A Major Food Disaster, this one in Europe

I have been hearing a LOT about the latest food-related horror that people who live in Europe are experiencing. My parents and my sister live in Greece, so they have told me about this -- it has been major news in Europe for a couple of weeks now, but not mentioned much here in the regular media.

The food production system in Europe is very bureaucratized (not unlike the US). They have their own agribusiness systems and food production has largely changed from traditional local growing and consumption to the agribusiness model of exporting crops and animal products.*

On June 6, 1999, I learned about the situation with dioxin contamination which has reached all of Europe because of the food production methods now in place. Apparently for some years it has been a practice of one or more companies in Belgium to collect used and rancid oil discarded from the deep-fryers of restaurants and sell it to animal-feed producers for addition to the fodder. At some point, some one or more individuals made the decision to add motor oil and/or oil from transformers to the animal feed.

This is where I have to take a break from writing and pull myself together. I am a little less shocked by this news than I would have been before I learned about the addition of toxic industrial wastes to fertilizers in this country. Since that I have become a little numb to the completely callous criminal insanity involved in acts such as these.

Apparently the presence of this poisonous oil in the animals' feed came to light after chickens started dying in convulsions. I don't know how long the poisoning had been going on before that occurred. One figure I have learned of is that there was "700 times the permitted amount" of dioxin in the feed. (Since the permitted amount should certainly be zero, I am not sure what that means.)

The animal feed contaminated animals and animal products most heavily in Belgium, Holland, and France, but the effects went all over Europe as well. And here in the US we do import things from those countries, most notably cheeses. Belgian meat is shipped all over Europe, and hundreds of tons of Belgian meat is regularly consumed in Greece.

The Greek government confiscated the Belgian meat after the contamination became known and is now under attack from the Belgian meat-producers. (This is reminiscent of the situation in the US with Oprah and the Texas cattlemen who sued her for speaking her opinion of their product -- see the "mad cowboys" website. At least they don't have such outrageous laws and lawsuits in Europe.)

Meat consumption has dropped 30% in Greece since this scare hit the news. The Greek Minister of Health made a public statement to the effect, "Let's not kid ourselves, our bodies are all full of PCBs, and DDT, and other toxic chemicals. We reek of the stuff." I don't know exactly what he said -- I'll try to find out.

Women in Greece rarely breast feed their babies, having succumbed to "modern culture", and all the formula and baby food that is sold in Greece comes from Belgium, so there is a great deal of anxiety about the effects on the babies in Greece. Also no doubt in many other countries in Europe.

In connection with this story, the TV news in Greece/Europe shows scenes in Sweden, where animals are still raised out in the open, able to graze and frolic in the sun. Apparently this is now an idyllic situation not commonly found in Europe (just as it has become more and more rare in the United States).

Greeks are being urged to "Eat Greek Products only".

That's all for now. 6/22/99

*The European bureaucracies have somewhat different priorities than those in the US, and the standards-setting bureaucrats may or may not be more responsive to citizen outrage. Europe does have some stricter standards than the US, and European citizens do seem to be more aware and outspoken about things like the hazards of genetically engineered food than are the masses in the US.