Food and Health

If one considers some typical modern foods- hamburgers laden with growth

hormones, vegetables laced with pesticides, soft drinks full of refined

sugar, and foods too numerous to mention whose colour and taste have been

artificially enhanced by manufactured chemicals- one could easily imagine

that the goal of the global food system is simply to provide the global

health care system with more customers. Local food systems, on the other

hand, are not only healthier for the environment, they provide people with

healthier food as well.

Fresh is Best

Local systems excel at providing fresh food, and health practitioners of

every stripe agree that fresh food is the most nutritious. Some

nutritionists have even determined that the best nutrition of all comes from

foods that are in season in ones locale. Since the vitamins in almost any

food are gradually lost from the time of harvest, even fresh foods from the

global system are usually less nutritious than local foods, because they may

have been harvested days or even weeks before reaching the kitchen table.

Tomatoes, for example, are often picked green and hard so that they can

survive mechanical harvesting and long-distance transport, and then ripened

in rooms pumped full of ethylene gas, which artificially initiates the

ripening process. Tomatoes like these are much less flavourful and

nutritious than the ripe tomato from a local farm, plucked from the vine and

eaten the same day.

Foods for the global market are bred for monocultural growing

conditions rather than nutritional content. Another high priority is visual

perfection. Decades of agribusiness and supermarket advertising, combined

with numerous senseless regulations, have persuaded people that fruits and

vegetables must conform to narrow standards of size, shape and colour.

Customers expect to find only bright red, unmarred apples, potatoes that are

properly shaped and without blemish, and carrots that are large, straight

and orange. Most western consumers are now so disconnected from

agricultural reality that heirloom varieties of unusual shape or colour are

not considered to be real food at all. And food grown in living soil where

insects are allowed to survive- sometimes leaving their mark on the produce-

is considered substandard, even though it is likely to be better tasting and

more nutritious than its more perfect-looking industrial cousin.

Biotech varieties are no exception to the rule among global foods.

Thus, despite the inflated claims about the virtues of genetic engineering,

the varieties that have reached the supermarkets so far have not been

improved nutritionally. Roundup Ready products, for example, are engineered

to survive herbicide drenchings; Flavr-Savr tomatoes are designed to sit on

supermarket shelves for long stretched of time without rotting; and Bt corn

and Bt potatoes have been engineered to contain a potent pesticide- not

extra nutrients- in every cell. Although so-called Golden Rice has been

engineered to contain extra amounts of vitamin A- and is being touted as a

cure for a form of blindness called by vitamin A deficiency- its main

beneficiary thus far has been the biotech industry, for which it has served

as a much-needed public relations vehicle.

Chemical Stews

Global foods tend to undergo a great deal of processing, which destroys

nutrients. Some highly refined products such as white flour, white sugar,

and white rice have had most of their nutritional content stripped away.

Since processing can also remove much of the taste and colour from food, the

global food industry often compensates by adding artificial flavourings and

colourings. In some cases, these chemicals are used simply because they are

cheaper than real flavourings and spices- as when real vanilla is replaced

by vanillin, a chemical substance that approximates the flavour that comes

from vanilla beans. Chemical preservatives are also deployed, to add to the

extended shelf life global foods require.

Local foods often contain no chemical additives, since they are

less likely to need processing. And because of the prevalence of small,

diversified, organic farms in local food systems, these foods are less apt

to contain residues of pesticides, herbicides, and other toxic

agrochemicals.

Although these chemicals now routinely turn up in our food and

water, they are very recent in human evolutionary history, and our defences

are therefore unprepared to protect us from them. They can cause cancer,

birth defects, immune system breakdown, and neurological damage, and can

interfere with normal childhood development. Some of these chemicals are

endocrine disrupters and have been implicated in the early onset of puberty

so prevalent in the industrial world. Studies have even indicated a

correlation between aggression and exposure to pesticides. The chemical

fertilizers used in industrial agriculture also pose a health problem:

nitrates in water, for example have been linked to blue-baby syndrome in

infants, birth defects, and cancer of the gastrointestinal tract.

