Summary: The swine flu crisis lays bare the meat industry's monstrous power

In this essay, the author talks about the Mexican Swine Flu as well as the fallacies in the world’s food safety protection system. The author first points out that the Mexican Swine Flu is a highly infective disease, and its harmfulness is comparable to SARS. Then the author says the propagation of Mexican Swine Flu reveals great fallacies in the world’s current food safety protection system. First, the swine flu “may prove that the WHO/Centres for Disease Control version of pandemic preparedness” (Davis 2009). The author gives an example to prove his argument: “the Mexico has world-famous disease experts, but it had to send swabs to a Winnipeg lab in order to ID the strain's genome[, and] lmost a week was lost as a consequence” (Davis 2009). Second, the high level of concentration in current animal farms is a highly dangerous practice. Davis (2009) says that “In 1965, for instance, there were 53m US hogs on more than 1m farms; today, 65m hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities.” With such a dense population, cross contamination of disease is highly possible. Third, the food production companies are powerful enough to obstruct supervision of food safety. For example, Davis (2009) says “the commission reported systemic obstruction of their investigation by corporations, including blatant threats to withhold funding from cooperative researchers.” All these factors resulted in the Mexican Swine Flu in 2009, and are continuing to threatening to cause new disease to rise from the food industry.
Comments and questions to consider:
1. As many Americans do not know, the SARS in 2003 mentioned above also resulted from food issues. People in Guangdong, China, consumed “roasted civet cat”, a local animal food, which carried the first virus. Besides, many less known diseases like the avian flu all rose from food-related issues.
2. The Swine Flu of 2009 has been mostly cured by now, but do you think the current food security system is good enough to prevent similar issues from rising?