Where Have All the (Unpasteurized) Almonds Gone? The Fear Factor’s Unfortunate Consequences
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?
The Complete Patient
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In the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt “There is nothing to fear but fear itself”.
Humans live in an environment inhabited by trillions of microorganisms and hundreds of thousands of different microorganism species. There are tens of thousands of different species of bacteria and viruses per gram of soil. Microorganisms are everywhere on, inside, and around us. They are at the basis of our life-support system. They supply and maintain our fertile soil and atmospheric gases. They cleanse our water supply, play a role in stabilizing atmospheric nitrogen concentration, and regulate the acidity or alkalinity of the soil. They therefore ensure that our world is livable.
The current militaristic approach to controlling organisms deemed responsible for causing disease is based on fear and superstition, the result of a lack of knowledge. The traditional understanding that bacteria are the primary cause of disease is simplistic and incomplete. Specific organisms cannot be destroyed or manipulated without inflicting huge collateral damage with an overall negative effect on life forms, the environment and the foods we eat. The pasteurization of milk, the use of wide spectrum antibiotics to prevent anticipated infection and the release of antibiotic resistant genes and BT toxins into the environment via genetically modified crops and organisms are all good examples.
Bacteria are extremely complex protein structures with an adept ability to survive. The encoded information governing this survival process was established long ago by an intelligence far superior to current human knowledge.
Albert Einstein expressed it well when he stated that, "the harmony of natural law reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly-insignificant reflection." Albert Einstein, The World As I See It, (1974), Bonanza Books, New York, page 40.
As individuals we respond to foreign substances differently, based on our own unique genetic background. Rather then directing attention at organisms such as Escherichia coli O157:H7 we need to better understand why a handful of individuals are overwhelmed and sickened by the toxins produced by this organism while thousands of people who are exposed to the same organism are left unharmed.
The problem as I see it rest not with the organisms but with those who superciliously think they can manipulate and control specific organisms with an array of toxic, invasive and destructive weaponry. Bacteria such as E coli 0157:H7 are opportunistic and when the competition is eliminated or weakened they move in, take over and wreak havoc.
Understandably health bureaucrats find it necessary to justify their existence. What they fail to realize is that their attempt to control is out of control. The shallow arguments they offer however, as a bases to intimidate and infringe upon an individual’s free will are not welcome by those who chose to make informed choices.
Ken Conrad
By that logic, farmers should be able to sell raw milk simply by labelling it "pasteurized," since the label apparently no longer means anything.