The health of farmworkers is seriously compromised by their

exposure to agricultural chemicals on the job. According to a United Nations

study, from 20,000 to 40,000 farmworkers die each year from pesticide

exposure. Another study indicates that as many as 300,000 farmworkers in the

United States alone suffer from pesticide related illnesses. But one

doesnٹt need to be a farmworker or even live near a farm to be exposed to

these toxic compounds. As Peter Montague of the Environmental Research

Foundation points out, Tens of millions of Americans in hundreds of cities

and towns have been drinking tap water that is contaminated with low levels

of insecticides, weed killers and artificial fertilisers. They not only

drink it, they bathe and shower in it, thus inhaling small quantities of

farm chemicals and absorbing them through the skin.Ӳ

If anything, Montague may have understated the extent of the

problem. A recent survey by the US Environmental Protection Agency found

that 80% of adults and 90% of children in the United States have measurable

concentrations of the pesticide chlorpyrifos in their urine.

Although agribusinesses insist that all of these chemicals have

been tested for safety, they are not tested in the multiple combinations to

which people are routinely exposed, nor are they tested over the long

periods of time that would be necessary to fully understand their effects.

Determining the so-called safety of individual chemicals is a an all but

meaningless exercise since people in the industrial world are effectively

immersed in a stew of such chemicals- arising not only from industrial

agriculture but from fossil fuel use and manufacturing processes as well.

In the United States, for example, roughly 1,000 new chemicals are marketed

each year, adding to the 70,000 already on the market. A study in the

journal Science points out that testing the commonest 1,000 toxic chemicals

in unique combinations of three would require approximately 166 million

experiments. Even if just one hour were devoted to each experiment and one

hundred laboratories worked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the

process would take more than 180 years to complete. Needless to say, no one

is planning to conduct those tests.

In any case, the proven health hazards of a particular

agricultural chemical are no guarantee that its use will be prohibited. The

herbicide Atrazine is a known carcinogen whose use has been banned in seven

European countries.. Nonetheless, it is perfectly lawful to use it on fields

throughout the United States. Unfortunately, Atrazine is not the exception,

but the rule; the US government agencies that regulate agricultural

chemicals allow at least thirty other pesticides classified as either

definitelyӲ or probablyӲ carcinogenic to be used on US crops. Even

chemicals commonly advertised as totally benign to humans can turn out to be

harmful. For example, a 1999 study in the journal of the American Cancer

Society linked exposure to glyphosate- the active ingredient in the

herbicide Roundup- to non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a form of cancer. In 1998,

more than 112,000 tonnes of glyphosate were used worldwide.

In addition to the inputs chemical farmers intentionally pour on

their crops, there are numerous pathways by which global foods can be

unexpectedly tainted with toxic chemicals. In Belgium in 1999, for example,

chicken farmers noticed signs of acute poisoning in their flocks. An

investigation revealed that the potent carcinogen dioxin had somehow

contaminated the chickensٹ feed. And in Taiwan recently, 30% of the rice

crop was found to be contaminated with arsenic, cadmium and mercury.

Food Poisoning

Proponents of the global food system would have us believe that industrial

processes have left our food all but free of bacteria, but the data do not

support that contention. A recent US study found one in five samples of

supermarket ground meat and poultry contaminated with salmonella, while

another study found the sometimes fatal germ, enterococcus faecium in 86% of

the supermarket chickens tested.

In fact, food poisoning incidents have risen in tandem with the

growth of the industrial food system. According to the Centres for Disease

Control and Prevention, salmonella-related illnesses in the United Stated

have doubled in the last two decades, and similar increases are reported for

illnesses from E. coli, campylobacter, and lysteria bacteria.

In the United Kingdom, food poisoning incidents increased

five-fold between 1982 and 1999, according to the British Public Health

Laboratory Service. In 1997 alone, over 54,000 food poisoning incidents

were reported in England and Wales. That sounds like a lot, but the

situation may actually be far worse. Research has shown that the ratio of

unreported to notified cases is 30:1- pushing the 1990s annual, average to

1.4 million food poisoning cases per year.

