Despite popular hysteria and the following political response, no one can
deny that all data demonstrate that modern agriculture has been a tremendously
beneficial endeavor. As the economist Thomas
DeGregori points out in latest book, Agriculture and Modern Technology:
A Defense, living in nature was not as healthy as most people usually
think.
Drinking water in the wild often caused « beaver belly
» (giardiasis), while populations who handled game and fur-bearing
animals had to deal regularly with, among other things, tularemia (a disease
related to bubonic plague), rabies, toxoplasmosis, haemorrhagic fevers,
leptospirosis, brucellosis, anthrax, salmonellosis, and lethal anaerobic
bacteria such as gangrene, botulism, and tetanus. It was the advent of
agri-business that brought us clean water and consistent, adequate, clean
and healthy food year-round.
An
old disease
The foot-and-mouth epidemic is no exception. Prior to the 1920s, this disease
was almost an annually recurring
threat to livestock everywhere. It was only modern animal husbandry that
allowed for the creation of relatively disease-free herds. The US has not
had an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease since 1929, but it remains endemic
in the poor areas of the world from Central Asia to Africa and South America.
Some further historical perspective on cattle diseases will shed more light
on the topic. In the recently reprinted
The Animal Food Resources of Different Nations(2),
the Victorian journalist Peter Lund
Simmonds reproduced
a letter written to one of his friends by an American missionary in India
in the middle of the nineteenth century. I will now quote it in full in
view of its pedagogical value:
In India, for at least twenty-five hundred years, we have had a class of
village « Kamius » (low caste),
called Chumars. I seldom,
if ever, saw a village so small as not to have at least one family of Chumars
in it, and some towns have three hundred families. These people are tanners
and shoemakers. Under ancient, as well as modern, Hindoo rule, and under
English rule, they have a legal status and a legal right to all dead cattle.
These people, the Chumars, are a large and thriving class, and eat all
dead cattle, dying from whatever disease.
The Hissard district is nearly as large as one half the State of Massachussetts.
It is a great cattle-growing
district, and a very large Chumar population is found in it. About twenty-two
years ago,
Dr. Adam Taylor, a distinguished English surgeon, was in charge of the
district, and from his lips I heard the following statement:
A fatal epidemic broke out in the district among the cattle. Dr. Taylor,
by repeated post-mortem examinations,
declared that the disease, as far as he could discover, was like a form
of typhus often called putrid fever in the human subject. The epidemic
raged for months, till forty thousand head of cattle perished; and all
these dead bodies were eaten by law, by legal right, by the Chumar population.
After the epidemic was over, and these forty thousand head of cattle
had all been eaten, Dr. Taylor made a careful examination of the Chumar
population, and he could find no traces of any disease among them caused
by eating the dead cattle, but on the whole they were more healthy than
any other class of villagers.
During the last twenty-five years I have examined nearly fifty such
cases. I will mention one. In the Hindoo
village of Kamius there were twenty-two hundred head of cattle. An epidemic
broke out among them, and in five months about six hundred of them died.
In this village there are twenty-two families of Chumars, of about eight
persons to a family. These families ate in five months about six hundred
head of cattle, all dying of a very fatal disease. I visited these Chumars,
saw their baskets of meat, saw in every house large earthen pots, filled
with meat, on the fire. I saw little children, eighteen months old, sucking
small bones of this meat, as little New England children
would suck the leg of a roast turkey on Thanksgiving Day. I visited these
families after their generous meat diet, and
found them all in as good health as any of the people. I have now lived
twenty-five years among the Hindoos, I have been
in medical attendance on every class (there are some thirty-six classes),
and I do not think that even among the Brahmins, the strictest vegetarians
in the world, there is better health than among the Chumars, who for twenty-five
hundred years have by law eaten all the cattle of India, dying by whatever
disease.
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« Simmonds' plea has been answered by the advent of practices that
are now pejoratively labelled "agri-business," which have resulted in marked
improvements in human health. » |
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A few pages later, Simmonds wrote comments that should give some more food
for thought to critics of modern agricultural practices.
Certainly the flesh of animals which have died of anthracoid diseases,
has proved actively poisonous when
eaten in the raw state, but when sufficiently cooked has been perfectly
innocuous. Of the fact that there is a large consumption of diseased meat,
viz., the flesh of animals affected with pleuro-pneumonia, foot-and-mouth
disease, and various febrile affections, no doubt can be entertained by
rational people, and it is readily admitted that no obvious mischief results
from eating such food; the evidence, in fact, of the unwholesomeness of
the flesh of diseased animals is absolutely nil. It is quite true that
the idea of eating diseased meat is distasteful – to a sensitive stomach
it may be nauseating – but the fact remains, that, with few exceptions,
there is no proof that the meat is really deleterious after it has been
submitted to the action of fire.
Despite the fact that cattle were frequently sick, but did not pose a fatal
threat to most people if they were cooked properly, Simmonds echoed the
call of his contemporaries when he urged scientists and others to find
ways to cure them. Since it was made almost a century and a half ago, this
plea has been answered by the advent of practices that are now pejoratively
labelled « agri-business, » which
have resulted in marked improvements in human health.
A
false problem
I will leave the final words on the topic to Thomas DeGregori:
The irony is that hoof-and-mouth disease creates a crisis precisely because
of the high level of health of
our herds. Since the threat to human health is virtually non-existent,
we could have chosen to simply contain
the disease and accept vastly less productive herds and less meat and milk
to consume as is the case in many poor countries today. In poor countries,
I have seen scrawny herds where the specific disease was undiagnosed and
accepted because there was no other choice. I have been involved in the
herculean effort to keep plants disease free using chemical pesticides
in order for people to simply have a crop which still may be laden with
micro-organisms. Modern agriculture and husbandry, as any human endeavor,
merits constructive criticism and can be further improved but using any
crisis as a basis for attacking it, is wrong. I invite all such critics
to join me in my next foray into regions where people are struggling to
survive and where they would be happy to reach a level of development to
deal with the problems of modern food production as we are privileged to
know it.
| 1.
It has been usual in North America to refer to foot-and-mouth disease (FMD)
as « hoof and mouth disease
». According to the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO)
« Foot and Mouth Disease » webpage
ungulates have hooves (which are a protective covering of the end of the
digits) on their feet. Foot-and-mouth disease does not infect the hooves,
but rather the tissues close to them. This may result in loosening of the
hoof from the surrounding tissue. Since the hoof consists of dead material
it cannot become infected with a virus. Hence the name « hoof
and mouth disease » is inaccurate. >> |
| 2.
The quotes given in this essay are excerpted from an abridged version that
was published in 1885 under the title The Animal Food Resources of Different
Nations, with Mention of Some of the Special Dainties of
Various People Derived
from the Animal Kindgom,
E.& F. Spon publishers, pp. 31-34. >> |
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