The Fifth Risk

by The Fifth Risk (epub)

  Changes in agricultural science trigger changes in the structure of the society: where people live, what they do, what they value, the metaphors that naturally pop into their minds. Those changes have been driven by research funded by the Department of Agriculture, done inside the land-grant colleges created alongside it. Virginia Tech, like the University of Wisconsin, was one of the original ones. “Because Virginia Tech was a land-grant university, there was a department called Human Nutrition, which I had never heard of as a field of study,” says Woteki. She ended up studying the subject because that was what she was encouraged to study. She had no particular connection to farming or agriculture: her father had been an air force fighter pilot; she’d grown up on military bases. “The first time I ever touched a cow,” she said, “was when I artificially inseminated one at Virginia Tech.”

  But she grew interested in the intersection between food and health. Her dissertation investigated a mysterious outbreak of illness in Texas, where, in the late 1960s, Mexican American kids were turning up sick and no one could figure out why. She figured out why: milk. “It wasn’t a pathogen,” she said. “It was the lactose in the milk.” Mexican Americans, as a group, turned out to be especially intolerant of it, though no one had known that until that moment. The symptoms usually started by age eleven or twelve.

  She became a professor of human nutrition at an interesting moment: in the early 1970s, Congress was taking a new interest in malnutrition in children. “There was a lot of stunting and wasting in children,” she recalls. After a talk given by a congressional staffer studying the effects of legislation on human nutrition, she walked up and introduced herself—and he hired her on the spot. One thing led to another, and soon she was leading a group inside the Department of Agriculture that took survey data and analyzed patterns in food consumption, to explore the relationships between the American diet and American disease. From there she moved naturally enough to the Centers for Disease Control, where she led a team seeking answers to basic questions about the overall health of the population. For instance, blood lead levels in children fell by a lot in the 1970s and early 1980s. This welcome development, they figured out, was due to the phasing out of leaded gasoline.

  In early 1993 a pediatrician in Seattle alerted the Washington State Department of Health that he was seeing in children symptoms of E. coli such as cramps and bloody diarrhea. In four western states hundreds of people became seriously ill. Four children died. The disease was tracked to Jack in the Box. The chain had been cooking its hamburgers at temperatures too low to kill the bacteria. The Department of Agriculture is responsible for the safety of all meat. The FDA handles all other food. An American killed by his spinach can justifiably blame the FDA, but an American killed by his steak is the responsibility of the Department of Agriculture. Cheese pizzas are the FDA’s problem; pepperoni pizzas are supervised by the USDA. After the Jack in the Box outbreak, the USDA created a new little box on the organizational chart called “Food Safety.” Woteki became its first undersecretary and served in the post for four years.

  After that she thought she was done with government. “Then 9/11 happened,” she said. “I had an emotional response: What can I do? It made me realize there were very few people who had ever had the experiences I had had.” She was able to explain the various threats to the food supply as few could, for example. She understood how genetic engineering might be used as a weapon of mass destruction. She knew that a microbe could bring down a civilization. She returned to government. For the last six years of the Obama administration she’d been the Department of Agriculture’s chief scientist.

  The same qualities that had led her to minimize the importance of her feelings had made her an excellent supervisor of science. Though she didn’t seem to care one way or another how she was addressed, no one thought of her as “Cathie.” She was always “Dr. Woteki.” “She was great at her job,” said Tom Vilsack. “She was very adamant about keeping politics out of science. If I called and said,” How about we delay the announcement of that grant for a week or so,’ it was” Hands off my science!’”

  We don’t really celebrate the accomplishments of government employees. They exist in our society to take the blame. But if anyone ever paid attention, they would note that Woteki’s department, among other achievements, had suppressed the potentially catastrophic 2015 outbreak of bird flu. They’d created, very quickly, a fast new test for the disease that enabled them to cull the sick chickens from the healthy ones. Because of their work, the poultry industry was forced to kill only tens of millions of birds, instead of hundreds of millions. In the early 1990s, the USDA had also dealt with the outbreak of ring-spot virus in papaya trees, when the papaya industry in Hawaii faced ruin and extinction. Inside the little box marked “Science,” the USDA helped genetically engineer a papaya tree that was resistant to ring-spot virus.

  The worst I could get anyone to say about Cathie Woteki was that she had an unusual sense of humor, at least by the careful standards of the Department of Agriculture. The jokes of scientists sometimes feel like experiments gone wrong, and she was very much a scientist. Her car license plate read DR WO. No one at the USDA called her that, or could imagine doing so. At Secretary Vilsack’s small office Christmas dinner for top USDA officials, Cathie’s scientist husband came wearing an elf hat. “No one knew why,” says a USDA staffer. “She had looked at her husband dressed as an elf and said,‘Yep, that’ll work.’ She never explained it. It was actually kind of endearing.”

