Medicine was changed forever with Alexander Fleming's 1928 discovery of the antibacterial properties of the mold penicillium. Within a decade and a half, a strain found growing on a single cantaloupe from a Peoria, Il., farmer's market had been manufactured into millions doses. Many soldiers wounded during World War II owed their survival to penicillin. In the years after the war, infections that had been deadly for all human history became treatable and survivable. Without a doubt, antibiotics are one of medicine's greatest achievements.
There's little that is controversial, however, in pointing out that antibiotics have been overused to the extent that they've become less and less effective. Everybody knows that doctors are being advised to stop automatically prescribing broad-spectrum antibiotics at the first sign of illness. Many people are also aware that it's a general practice in agriculture--one that contributes to the rise of so-called "super bugs"-- to pump animals full of antibiotics to promote rapid growth and to prevent diseases that could easily and rapidly spread in overcrowded feed lot conditions. So I applaud the decisions of major fast food chains like Chick-fil-A, for example, that have recently committed to purchasing only chicken raised without antibiotics. Recently even the government has gotten on board, restricting the sale of feed containing antibiotics without the say-so of a veterinarian. I find it a little ironic, however, that while I can no longer purchase medicated goat feed at the local hardware store, mega-farms with veterinarians on staff can continue to pump their animals full of antibiotics just as they always have. That's the meat most people end up buying in the grocery store. Yummy.
But I digress. This post is not so much about the dangerous overuse of antibiotics as it is about a by-product our modern miracle cure-all: the idea that bacteria are an an enemy to fight against; the notion, more broadly, that anti-septic cleanliness is synonymous with health.
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The temperature has been dipping down into the mid-twenties at night, signaling that it's time to start harvesting the dozens of heads of cabbage that we've carefully weeded and watered in the garden all through the fall months. Sauerkraut is just about the easiest thing in the world to make. It's simply a matter of slicing up the heads of cabbage and working in some salt. Then the salted cabbage is packed into gallon glass jars, pressed down layer by layer with a potato masher to ensure that each jar is as full as possible. This afternoon I added a few splashes of white wine as I pressed the cabbage down in order to add a touch of sweetness. But really, it's as simple a process as food preservation can possibly be.
Then the cabbage sits; and over time it gradually ferments. More specifically, it sits on the kitchen counter for a month or more as bacteria work overtime to multiply themselves, feasting upon the sugars of the cabbage, with the byproduct of that delicious tanginess that is characteristic of fermented food. By the middle of January, with the everything in the fall garden having succumbed to the frost, except perhaps the carrots deeply composted as they are in fallen leaves, this fermented kraut will become our main vegetable. It will be an accompaniment to pork and sweet potatoes, to curried chicken and goat, to pretty much anything else that Rosemary can dream up to keep us fed during those long, cold, dark winter months.
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Bacteria, of course, is not bad per se. Again, there's little that is controversial in pointing out that bacteria play an indispensable role in fostering human health. Scientists talk about the trillions of microorganisms that inhabit each human body as its microbiome, and no place in a person's microbiome is more important than his stomach, his gut flora which break down food and help to extract nutrients and important vitamins and minerals. It's also not controversial to point out that exposure to the diverse bacteria present in fermented foods like sauerkraut, and in the process of our everyday encounters with other people and creatures with their own microbiomes, help us to build up important antibodies and resistances to the more dangerous bacteria that we are also likely to encounter, the likes of which antibiotics like penicillin were developed in order to combat.
Not controversial, perhaps, but overlooked and severely under-appreciated, to be sure. Although there is a fringe Whole Foods-type craze about all things probiotic, it is certainly not main-stream at present. That's to the loss of most people, because all the research shows that we need a great deal of exposure to bacteria in order to foster good health. Besides the continued over-prescription of antibiotics, which kill good bacteria as well as bad, there is the omnipresence of anti-bacterial soap, which, while perhaps a very necessary thing in the hospital operating room, is not such a great thing with which to wash one's hands on a regular basis. The store versions of traditional "live" foods like sauerkraut usually don't contain any live bacteria cultures at all due to high-heat canning processes that kill bacteria indiscriminately, resulting in an absolutely sterile food product.
Which leads back to my point about the lamentable by-product of antibiotics, our modern-day miracle cure-all, namely, the idea that the modern world ought to be clean, spotless, and wholly anti-septic.
