The one issue food activists should focus on

President Obama hasn’t talked much about antibiotics use on the farm. Nor has the first lady, who clearly knows that it is less politically risky to advise families to eat more fruits and vegetables than to support policies that could raise the price of meat. But the administration appears interested in change. In 2012, the FDA issued draft guidance that asked the pharmaceutical industry to change labeling and marketing practices so that antibiotics are used only to treat sick animals. It was the first related action the FDA has taken since it first noted the dangers of adding antibiotics to animal feed 34 years ago. Without some push from inside the administration, political watchers say, the agency probably would have continued to stay mum.

But the FDA guidelines don’t go far enough. They allow plenty of wiggle room about what constitutes an appropriate use of antibiotics for disease prevention. And the guidelines are voluntary. ­Although there is an implicit threat of regulation in the agency’s position, pharmaceutical companies could choose to ignore them.

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Luckily for food-reform activists, there is a quicker way to get antibiotics off the farm: a bill called the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act, or PAMTA. Sponsored by Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) and Sen. ­Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), it would require farmers to phase out the use of common antibiotics for growth promotion and disease prevention while allowing their use in the treatment of sick animals. The bill has been introduced in every session since 2007. But it has gone nowhere because the powerful meat and pharmaceutical industries have many friends on both sides of the aisle in Congress.

Slaughter plans to re-introduce the bill in the new session of Congress, and food reformers should support its passage. That means doing the usual things, such as writing letters to members of Congress and asking them to co-sign the bill, and supporting efforts like the Pew Campaign and Keep Antibiotics Working, a coalition of consumer, environmental and agricultural advocacy groups. But it also means that food-reform groups must develop alliances with powerful and, frankly, more experienced lobbies that hold greater sway on the Hill. In this case, that means forging relationships with health insurers, which will suffer mightily if America sacrifices the power of antibiotics for cheap meat.

“The food movement needs to make alliances. One is with the health-insurance industry,” says Pollan. “It’s the only way to make change.”

Over the past decade, the food movement, if you can call it a movement, has successfully made food an “issue.” But its solution, for the most part, has been to support an alternative food chain — critics allege mostly for its mostly elite members — rather than remaking the food chain that feeds millions, indeed most, Americans.

As Hauter, of Food and Water Watch, likes to say, we just can’t shop our way out of this. Only smart politics will yield smarter food.

Here’s to cleaner meat in 2013.

Black, a former Food section staffer now based in Brooklyn, writes Smarter Food monthly. Follow her on Twitter: @jane_black.

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