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food-borne illness

Prawns & other fishy business

I often share tables and menus with people who have not spent the past half dozen years or so obsessing about food to the same degree as I, and who therefore do not have as much trouble finding something edible in restaurants and other food outlets. Most of them do not register my shudder at the sight of prawns on the menu; nor do I act on first instincts to seize the menu and tear it into tiny pieces and then arms flailing eyes wild to scream at them “don’t touch them they’re poison!!!!” It’s become one of those things I simply won’t comment on unless invited.

One of the reasons I eat very little fish anymore, and particularly avoid prawns, as well as farmed catfish, basa, tilapia etc from China, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and elsewhere – and of course farmed salmon from  Canada – is because of the use of antibiotics, which are used to combat potential infection in overcrowded tanks and cages. This is prophylactic use, not treatment of illness, and is as worrying as the use of low dosages of antibiotics as a growth enhancer in land-based meat farming. The most troubling of these antibiotics is a series called fluoroquinolones.

So I’m inviting myself to comment here, because I have just read an article about these very chemicals (showing up in fish illegally imported to the US from China, Thailand, Canada, Indonesia, Vietnam and Ecuador) and simultaneously noticed that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has relaxed by .04 ng/g the fluoroquinolone residues in aquaculture products action level from 0.6 ng/g (ppb) to >1.0 ng/g. This is because

The revised action level continues to provide adequate human health safety to consumers and is considered stringent enough to detect deliberate use of fluoroquinolone therapeutants in aquaculture.

Well all right then. It’s tiny, and the CFIA continues to assure us that  there is no change in Health Canada’s policy of

zero tolerance for deliberate use of fluoroquinolone therapeutants (ciprofloxacin, danofloxacin, enrofloxacin and sarafloxacin) during fish production life cycle.

But if you also read

Resistance to quinolones has been reported in a variety of important bacterial pathogens, including Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, and other enteric organisms; Pseudomonas aeruginosa; Chlamydia trachomatis and Mycoplasma pneumoniae; Campylobacter jejuni; Burkholderia cepacia; Stenotrophomonas maltophilia; Neisseria gonorrhoeae; Staphylococcus aureus (especially oxacillin-resistant strains); Enterococcus faecium; and Streptococcus pneumoniae.

Don’t you just not want to go there at all? Particularly on a week when there’s news of a new antibiotic-resistant strain of gonorrhea and a spike in the incidence of syphilus — as well as general increases in STD’s in the elderly as well as youth. Not to forget the ever-increasing rates of food-borne illnesses like campylobacter jejuni, salmonella, and E. coli O157:H7 (and the new one that surfaced in Germany this year, E. coli O104:H4). And of course the hospital superbugs. It’s all enough to put you off your dinner.

A couple of months ago Barry Estabrook laid out the issues, and praised the one prawn I will still eat and am thankfully positioned to find – the Spot Prawn.

I have no doubt that things have improved since 2003 when Felicity Lawrence documented problems with the industry; but I am still suspicious of foods like prawns whose cost has so cheapened on the menu. And I know that most restauranteurs are watching their price points too carefully to ask too many questions about the full story on everything they buy. And will mislead you whether by accident or not, as I learned in Newfoundland a few years ago where a waitress informed me that the tiger prawns on the menu were local, which I doubted enough to double check; and yes, they were local – to Thailand I think it was.

Scared of our food

Listening to the periodic updates on the salmonella in your fast food tomato (or is it the peppers or is it the salsa or what the heck is it anyway) made me run back to Michael Pollan for comforting words. His 2006 article (remember the spinach E. coli scare?), the Vegetable-Industrial Complex, has a lot to say to today’s issues and is worth revisiting, or just plain visiting if you missed it the first time.

If you don’t want to read the whole article, I like this bit in particular:

Wendell Berry once wrote that when we took animals off farms and put them onto feedlots, we had, in effect, taken an old solution–the one where crops feed animals and animals’ waste feeds crops–and neatly divided it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm, and a pollution problem on the feedlot.

Timely thoughts, now that we’re in the season of growing and farmers marketing. The trust that Pollan talks about with respect to produce he buys from stallholders he’s known and patronised for years is missing from what you pick up off a supermarket shelf, or from a fast food counter. And he makes another important point, one that small BC meat producers will recognise, about governments punishing small farmers in their efforts to impose safety measures on industrial-scale farming.

On that very topic, I happened upon a recent podcast of the always interesting Kootenay Coop Radio program, Deconstructing Dinner, which was about The Culture of Meat and features an interview with Susan Bourette, the author of Carnivore Chic: From Pasture to Plate, A Search for the Perfect Meat.