Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Heath and Our Food (17 page)

Fermentation produces a drink with a maximum alcohol content of only about 13%, but usually it is much less. By about 2,800 years ago, the Chinese had worked out a method to make the alcohol content much stronger—distillation. Around the same time, the Javanese discovered how to distill a potion they call “arrack” from fermented sugar cane and rice. The Greeks and Romans also made crude distilled products. However, it took the Arab alchemists in the 8th century to develop the equipment and techniques to put distillation on a predictable, economic, and palatable footing. By the late Middle Ages, distilled spirits were widespread in Europe. The beverages could now have an alcohol content ranging up to 80%. (Nowadays, most governments restrict the alcohol content to 45% maximum.) In the 19th century, Western entrepreneurs industrialized the production of spirits and actively sold to global markets. In this way, Scottish whisky, Dutch gin, English rum, French brandy, American bourbon, and Russian vodka beat out local brews to become world brands. Consumption of spirits has declined in America from 1.8 gallons per person per year in 1970 to 1.1 gallons annually in 2002. (Again, these figures cover the whole population, not just those of drinking age.)

Back in the Middle Ages, monks were experimenting with making alcoholic “elixirs” designed for medicinal purposes, with closely guarded recipes using fruits, sugar, herbs, and spices. We know these elixirs today as “liqueurs.” Benedictine was among the first liqueurs in 1510. Chartreuse came in 1607 and was swiftly followed by Cointreau, Grand Marnier, Curacao, and many more. They have an alcohol content ranging from 25% to 60%.

Tea and Coffee

Earlier, we mentioned heated water and infused herbs—one of them, tea, found by the Chinese around 350 b.c., has come to dominate the market. But tea did not come to Europe until the English East India company, trading with the secretive Chinese in the 1660s, introduced tea leaves to London's coffee houses. This ushered in the picturesque age of the famous sailing clippers: these graceful, high-speed ships raced across the oceans to be the first with their precious cargo in the capitals of Europe. However, for almost two more centuries, no European knew what a tea plant looked like. Then, in 1827, a young Dutch tea taster, J.I.L.L. Jacobson, risked his life to penetrate China’s forbidden tea gardens and bring back tea seeds to cultivate the tea plant in the Dutch East Indies. In 1823, coincidentally, a variety of tea had been discovered growing wild in Assam, India. Under British government encouragement, tea plantations were developed using plants from both Assam and China, and India became a major producer and consumer of tea. Most tea in the world today is so-called “black tea”: it comes from the same plant as green tea, just the drying and fermentation process is different. Annual tea consumption in U.S. is not as high as in other countries and has been stable since 1970 at around 7 gallons per person.

Coffee rivals tea in worldwide consumption. It is thought to have its birthplace in southern Ethiopia and to take its name from the province of Kaffa. It was as recently as the 15th century that the plant was discovered and transplanted to southern Arabia. From there, it swiftly became popular all over the Arab world. By the early 1600s, major European cities could boast of their coffeehouses, which became centers of political, social, literary, and eventually business influence. By the late 1600s, coffeehouses became popular in North American cities such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Annual consumption of coffee has been falling in the U.S. in recent times, from 33.4 gallons per person in 1970 to 22 gallons in 2002.

Cocoa

Cocoa has its origins in Central America, where the Maya and Aztecs held it in great esteem. At the court of Montezuma, the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortes was served a bitter cocoa-bean drink. He brought the bean to Europe, where the cocoa drink was sweetened, flavored with cinnamon and vanilla, and served hot. The beverage remained a Spanish secret for almost 100 years. In 1657, a Frenchman opened a shop in London, at which solid chocolate for making the beverage could be purchased at 15 shillings a pound. At this price. only the wealthy could afford to drink it, and fashionable chocolate houses appeared in London, Amsterdam, and other European capitals. It was not until the mid-19th century that cocoa became affordable for all levels of society. Today, “chocolate drink” powders that have only a small percentage of cocoa adulterated with sweetener, fillers, and artificial flavors, dominate the market for cocoa.

