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TechnoratiThe High Cost of Cheap Food
I used to find Flaming Hot Cheetos, bagged pickles, and the occasional plate of fried chicken in my classroom when I taught Senior English in Louisiana.
I allowed some of my students to eat at their desks after lunch. I had to; there were three pregnant seniors in my fourth period.
Shayna, who was in her third trimester during her last semester of high school, mostly snacked on packets of those horribly orange peanut butter crackers. Over half of my class was obese. After pizza or macaroni or hamburgers from the cafeteria, they'd fall asleep against their will, come to, apologize, then nod off again.
My students were kids who carried iPhones and wore brand-name shoes. Eighty percent were black, 98 percent were low-income. They'd been raised to look as good as they could, but eat as cheaply as possible.
For awhile, you can ignore poverty in schools, outbreaks of cookie dough E. coli, and the fact that 27 percent of our country's children are obese. But they're all connected — and these layers of bad news will eventually weigh one down.
I found this statistic a little harder to overlook: For the first time in 200 years, today's children have a lower life expectancy than their parents.
Unhealthy school lunches are certainly one reason. Here's another: Most of our food comes from huge factory farms that are government-subsidized to produce food products quickly but not nutritiously.
A partial list of Health and Human Service's recalled foods so far this summer include:
• Lewis Laboratories' chocolate flavor nutrition drink;
• C.F. Sauer gravies and sauce mixes;
• Publix Brand chocolate and vanilla whey protein;
• Malt-o-Meal Maple & Brown Sugar; and
• Three types of seasonings from Kroger.
There aren't any unfamiliar family names up there because smaller, organic farms abide by the rules of nature: You are stewards of your stock; you allow the soil to regenerate; and you don't add dry milk and MSG to everything, then recall it a month later. You learn the names of the plants you're eating, and you connect a chicken sandwich to a living thing with feathers — something the fifth- grade students I worked with couldn't do. The bigger farms are the ones responsible for the litany of gone-wrong products.
The most recent "good news" is that the FDA is pushing for "preventative process controls" through the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 (HR 875) and the Food Safety Enhancement Act (HR 2749), in order "to protect the public health by preventing food-borne illness and ensuring the safety of food." Problem is, the process controls the government will deem as necessary will likely be too expensive for small organic farmers who are doing more to keep this country healthy than the huge agribusiness companies (Tyson, Sedexho, Hormel) who can buy bigger freezers and continue to sell nicely wrapped crap.
What the passing of HR 875 and 2749 could mean is a loss of organic, small-farm options and a reduction of both the shopper's autonomy and the good things that are happening in the food world today.
Endangered are farmers' markets, Community Supported Agriculture, and programs like the Farm to Cafeteria initiative, which fills cafeterias with fresh heads of lettuce and teaches kids that accountability can mean nurturing little green lives. These programs banish the resentment often extended toward the gourmet, neo-hippie organic movement. Supplying cafeterias with local organic food isn't fancy; it's cheaper than skipping lunch. In the long run, our tax dollars wouldn't subsidize the petroleum that keep factories surging, trucks transporting our tomatoes, and our health insurance bills skyrocketing.
In the long run, I would like for Shayna's little girl to have a banana when she's hungry in the afternoon and dirty fingernails from digging in a garden, not a chin covered in garish orange crumbs.
Are these aspirations likely? One in three children today will develop Type 2 diabetes (one in two if they're black or Hispanic). It's partly because we aren't eating diversified foods anymore, and the FDA's new plans to protect factory farms will ensure that we continue to eat a fairly homogenized diet of refined sugars.
According to Vandana Shiva, an Indian crop ecologist quoted in Barbara Kingsolver's book "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," over the course of history, humans have consumed over 80,000 plant species. That number has now been reduced to eight species, with a continuous honing in on modified canola, corn and soy.
When Kingsolver wrote the book in 2007, only six companies controlled 98 percent of the world's seed sales (Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, Mitsui, Aventis, and Dow), and they continue to desecrate land. Juggernauts like Monsanto send 330 small farm operators off their land a week.
In a nutshell, government regulations will soon favor genetically modified (or GMO) seeds over organic seeds, and organic seeds might eventually become illegal.