  The first time we spoke wasn’t long after Trump had nominated her replacement. His name was Sam Clovis. He had a doctorate in public administration from the University of Alabama but no experience in science. He’d come to prominence in 2010 as a Rush Limbaugh–style right-wing talk-radio host in Sioux City, Iowa. As Iowa chairman of Rick Perry’s 2016 presidential campaign, he’d ripped Trump loudly and righteously for having “no foundation in Christ.” Then he’d quit Perry’s campaign to become co-chairman of the Trump campaign, declining to address rumors he’d done it for the money. (“I’m not going to talk about how much money I’m getting paid,” he told the Des Moines Register. “It’s just not going to happen.”) His appointment as the USDA’s chief scientist felt like a practical joke to those who had worked there: this was the place that, back in the early 1940s, had taken Alexander Fleming’s findings and effectively invented penicillin. It had triggered the antibiotics revolution. It had coped with blights and outbreaks. The consequences of the science it funded—or did not fund—was mind-boggling. The person Clovis was replacing had taught at universities, worked in the White House, and, along the way, been elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

  “They are going to politicize the science,” said Woteki. “My biggest concern is the misuse of science to support policies.”

  In recent years, much of the department’s research has dealt with the effects of climate change. The head of science directs nearly $3 billion in grants each year. Woteki directed the science that leads to nutritional standards for schoolchildren. She set research priorities. Hers had been food security; domestic and global nutrition; safety of the food supply; and figuring out how best to convert plants into fuel. “All of that has to be done in the face of a changing climate,” said Woteki. “It’s all climate change.” It might sound silly that the USDA funds a project that seeks to improve the ability of sheep to graze at high altitudes—until you realize that this may one day be the only place sheep will be able to graze. “We’re going to become even more reliant on the efficiencies that come from the investment in science,” she said. One-quarter of the arable land in the world is already degraded, either by overfarming or overgrazing. “Changing temperatures and changing rainfall patterns will force changes in the way crops are grown and livestock are raised,” she said. “The changing climate brings new risks of food-borne disease. Even the pathogens are influenced by temperature and humidity.”

  If the Trump administration were to pollute the scien
tific inquiry at the USDA with politics, scientific inquiry would effectively cease. “These high-level discussions really worry me,” she says. Research grants will go not to the most promising ideas but to the closest allies. “There is already good science that isn’t being funded,” she said. “That will get worse.” Junk science will be used to muddy issues like childhood nutrition. Maybe sodium isn’t as bad for kids as people say! There’s no such thing as too much sugar! The science will suddenly be “unclear.” There will no longer be truth and falsehood. There will just be stories, with two sides to them.

  Since she had run two of the little boxes on the org chart, I decided to kill two birds with one stone and ask Woteki what most worried her about food safety.

  “Regulatory reform in food safety without science,” she said.

  That was too general. I pressed her for some real, specific concern. “They could increase the line speeds,” she said, without having to think.

  The USDA has big, fat, quite readable rule books to prevent meat from killing people. One rule concerns the speed of the poultry-slaughter lines: 140 birds a minute. In theory, some poor USDA inspector is meant to physically examine each and every bird for defects. But obviously no human being can inspect 140 birds a minute. No industry can kill nine billion birds each year without wanting to find faster ways to do it. In the fall of 2017, the National Chicken Council petitioned the USDA to allow for line speeds of 175 or faster. “It’ll make it even harder for inspectors to do their jobs,” says Woteki. (The petition, at least for now, stands rejected.)

  What she fears isn’t so much the bad intentions of the people who fill the jobs she once did. She fears their seeming commitment to scientific ignorance. No big chicken company wants to poison a bunch of children with salmonella. But if you speed up the slaughter lines, you need to make the new speed safe. Ignorance allows people to disregard the consequences of their actions. And sometimes it leads to consequences even they did not intend.

  Ali Zaidi drew a distinction between the little boxes inside the Department of Agriculture that enforced regulation (such as Food Safety) and those that spent money (such as Science). “One is the stick and the other is the carrot,” he said. “You pay for things often that you can’t or won’t regulate.” Where the government had the power to regulate, it had less need to pay for things. It couldn’t compel university professors to do agricultural research, and so it paid them to do it. It had the power to compel, say, egg producers to adhere to rules that kept eggs from making people sick, and so didn’t need to pay them to do it. “In the extreme case the federal government could just buy eggs for everyone and test all of these eggs,” said Zaidi. “That’s obviously a dumb thing to do from an economic point of view, but it shows you how regulation takes the place of expenditure.”

  The regulation side of things is, as a rule, less vulnerable to the short-term idiocy of a new administration than the money side of things. The big show Trump has made of removing regulations by executive order has done far less than he suggests, as there is a formal rule-changing process: you must solicit outside opinion, wait a certain amount of time for those opinions to arrive, and then deal with the inevitable legal challenges to your rule change. To increase the number of chickens a poultry company murders each minute might take years, even if it is the smart thing to do.

  But to change who gets money to do agricultural research, or whether they get it at all, is a cinch. For that reason, Ali thought the little box marked “Science” was of far greater concern than the box marked “Food Safety.”

