Avian flu is a lesson in food vulnerability

The Irish Lumper was so productive that by 1845 it was the primary food for 40 percent of that country's population. Before its introduction the Irish diet was a blend of small grains and milk. The Lumper, a strain of potato lacking genetic diversity, displaced traditional foods and enabled the human population to boom.

Out of nowhere a pathogen arrived and by 1852 over 1 million Irish starved to death and another million emigrated to escape hunger. The blight was compounded by an oppressive political system the English imposed on the Irish, but the catastrophic loss of its food base caused misery and disruption. Had the Irish planted an array of potato varieties, as the people of South and Central America did, some strains would likely have resisted the blight and muted the hunger.

Recently millions of Iowa's laying hens were euthanized to prevent the spread of avian flu, a virulent pathogen. Officials quickly claimed that killing the birds posed no threat to the food supply. They are wrong.

Cramming millions of genetically similar animals in enormous buildings enables a disease to race through a flock. Years ago eggs came from thousands of small flocks on nearly every farm. Hens were of dozens of breeds with enormous genetic diversity. They produced fewer eggs than today's hybrids but a disease might hit one vulnerable breed while others enjoyed genetic resistance. Because chickens were in small scattered flocks a microbe would be challenged to infect them all.

American agriculture has swapped dispersion and diversity for maximum productivity. Farmers select the most efficient strains of crops and livestock, resulting in enormous populations with similar genetics that lack the buffering diversity and dispersion offers.

Modern farming produces abundant food at reasonable cost, but it comes at a cost. As avian flu demonstrated microbes can roar through a population before science develops a resistant variety, medicine, or pesticide to stem an epidemic.

The death of millions of hens is a wake-up call. Something similar could happen to corn. Modern humans are as dependent on this single grass as the Irish were on the Lumper. We eat corn directly, it is the primary livestock feed source, and it is the raw material for millions of gallons of ethanol. A corn blight would devastate humans worldwide.

Compounding commercial food vulnerability is the inability of most Americans to acquire food close to home. Years ago families produced at least part of their meals from home gardens, small chicken flocks, and foraging wild plants in urban and rural areas. This still can be done but the knowledge of how to do it has largely been lost. Ironically, a yard able to grow wild food is often poisoned to create monocultures of inedible grass.

Increasingly people are uneasy with society's dependence on commercial food and are gardening, eating wild foods, and keeping diverse flocks of chickens in the yard. Few families can produce all their food close to home, but knowing how to grow and find food reduces dependence on commercial food.

' Rich Patterson is co-owner of Winding Pathways. Comments: windingpathways@gmail.com