Hand-planted kale and preservative-less poultry might be things of the past. The FDA says requiring eggs to be kept at 45 degrees will make us healthier, but I've owned chickens, and their eggs are like silk when it's 60 and sunny.
The standard that food providers should be held to is purity of process and intent. We don't need to add bad things to our food. Agribusiness doesn't promote food safety, it swells with immoral shortcuts (a thousand chickens in a bedroom- sized space, soil made prematurely infertile, etc.).
What we need to do is take a good, hard look at what "safe" means.
Take a garden. Plant what grows best in your sun. Water the leaves, the roots. Walk through your rows. (If you don't have a yard, that's what urban gardens are for.)
Now take another garden. Grow it long and wide, cutting away the ecosystems along its edges. Decimate the birds and the bugs. Spray it with regulatory chemicals to ward off the changes provided by the wind and the rain, the nutrient highways for our food.
Which one would you call "safe"?
I tried to teach my kids how to write, but I also told them what I'd learned: that an adult needs eight hours of sleep, that homemade bread and hand-written letters are second to none. That, as Annie Dillard said, "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our years."
On a more human level, the current statistics mean that less of our kids' days are spent learning, whisk in hand, how their grandma's wrist turned yolks in a bowl. We are unaccustomed to bugs in our lettuce, fish with heads, berries covered in the harvest's dust.
The situation here is honest food; the deeper story is our respect for human life. Lose the first, and you lose the second, too.
I might not have much to hand down to my kids (when I have them). But I do have a recipe for sweet potato bread and a dad whose knees are muddy all summer long from gardening. I'd like to give my children shiny vegetables, basil that leans into the sun, and teach them how to smell a crust that's done. If the worsening economy means our kids might inherit less, then we should be giving them longer lives to live.
55 Comments so far
Show AllA sign at the local diner says it all: CHEAP FOOD IS NOT GOOD AND GOOD FOOD IS NOT CHEAP! Invest a little and watch your dividends grow. Keep laffing Garfield; it's all you have.
PS Be sure to read the post written by "Merry" and the letter I received from our rep Chellie as well. I think it will be encouraging to all to actually see that even if it only happens once in a blue moon, our efforts do sometimes make for change.
To those of you who garden, you may want to bring this up at your group, if you have one. If not, you may find this a good time to join an on-line group in your area.
We discussed HR 875 a few months ago at my gardening group. Our new state representative Chellie Pingree was a co-sponsor, but she actually withdrew her name after getting calls from her constituents. She spoke with our state ag group, MOFGA (Maine Organic Farming and Gardening Organization), and realized that it would not be in the best interests of our country to pass this bill. Others may wish to do something similar in their state since their reps may not really understand the bill very well either.
If you want some good talking points, you can read MOFGA's position statement here:
http://www.meetup.com/portlandpermaculture/messages/boards/thread/6547075/0#26285949
I am currently working at the summer camp my town offers to children ages 4-14. It costs $25 for the entire summer and includes a "healthy and nutritious" breakfast and lunch.I work at a site with 6-10 year-olds, and it is astonishing to see how overweight many of these children are. (I think it is also important to note that this is an urban area- about 90% of these children are Black or Hispanic.) We have six-year-old girls who waddle. For breakfast, we give them boxes that usually contain a cereal (generally Trix, Frosted Mini Wheats, Frosted Flakes, etc.), a juice box, a milk and a snack (goldfish, graham crackers,etc.). Lunch is usually a variation on mystery meat sandwiches, some kind of fruit, and usually a snack of some sort. These foods are the last things these kids need. Coated in sugar, usually all over-processed and factory made, these are the foods that have made them overweight in the first place. It's such a struggle, because for quite a few of these kids it is the only time they eat. From what I understand, this is a government-sponsored breakfast and lunch program. For all this talk about health-care reform and the war on obesity, it seems like the government is doing more to sponsor obesity than help cure or prevent it.
this is a long movie. it is well worth watching if you havent seen it.
The World According to Monsanto - A documentary that Americans won't ever see
The World According to Monsanto, part 1 of 10:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_OJcPKEYDE
Yes, it's important to spread the word about it. Tell everyone to watch it on YouTube!