Soft Drinks

The first marketed soft drinks appeared in 17th-century France as a mixture of water and lemon juice, sweetened with honey. But the race was on to carbonate water—the idea was to produce cheap versions of naturally occurring health spa mineral waters. In 1772, the English scientist Joseph Priestley demonstrated a small carbonating apparatus to the College of Physicians in London. For this invention, he is nicknamed “the father of the soft drinks industry.” Using Priestley’s apparatus, Thomas Henry, an apothecary in Manchester, England, produced the first commercial quantities of carbonated water. Jacob Schweppe, a jeweler in Geneva, read Priestley’s papers and, by 1794, was selling highly carbonated waters to his friends. He added other mineral salts and flavors, such as ginger, lemon, and quinine (to make tonic water). Schweppe moved to London and built a worldwide soft drinks empire.

In 1886, Dr. John Pemberton, an Atlanta chemist, developed what he called an “esteemed brain tonic and intellectual beverage, a cure for all nervous affections, sick headache, neuralgia, hysteria, and melancholy.” Pemberton’s product contained carbonated water, sugar syrup, cocaine from coca leaves, caffeine from kola nuts, and other secret flavors. It was later marketed under a telling name, Coca-Cola. Because Pemberton was ill, he sold two-thirds of his business in 1888 to cover expenses. He died later that year, never knowing how successful the product would become. Asa Candler, an Atlanta druggist, bought the entire business in 1891 for $2,300. The Coca-Cola company removed the cocaine by 1929. Even so, consumption has soared. Americans in 1940 consumed an average of one 6.5 ounce bottle per week, or 2.6 gallons per year.
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This has increased ten times to 25.8 gallons per person for the year 2003. Another carbonated cola beverage has been around almost as long—Pepsi Cola; they sell 22.0 gallons per person annually. Thus, consumption of just these two beverages combined is nearly 48 gallons per person per year, or over a pint a day. Other carbonated soft drinks account for a further 7 gallons per year.

Milk

We examined milk in the Milk Group, but here we look at it as a beverage. Milk in its raw form can be dangerously contaminated with unhealthy microbes. These used to cause a lot of sickness until Victorian times. Then, inspired by the work of Louis Pasteur, it was found that milk could be made safe by heating it to 162°F (72°C) for 15 seconds. This “pasteurized” milk was the form in which milk was commercialized until the 1960s. In those days, milk used to have the cream float to the surface (some may remember bottles of milk with a plug of rich cream at the top). Today, milk is usually “homogenized” as well: the milk is heated and squirted by pressure pumps through nozzles so that the cream stays evenly distributed throughout the milk.

Since the 1960s, there has been an awakening to the dangers of milk fat—nutritionists have been advising the use of skimmed or semi-skimmed milk over whole milk. Skim milk is made in a machine that centrifuges the milk at 6,000 rpm to separate the fat from the skimmed milk. Consumption of whole milk has declined dramatically from 25.5 gallons per person per year in 1970 to 8.0 gallons annually in 2002. Meanwhile, skimmed milk consumption in its various forms has increased from 5.8 gallons to 15.5 gallons annually. Overall, annual milk consumption per person in America has declined from 31.3 gallons in 1970 to 22.2 gallons in 2002.
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And the unhealthy milk fat? That is recycled back to American consumers as cream, butter, and ice cream.

Juices

From the time when it was learned how to preserve fruit juices in reasonable condition (using pasteurization) in the 19th century, bottlers have canned and packaged various juice products. They pressed the juices from the fruit, strained, clarified, filtered, pectinized, and pasteurized it. They concentrate some juices by evaporation. Today, by far the most popular juice is from oranges; it is followed by apple, pineapple, and so on. Total fruit juice consumption has been rising steadily from 5.7 gallons per person per year in 1970 to 10 gallons annually in 2002.

