An Alberta Farming Family's Perspective on Food Safety

Accompanying my son on a school field trip provided a unique opportunity to hear another perspective on food production (farming) and food safety. Although I grew up on an acreage with a huge garden, raising farm animals, and having farm families in our social circle, I have spent most of my adult life as a city-dweller.

Boy, has farming changed.

Welcome to Twin Valley Farms (http://twinvalleyfarms.ca/), where farming is now agribusiness and high-tech. Irrigation is initiated with a cell phone application. Seeders and sprayers now cover fields more or less automatically, guided by GPS. Crops such as faba/fava beans and other legumes that most Canadians don't eat are grown for consumers in India and Egypt. Canola is of the genetically engineered variety, and glyphosate is seen as environmentally friendly, reducing tillage and fuel consumption. Monsanto is seen as a friendly business partner.

It's interesting to meet people who genuinely believe in their agricultural practices, even though some of their opinions are different from mine. I heard that one of the farm-family members/presenters expressed outrage over a sign in Sobey's that said "organic is better". It's fair to say that organic may not always be better (as our mealworm experiment showed), but I still have reservations about glyphosate and widescale genetic modification of crops. What is sometimes safe may not always be safe; science is full of examples of trial and error.

Real science is typically slow to come to conclusions, and sometimes reverses itself. I had an interesting discussion with a teacher about whether or not people are looking for a scapegoat for their health issues when they react fearfully to modern farming practices. I have seen examples of both the organic and non-organic sides of the issue cherry-picking data. As consumers, we need better information from experts who have nothing to gain from either side. Unfortunately, nothing to gain typically means "no funding" and "no voice".

My plan is to continue to explore these issues in this blog, in particular the question of whether modern human health problems are more related to practices in modern food production (farming, processed foods) or the depletion of important species in the human microbiome (human microbial ecology). Is it big ag' or possibly big pharma that's giving so many folks a pain in the gut? Our collective mental and physical health may be at stake.

Meanwhile, don't panic... we're mostly healthy. Ciao!