I'll keep on gardening organically, saving and planting heirloom seeds until the day I die. Nobody will take that away from me. If gardening is outlawed, I'll become an outlaw, and will defend my garden with my life, if necessary. I refuse to let any soul-less corporate giant force-feed me their death-culture poison.
Grow yer own, and keep yer tools sharp! Arrrrrgh!
I remember being public schools, and the so-called "healthy food" was garbage that wasn't fit for stray animals. And they used to wonder why kids crowded around the vending machine when one was installed or brought their own food from home, or played with the food they were served.
Christ, I used to skip lunch half the time because the food was so bad and would just eat when I came home. Then my stomach would be growling the rest of the day. Some kids didn't have a grandma to visit on the way home from school for a sandwich, or when they do come home, find an empty pantry.
Healthy food needs to be GOOD food as well, or else kids and adults won't touch it. And there's no reason why it can't taste good.
Hell they could tie it in to food service training. If kids want to be on that track, have trained chefs teach kids how to prepare and serve food. They can develop menus and cook for their peers.
"Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control food and you control the people." Henry Kissinger, 1970
For an in-depth look at what Kissinger obviously had in mind and how to bring it about, check out William Engdahl's Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation
A couple of other points: I noticed a mention of sea salt and it reminded me that most people get their very necessary intake of iodine from fortified table salt. If you are a regular sea salt user, please keep this in mind. The other point: we talk here of potential poisons entering our mouths. Keep in mind what you breath. Keep in mind what you put on your skin. Some parts of your body such as forehead and groin, absorb chemicals so readily, that it is virtually the same as swallowing them.
The real issue is how to get decent healthy food at a fair and reasonable price. For our family of 4 food is the single most expensive item on our family budget.
I appreciate the need for organic or nearly organic food grown locally, but still see a need for attention paid to food safety. Organic food is not always good for you. E.coli lives on organic food as well as in Tyson chicken. Sea salt is still primarily sodium and an excess of that substance does cause high blood pressure in some people. An excess of unfermented soy does cause problems, organic or not.
The point is that food safety has to be practiced by all producers. There must be standards and they must be upheld. I would like to see someone come up with enforceable rules which do not hamstring small time growers. Certainly the country can come up with guidelines that food producers must follow as well as appropriate warnings that would alert purchasers to potential problems. The goal is to inform people and producers while allowing small farmers to continue growing food for all.
This article brings back painful memories of my younger days when I used to get so addicted to all the junk out there and even skip eating vegetables and local produce just because it wasn't as seductive. In addition to being fat, I became depressed and would even lose my mind and eat madly just to think I'd get out of it. After I moved to St Louis a few years ago, my life style changed and I thinned down after realizing that to be able to walk fast and not run out of breath, I had to overcome my addiction to meat and junk food. I already have so many regrets about not supporting my local small farmers and farmers markets when they existed in my parents' small town. I can only thank my stars that I had eaten better in the last few years or I don't know if I'd even be alive today. I wish the young students in this article lots of luck and hope they won't make the same mistakes I used to make.
Eating more junk food in the hopes of avoiding depression will generally only plunge you more into it. One minute, it tastes so good but the next hour it seriously affects your metabolism and then the brain cells. You're one lucky girl who pulled out. Most people aren't as lucky to snap out of it.
Bennett Miller
Shreveport, LA
One of the wonders of the human body is that it begins to repair itself immediately once a person stops abusing it.
I also spent much of my life on bad diets and worse habits. About sixteen years ago, I came to understand the basics of nutrition, both how little food we need to surive (if it's good food) and the harm that bad foods do to us.
Today, I'm easily the healthiest and most active among my brothers and sisters. While most people my age are taking handfuls of medications for one ailment or another, I take only vitamins and an occasional acetaminophen.
q
"About sixteen years ago, I came to understand the basics of nutrition, both *how little food we need to surive (if it's good food)* and the harm that bad foods do to us."
Wouldn't ya know, I had just started reading up on that fact. On how you don't really need very many calories to be healthy as long as you're getting enough nutrition. It seems really interesting. Do share stories or info.
"One of the wonders of the human body is that it begins to repair itself immediately once a person stops abusing it."
Sometimes it's easy but other times it isn't. One thing that can happen though is people can lessen their intake of bad foods over time. That to me is a real winner compared to taking crash diet gimmicks and then regaining the weight all over again.