Although most cases of bacteria-tainted food are the result of

unsanitary conditions in the large-scale facilities that mass-produce and

process foods, the response from corporate agribusinesses and health

regulatory agencies has nothing to do with cleaning up, let alone reducing

the scale of, the global food system. In the United States, approval has

instead been granted for irradiation as a method of sterilizing meat and

other food products. Although polls indicate that three-fourths of the US

public does not want to eat irradiated food, this techno-fix is cheaper for

industry and allows the fundamentally flawed global food system to go

unchallenged.

In the long run, however, this solution is likely to create more

problems than it solves. A large body of scientific evidence shows that

irradiation reduces the nutritional value of food and leaves byproducts in

the food that are themselves health hazards. Although e-beam technology is

now being hailed by the food industry as a safe alternative to gamma ray

irradiation- which uses radioactive materials- their effects on food are the

same. According to Public Citizenٹs Critical Mass Energy Project,

Food irradiated by either process is deficient in vitamins and other

nutrients, has caused serious health problems in laboratory animals, tastes

and smells worse, is bereft of beneficial microorganisms that keep botulism

and other potential deadly maladies at bay, may contain carcinogens and

mysterious chemical compounds, and in the case of meat may still be tainted

with faeces, urine, pus and vomit resulting from filthy slaughter-house

practices.Ӳ

Techno-fixes like irradiation provide, at best, temporary solutions to food

safety problems whose roots lie in the excessive scale of the global food

system. But proponents of global food never cease imagining that these

problems can be eliminated by ratcheting up the scale one more notch. For

example, Ray Goldberg, professor of Agriculture and Business at Harvards

Business School, believes that the proper response to food scares is simply

to apply more technology and to ٳbarcode every product, from a grain of

cereal to a loaf of bread. And even though the increasing scale of the

global food system is responsible for most food safety problems, Professor

Goldberg stubbornly believes that scaling up is the solution: ҳThese huge

multinational corporations that have huge plants throughout the world have

to lead the waySand as consolidation grows in the food system, it will

become safer.

Factory Farms and Human Health

There is little doubt that animals raised on small-scale diverse farms are

apt to be healthier. When allowed to range freely, particularly in

organically maintained yards and pastures, they receive more exercise, their

diet is more varied and they are exposed to commensal bacteria that help

exclude, and build resistance to, harmful pathogens. Some organic

practitioners also argue that free-ranging animals actively seek out plants

with medicinal properties that can build their resistance to illness,

When Livestock production is carried out on a scale that suits

the global market, however, huge numbers of animals are kept in tightly

confined conditions, and the potential for disease outbreaks is much higher..

The important considerations of animal welfare aside, these methods lead to

the rampant use of antibiotics, which poses a significant health risk, not

only for the livestock, but for consumers as well, since antibiotic residues

can remain in meat and milk. Roughly half the 25,000 tonnes of antibiotics

produced in the United States are used in the raising of animals for human

consumption.

There are other reasons for concern about the overuse of

antibiotics in giant livestock operations. Some 40 to 80 percent of the

antibiotics used in farming are thought to be unnecessary even under factory

conditions, as 80 percent of their use is as a preventative measure and for

growth promotion. Overuse has already rendered some drugs ineffective and

may even make some strains of bacteria untreatable. According to the Public

Health Laboratory Service in Britain, a new strain of salmonella that first

appeared in the United Kingdom in 1990 is resistant to at least four

antibiotics and now accounts for 15 percent of all salmonella food poisoning

cases. The newest class of antibiotics, fluoroquinolones- viewed as the last

line of defence for some human infections- are already proving ineffective

against some bacteria strains. An epidemiologist for the US Centers for

Disease Control and Prevention says that among public health officials

ҳthere is no controversy about where antibiotic resistance in food-borne

pathogens comes from: the heavy use of antibiotics is to blame.

The huge amounts of manure that the industrial livestock farms

produce also represent a human health risk. In the Cape Fear region of

North Carolina, for example, factory hog farms produce ten million metric

tonnes of waste annually, equal to that produced by forty million people.

