This may spoil your appetite: a review of “The End of food”

The End of Food by Thomas F. Pawlick (Dewey call #: 338.19 Pawlick)

In the 1930s, Russian dictator Joseph Stalin decided that farms needed to be organized along a mass-production basis. The Kulaks, or rural proprietors, resisted and thus they became enemies of the Revolution. Stalin employed brute force: farmers were arrested & shot or exiled to Siberia; crops were confiscated with no compensation, or burned in the fields. These tactics led to a famine with a death toll in the millions. Worst of all, it created a brain drain of Russian farmers; those who had worked the land for generations and who understood the land & local & regional products were killed. “Before this one-man disaster ended, more than 10 million individual Russian farm people were killed (p. 161).” To this day, Russian agriculture has not recovered.

Over here, in our Republic of the United States, we don’t have a totalitarian regime. We do have multi-national corporations & the Chicago school of Economics model. Since World War II, individual, family-run farms have been on the decline while corporate factory farms have risen. Under the Nixon administration plans were made to restructure American agriculture under the economic theory of “comparative advantage”. As Pawlick says in the book, “The idea was, basically, to convert the countryside into a vast, mass-producing grain factory – and later, under succeeding presidents, into factories manufacturing tomatoes, oranges or whatever else.” That is the free-market equivalent of collectivism. Today, only 20 large corporations control US poultry production (p. 166).

Family farms aren’t the only ones suffering. The quality of the produce & the meats we eat is declining; as is the health of land that our food is grown on.

Did you know that veggies & fruits contain FEWER nutrients than they did 50 years ago? Veggies & fruits in North America (Canada included) have less Vitamin A, C, iron & calcium. Of course, sodium is on the rise, as is the amount of chemicals in them (more on that in a moment).

As an example, take the potato (p. 15-16), as published by the Toronto Globe & Mail in 2002. “…The average spud, has lost 100% of its Vitamin A, which is important for good eyesight; 57% of its vitamin C and iron, a key component of healthy blood; and 28% of its calcium, essential for building healthy bones & teeth. It also lost 50% of its riboflavin and 18% of its thiamine. Of the seven key nutrients measured, only niacin levels have increased…the story is similar for 25 fruits and vegetables that were analyzed…”

The numbers in the article were based on food tables from the Canadian government & echo numbers published by the USDA tables.

Further eroding the nutritional value, mass-market tomatoes are ripened in rooms with concentrated doses of ethylene, a.k.a etephon, (p. 102). “According to Mozafar’s survey, multiple studies have shown that ‘vine-ripened fruits are higher in ascorbic acid (vitamin C) than those that are artificially ripened …. The reason for the relatively higher ascorbic acid in the vine versus artificially ripened tomatoes may be due to differences in the rate of ascorbic acid synthesis (or accumulation) in the fruits ripened differently. (p. 103)”

Vitamin C is significantly decreasing in America’s tomatoes, broccoli, and other produce. Vitamin A is down 43.3 percent in tomatoes, by 30.5 percent in tomato juice. Deficiency of Vitamin A rich foods can lead to night blindness, disease-prone children, shortness of breath, malnutrition, and scaly lumps on skin. GAHHH!

Eating free-range and organic foods are better for humans. "Eggs from free-range hens contain up to 30 percent more vitamin E, 50 percent more folic acid, and 30 percent more vitamin B12 than factory eggs (p.119)."

While vitamins & nutrients are declining, toxic additives & chemicals are on the rise in our foods. For years, the media has reported on the amounts & effects of the mercury in our fish & rBGH (bovine growth hormones) in our dairy products.

But did you also know that meat packers & supermarkets have taken to adding a chemical cocktail of things into our meat & selling them (for higher prices, of course) as “enhanced meat”? This mix can include water, salt (not a good thing for those on a sodium free diet), phosphates, antioxidants, & other flavorings. More information on enhanced meat. For more about meat packers, read “Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser. I had to stop reading when I got to the meat packing section because the total disregard for their workers health & safety made me ill. It’s sad how how soulless some people are.

Then there are the pesticides in our food. A study “…analyzed samples from U.S. Food & Drug administration records and found that nearly half of the registered contaminates found in non-organic food samples were actually legally BANNED pesticides. ‘The 10 most contaminated foods were strawberries, bell peppers, spinach, cherries, peaches, cantaloupe, celery, apples, blackberries, and green peas.’” People who eat conventionally grown, non-organic foods, are at a higher risk of cancer & other deadly diseases.

The pesticide DDT has been banned in most industrialized countries. However, they are still finding traces of it in our food because the corporations that make it are still allowed to sell it. Some of our food is imported from countries where it’s still legal to use. Hopefully the usage is declining since the Stockholm Convention, ratified in 2001 and effective as of 17 May 2004, outlawed several persistent organic pollutants, and restricted the use of DDT to vector control. As of 2006, DDT continues to be used in other (primarily tropical) countries where mosquito-borne malaria and typhus are serious health problems. Use of DDT in public health to control mosquitoes is primarily done inside buildings and through inclusion in household products and selective spraying; this greatly reduces environmental damage compared to the earlier widespread use of DDT in agriculture (according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT).

Scientists haven’t really begun to study the effects on humans of the chemicals in our food; let alone, how those chemicals react to one another. Could the stuff in our food be reason we have rising rates of cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, & who knows what other diseases or illnesses? Who knows, maybe even some of Ben’s illness can be traced to chemicals in our food?

