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TechnoratiSeveral weeks ago, I attended a remarkable presentation by Raj Patel author of Stuffed & Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. Part of what was astounding was the number people who arrived, cramming themselves into a small bookstore -- literally from floor to ceiling, wall to wall -- to hear Patel expound on the challenges threatening the world's food supply. The audience represented every age and ethnic group. And I am not sure any were ready to hear what Patel had to say.
First, he launched into a guilt-inducing description of the process that brings us our chocolate bars. The living conditions of most of the farmers who grow the cocoa beans, and the poor wages they make for their hard work. The depletion of the soil, the profits of the middlemen, the inclusion of ingredients that "keep food fresh on our shelves for a millennium."
Believe me, there is no way to happily and innocently eat a Hershey Bar after his graphic description. And even those of us who felt superior because we only eat organically grown chocolate treats were not assuaged. Although the soil where organic beans are grown is more tenderly nurtured, and protected from pesticides and weed killers, many farmers are still on the losing end of the financial bargain and ingredients like soy lecithin are still used to smooth and preserve the candy.
In fact, soy itself, ubiquitous in so many food products, served as a prime example, for Patel, of the huge problems facing the food industry. Soy agriculture and production demonstrates "how something wonderful can be turned into a curse," by agribusiness, according to Patel.
Henry Ford, as it turns out was a soy buff. He wanted to grow cars out of soy, make suits out of soy, use soy in every facet of human life. And the soy industry Ford helped launch has insinuated itself in many aspects of our daily existence. In the process, soy agriculture has led to deforestation of the Amazon Rain Forest, drained aquifers (irrigation of soybean fields uses an inordinate amount of water) and virtually enslaved Brazilian farmers at the benefit of profiteers. Yikes.
And it is not just one particular crop, in one particular part of the world. The whole food system is sick. Control of seed banks, GMO (genetically modified) crops, the scores of steps food takes from field to table -- all have contributed to a relationship with food that is the opposite of nourishing for people on a global basis.
One of the ironies of modern agriculture and modern food processing, Patel says in his book, is that at the same time 800 million people on this planet are starving -- both for calories and nutrients -- one billion people are overweight -- which means they are getting ample calories, but not necessarily nutrients. "Global hunger and obesity are symptoms of the same problem," Patel writes in his compelling work, describing a food system that does not work for the majority of the world's population.
At the bookstore presentation, the vast majority of us in the audience had one crucial question on our collective minds: "What can we do to help, to make a difference, to help heal the food system?" Fortunately, Patel could delineate some of the key problems and possible solutions. He said several factors are currently driving the world food crisis: the price of oil; the diversion of food crops to bio-fuels; increased demand for meat (particularly in countries eager to adopt western ways of eating that are associated with increased wealth); poor harvests; and financial speculation fueled by World Bank policies in developing countries.
How can we, as well-off consumers, help change the equation? We can buy child-friendly/locust-friendly organic, shade-grown food thriving in healthy soil free of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. We can support fair trade, which pays farmers living wages and cuts out food system intermediaries by encouraging the purchase of food in its most unprocessed, raw state. Think farmers' markets, not frozen dinners and industrialized food products in boxes and bags.
Even though it is hard to imagine in our busy lives, he says food should not necessarily be convenient, it should be nourishing. Right now, "We are being made for our foods; rather than our foods being made for us," he told the crowd. Makes you pause, right?
One of the keys, he said is, raising children who "learn to speak up for food." Kids who feel connected to the source and value of what they eat. And just today, I witnessed the opposite of this approach. A young family -- mom, dad, and daughter -- purchased a lovely plate of French toast at the Little House Café. The French toast was made with healthy, organic ingredients and looked irresistible. But, as so often happens, the little girl couldn't manage to finish her breakfast.
The logical answer -- take the leftovers home for another yummy meal. Encouraging children to eat past the point of hunger is not healthy. So yay on that score. However, this family just dumped more than half the French toast in the garbage. Boo!
When I was growing up my mother told us to clean our plates because children in China were starving. Not really a good rationale; but there are children and adults around the world starving at this very moment, and we do need to teach our children to appreciate, not waste, the healthy food they have access to.
Patel told his appreciative audience that part of the answer to our food system's crisis is to raise new generations who really love food, and are willing to defend the sources and quality of our food. We need to reclaim our food culture from industry interests, so everyone on this planet can eat good, nutritious, safe, and satisfying food. Sounds good to me.
Noelle Robins is an Alameda writer.
©2008, Alameda Sun
9 Comments so far
Show AllTreefitz - that was inspiring. I would like more details.
I see teenagers take their little bit of pocket money after school and buy neon blue liquids to drink and packets of chips to eat. The drinks cost about 25 cents. Chips are cheap. It's like they are on their own with no parental or societal support.