When heavy rains hit in 1999, numerous lagoons containing the manure burst.

In one case, two million gallons of hog waste spilled when a lagoon ruptured

at a farm that raises hogs for a subsidiary of Smithfield Foods, the largest

pork producer in the United States. Such manure spills were one reason the

storm left 400,000 wells in North Carolina contaminated. Health officials

expressed concern that an outbreak of gastrointestinal and other diseases,

such as pathogenic E. coli, might be caused by contaminated drinking water.

Other agribusiness livestock practices are equally alarming.

Monsanto has been aggressively marketing rBGH, a recombinant form of a

naturally occurring hormone, for use in dairy cows. The use of the

genetically engineered hormone increases milk production by 15 percent or

more, but has numerous side effects: treated cows do not live as long; they

are prone to develop mastitis (an infection of the udder, usually treated

with antibiotics); and they often give birth to deformed or stillborn

calves. As far as human health is concerned, perhaps most worrisome of all

is that researchers have found elevated levels of another hormone, IGF-1, in

milk from cows treated with rBGH. IGF-1 has been linked to increased

likelihood of cancer in humans.

Unfortunately for the general public in the United States, on of

the very few countries where the use of rBGH is legal, the human health

effects of this biotech product have hardly been explored. As Brewster

Kneen points out,

ҳThe only actual testing of the drug is currently being carried out as an

uncontrolled experiment on the American people, who are unknowingly

consuming the milk from the drugged cows. They are unknowing because the

drugs manufacturer has lobbied, litigated and intimidated, with near-total

success, to make labelling that would indicate whether or not milk comes

from rBGH-treated cows virtually illegal.ٲ

One of the most disturbing human health consequences of industrial livestock

production is the spread of Mad Cow Disease across the species barrier from

cows to humans, in the form of the deadly Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (CJD).

It is generally believed that the cow variant of the disease, bovine

spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), became widespread throughout the United

Kingdom because of the practice of feeding the remains of dead livestock to

cows- an innovationӲ of large-scale agribusiness. Dead livestock were

boiled down, ground up, and added to cattle feed, even though cows are

naturally herbivores.

Another innovation of the global food system- the mechanical

separation of meat- is thought to have played a role in spreading the

disease to humans. The process extracts minute amounts of meat from bones

by forcing it through a sieve under high pressure, resulting in a paste-like

product- a legal ingredient in various cooked meat products- that may have

included spinal cord tissue from infected cows.

BSE eventually killed 175,000 cows in Britain; since the disease

is believed to have a latency period of ten years, far more were undoubtedly

infected. Although the British government initially insisted that there was

no link between Mad Cow Disease and CJD in humans, it was later forced to

reverse this stance and eventually ordered the destruction of every cow

older than thirty months, some 2.5 million animals.

By the end of 2001, more than one hundred people had died of CJD

in the United Kingdom. Like BSE in cows, however, CJD has a long latency

period, and it is still unknown how high the death toll will eventually

rise. The UK governments chief medical officer, Professor Liam Donaldson,

admits, ٳWere not going to know for several years whether the size of the

epidemic will be a small one, in other words hundreds, or a very large one,

in the hundreds of thousands.ٲ Meanwhile, cases of Mad Cow Disease have

turned up in most other European Countries and now in Asia as well.

The UK beef industry was still reeling from the impact of BSE

when an outbreak of classic swine fever struck Britain in 2000, leading to

the slaughter of tens of thousands of pigs. It is believed that the

outbreak stems from practices all too common among industrial pig

operations: transporting animals in contaminated vehicles and feeding them

waste food containing infected meat.

Problems like these are an inherent part of a food system that

is so large that companies can increase their profits by millions of dollars

simply by saving a few cents on each animals feed, or by using chemicals or

processing methods that reduce costs by a fraction of a percent.

We all want safe, healthy food, but we cannot rely on the global

food system to provide it. The corporate food chain has grown so long and

the distance between producers and consumers so vast that no one can really

know how their food was grown, how it was processed, and how it was treated

during its long travels. Only by localising and reducing the scale of our

food systems can we once again trust the food we eat.