Interestingly some of the largest corporations that own factory farms are OIL and CHEMICAL Companies. Some of the big ones include: Cargill, Monsanto (a maker of a Agent Orange not to mention rBGH & several varieties of seeds), International Mineral & Chemical Corp, and Tenneco. They’ve got an economic imperative, “the bottom-line”, to use their own chemicals and seeds.

Many of the remaining smaller, non-corporate farms may have no say in how they farm their land. “Working land that may be heavily mortgaged, saddled with further debt from the purchase of machinery and inputs, they are often locked into ironbound contracts with food processors. The later provide them with the processors own proprietary seed varieties and may dictate everything from fertilizer, irrigation, and herbicide regimes to the time and method of harvest.”

This brings us to the term “proprietary seed varieties.” There are hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of different types of each veggie or fruit. Take the tomato. There are 5,500 kinds for home gardeners to choose from in the Seed Savers Exchange; but only 10 varieties are grown in California for mass marketing; the number is 11 in Florida; 15 for the whole of America. The corporate factory-farms will only grow the tomato(es) that meet these basic criteria (p. 10-11): yield (pounds/acre), uniformity of size/large size, uniformity of shape, firmness, resistance to disease, heat tolerance, uniformity in time of ripening (color).

Notice that the list does not include nutrition or, most important to my taste buds, taste. Trust me when I say that tomatoes & berries are better when you buy them from organic markets or farmers markets or you pick them yourself. We’ve been getting tomatoes from our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm this summer & they have the most wonderful scent, while the tomatoes from Safeway are scentless, tasteless & in many cases rock-solid.

Modern agricultural practices are having an effect not only on our bodies but also on the land. Here’s the quick and dirty lowdown, if you want to know more the book has great information.
In modern farming the goal is to maximize production (mustn’t forget the bottom-line), so row after row of the same plants are planted. Crops aren’t rotated and the fields aren’t allowed to remain sallow for a year after growing. Under traditional farming methods, the depleted nitrogen would be replaced by planting a row of beans; but today chemical fertilizers are used to replace the nitrogen. These chemicals are expensive so the farms must continue to plant the high-yielding crop that will give them the greatest return on investment. With the same thing being grown constantly, noxious insects, which might have been deterred or killed when the crops were changed on an annual basis, become a problem and need to be kept through the use of herbicides and pesticides.

Irrigation is another big issue. Water is a huge issue in the Western US. There are sometimes fights over the use of rivers and other waterways for farming. California has used up much of its water (they drained one of the largest freshwater lakes in the US for irrigation) and has to buy additional water from various states (including Oregon) to irrigate large tracts of arid land during the hot summer months.

There is some evidence that shows that over-watering can adversely affect the nutrient quality of crops (p. 104); there’s a certain level of water needed beyond that nutrients start to drop. Commercial farms must over-water to maintain their high-yield crops and the size of the fruits and vegetables. “He {Mozafar} cites numerous studies showing that rainy climate is known to decrease vitamin C in turnip greens, rose hips, onions, feijoa fruits and black currants. He adds that ‘experiments conducted under controlled conditions have shown that increased water supply to plants may reduce the ascorbic acid concentration in cabbage, cauliflower, celery, cucumber, muskmelon, radish, snap beans, and tomatoes.’”

The level of water also affects the salinity of soil (p. 105). “Soils contain various kinds of mineral salts, a portion of which are dissolved in soil water. As they draw moisture from the ground, crops separate the water from the salts, leaving the latter concentrated in the soil. If a soil is already slightly saline to begin with, irrigating it and then sowing crops will tend to draw the salts up toward the surface, and concentrate them. If the climate in the area is hot, water evaporation will make the problem worse.” Data on the effect of salinity on vitamin content is limited (p. 106) but it has been shown to reduce ascorbic acid in cabbage, tomato and okra and reduces carotene concentration in radish, cabbage, lettuce and tomato.

Evidence, while not conclusive, points that mass-production agricultural methods are not the best for growing nutritional foods.

I feel very lucky to live in a state that is 88% small farms & only 1% corporate owned farms (this figure comes from an Oregonian article I read in August. I’m curious to know if this # counts the Tree & grass farms we have; those are two of Oregon’s big exports. Of course, not all of that percentage is organic. I’m also lucky to live in an area where many neighborhoods & most cities have weekly farmers markets. For the last two years, we’ve split a share of a Community Sponsored Agriculture (CSA) farm with another friend during the summer. We’ve also got a small garden in our backyard, which I’m hoping to enlarge. So hopefully we’re getting more nutrients than if we were purchasing from the big supermarkets.

Thank God we don’t have to stop eating. There are ways to get more nutrients in our food. Pawlick includes 4 chapters of solutions. For those who don’t want to read the book (although I highly recommend it), here’s what you can do:

Support your local farmers - shop at farmers markets or join a CSA
Know what you are eating – ask questions, see where is it grown if you can, are they truly certified organic (some places fudge this a bit, maybe Jeremy can comment on this, he knows quite a bit about permaculture)
Grow your Own – that way you know what’s in it & it’s actually rather fun
Eat at restaurants that use local, organic produce

Good websites for more information:
Eatwild.com