Poulet nouveau

I pick up the P-I to read another article on yet another indication that the overuse of antibiotics in industrial livestock production is endangering the effectiveness of many of the most crucial antibiotics for humans. This comes as no surprise to me, as I continue to nurse my antibiotic-resistant ear infection even while I prepare for an orchestra concert in less than two weeks. It’s a challenge to play in tune with plugged ears.

After Number One’s smashing end-of-season concert this weekend, we stopped for dinner with friends at a Middle Eastern restaurant; navigating the menu to accommodate diets is always challenging, but then a friend asks, “you eat meat, don’t you?” I have to explain that since I am allergic to antibiotics, I only eat meat that I know has not been fed antibiotics, which in most cases means organic. I settle on falafel balls, which, despite being delicious, make my nose runny. I wonder if they have stretched the chick peas with wheat flour.

From where I sit in the restaurant, I can just see the corner of the parking lot where just one day before, I shelled out $15 for a “poulet nouveau” Sea Breeze Farm’s tongue-in-cheek appellation for their fresh chicken. That free-range bird is now stuffed with apples and shallots and trussed up in my oven, preparing itself for its premier on our dinner table tonight (with roasted potatoes and kale as backup singers). The farmer has had to raise his prices since the price of organic feed, like pretty much everything else, has skyrocketed. I was wondering if I should revert to the organic brand from California, but then I picked up the morning’s paper.

The culprit of the study in question is MRSA, which stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. As its mouth-filling name implies, it is a potentially fatal bacteria that is resistant to a specific family of antibiotics. While the government issues reassuring, it-isn’t-as-bad-as-it-sounds statements, Dr. Rebecca Goldburg, senior scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund, notes, "There are now more deaths in the USA from MRSA than from HIV-AIDS, but U.S. officials appear in denial about animal agriculture as a source of these deadly bacteria."

The study focuses on pork, so I expect that pork sales will decline, but they also say they will start looking at different types of farms to see whether free-range and organic producers are seeing the same rates of infection—which not so incidentally affect the people working on the farms. Those who made it to the end of the very long article learned that experts are warning that MRSA could also be in beef, chicken and lamb. But no one, and certainly not the USDA, is checking. Short of sending off to China for little meat-colored ribbon lapel pins or a benefit concert, there doesn’t seem to be much a body can do. Since my wardrobe doesn’t typically have lapels, I’ll just continue to follow my gaze and my heart to the farmer’s market, where the scrawny bird’s price tag doesn’t seem very high at all anymore.