Some of the causes for this pattern:
1. Lack of money - good drinks and food cost much more.
2. Lack of education about how to spend a food dollar
3. Little availability of fresh natural food in the vicinity of the school
4. A food industry that produces lots of empty and harmful foods. College educated "food engineers" paid to develop cheap and attractive items.
5. Legions of well paid advertising psychologists who study how to lure innocents to buy inferior food products (Psychologists have gone the way of accountants - now often disreputable as a profession.)
6. Youth culture corrupted by consumerism and image - kids consider it nerdy to carry food from home in a paper bag.
7. School lunches that feature unappetizing tiny deformed sour apples and such
8. Vending machines that sell junk in schools. Water fountains that do not work.
School education programs should include food and nutrition units - not only pyramid charts and such but practical strategies for getting good food. Gardening and shopping should be included. Ecology and social policy would interest teenagers. Maybe treefitz could come and speak!
A good nutrition program would have to be a bit counter-culture because our mainstream food situation is bizarre.
(Once again I am fantasizing about community things in the midst of so many global developments that seem to point to disaster for the earth and human life. I just bought the Patel book and will look for some strength there)
Tree Fitz___ I agree with much of what you say, but if a person cannot pass by the chips and tacos and doughnuts, it is their own fault, not the foods.
The same would apply to anyone smoking and drinking to excess. Is it not their own fault for using something that is not good for them? We tried Prohibition and it made things worse so I believe it is shortsighted to only blame the food products and the people that produce them.
There are plenty of good healthful foods available along with the junk food in the grocery stores. I grew up when there were very few items in the stores and certainly do not want to return to those conditions.
I wish I could hear Raj Patel talk about the food supply.
I have been a vegetarian off and on. I have known for a long, long time that it is not efficient to grow food (grain) to grow food (we grow grain to feed animals to eat the animals).
Being a localvore is not THE solution but it is something I can do.
I am learning to only eat 'real' food. For me, I define 'real' food as food that I buy fresh and raw. So much stuff sold in grocery stores for humans to eat is not nutritious, plus processed food is full of chemicals. If something can sit in the freezer aisle for many months, do you really want to put it into your one precious body?
I am learning that I don't need to eat much food, that lots of my former eating habits were habits that were slowly instilled in me by a corporate/consumer culture that sent me messages telling me I could be, what, happier and/or better if I bought the things advertised in the pretty ads?
I have lost one hundred pounds over the past two years. My secret? I only eat real, whole food. I buy fresh vegetables, organic dairy and eggs and, yes, some fish and a little meat. Not only have I lost weight, but I spend much, much less on food than I used to.
Sure, once in a blue moon, I'll have some ice cream -- processed food. Once in a great while, I'll buy a pastry -- I am a diabetic and I count my carbs for my health.
Recently, I got off a ferry on an island in Puget Sound and then I took a local island bus to my friend's home. It was evening rush hour, with many workers getting off the ferry and climbing onto the free buses. Dinner time. There were three young guys on that bus, twenty-somethings. They looked like they did some kind of physical labor, wearing rugged work clothes. Plus they looked like they got dirty in their jobs. They looked just fine, I'm not criticizing them, just describing that they looked like fit young men who worked using their bodies. Maybe construction?
But my point is that each of these young guys, who had just put in what sure looked like a day of hard work, were each munching on a bag of taco-flavored corn chips and drinking from plastic bottles of sugar-filled soft drinks.
Those guys were hungry. Those guys couldn't eat those chips fast enough, their hungry drove them on.
I felt maternal towards them. I wanted to take the taco chips and the sodas away from them and invite them to join me for some real food, a salad and some meat. I was heading to a friend's home so I wasn't in a position to invite strange young men over for supper. . . but I wanted to.
Those guys would have thought I was a nut job if I had tried to point out to them that a nine ounce bag of taco chips is not really food.
And those guys' bodies were not being properly nourished.
I know they might have eaten something else when they got off the bus, when they got home. . . . I believe that if those young men understood what real food is like, they would not have been wasting their money eating pretend food. And everyone eats like this nowadays.
Kernel suggests that the problem is not food but our sedentary lifestyle. I disagree. Quite a lot of people in this country think that a lot of the products sold in grocery stores constitute food. .. people think taco chips and frozen pizza are food.
We have so much work to do as a society. I feel overwhelmed by all that's wrong. When we will begin to put it all right?
Noelle___I agree wholeheartedly with your statement that children should be taught to take only what they need to eat and clean up their plstes. My wife and I were raised that way and also our children. We had to work on the grands however, as the inlaws were used to dumping all left overs down the garbage disposal with no thought whatsoever.
I do not believe that our food itself is the problem some seem to think, as people are living much longer now than our parents and Grandparents did. With a few exceptions, we have a very satisfactory food system in this country for people to choose from to suit one`s own taste. Most prepared types of foods have the fat content listed so anyone can avoid the bad kinds if they make the effort.
