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Tag: "Food"

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By Erich Vieth on November 05th, 2009

Our love-hate relationship with animals

In “Flesh of your Flesh,” published in the November 9, 2009 edition of The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert reviews several books that investigate the kinds of creatures we eat. Well, actually, we love our creatures too:

Forty-six million families in the United States own at least one dog, and thirty-eight million keep cats. Thirteen million maintain freshwater aquariums in which swim a total of more than a hundred and seventy million fish. Collectively, these creatures cost Americans some forty billion dollars annually.

We love our animals, but we also love to eat them:

This year, they will cook roughly twenty-seven billion pounds of beef, sliced from some thirty-five million cows. Additionally, they will consume roughly twenty-three billion pounds of pork, or the bodies of more than a hundred and fifteen million pigs, and thirty-eight billion pounds of poultry, some nine billion birds. Most of these creatures have been raised under conditions that are, as Americans know—or, at least, by this point have no excuse not to know—barbaric.

Isn’t this a contradiction that we love our pets but that we don’t care that we treat farm animals so incredibly badly?

Kohler quotes Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Eating Animals: “Food choices are determined by many factors, but reason (even consciousness) is not generally high on the list.”

Food • Health
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The Monsanto monster
By Brynn Jacobs on October 26th, 2009

The Monsanto monster

Monsanto has been a target for many years. They have a terrible environmental and health record, they have harassed small farmers for years, they’ve bribed officials in Indonesia, and they’ve joked about performing “rural cleansing” (a play on the words “ethnic cleansing”, i.e. genocide), and told small seed cleaners that rather than buy them out, “We’d rather put you out of business, it’s more fun that way.” All this from the company that brought Agent Orange to Vietnam, resulting in 400,000 deaths and disabilities, as well as 500,000 children born with birth defects.

However, in the world of corporate PR, no sin is too big. Monsanto has sought to remake its image as the company that’s helping to feed the world. Their website claims that “We apply innovation and technology to help farmers around the world produce more while conserving more. We help farmers grow yield sustainably so they can be successful, produce healthier foods, better animal feeds and more fiber, while also reducing agriculture’s impact on our environment.” High claims, to be sure. Too bad we don’t know if they hold up to scrutiny.

A new article by the editors of Scientific American explains the situation:

To purchase genetically modified seeds, a customer must sign an agreement that limits what can be done with them. (If you have installed software recently, you will recognize the concept of the end-user agreement.) Agreements are considered necessary to protect a company’s intellectual property, and they justifiably preclude the replication of the genetic enhancements that make the seeds unique. But agritech companies such as Monsanto, Pioneer and Syngenta go further. For a decade their user agreements have explicitly forbidden the use of the seeds for any independent research. Under the threat of litigation, scientists cannot test a seed to explore the different conditions under which it thrives or fails. They cannot compare seeds from one company against those from another company. And perhaps most important, they cannot examine whether the genetically modified crops lead to unintended environmental side effects.

Food • Health • Intellectual property
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How peak oil affects food and everything else
By Erich Vieth on September 15th, 2009

How peak oil affects food and everything else

Media Education Foundation has released a new documentary called “Blind Spot” which

explores the inextricable link between the energy we use, the way we run our economy, and the multiplying threats that now confront the environmental health and stability of our planet. Taking as its starting point the inevitable energy depletion scenario known as “Peak Oil,” the film surveys a fascinating range of the latest intellectual, political, and scientific thought to make the case that by whatever measure of greed, wishful thinking, neglect, or ignorance, we now find ourselves at a disturbing crossroads: we can continue to burn fossil fuels and witness the collapse of our ecology, or we can choose not to and witness the collapse of our economy. Refusing to whitewash this reality, Blind Spot issues a call to action, urging us to face up to the perilous situation we now find ourselves in so that we might begin to envision a realistic, if inconvenient, way out.

You can watch a ten-minute excerpt here. By watching it, I learned that:

  • The U.S. now has more prisoners than farmers.
  • Corn ethanol is energy negative (making it uses more energy than burning it).
  • It takes 30 calories of energy to bring one calorie of lettuce from California to the average plate.
  • The average item of food travels 1,500 hundred miles to your plate.
  • The concept of peak oil (essentially, that we are running out of cheap oil), is still ignored or rejected by most businesses, governments and individuals.

See the related posts for more information on peak oil, as well as here and here.

Economy • Energy • Environment
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Fat and salt and sugar and fat and salt and . . .
By Erich Vieth on August 03rd, 2009

Fat and salt and sugar and fat and salt and . . .