Bennett Miller
Shreveport, LA
Yes, I believe that too. But even more to the point, everyday we are bombarded by umpteen assorted weird chemicals, in the air, in our food, applied to our skin, etc. But a healthy diet, exercise, and intelligent care dealing with chemical and pollutant dangers, generally leads to good things.
And allowing only a few companies to control the world's seed supply will lead only to bad things.
q
Any time a monopoly exists, trouble will follow. Whether it is a single company or a few acting in collusion, we must necessarily raise an uproar. Changes in patent law are a great starting point.
This is a fine article, but the little scare tactic of "organic seeds might eventually become illegal," is silly and over the top. Personally, I feel bad for anyone who doesn't either have a fine garden of their own or easy access to a quality farmer's market. We have wonderful vegetables including the likes of edible pea pods and Bright Lights Swiss Chard, beautiful flowers, and amazing herbs including 2 of my favorites, basil and french tarragon. A recent story in our local paper noted one farmer who planted the "weed" purslane. I had always considered it a great nuisance. He said it was tasty and high in omega3. I put it on my pizza. It was wonderful. I put it in my salad. Again, excellent.
See Monsanto's successful suit of canola farmers in Canada when roundup-ready canola that Monsanto had sold to some farmers crossed access roads and hybridized the crops of farmers that had not purchased the product.
The farmers had to pay prohibitive fines to Monsanto. How could one tell which plants had been hybrid? One had to spray the field with Roundup: the plants that survived, one could not use.
That may not make the seeds themselves illegal, but it certainly bars planting them.
Can you please cite this suit?
Percy Schmeiser in the only case I know that went to the Supreme Court of Canada did not have to make any payment.
Percy Schmeiser didn't finally win through appeals until after years of court battles that ruined him financially. Monsanto is still trespassing on people's fields in search of their patented genes in the crops of farmers who never had any Monsanto contracts or purchases, still releasing its rabid team of 70 permanently retained lawyers on innocent people, still ruining farmers, even though Monsanto has admitted that they cannot control the pollen drift from GMO fields. As Monsanto has invaded Mexico, they've had to make public promises not to sue people for having Monsanto genes in their fields when they never bought the seed, because they found that was the number one objection of Mexican farmers to Monsanto's agribusiness.
Greg R,
Where did your pizza dough grain come from? Where did the other ingredients in your salad and the other things you ate with them and the things you ate the day before and the things you ate day after come from? Where did your seeds come from?
I'm all for organic farming and gardening, seed-saving and exchange, permaculture and urban food production and hope that those will become huge forces acting to save us in the face of climate catastrophe, constitutional crisis, and corporate power and ownership of government.
But E.F. Schumacher's Law of the Disappearing Middle, and the ability of our incredibly wealthy society to ignore, drown out, buy off and wear down dissent rather than use violence against it mean "becoming illegal" isn't the most likely course for organics. (Although with HR 2749, 814, 759 and 875 and S 425 chemical agriculture corporations are certainly attempting to use the law and disaster capitalism to speed the death of organics and scapegoat anyone and everything but themselves). More likely, organic food, fiber, medicine and lives will simply become harder and harder and scarcer and scarcer until it goes the way of slash and burn agriculture unless we protect our rights.
We are something like 70% urban now in the US. Even with marvelous creativity and hard work all city folks' food is extremely unlikely to be produced in the cities. I'm gald you liked your salad and pizza and can take joy in growing it. I do too. But it's not enough. There is also a huge political struggle going on now over the vast majority of food supplies for the world, and to think we can go on hoeing our own gardens, ignore politics and everything will be allright is naive.
Anyone familiar with Monsanto's tactics knows that the notion of illegal organic seed and even illegal private home gardens is not at all over the top, but scarily within the realm of possibility.
I'll show Montana hospitality by serving a tall glass of ice cold roundup lemonade to any Monsanto goon that dares set foot on my property!
It is not over the top that organic seeds might become illegal.
One of Bremmer's famous rules in Iraq was to force Monsanto terminator seeds on the Iraqi people. And that is just a prototype for what is in store for us.
