Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Heath and Our Food (9 page)

Carrot Color Frivolity

The ancestral wild carrot came from western Asia (the region of Turkey, Lebanon, and Syria). It was a deep purple color and it was skinnier and had a hard yellow core. As long ago as the 16th century, Dutch farmers thought it amusing to breed a carrot in the Dutch national color: bright orange. For us in the West, this is the “proper” carrot color; however, for the people of western Asia the carrot has remained purple. Now, growers want to jazz up their product and make it more appealing. Plant breeders are experimenting to make carrots with all kinds of hues, from white through primrose and bright red to black.

This kind of plant breeding has a long history, but this does not automatically make it an acceptable thing to do. The whole point is that plants have been changed for a variety of reasons, but none of them has to do with nutritiousness. We just do not know what has been lost or gained in the process. However, with plant breeding, at least scientists were working with combinations of genes that could have occurred in nature.

Since the 1970s, scientists have been artificially manipulating plant genes to achieve desired characteristics. Sometimes genes from a quite different species, or even an animal, are introduced to modify the plant genes. Their goals have been to make farming easier and cheaper by improving yields, and by producing crops resistant to pests, drought, salt, and weed killers. A second objective is to make foods that transport well, are easily packaged, and have a long shelf life. It is an incredibly powerful technique that has few boundaries. A Supreme Court decision in 1980 made genetically modified organisms (GMOs) patentable, so there is a strong incentive for agri-business to focus on GMO plants and to ignore conventional breeds. The momentum is so great that it is like a runaway train hurtling into the darkness. No one knows what will come of it, but one thing is clear—the train is rushing us on an enforced journey away from our human origins.

FOOD PROCESSING, TRANSPORT, AND STORAGE

With the Industrial Revolution going full-swing during the 19th century, cities grew to sizes never before seen in history. Chicago’s population increased 17-fold from 30,000 in 1850 to 500,000 in 1870. New York City grew 25 times bigger, from 60,000 in 1800 to 1.5 million in 1870. In contrast, Babylon at the time of the Biblical exodus (1447
b.c.
)
was only about 60,000 total.
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Feeding populations in these enormous agglomerations required novel methods. It was quite impossible to get most fresh foods to them in the normal way. Food had to be “preserved,”—that is, processed in a way that stopped it from going bad. Meat and fish were a particular problem but there were tried-and-true methods to conserve it: salting and smoking. Salt beef, bacon, cured ham, kippered herring, and bologna were just a few examples that took over the diet of city dwellers, replacing their fresh equivalent.

Wheat quickly goes rancid when made into flour. For this reason, since time immemorial, bakers only milled their flour when they were ready to use it. However, ingenious industrialists found that the problem lay in the wheat germ. By the simple expedient of removing the wheat germ as the grain was milled, flour would keep almost indefinitely. Mechanization was brought to traditional processes of grinding cereal grains into flour. For 10,000 years, this had been achieved by grinding the grains between two stones. In the 19th century, that process changed. Steel had arrived and the quirky millstones were replaced by banks of steel cylinders rotating at high speed. These progressively ground the grain down to ever finer particle sizes.
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At every stage, there were sieves to separate the bits of outer husk (bran) from the flour itself. The whole lot was driven by steam-powered machinery—it was a tremendous advance in productivity. This procedure has been continued right to the present day.

The industrialization of milling and baking also changed the nature of bread. The bakers like the new “refined” flour. It was uniform in size and free of bran and wheat germ, so bread-making became much more predictable. It did not need human skill to ensure that the bread baked properly every time, so this meant that bread could be made on a production line too. But both the bran and the wheat germ had been stripped out of the bread. It was not until much later when scientists discovered that wheat germ is a powerhouse of important nutrients, including omega-3 oil, vitamin E, and choline (a B vitamin). It was the precious and fragile omega-3 oil that went rancid so quickly. In one stroke, this processing deprived city populations of vital nutrients. As we shall see, this had surprising and unexpected negative consequences for the consumer.

The first patents for canning food were issued as early as 1810 in England; the United States soon followed. The technique involves sealing the food in the can and then heating it to over 200°F. Most animal foods can be preserved this way and a good many plant foods as well. Always the pressure is on to select variations of the food that withstand this treatment best. Some foods, like milk and fruit juices, are “pasteurized”—the food is heated very briefly to an elevated temperature and then sealed into bottles. No one thought particularly hard about what was happening. Heat, it was known, killed the harmful bacteria that cause food to rot, so that was good. It was less understood that heating also destroyed natural enzymes and many other micronutrients.

The Importance of Micronutrients

We know that there are many active compounds in the foods we eat, particularly fruits and vegetables. We are familiar with the “classic” micronutrients that have been identified over the past 100 years: vitamins A, B, C, and so on, and minerals like iron, selenium, zinc, and iodine. However, we now know that there are thousands of other micronutrient compounds that play a part in the smooth functioning of the body. In this book, we call them “background” micronutrients. For example, there is the family of carotenoids, of which there are over 600. They give the color to carrots, oranges, tomatoes, and melons. There is the phenol family with over 5,000 members. They too are present in all fruits and vegetables, and strongly present in tea, coffee, and wine. And there are the 7,000 terpene compounds, which are omnipresent in all plant foods, particularly in spices and aromatic herbs. We must not forget the thousands of bioflavonoids, yet another vast range of compounds that are essential to health.

We know that all these micronutrients, both classic and background, are important to optimum health. We can’t define exactly how all these compounds work, but we ignore their importance at our peril.