Amy Goodman recently interviewed David Kessler, who used to be Commissioner of the FDA under Bush I and Bill Clinton. He has really turned up the heat on the unhealthy food industry, and it is a huge industry. It’s repeat clients also frequent hospitals in droves, as reported by DemocracyNow:

[A] new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that the direct medical costs of obesity total about $147 billion a year. That amounts to nine percent of all US medical costs. It’s also over $50 billion more than the annual spending on cancer.

The problem is that we have these innate and insatiable cravings for salt and sugar and fat.

Fat and sugar, fat and salt, fat, sugar, and salt stimulate us to eat more and more. Does the food industry understand the inputs? Absolutely. They understand that fat, sugar and salt stimulate us, and they understand the outputs. They understand we keep on coming back for more and more, as Kessler explains:

Have they understood the neuroscience? Have they understood how fat and sugar work? I don’t think so. But we now have that science. But what’s important is the fact that they have figured out—they’ve learned it experientially—what works, and they construct food to stimulate us to eat more . . .

What has the food industry done? They’ve taken fat, sugar and salt, they’ve put it on every corner. They’ve made it available 24/7. They’ve made it socially acceptable to eat at any time. They’ve added the emotional gloss of advertising. Look at an ad; you’ll love it, you’ll want it. They’ve made food into entertainment. We’re living, in fact, in a food carnival.

But how much fat, sugar and salt can you possibly pump into food? More than you can imagine. Kessler explains the formula:

So, take an appetizer in a modern American restaurant. Take buffalo wings. What are they? You take the fatty part of the chicken, fried usually in the manufacturing plant first. That loads about 30, 40 percent fat. Fry it again in the kitchen of the restaurant. That loads more fat. That red spicy sauce? What is it? Fat and sugar. That white creamy sauce on the side? Fat and salt. What are we eating? Fat on fat on fat on fat on sugar on fat and salt.

But aren’t the obese people the real problem? Why blame the terribly unhealthy food industry (Did you like this framing of the question)? Yes, people need to get disciplined about the way they eat. No doubt. But when 2/3 of American adults are overweight, it’s time to assume that the artery-clogging food manufacturers of American are immorally creating an environment ubiquitously filled with toxic supersized portions. In short, I fully support new Congressional legislation would provide up to $10 billion a year for a prevention and public health investment fund that would include a focus on curbing obesity.

See this related post on the effect of growing portion sizes.

Food • Health • Medicine • Politics
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Adult baby food
By Erich Vieth on June 23rd, 2009

Adult baby food

Dr. David Kessler has written a new book called “The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite.” He was recently interviewed by Katharine Mieszkowski of Salon.com. You can also listen to their discussion here.

I was intrigued by Kessler’s notion that much of the food to which people become addicted is “adult baby food”:

We’re eating, in essence, adult baby food. Twenty years ago the average chews per bite was about 20, now it’s two or three. The food goes down in a whoosh and it’s very stimulating. It’s layered and loaded with fat, sugar and salt. It’s as if you have a roller coaster going on in your mouth. You get stimulated, it disappears instantly and you reach for more.

But it’s not just the fat or the sugar. We dress up food really well here in the United States:

We make food into entertainment. We make it into a food carnival. Go into a modern American restaurant: the colors, the TVs, the monitors, the music. You do it with your friends. We’ve taken sugar and added all these multiple levels of stimuli. What do we end up with? Probably one of the great public health crises of our day.

Go visit Salon for the entire article. Lots of worthy observations. For instance, he discusses why people get fat (it’s not because fat people enjoy eating more than skinny people). Also, there is no body “set point” to protect you from gaining weight. Kessler offers lots of ideas for not allowing your brain to get hijacked by high calorie food.

On a related note, I’ve had to constantly monitor my own eating and exercise to keep myself where I need to be (I’m now 5′ 11″ and 170), and I use a variety of techniques I described here, especially the need to avoid refined carbohydrates and to constantly aim for whole grains and lots of vegetables and whole fruits (not juice).

Featured • Food • Health • Psychology Cognition
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Ballpark food lighting up our Pleistocene taste buds.
By Erich Vieth on May 07th, 2009

Ballpark food lighting up our Pleistocene taste buds.

What is it about ballpark food that makes it so delicious? I think that these new truth-in-marketing signs at the ballpark pretty well sum it up.

Photo (etc) by Erich Vieth

These stadium food vendors truly excel in offering superstimuli for our not-ready-for-modern-times stomachs and eyes. What should we do about this mismatch between our pleistocene cravings and our modern abilities to pump out this life-shortening quality-of-life-diminishing fare? That’s the question raised by Dr. David Kessler, former Commissioner of the FDA:

Fifty years ago, the tobacco industry, confronted with the evidence that smoking causes cancer, decided to deny the science and deceive the American public. Now, we know that highly palatable foods—sugar, fat, salt—are highly reinforcing and can activate the reward center of the brain. For many people, that activation is sustained when they’re cued. They have such a hard time controlling their eating because they’re constantly being bombarded—their brain is constantly being activated.