And don't forget about the farmers who must destroy their seeds because Monsanto is so careless with their GE seeds that the responsible farmer's crops are contaminated with Monsanto's "intellectual property". In our upside down world, the farmer has to destroy their own seeds rather than have Monsanto held accountable for its pollution of the gene bank.
Just wait until Monsanto comes and forces your garden to be burned because some pollen containing some of their patented genes have blown onto your property. When you eat your tomatoes, you are STEALING from Monsanto and you must be punished for your CRIME.
"It is not over the top that organic seeds might become illegal."
The Saskatchewan Organic Agriculture farmers are fighting back through their Protection Fund. Unfortunately they were denied class action status to sue Monsanto for compensation for losses resulting from the contamination of certified organic fields and crops by genetically modified canola. The issue of corporate liability for genetic contamination remains unresolved.
A US appeals court recently denied Monsanto's appeal to introduce GM alfalfa until the USDA completes an environmental impact statement.
The problem is not genetic modification per se but the way the chemical companies have set it up to use their chemicals for command and control, as nedlud remarked. Engineering chemical resistance is trivial and self serving. Remember the old days of GM when it was promised that the genetic modifications would never escape?
However there are there are good reasons for genetic modification. World wheat will be at risk when the Ug99 strain of stem rust arrives in Europe and the Americas. I understand the search for resistance is ongoing using standard breeding techniques, but an identified resistance gene could be more rapidly introduced using standard molecular genetic engineering.
I'm no Monsanto lover, but I'll stick to worrying about unnecessary war, Global Warming and other assorted policies that I am convinced are wrong-headed. I'll let you worry about someone's garden possibly getting burned.
Here is a link to what they are talking about:
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m47991&hd=&size=1&l=e
You better go back and read those policies. They're not kidding.
Bennett Miller
Shreveport, LA
I think that it's wonderful that you have your own garden and appreciate the value of properly grown vegetables. However, your discussion of the delights of fresh greens has little or nothing to do with the author's claim about the predominance of GM seeds in commercial agriculture, a claim which she substantiates with specifics.
The truth is not a scare tactic and I have to wonder about your motivation for scoffing at the facts that she presents.
q
There's lots of gm in corn and soy. I should know. I plant both. Perhaps wheat is next. Whether this is good or bad, I do not know. But c'mon, making organic seed illegal is such a silly far-fetched idea, that it's purposeless to mention it unless you're going for a paranoid, knee-jerk reaction.
Greg R~
I told quickstepper once to 'connect the dots' and he responded. You seem less able.
'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his NOT understanding it.'
The above is a quote generally associated with Upton Sinclair, and reflects VERY accurately, how the rise of the global corporate monolith to power was so easily accomplished. Simple hiring and firing. Same thing happened out on the farm. Now there is no freedom to be had anywhere. We have a BIG fight on our hands, if we're to get it back. A BIG FIGHT.
GMO's are not good, even if they weren't bad for you physically--which they ARE, by the way. They are a weapon used by corporations to consolidate and control. Too bad your little view of things can't comprehend this.
Thankfully, others can.
I hope you got a decent shower the other day. Most of it missed us, and we're kinda dry, but not that bad. I've never seen anything that I would consider anywhere near definitive proof that gm is bad, but I certainly understand that it is possible. Most crop farmers are, like me, using this technology, because not using it makes life more difficult for the farmer in a number of ways. I assume you do not totally appreciate all the difficulties this adds, since you are mainly dairy. Your quote, "Now there is no freedom to be had anywhere," reminds me of similar quotes I've read recently in discussions with right-wingers (mostly farmers) on another web site. They say socialism is roaring in and destroying our freedoms and that big government will be the end of America. Americans are concerned about millions of things: some important, some not, and most in a big, muddled middle where ideas and opinions gestate and hopefully the best is born, but of course money perverts most everything.
Got 3/4 of an inch. It was helpful, but it has been another bad year weather-wise here in west central Mn.
You make me laugh, Greg, with your 'safe' thinking. I know you are doing your best, in that regard. Comparing me to idiots though, is not accurate and not helpful, except to those supposedly 'safe' dimensions in which you, seeking comfort, try to reside.
The world is changing and we are caught in its web.
PARADIGM SHIFT.