The main culprit is not the quality of food as much as the modern lifestyle that allows far too much sedentary activity. That problem will be hard to change, as younger people have become hooked on I-Pods, cell phones, computers, and many other gadgets, none of which require much exertion.
Making an effort to get people moving again with gardening and learning to prepare food will do much more good than trying to upset the whole agricultural system which is doing a great job of feeding this nation. If we still had the old system requiring much backbreaking labor for little return, we would not be producing even enough food for our own country, let alone all the starving people in the world.
RUTHK-As to tracking credit card purchases...I think they only way to combat this is to not use store shopper cards and to use cash.
We've tried to instruct our kids to eat until they are not hungry, NOT until they are full-sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. We also talk a lot about where the food comes from. My husband grew up on a dairy farm, and even though they are suburban kids, they know the basics of how to make dairy products. We grow a garden and they all know how to grow food and where it comes from. More schools need gardens. Change will come from the children
RUTH K: I am aware of (and upset by) everything you share in your post. As to food, one must add the myriad of ingredients that add to "shelf life," or the irradiation of meat at huge food chains. You know that commercial, "What's in YOUR wallet?" It should be "what's in your food?" Human life today is a sped up Darwinian experiment in survival of the fittest, and by that I mean those whose bodies can adapt to the substantial chemical cocktails they are being asked to process without any biological precedent.
Just as Thalydimide skipped a generation before delivering children with distorted limbs, I think some drugs being used irresponsibly today are going to yield genetic defects not in the present, but in terms of the "fruit" of the longer term genetic harvest.
RIGHT TO LIFE should be projected at these campaigns to adulterate human biolgy and genetics! The same rape of nature applies to animals and those plants, like soy, that are being genetically FITTED to meld WITH herbicides. I'm sure eating the herbicide hybrid HAS to be healthy. Not. But the legal system is now protecting profit obscenely over those it trespasses against. This whole paradigm shows that justice has come to protect offenders, while the innocent suffer. The axis has been lost... the center cannot hold; a great correction is in its beginnings. And the Stock market is only a fraction of its expression(s).
I grow more paranoid every day. The fact that a person is paranoid may be a mental disorder. It make also mean that someone is trying to do you in. I think it's the latter.
Monsanto has just bought another seed company. They want to control food staples; corn, wheat, rice, and now, sugar. The FDA will insist that Monsanto's genetically-modified foods are "substantially equivalent" to non GMO's. They will also insist the "Milk is milk" even if it contains bovine growth hormone. When organic farmers have their crops contaminated with pollen from GMOs, they end up being sued for illegally growing GMOs.
A bill pending in Canada (C-51) would make it illegal to sell dietary supplements without a doctor's prescription. Imagine going to jail because you buy a multi-vitamin or Vitamin C!. The nutients in our food depend on the soil in which it is grown. With depleted soil conditions, the nutrients decrease. Many of us need supplements. If a similar bill comes to this country, it will probably mean that health food stores will have to close and the availability of organic produce will diminish.
Just today on CNN, they were talking about credit card companies tracking all purchases made via credit cards. Your credit score not only on whether you pay your bills but on what and where you buy. To my mind, this is an invasion of privacy. They mentioned this in the program, but said that nothing could be done about it.
Warrantless surveillance has become commonplace. Everything we say or do seems to be monitored. The other day at the library I saw a book that looked interesting. It's title was "How to Overthrow the Government". My first thought was that, if I take out this book, the FBI will be knocking at my door.
We have been told that we need smaller government and more de-regulation. This seems to apply only to the big corporations and to the 10% richest people. For myself and others like me, I see us as factory farm animals that can be fed garbage and allowed to exist only as long as we are profitable to big pharma and big food and as long as we don't make waves.
Is this paranoia or reality?
Raj Patel together with Paul Roberts and mark Winne have written 3 great books about the current food situation. Sadly our society with its tendency to abdicate food responsibility to others has allowed the development of a very interrelated complex form of agribusiness.
The simple solutions of growing your own food or buying local are often touted as an alternative, but these writers and people like Stan Cox warn against the feel good complacency that being a locavore may engender.
However unless we start rebuilding a local food system by making choices, it will almost certainly get a lot worse, and when or if a major crisis happens there will be no alternative.
An apt metaphor may be having to rebuild a ship while it is sinking.
I grow food, my son helps and eats it, and we buy local as often as we can. And if nothing else I would recommend these steps to everyone.
We also need good alternatives, that can find broad support, to throw our weight behind and get of our backsides and do something.
this planet might be able to provide for need, but will never be able to provide for want...even as it is depleted entirely...can want be eliminated, and need be enough? but feed yourself, and starve the corporation...