For decades the food industry was able to argue, “We’re just giving consumers what they want.” Now we know that giving them highly salient stimuli is activating their brains. The question becomes what do they do now?

When I say “superstimulus, I mean it. I can’t believe how many obese people I recently saw at the stadium. Half of them wore Albert Pujols jerseys, but none of them looked like Albert Pujols.

Now, while we’re still discussing stadium food, here’s an untouched photo clearly demonstrating that the world is almost out of fresh water. After all, there’s no other explanation for why anyone would pay twice as much for 20 ounces of drinking water than for a gallon of refined gasoline.

image by Erich Vieth

I can just imagine the conversation:

Child: Daddy, can I have a few sips of water?

Father: Billy, how many times have I told you that we can’t afford to drink water!

Featured • Food • Health
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The American war against telephone poles
By Erich Vieth on February 04th, 2009

The American war against telephone poles

In a short article entitled, “The War on Telephone Poles,” the February 2009 edition of Harper’s Magazine includes a fascinating excerpt from an essay by Eula Biss, which was originally titled “Time and Distance Overcome” as it appeared in the Spring issue of Iowa Review. Biss’s article is a terrific example of the human tendency to resist long-range change that would substantially improve the community as a whole.

As she clearly documents in her essay, many people ferociously opposed the erection of telephone poles back in the 1880’s. Whatever their stated reasons (aesthetics and defense of private property were often argued), the real reasons for resisting telephone poles were timeless: fear of change combined with a warped sense of the importance the individual in relation to his or her community. The Biss essay reminds us that Americans have long been quite capable of harpooning critical community-building endeavors in the name of individual freedom. We don’t fight telephone poles anymore, but this destructive tendency is one we still see in modern day America.

Only a small bit of Biss’s essay is available online. The basic idea presented by her essay is that in the 1880s, numerous people (including elected officials and newspapers) ferociously opposed the erection of telephone poles. They argued that telephone poles were ugly. They characterized telephones to be considered playthings of the rich.

American Culture • Consumerism • Environment • Featured • History • ignorance
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By Erich Vieth on December 02nd, 2008

What it’s like to not shop for a year.

Judith Levine and her significant other decided to not shop for a year.   She wrote about her trials and tribulations in her book, Not buying It: My Year Without Shopping. She also wrote about it in Washington Post in an article titled, “Don’t Buy It.” Here’s an excerpt:
People can learn to live with less — [...]

American Culture • Consumerism • Economy • Environment • Food
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By Erich Vieth on June 26th, 2008

Eating your front lawn

Why grow grass when you can eat your front yard?   Grass is no longer cool, according to this article in Time:
The problem, as [architect and founder Fritz] Haeg sees it, is that the “hyper-manicured lawn” is looking increasingly out of date. In the 1950s, when suburbia first began to sprawl, a perfectly trimmed [...]

American Culture • Food
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By Erich Vieth on June 24th, 2008

The average item of food travels 1,500 miles to your plate

How can your average item of food travel 1,500 miles to your plate?  Cheap oil, that’s how.  But be careful how you count the carbon generated by the delivery of your food.
The amount of “oil in our food” suggests that we will be eating a lot more local food, rather sooner than later.

Food
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By Erich Vieth on May 28th, 2008

People who eat people . . .

There’s a new book out on cannibalism, in case you’re interested.  And, yes, you are interested.  It’s called “Among the Cannibals: Adventures on the Trail of Man’s Darkest Ritual” (Smithsonian Books, 278 pages. $25.95), by Paul Raffaele.  Here’s a short summary by Malcolm Ritter.
Here’s an eerie thought: In a world where we worry about [...]

Culture • Food
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By Erich Vieth on May 18th, 2008

How Americans waste food: they burn more because they’re obese and they throw it away.

Americans are increasingly complaining that the cost of food is going up. Two recent articles demonstrate that Americans are profligate wasters of food in at least two major ways:
1) Obese people consume 18% more food energy than lean people and more than sixty million Americans are obese. Simply put, it takes more calories to [...]

Economy • Environment • Food • Health • Statistics
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By Erich Vieth on April 30th, 2008

Diversion of crops for fuel use is “criminal”

The United States and the European Union have taken a “criminal path” by contributing to an explosive rise in global food prices through using food crops to produce biofuels, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food said today.At a press conference in Geneva, Jean Ziegler of Switzerland said that fuel policies pursued [...]

Energy • Food • Good and Evil
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