  There were two other important little boxes inside the USDA. One was marked “Farm,” and the other was “Rural Development.” Ali Zaidi had watched many billions flow through the first and a few billion flow through the second. He thought it highly unlikely the Trump administration’s budget cuts would have much effect on the farm dollars. A lot of that money went to big grain producers. The same Republican senators from farm states who said they abhorred government spending of almost any sort became radical socialists when the conversation turned to handouts to big grain producers. “The money follows the political power of the constituencies,” said Ali, “instead of the evidence of need in America. If you really boil down the difference between the farm side of the budget and the rural-development side of the budget, the farm subsidies can wind up in the pockets of large corporations. It’s the rural-development money that tends to stay in these communities.”

  Without that money, he thought, rural America would be a very different place than it is. “Without the USDA money it’s possible we’d look like sub-Saharan Africa, or rural China,” said Ali. Much of small-town America is dispersed and disorganized and poor. The people in those communities don’t have the money to hire Washington lobbyists. Yet a way of life depends on the sort of federal subsidies only a powerful lobbyist might procure. “It’s preserving an emotional infrastructure,” said Ali. “We have decided this is the type of community we want to preserve. But the entire time I was in the White House, we grappled with the question: Where do we find the political capital for rural development? Because it can’t just come from the people rural development helps.”

  By the time she left the little box marked “Rural Development,” Lillian Salerno had spent the better part of five years inside it. The box’s function was simple: to channel low-interest-rate loans, along with a few grants, mainly to towns with fewer than fifty thousand people in them. Her department ran the $220 billion bank that serviced the poorest of the poor in rural America: in the Deep South, and in the tribal lands, and in the communities, called colonias, along the U.S.-Mexico border. “Some of the communities in the South, the only checks going in are government checks,” she said. And yet, amazingly, they nearly always repaid their loans.

  Half her job had been vetting the demands from rural America for help. The other half had been one long unglamorous road trip. “It wasn’t like I could just fly to New York City. I’d be going to, like, Minco, Oklahoma. Everywhere I went was two flights minimum plus a two- or three-hour drive.” On the other end of the trip lay some small town in dire need of a health center, or housing, or a small business. “You go through these small towns and you see these ridiculously nice fire stations. That’s us,” she said. It was always more expensive for these towns to get electricity and internet access and health care. “But for the federal government, rural Alaska wouldn’t have any drinking water.” The need was incredible; her work felt urgent. “We’d give forty thousand dollars for a health clinic and the whole time you’re like, Shit, this makes a difference.”

  As the USDA’s loans were usually made through local banks, the people on the receiving end of them were often unaware of where the money was coming from. There were many stories very like the one Tom Vilsack told, about a loan they had made, in Minnesota, to a government-shade-throwing, Fox News–watching, small-town businessman. The bank held a ceremony and the guy wound up being interviewed by the local paper. “He’s telling the reporter how proud he is to have done it on his own,” said Vilsack. “The USDA person goes to introduce herself, and he says,‘So, who are you?’ She says,” I’m the USDA person.’ He asks,‘What are you doing here?’ She says,” Well, sir, we supplied the money you are announcing.’ He was white as a sheet.”

  Salerno saw this sort of thing all the time. “We’d have this check,” said Salerno. “We’d blow it up and try to have a picture taken with it. It said UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT in great big letters. That was something that Vilsack wanted—to be right out in front so people knew the federal government had helped them. In the red southern states the mayor sometimes would say,” Can you not mention that the government gave this?’” Even when it was saving lives, or preserving communities, the government remained oddly invisible. “It’s just a misunderstanding of the system,” said Salerno. “We don’t teach people what government actually does.”

  She herself hadn’t learned until very late. She’d grown up in a family with no money,
and nine children, and Republican sympathies, in a small farming town in Texas called Little Elm. Her graduating high school class had eighteen people in it. She was both student council president and head cheerleader. (“The reason I’m not very good at math is you had to choose: cheerleading or math. And I chose cheerleading.”) Few of her school’s graduates ever went to college, but she was admitted to the University of Texas, on a Pell grant. She paid for what the grant didn’t by waiting tables.

  She was waiting tables in Little Elm in the late 1980s when friends started getting sick, and dying, from AIDS. She went to Dallas to visit them. There, at a hospital, she saw that men condemned to death were going without care: the nurses were frightened to interact with them. They had a particular fear of being infected by the needles that delivered medication to the patients. “At that time everyone died,” said Salerno. “And they are told,” The nurses aren’t coming.’ I said,” That’s about as fucked as anything I ever saw.’” She had a raw sense of injustice, and a desire to see life be made fair. “Small town, big family, no resources: you look at the world in a certain way.” She also had a roll-up-your-sleeves-and-fix-it attitude. After seeing the needless suffering, she came up with an idea: the retractable needle. It worked like a ballpoint pen. A friend of hers, an engineer, designed it. She applied to the local community bank for a loan and got it. It wasn’t until much later that she discovered that the loan had ultimately come from the Small Business Administration, and that the federal government had simply used the local bank as a delivery system. She didn’t know enough to know that no bank was going to lend money to a first-time entrepreneur on the strength of a new invention—in part because banks didn’t value willpower. “All good inventions come from something personal,” she said. “People create things because it’s personal.”