It's simply not the case.
Yet it is a worldview that goes beyond food and the fighting of illness to touch every aspect of our lives, especially the sterile, anti-septic, "safe" way that we raise our children. A thoroughly interesting article by two MD's in the Wall Street Journal a few months back attempted to buck the trend, suggesting that it is necessary to let children get dirty in order to foster the growth of a strong microbiome. I was particularly amused by the anecdote the two MD's shared about the friend who once discovered her son "knee-deep in a cesspool of pig waste." Yep, we can identify with that sort of thing here at Kleinshire. But even this anecdote shows the true difficulty of overcoming our modern worldview, for it's not just our own personal revulsion at uncleanliness and lack of safety, but society's as well. And society, in turn, can wield heavy normative influence in matters such as these.
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Society's normative influence is what I was thinking about earlier this week after viewing a Facebook post on a local community page. A distraught mother had posted a picture of the puncture wound of her daughter after an attack by somebody's loose pit bull. The mother said that her daughter had been to the doctor for stitches and was going to be okay. Then she described the pit bull and the approximate location and asked for help in tracking down the stray dog. A terrible situation, to be sure, and one that is all too common out here in rural Franklin County where many people let their dogs run loose. But as I glanced through the thread I was taken aback by the comments. Although there were plenty of sympathetic responses, someone had the temerity to suggest that it was the mother's fault for letting her daughter play outside without proper supervision. Another person took issue with the fact that somebody would probably lose their beloved pet as the result of this mother's "vendetta."
Seriously?
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Our modern society, I think, expects us to raise our children anti-septically, safely. It is normative not to expose children to dangers, be they in terms of the food that they eat or the places that they play. To be sure, in highfalutin' circles there are people like the MD's whose article was published in the WSJ, who can openly speak about how letting children play in unsanitary conditions and eat food off the ground of the chicken run without attracting the attention of Child Protective Services. There are people like Silicon Valley's Mike Lanza, who can brag about letting his children, and the children of the entire neighborhood, climb onto a roof high above a stone patio in order to develop a sense of bravery, confidence, and entrepreneurial independence. But like with the Whole-Foods probiotic craze, it's a fringe movement for those wealthy and well-connected enough to pull it off. For the rest of us a few rungs down the economic ladder, who may also be convinced that we need more danger, more sepsis, in our lives, there are fewer options that society considers acceptable.
Free-range parenting deserves a post of its own in the near future. But regarding "live" foods in particular, most people simply cannot afford to shop at Whole Foods or their local farmer's market. Rather, they are relegated to the affordability of whatever is available at their local grocery store, where governmental regulation militates against any but the blandest, safest, most sanitary of foods. Milk sold in stores, to give an example that drives me crazy, needs to be pasteurized, a process that involves heating it in order to kill all the bacteria present in it, potential harmful bacteria to be sure, but helpful probiotics as well. Even when regulations would allow for "live" foods like saurkraut, for example, it is vastly costlier to process and get to market than the heat-treated, bacteria-free version.
To bring about a true change would necessitate a total societal transformation. In terms of food, it would involve being closer to our food sources, and in most cases being willing to pay significantly more for what we eat. Which is hard to do when health insurance costs four or five times more than it did in the simpler time when people spent twice as much as we currently do for food. In terms of raising our children, it would involve living around people who actually formed a like-minded community. Which sounds great, until one tries to buy a house near other like-minded people in a tight housing market.
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Even though the anti-septic nature of modern society is harmful to us and especially to our children, in terms of the antibiotics we overuse, in terms of the blandly safe food we eat, and in even in terms of the uncertain company we keep, the mass-production and disconnectedness that fuels globalized modern life necessitates that very anti-septic, unhealthful lifestyle. When one doesn't know where one's food comes from, or how long it has sat on the store's shelf, or whether the person who harvested it or processed it cared enough to do so carefully, then one has to depend on the government and its onerous regulations to make sure it is safe to consume. When we don't know our neighbors, where they come from or what their values might be, then we need to be ever vigilant with our children.
Would that it were otherwise. In the meantime, my wife and I will form our own hippie commune of two. We will let our children play in the dirt and mud of our own fenced yard, and every evening during this long, dark, cold winter of our discontent we will feast on fermented cabbage from our own garden and drink deeply from the delicious raw milk of our own goats.
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