Our faith in the modern food system is touching. When a bag of salad leaves reads: "Washed and ready to eat", most people will consume the contents without a second thought. We assume that the leaves were grown safely, picked hygienically, then broken up, washed, dried and bagged in a factory so meticulously clean that we don't even need to rinse them under the kitchen tap.
And why shouldn't we? On the face of it, our food has never been safer. Growers, farmers and food processors all over the world are knee-deep in regulations and protocols imposed by national and international food safety bodies and a handful of ever-more powerful and demanding retailers. The European Food Safety Authority tells us that it is on the case from "field to fork" and boasts about its "rapid alert" system. In the UK, when a food scare hits the headlines, a spokesperson for the Food Standards Agency will reliably pop up with soothing words that play down risk.
On the odd occasion when our normally laid-back trust might flip into panic, as is the case with salads following the new E coli outbreak in Germany, we can buy into the comforting notion that the transnational public health establishment is dedicated to tracking down the source of a rogue problem. Our shiny, clean, state-of-the-art food system is not called into question.
It should be. The white-coated, hair-netted, thoroughly scrubbed-up and hosed-down food safety establishment talks a language of "bio-security", "hazard analysis" and "critical control points", but the truth is that the food industry is largely self-regulating. The paraphernalia of modern food safety has more to do with corporate convenience and the establishment of a paper trail to demonstrate "due diligence" in the event of a problem than guaranteeing public health. Tick-lists, paperwork and audits abound. These bureaucratic processes are predicated on the questionable assumption that when people say they did something, such as testing the microbiological quality of salad washing water regularly or halting pesticide treatments two weeks before harvest, they actually did so.
With food scandals now arriving in a steady stream, we need to understand that by its very nature, our industrialised, globalised food system begets public health problems. It is geared to churning out vast volumes of food and raising productivity, but at the lowest cost. So farmers and growers are pushed to make savings by cutting corners and adopting intensive practices, which open up unprecedented risks that are graver all the time: everything from toxins from GM crops turning up in foetal blood, through sickly, cloned calves dying soon after birth, to the creation of more virulent superbugs.
The emergence last week of a new strain of MRSA in British cows, resistant to key groups of antibiotics, is a case in point. The root cause here is almost certainly routine use of antibiotics on intensive dairy farms. These are being used as a hi-tech "fix" in an increasingly desperate attempt to keep a lid on mastitis, one of the diseases endemic to factory farming. But when the supermarkets pay dairy farmers less than the cost of production, what else can we expect?
Modern food production units – be they US-style beef feedlots or European glasshouse and polytunnel "hubs" that are the size of a small town – are of such a scale that they amplify the impact of all the public health time bombs that our industrial food systems cooks up. If water polluted with potentially deadly food poisoning bacterium such as E coli should ever contaminate a crop of cucumbers, hope and pray that it happens in some isolated farm, cut off from global trade routes, not, for instance, in the Dutch greenhouses that provide a third of the world's supply. A small outfit producing a contaminated product will affect only small numbers of people; a giant one doing the same will hurt large numbers.
Russia's ban on fruit and vegetables from the EU has been denounced as politically motivated and disproportionate. But globalised food distribution and retailing very efficiently delivers major public health problems across national boundaries in hours, without us booking a home-delivery time slot and before the food police are any the wiser. Earlier this year, dioxin-contaminated eggs, also from Germany, were sent to Holland for processing, dispatched to two UK companies that manufactured processed foods and then distributed throughout the UK by major supermarkets. By the time all the links in the chain spanning three countries were established, the UK Food Standards Agency acknowledged that the majority of affected products would have been sold and eaten. Russia may well be grabbing a trade advantage, but if you were a Russian citizen and got E coli poisoning from eating salads imported from an already affected region, you'd want to know why your government hadn't been protecting you.
The UK's worst E coli outbreak to date, in Lanarkshire in 1996, killed 21 people. The source – a small butcher's shop where there was cross-contamination between raw and ready-to-eat meats – was fairly quickly identified because the cases were localised. By contrast, although the current outbreak of E coli appears to affect people in northern Germany, or those who have been there, the source of the poisoning is shrouded in mystery. The key difference here is that the Lanarkshire people were eating local meat. In Germany, they may have been eating salads that came from hundreds of miles away, making it much harder to pinpoint the source.
Whether it's E coli or something else, repeat food scandals are here to stay until we accept that, as Oxfam now puts it, the global food system is "broken" and increasingly dysfunctional – in the case of food safety, dangerously so. Institutionalised risk-taking is endemic. The food safety authorities just live with it. An alarming 75% of British poultry, for example, is contaminated at point of sale with campylobacter, a food-poisoning bug that, in the worst scenario, can kill you. We are told to cook chicken thoroughly to kill it off, wash our salads (although we now know that E coli isn't reliably killed off even by chlorinated water) and not fret about the MRSA incubating down on the farm, because pasteurisation kills it. So that's all right then. Panic over.
But if we want our food to be truly safe, we must recognise that this can only be delivered by a radically different model of food and agriculture, one that is based on the largely untapped potential of small-scale, much more regional production and food distribution. We need a new system that no longer concentrates power and control of the food chain in the hands of a few global corporations and interest groups, at the expense of everyone else, one that puts diversity at its heart and respects the limits of the natural world, rather than trying to override them. Until then, expect more food scares. It's business as usual.