Sorry, I didn't mean to compare you to "idiots." Some of those right-wingers I spoke of do seem like idiots, but some are clearly not, they simply come at things from a different (and I think very wrong-headed) perspective. Many of them are surprisingly paranoid that the government is out to get them. They take it very personally. One fellow keeps a loaded shotgun under his bed. I felt compelled to caution him that such a scenario could lead to disaster.
Are you by any chance, an 'eldest son'?
You display a strong need to placate and to pacify; to moderate and to disarm.
Sometimes that works and is needed and sometimes it represents a personal compulsion.
When people operate merely under personal compulsion, they are operating blind.
This article seems to ramble without focus. Yes, cheap food is bad. Yes, we need more small organic farms. Yes, the chemical companies control agriculture.
One answer: Get rid of CAFOs
And let's not forget for one minute it has been our gov't that has subsidized these atrocities with our tax dollars.
The author discussed that in the article.
Bennett Miller
Shreveport, LA
I found the article quite cogent, relating the continuing spread of bad diet in our country to the endangerment of community based farming.
"Get rid of CAFOs"
No doubt about it. Most of the processed foods come from CAFOs and even vegetarians aren't immune to this.
How do you figure?
Where do most of the vegan food products come from? It's all processed and CAFOs pretty much do most of it.
Jenny, I get you, but I think you're confusing CAFO with chemical monoculture. CAFO stands for Confined or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, in which animals are locked up in pens to eat all day and wallow in their own filth, as opposed to being in pasture or in a healthy combination of barn and pasture. In the case of cows, the steady diet of corn corn corn makes them sick, gives them gas and diarrhea. When you drive near a CAFO the smell will nearly choke you. At the Smithfield plant in Mexico, where people suspect H1N1 developed, it's said that four Yankee stadiums full of manure are produced each year. There are what they call manure lagoons there, covered by clouds of flies.
I understand what you're saying about vegetarianism and big agribusiness. Most industrial scale organic farms are either cheating on organic processes, or just hoping for the best and heading toward crop disasters.
True organic farming means feeding and building up the soil, companion planting to deter crop pests, to attract beneficial pests, to buffer weather damage, and to have more food per acre rather than increased yield per crop.
>>When Kingsolver wrote the book in 2007, only six companies controlled 98 percent of the world's seed sales (Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, Mitsui, Aventis, and Dow), and they continue to desecrate land. Juggernauts like Monsanto send 330 small farm operators off their land a week.
I could not help but notice how many of the companies that now control our FOOD supply , are companies that had their history in producing CHEMICALS.
Much of the genetic engineering of the seed stocks is to make them compatible with pesticides that these companies manufacture. Most of the corn planted here in the Midwest is “Round-up Ready” or has been altered so that it grows its own pesticides.
What a silly article ! I eat plenty of cheap foods everyday and I'm doing fine. Big government has no business regulating our food and should get out of the way ! And another thing. The article talks about pregnancy when that wasn't necessary. Maybe if those girls would spend more time eating, sleeping, and watching more cool television instead of meddling with boys, they wouldn't be getting into teen pregnancy trouble. Now if you'll excuse me, I gotta enjoy my two plates of meat loaf and some Dr. Pepper ! MMMMMMMMMM !!! MORE FOOD !! MORE TAX CUTS !!
"Big government has no business regulating our food and should get out of the way!"
Big government does the most harm by subsidizing chemical agribusiness. Chemical agribusiness will never decline those subsidies. They'd see that as money left on the table. Subsidies free them to take over the world's agricultural fields and put organic and sustainable farms out of business with predatory food pricing.
If LG were to not eat all the junk he loudly prides himself in eating, then perhaps he'd learn something. Sadly, the most rightwing states in the union are the worst in obesity. Coincidence? I think not.
Bennett Miller
Shreveport, LA
If you are past 40 and still eating like you were 16 and are not sick then you are a rare beast and more power to you.
If you are under 40 you might have some unpleasant medical adventures ahead.
Cassandra, Laffing Garfield is a troll. Most of us ignore him.
q
Excellent writing, excellent work.
Everyday people in mainstream places like stores and offices need to see thinking such as this.
i'll post this at my place of work later today. Right now i'll check the chickens for eggs, and water the basil starts...