Systems of food transport became quicker and more reliable, so many more food products were grown for export to the burgeoning cities. Thus, varieties of plant were chosen that survived transportation well. Bulk storage systems improved with the development of refrigeration in the 1920s and of scientific techniques of “conditioning,” which sought to slow or prevent spoilage by careful control of moisture and gases in the silo. Plant varieties that stored well were favored.

THE FAST-FOOD INDUSTRY

In just the last 50 years, there has been a tremendous shift in the way families get their meals. In the year 1950, the average American spent $2,625 for food eaten at home and a further $724 on food eaten out.
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(All money is expressed in year 2000 dollars.) In other words, about 20% of the food budget was spent on food eaten away from home. In contrast, in the year 2000, the average American slashed nearly in half the dollars spent on food eaten at home to $1,500. Meanwhile, consumption of meals eaten out jumped by almost 50% to $1,125. In other words, over 40% of the food budget is spent on eating out.

An industry had sprung up to fulfill a need. Americans were earning more money but they had less free time, and more and more women were working. This “fast-food” industry, as it came to be known, provided attractive, tasty, and cheap food—and you did not even have to stop the car engine while collecting your order at the “drive-thru” window. It is hard to imagine that in 1950, McDonald’s had just one outlet (in San Bernardino, California). Today, they have over 11,000. They were quickly followed by imitators such as Burger King (now over 6,000 outlets) and Wendy’s (now over 3,500 outlets). These establishments specialized in a new type of food, the hamburger. However, other enterprising food suppliers introduced different but new foods to the scene: pizza and tacos, for example. Others reworked traditional ideas: fried chicken and sub-sandwiches.

Almost always, the accompaniment was French fries and a soft drink. The soft drink industry had gotten going earlier, partly encouraged by Prohibition in the 1920s. Even so, in 1940, the average American consumed only about 6 ounces per week. By 2000, that had jumped by 20 times to a gallon a week (128 ounces).

These changes are radical. At the 1950s family meal, hamburger, pizza, and tacos were either unknown or rarely served. Potatoes were not often served in the form of French fries; soft drinks were absent. All these changes have occurred just in living memory and we will later look at the consequences of this dramatic shift in feeding habits.

FOOD SAFETY

Like any traded item, food is vulnerable to cheating. The Code of Hammurabi, in 1750
b.c.,
laid out penalties for brewers who sold short weight. The Greeks and Romans struggled with vintners who dyed and flavored their wine. In 1202, King John of England proclaimed the first English food law, “the Assize of Bread,” which prohibited adulteration of bread with such ingredients as ground peas or beans.

As the food supply was industrialized during the 19th century, more and more foods were processed and packaged for sale. Unscrupulous merchants adulterated their products with cheaper and sometimes harmful substances, labels were deliberately misleading, inferior food was fancied up with dyes and artificial flavors, and food was preserved with noxious chemicals. In the United States, Abraham Lincoln set up the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) with a division called the Bureau of Chemistry to look into such matters.

Following his investigation of food adulteration, in 1880 the chief chemist Peter Collier recommended a national food and drug law. The bill was defeated, and this was a portent of battles ahead. Why would Congress refuse to legislate for food purity? Only if there were powerful forces opposed to these measures—the nation’s food supply is the subject of a titanic battle between the food industry and governments that try to regulate it for the public good.

In 1883, Dr. Harvey Wiley became chief chemist and took up the battle. He expanded the Bureau of Chemistry’s food adulteration studies and campaigned for a federal law. He was so vigorous and forthright that was called the “Crusading Chemist.” Finally, a law was passed in 1906. The pure food regulations were scientifically sound, thorough, and gave strong powers to the Bureau of Chemistry to enforce them. Had these regulations been allowed to remain in place, they would have made America one of the healthiest places in the world to eat, but trouble was already on the horizon.

On signing the regulations, the Secretary to the Treasury complained that they were too severe on the food industries. The fishermen of Massachusetts wanted to keep borax; the dried fruit industry of California wanted to use sulfur dioxide; ketchup interests begged for benzoic acid. Very quickly, industry forces set about undermining the Bureau of Chemistry. The Secretary of Agriculture, James Wilson, was persuaded to set up a board, under chairman Ira Remsen, to protect the manufacturers. This “Remsen Board” started making its own recommendations to Wilson, who often upheld them, over the head of the Bureau of Chemistry. The Crusading Chemist’s success was short-lived. In Dr. Wiley’s words, “The food and drugs law became a hopeless paralytic.”

In spite of the restrictions and difficulties, Dr. Wiley battled on. He tried to stop the bleaching of flour, which often uses chlorine dioxide, a chemical akin to household bleach. In a test case, the Bureau of Chemistry sued the Lexington Mill and Elevator Company for contaminating flour with nitrogen peroxide, another bleaching chemical. The case took almost 10 years to complete as it went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. The Supreme Court finally ruled against bleached flour in 1919. But mysteriously, the USDA wrote the application guidelines in such a way as to make the ruling easily circumvented. Bleached flour has never been removed from commerce in the U.S. to this day.
On the other hand, bleached flour has been banned in many European countries.

Dr. Wiley took on the Coca-Cola company for dispensing its wares without disclosing the ingredients. The two sides fought to a standstill. Coca-Cola made a concession: it removed cocaine from the formula. On the other hand, it retained the right to keep some of the ingredients secret from the public. In 1912, Dr. Wiley resigned in disgust and wrote: “The makers of unfit foods have taken possession of Food and Drug enforcement, and have reversed the effect of the law, protecting the criminals that adulterate food, instead of protecting the public health.”
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