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December 16, 2020 - January 3, 2021
Our culture codifies the rules of wise eating in an elaborate structure of taboos, rituals, recipes, manners, and culinary traditions that keep us from having to reenact the omnivore’s dilemma at every meal.
By replacing solar energy with fossil fuel, by raising millions of food animals in close confinement, by feeding those animals foods they never evolved to eat, and by feeding ourselves foods far more novel than we even realize, we are taking risks with our health and the health of the natural world that are unprecedented.
“What am I eating? And where in the world did it come from?”
definition of industrial food: Any food whose provenance is so complex or obscure that it requires expert help to ascertain.
For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn.
everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn.
So the mountain grows, from 4 billion bushels in 1970 to 10 billion bushels today. Moving that mountain of cheap corn—finding the people and animals to consume it, the cars to burn it, the new products to absorb it, and the nations to import it—has become the principal task of the industrial food system, since the supply of corn vastly exceeds the demand.
since the cow is by nature not a corn eater. But Nature abhors a surplus, and the corn must be consumed.
The ratio of feed to flesh in chicken, the most efficient animal by this measure, is two pounds of corn to one of meat, which is why chicken costs less than beef.)
The speed at which these animals will be slaughtered and processed—four hundred an hour at the plant where 534 will go—means that sooner or later some of the manure caked on these hides gets into the meat we eat. One of the bacteria that almost certainly resides in the manure I’m standing in is particularly lethal to humans.
I could follow the nitrogen runoff from that fertilizer all the way down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, adding its poison to an eight-thousand-square-mile zone so starved of oxygen nothing but algae can live in it.
In many ways breakfast cereal is the prototypical processed food: four cents’ worth of commodity corn (or some other equally cheap grain) transformed into four dollars’ worth of processed food. What an alchemy!
The problem is that Wall Street won’t tolerate such an anemic rate of growth.
two options if they hope to grow faster than the population: figure out how to get people to spend more money for the same three-quarters of a ton of food, or entice them to actually eat more than that.
Which is good news indeed for the hero of our story, for it happens that turning cheap corn into complex food systems is an excellent way to achieve both goals.
Our bodies are storing reserves of fat against a famine that never comes.
turns out to be a highly industrialized organic product, involving a choreography of thirty-one ingredients assembled from far-flung farms, laboratories, and processing plants scattered over a half-dozen states and two countries, and containing such mysteries of modern food technology as high-oleic safflower oil, guar and xanthan gum, soy lecithin, carrageenan, and “natural grill flavor.” Several of these ingredients are synthetic additives permitted under federal organic rules.
Ah, but what about the “free-range” lifestyle promised on the label? True, there’s a little door in the shed leading out to a narrow grassy yard. But the free-range story seems a bit of a stretch when you discover that the door remains firmly shut until the birds are at least five or six weeks old—for fear they’ll catch something outside—and the chickens are slaughtered only two weeks later.
Eating organic thus married the personal to the political. Which was why much more was at stake than a method of farming.
(In fact, the USDA was actively hostile to organic agriculture until recently, viewing it—quite rightly—as a critique of the industrialized agriculture the USDA was promoting.)
specifically to the three chemical nutrients Liebig highlighted as crucial to plant growth: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, or to use these elements’ initials from the periodic table, N-P-K.
The ethical implications of buying such a product are almost too numerous and knotty to sort out: There’s the expense, there’s the prodigious amounts of energy involved, the defiance of seasonality, and the whole question of whether the best soils in South America should be devoted to growing food for affluent and overfed North Americans. And yet you can also make a good argument that my purchase of organic asparagus from Argentina generates foreign exchange for a country desperately in need of it, and supports a level of care for that country’s land—farming without pesticides or chemical
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though the Earthbound greens, in their polyethylene bag, stayed crisp right up to the expiration date, a full eighteen days after leaving the field—no small technological feat.
But that does not mean those poisons are not making us sick: Remarkably little research has been done to assess the effects of regular exposure to the levels of organophosphate pesticide or growth hormone that the government deems “tolerable” in our foods. (One problem with these official tolerances is that they don’t adequately account for children’s exposure to pesticides, which, because of children’s size and eating habits, is much greater than adults’.)
So I can wait for that science to be done, or for our government to ban atrazine (as European governments have done), or I can act now on the presumption that food from which this chemical is absent is better for my son’s health than food that contains it.
Why in the world should organically grown blackberries or corn contain significantly more of these compounds?
The Davis authors hypothesize that plants being defended by man-made pesticides don’t need to work as hard to make their own polyphenol pesticides.
If the high price of my all-organic meal is weighed against the comparatively low price it exacted from the larger world, as it should be, it begins to look, at least in karmic terms, like a real bargain.
“You have just dined,” Emerson once wrote, “and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”
of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap.
Americans today spend less on food, as a percentage of disposable income, than any other industrialized nation, and probably less than any people in the history of the world. This suggests that there are many of us who could afford to spend more on food if we chose to.
“Eat your view!” takes work, however. To participate in a local food economy requires considerably more effort than shopping at the Whole Foods. You won’t find anything microwaveable at the farmer’s market or in your CSA box, and you won’t find a tomato in December.
perhaps most important, meat, eggs, and milk from pastured animals also contain higher levels of omega-3s, essential fatty acids created in the cells of green plants and algae that play an indispensable role in human health, and especially in the growth and health of neurons—brain cells.
(The process of hydrogenating oil also eliminates omega-3s.)
These days farmed salmon are being fed like feedlot cattle, on grain, with the predictable result that their omega-3 levels fall well below those of wild fish.
When chickens get to live like chickens, they’ll taste like chickens, too.
the rat minimizes the risk of the new by treating its digestive tract as a kind of laboratory. It nibbles a very little bit of the new food (assuming it is food) and then waits to see what happens.
The first bias predisposes us toward sweetness, a taste that signals a particularly rich source of carbohydrate energy in nature.
Our sense of taste’s second big bias predisposes us against bitter flavors, which is how many of the defensive toxins produced by plants happen to taste.
Cooking is often cited (along with tool making and a handful of other protohuman tricks) as evidence that the human omnivore entered a new kind of ecological niche in nature, one that some anthropologists have labeled “the cognitive niche.”
The French eat all sorts of supposedly unhealthy foods, but they do it according to a strict and stable set of rules: They eat small portions and don’t go back for seconds; they don’t snack; they seldom eat alone; and communal meals are long, leisurely affairs. In other words, the French culture of food successfully negotiates the omnivore’s dilemma, allowing the French to enjoy their meals without ruining their health.
It may be that our moral enlightenment has advanced to the point where the practice of eating animals—like our former practices of keeping slaves or treating women as inferior beings—can now be seen for the barbarity it is, a relic of an ignorant past that very soon will fill us with shame.
Meat comes from the grocery store, where it is cut and packaged to look as little like parts of animals as possible. (When was the last time you saw a butcher at work?) The disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in which there’s no reality check on the sentiment or the brutality;
“If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans for the same purpose?”
“The question is not Can they reason? Or Can they talk? But Can they suffer?”
But most domesticated animals can’t survive in the wild; in fact, without us eating them they wouldn’t exist at all!
But doesn’t the very fact that we could choose to forego meat for moral reasons point to a crucial difference between animals and humans, one that justifies our speciesism?
Animals are treated as machines—“production units”—incapable of feeling pain.
Every natural instinct of this hen is thwarted, leading to a range of behavioral “vices” that can include cannibalizing her cage mates and rubbing her breast against the wire mesh until it is completely bald and bleeding.
This is another example of the cultural contradictions of capitalism—the tendency over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society.
