The timing of news that the California Almond Board will as of August 1 begin requiring pasteurization of almonds is interesting from the perspective of the discussion that’s been going on here over the last few days.
This news, troubling as it is, helps us appreciate the intensity of the agriculture industry’s desire to eliminate any and all risk from the food system. (Thanks to the Weston A. Price Foundation for the news tip.)
The reason for the new pasteurization requirement? It seems that over the past six years, there have been two outbreaks of salmonella poisoning linked to almonds (no deaths, as far as I can determine). So the association, which oversees the production of all America’s almonds, and 80% of the world’s supply, has decreed that the best way to make consumers feel that almonds are absolutely safe is to pasteurize them.
Because "the California almond industry is taking every precaution to provide the safest, highest quality almonds in the world, almond suppliers must have the certainty that all almonds reaching consumers have undergone" pasteurization, says the CAB’s web site.
What will pasteurization do to the nutritional value of the almonds? No one knows for sure, and the CAB’s web site interestingly avoids dealing with this question in its FAQs, but the Weston A. Price Foundation speculates such processing will deplete almonds’ considerable nutritional value.
This development relates directly to one of the underlying questions that’s been discussed here over the last few days: must we as a society remove all risk from food consumption (such as by sanitizing food to such an extent that it becomes lifeless), or is a bit of risk a necessary part of consuming natural unprocessed foods?
What bothers me as a media person is that situations such as the one I’ve described involving Mary McGonigle-Martin and her young son, Chris, seem to wind up sparking these regulatory crackdowns. People read about others becoming ill from food, and say, “That’s horrible. Can’t they stop this from happening?”
So they, the government and association officials, go looking for scapegoats and “solutions,” and adopt a machine-gun approach: just kill all the bacteria, and the problem is gone. It all sounds logical to consumers who may not appreciate fully that their food is gradually becoming less nutritious.
The other thing that happens in this kind of scenario is that choice is eliminated from the equation. All almonds must be pasteurized, just as all milk must be pasteurized. So will those of us who want unpasteurized almonds need to trek to California almond groves to purchase them?
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