Water

Our Pleistocene ancestors’ water came from rivers, lakes, and waterholes. Often, they had to compete with lions, crocodiles, and hyenas for a sip from a muddy, excrement-infested water source. It is probable that they picked up many nasty parasites and diseases from their water supply. Water supplies in the early civilizations were even worse: the high concentrations of population not only took water out of the river, but put sewage back in. The major cities would be located on a good river, and mostly the population had to get drinking water from it as best they could. There were outbreaks of various waterborne diseases, but usually the gods were blamed rather than unsanitary practices.

This changed dramatically in Victorian times: there were particularly bad outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, and typhus in London and scientists had discovered that sewage-contaminated water was the cause. In reaction, the authorities undertook immense construction projects from 1850 to 1875 to build elaborate networks of pipes and tunnels to collect raw sewage and carry it to treatment works outside the city. In parallel, pumping stations, reservoirs, treatment stations, and pipe networks were constructed to bring safe drinking water to every household. It is said that this new science of public health engineering has done more to prevent and cure disease than any conventional medical treatment. Quickly, public health engineering spread to America and continental Europe. Overseas, the public works department became one of the most important development arms of British and French colonial governments.

Water for municipal supplies comes from two chief sources: surface water from rivers and lakes, and groundwater from water-bearing layers underground. Surface water is usually dirtier and needs several stages of treatment. It is first filtered and then “flocculated,” a process whereby certain chemicals are added to the water to make the fine particles clump together and sink to the bottom where they can be strained off. Other chemicals are sometimes added to reduce acidity and to bring hardness to acceptable levels. Both surface water and groundwater need to be disinfected to kill harmful bacteria. Most commonly, this is done by injecting chlorine gas; excess chlorine is removed when it has done its work. The gas ozone is sometimes used instead of chlorine because it leaves less odor, but it is more expensive.

In this way, municipal water contains traces of the chemicals that have been added. They are mostly harmless substances like slaked lime, baking soda, and alum (aluminum sulfate). Chlorine is potentially more aggressive, but the active quantities that remain are usually harmless too, certainly a lot less than in the average swimming pool.

There is some evidence that a chemical called fluoride helps fight tooth decay so, more controversially, some municipalities voluntarily dose their water supply with fluoride. Now it happens that the waters of our African homeland were quite rich in fluoride, certainly no less than the concentrations deliberately put there by some municipal authorities. Nevertheless, many consumers object to being forcibly medicated in this way.

A great many of the water treatment plants and distribution networks were built over 100 years ago. Not only have they reached the end of their useful lives, they suffer a chronic lack of investment. In consequence, they are vulnerable to mistakes in chemical dosage and to contamination through leaky pipework.

Everybody was happy drinking municipal water until the 1980s, when the public became more concerned about the aging equipment, the added chemicals, and the forced fluoridation. The bottled water company Perrier brilliantly exploited this disquiet. They initiated a marketing coup on a scale similar to Kellogg with breakfast cereals (see Chapter 2) and persuaded Americans and Europeans to abandon drinking the water they could get for free out of a tap and buy water in a bottle.

The mineral water companies latched on to another alarm—that we are all dehydrating from lack of water. Remarkably, they persuaded us to not only switch from tap water to bottled water but also to drink much more of it. Such was their success that consumption of bottled water has soared from virtually zero in 1970 to 21.2 gallons per person per year in 2002. Curiously, consumer watchdogs estimate that 60% of the bottled water sold on the market is simply municipal water put into bottles (sometimes with further treatment). Most of the remaining 40% of bottled water does indeed come from natural springs and wells, but it still has to be sterilized, conditioned, and carbonated.

The Health Consequences of Our Beverage Choices

Our species, like most on the planet, are designed to get most of their liquid intake from water. Until recent times, that was still the case for us, even in the West. But we have seen the rise of alternative drinks, which have come along just in the average grandparent’s lifetime. Setting aside wine, distilled spirits, and liqueurs, which are not thirst quenchers, what are we now consuming instead of water? When we add up the figures for beer, tea, coffee, cocoa, soft drinks, juices, and milk, we find that the average American is consuming, in a year, 150 gallons of liquid that is not plain water—that comes to 3.25 pints per day!