, resistance became the order of the day, and many folks just didn’t answer the door anymore. They really missed Dugan’s, and the truck driver/salesman really missed the business.
It was a late summer afternoon in 1931 when my grandfather, a proud, honest, hard-working Italian immigrant, was walking home from his job. At least he had a job. He found work polishing the shoes of businessmen and bankers in New York City. There were fewer shoes being polished those days, so there were fewer nickels to bring home. It had been a bad shoe day, and that day a Dugan’s truck driver miscalculated a turn at the corner where Grandpa stood. The wheel mounted the tall curb, the truck crashed onto its side in the street, the back doors flung open, and thirty or forty pound cakes went flying out into the street.
It took hungry passersby no more than a few seconds to clean the street of poundcakes, as Grandpa told the story, but he was terrified to join them. As an immigrant, he was VERY respectful of the laws of his new country and fearful of the policemen charged with enforcing those laws. He had turned from the corner and crossed the street to avoid the commotion when he saw it. One lone pound cake, still wrapped in cellophane, was lying on the grate of the sewer on the opposite side of the street. It was just him and the pound cake. What was a man—a hungry man—to do?
As Grandma tells it, she responded to a loud, nervous knock on the door and found her pale husband with beads of sweat on his forehead and a bulge under his shirt, shaking and saying in broken English, "Clos-a the door! Clos-a the door!" He ran into the kitchen, and she shut the door quickly behind him. He hid the "stolen" goods under the footed stove, parted the curtains of the kitchen window to be certain he wasn’t followed, and then collapsed into a chair to recover.
Grandma swears that, over the next week, the "stolen" pound cake had been made into at least 70 desserts, most of them offered to friends. Razor-thin slivers of pound cake had been shaved from the golden loaf, and everyone politely praised the delicious cake and my grandparents’ generosity.
Whenever I heard that story as a child, I wondered if we would ever see days like that again in America—"pound cake days" was how I characterized it. People scurrying in the street to steal food that they could not pay for. Hungry people. I have never felt more certain of this possibility than I do now. Why? If you have been following these Updates over the past two years, you know many of the reasons. Global population growth. Deteriorating farmland. Diminishing water supplies. Expanding cities. Growing dependence on hybrid and engineered seeds. Toxic waste-polluted soils. Increasing frequency of weather extremes. Maximum biological plant yields already reached. Diminished response to fertilizers. Just-in-time production. Depleted food stockpiles. International trade agreements. The Year 2000 computer bug. Is that all? Not quite.
The increasing frequency and scope of dangerous, even lethal, microbial contamination of foods worldwide is cause for both alarm and for new, serious public and private pressure to determine the root causes of these outbreaks. Root is the key word, here. What are the critical, underlying behaviors used by our food producers, processors and distributors that may be contributing to this dangerous and growing trend? What are our own critical behaviors and expectations that exacerbate or reinforce the problem? Are deadly outbreaks of new super-strains of bacteria in the food supply the early warning signs of a more pervasive upset in the tenuous balance between humans and microbes?
Despite the narrow focus of recent news reports on the deaths of children eating hamburgers and drinking apple juice, this is a big picture problem demanding big questions and equally big solutions. It is considerably easier to trace the path of E.coli from soil to dropped apple to cider press to unpasteurized juice to sick and dying kids, and call the case closed, than it is to track how hemorrhagic E.coli serotype O157:H got there in the first place.
If it was the common practice in a specific orchard to fertilize with cow manure, then we must ask why it is that cows are now increasingly infected with this often deadly strain of normal colon bacteria. Between 10,000 and 20,000 cases of E.coli O157:H7 occur in the United States each year. A single outbreak in Japan in 1996 sickened 9,067 people, 6,000 of them school children. One in ten developed kidney failure, and scores died. And this powerful E.coli strain is only one of many super-bugs on the rise in global food supplies.
The recent, massive recall of millions of pounds of ground beef tracked to one producer, and the subsequent discovery that the cattle in question had been fed nearly raw chicken manure as a high-protein, money-saving component of their diets, should be a gigantic wake-up call to each and every one of us. What motivates beef producers to feed chicken manure to cattle? Farmers interviewed about the practice claim that they could not afford to pay the high price of grain to feed their cattle if they wanted to realize even a small profit for their labor, and that this was a USDA approved practice. What’s wrong with this picture?
If the price of grain is too high for hard-working farmers to be reasonably compensated for their labor—too high to produce clean beef fed on REAL food— is it time to question our massive sales of grain abroad? Is it time to return to policies that would ensure large enough national grain stockpiles to shift the supply and demand equation in favor of producers of our own food?
As a long-term solution, one current official remedy suggests that producers of unpasteurized apple juice voluntarily re-think their products and pasteurize them. A band-aid approach. Over the long-term, it will not work. Neither will reminders to farmers that they must fully compost their chicken manure at higher temperatures before feeding it to cattle. Nor will random testing of juice, beef, alfalfa sprouts, raspberries, cheese or any food in which deadly organisms have been found in recent years. Tests may monitor the occurrences of these microbes more closely, but will not eliminate them. .
An even casual analysis of data from global population studies, microbial genetics, ecology, modern agricultural and medical practices, international trade agreements and yes, of bottom-line oriented business practices, suggests the probability of a dramatic escalation in life-threatening contamination incidences in the future. You could argue that food poisoning and accidental contamination have always been with us. True, but never on the scale possible today.
Massive quantities of fruits and vegetables arriving from multiple producers in many different countries for processing in a single facility, shoulder-to-shoulder cattle in stockyards and slaughter houses, wing-to-wing packing of chickens into houses and laying cages, all foster the spread of powerful old and emerging microbial diseases. Modern, efficient transportation simply ensures their rapid and widespread distribution.
The complete dependence on others for food by ever-greater numbers of humans in increasingly dense urban centers is a natural set-up for disaster. Never in human history has a relative handful of people—the food producers, processors and distributors—been entrusted with the task of feeding so many. Never before has the pressure been so great to produce more food faster and cheaper. Never before have so many millions been so far removed from the hands-on production of food for their own survival. Think about it. Most of us have willingly, happily and gratefully turned over the responsibility for feeding us to perfect strangers whose interests, knowledge and care may be far less than perfect, and most of us expect it will always be that way.
What does all of this have to do with pound cake? Simply stated, massive and dangerous microbial contamination events will become a growing threat to a food supply system already fraught with potential Achille’s heels. In these still mostly bountiful times, it is a tempting yet dangerous delusion to think that we will never want for food. Our nearly complete individual and collective dependence on the current system virtually ensures that we will. Fact is, a golden pound cake on a sewer grate may one day be the most wonderful thing you’ve seen in some time. .....Geri Guidetti
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Food and Grain Supply Updates may be reprinted without permission IF no revisions are made and copyright and signature files remain intact.
All contents copyright © 1997, Geri Guidetti. All rights reserved.
Revised: 15 Sep 97
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