The Omnivore’s Dilemma Part 5 of 10: Republic of Fat
November 24, 2009 by dr. lam · 2 Comments
What is very interesting is that a couple hundred years ago when our founding fathers brought forth a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, they also brought forth a ton of booze. That’s right. Pollan shows how up until about the time of prohibition (and perhaps thereafter for a while as well), we were inundated with cheap corn whiskey, so that typical Americans drank alcohol for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and oh I forgot at eleven am (called the elevenses), what we would call our coffee break.
The same problem has plagued the United States since the 1970s but of a different variety. Now cheap, subsidized corn has led most U.S. residents not to out drink themselves (although some do that well) but to eat themselves into an early grave. In fact, the thought today is that children born after the year 2000 may have a shorter life expectancy than their parents, a landmark first in the history of mankind.
A lot of that corn we ingest comes in the form of high-fructose corn syrup, or HFCS. 1980 was a watershed year. That is the year that Coca-Cola switched from pure cane sugar to HFCS and Pepsi followed suit shortly thereafter. No one complained or even noticed. What is the big deal anyway? Aren’t sugar and HFCS pretty much the same? Actually, yes. However, what happened was that tariffs that the corn lobby imposed on sugar made HFCS a few cents cheaper to make. Realizing that most consumers would not buy another bottle of coke just because of this marginal cost savings, the soda manufacturers upsized all the drinks from, e.g., 8 oz. to 32 oz. servings and charged an incremental premium for this bonus surplus. Most Americans favored the extra size and guzzled accordingly. What is shocking is that even though our HFCS intake since 1985 went from 45 to 66 pounds per person per annum, that is not at the expense of other sweeteners. In fact, we have enlarged our intake of all sweeteners (cane, beet, HFCS, glucose, maple syrup, etc.) from 128 to 158 pounds per year. We are in short supersizing everything.
We owe a lot to David Wallerstein who invented supersizing at McDonald’s. Ray Kroc simply did not believe that people would consume more if they were given larger portions. It is now known that we can consume 30% more if we simply see more on our plate, almost as a biological response to scarcity. Kroc changed his tune when Wallerstein reported people were scrounging around their tiny french fry bags because having 2 sodas or 2 bags of french fries was self-deemed gluttony. Having a large bag of fries on the other hand was simply no big deal. Wallerstein, until his passing in 1993, worked in a Texas movie chain before his stint at McD’s and helped people see that individuals would consume any size bag of anything so long as it was in a single container. Once you ordered two small bags of popcorn, you would think yourself more of a gourmand than the abstemious Puritan that we desired to be.
In short, we are in our predicament because of the flood of cheap corn that is so readily available making us spend less on our food and desire to eat even more of it not out of necessity but because it is there.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma Part 4 of 10: CAFOs
November 20, 2009 by dr. lam · 5 Comments
Where does all that cheap surplus corn go? Well, as mentioned, it goes to feed our livestock. 60% of the cheap corn is used to feed the 100 million heads of cattle that we have in America. In fact, in the past farmers would grow their own feed corn to be fed to their steer. Today, farmers can’t compete against CAFOs, or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, that corral steer among other animals into tightly packed feeding arrangements to grow fat on cheap corn. Subsidized feedlot corn sold to CAFOs is so cheap that the corn is actually sold to the CAFOs at less than it costs them to make it. Accordingly, farmers are out of business raising cattle. They can’t afford it.
In the old days, farmers would feed the cattle the waste grain and the cattle would fertilize the land with their waste, creating a closed ecologic loop. Today, CAFOS herd the steer stacked almost on top of each other creating indescribable quantities of their own toxic waste that has no exit strategy. The waste piles up, damaging the environment, the soil, the water supply, and the animals. Simply put, the waste just keeps piling up and wreaking havoc everywhere. Not to mention the terrible conditions that these animals are mired in during their lifetime.
These CAFOs and the cheap corn that has fed the CAFOs have permitted meat to be cheaper than ever. What in the past was a rare delicacy can now be afforded by all and even eaten 3 times a day at a pittance. Chickens still cost less than cattle because they require much less feed per pound of flesh. The USDA rewards cattle for their marbling, a direct result of the ingested corn. Of course, the saturated fat and the high omega 6 content in corn-fed beef may take the heavily marketed concept of “corn fed” as being a good thing to be revealed for its truly negative impact. The hunter-gatherers that live today have very little heart disease despite subsisting on a high beef diet because their beef is almost all grass fed. As you may know, all Argentinian cattle are raised on pure grass. We just have too much cheap corn that we have to get rid of. Might as well fatten the cows so that we can get even fatter.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma Part 3 of 10: The Story of Fritz Haber
November 19, 2009 by dr. lam · 1 Comment
Who? Fritz Haber won the 1920 Nobel Prize and without his invention of nitrogen-impregnated fertilizer we would not have modern agriculture as we know it. Further without his fertilizer system, we would not be able to feed the world the way we currently do, and it is estimated that 2 out of 5 people on this planet would not be around without Haber’s invention.
Why have we not heard of Haber? Most likely because Haber had a very ignominious life that is not particular cause for celebration. Haber’s invention of bonding nitrogen to the soil was used during World War I on behalf of Germany’s war effort when nitrates used for explosives were both in short supply and cut off by the British. Haber’s synthetic nitrates helped Germany prolong the war campaign, and Haber served relentlessly on behalf of his motherland, even creating the infamous Zyklon B gas that would later be used by Hitler in the concentration camps. His wife, a fellow chemist, sickened by her husband’s promotion of the war effort, killed herself with her husband’s army pistol. In the 1930s, Haber, a German Jew, who later converted to Christianity, was compelled to flee his native land with the rise of the Third Reich and died a broken man in an obscure Basel hotel in 1934.
Although Haber’s process defines the modern fertilization process that has literally supported our population boom, Pollan calls what we have gained from his knowledge a true “Faustian bargain.” In order to get the nitrogen and hydrogen to meld with the soil, we need a ton of non-renewable fossil fuel to accomplish that end, as compared with the free energy of nitrogen that certain bacteria living at the base of legumes would otherwise create in small quantities. In addition, fertilizers can obviously pose health risks and further pollute the land and the water supply when there is spillage and oversupply of it. In short, fertilizers support our human growth and appeal to our big-scale industry of farming but has darker, untoward consequences of which we must also be cognizant.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma Part 2 of 10: We are Corn
November 18, 2009 by dr. lam · 12 Comments
If we are what we eat, then we are corn, spoonfuls, gallons, and tonnage of corn. When the Europeans came over to settle North America, they considered themselves wheat people, as a more glorified expression of their stock; juxtaposed against the Native American folk and Mexicans who were truly corn people. Even today, many Americans may believe that they are of wheat origin, except of course our proudly corn-fed Midwesterners who hail from a different breed. However, that is simply not true anymore. We are corn.
Corn expressess a very strong DNA footprint of carbon 13 given its unique molecular structure that carries 4 carbon atoms compared with many legumes that only have 3 atoms. We can actually scan a person’s hair and other body parts to see how much we are made of what. Mexicans today who consume corn but not in the radically superabundant quantities that we do actually have much less carbon-13 corn in their systems than we do. We are filled with corn. High-fructose corn syrup colors our daily lives as opposed to the pure cane sugar that the Mexicans still heavily rely on. Further, their meat still oftentimes graze on grass, whereas our cattle, chicken, lamb, and even fish eat corn. So we are not only what we eat but we are what we eat eats and again that is corn.
The story starts in Iowa, the epicenter of corn manufacturing. How did we get to where we are? First, corn provides abundant calories owing to its unique possession of a carbon 4 (C4) structure, alluded to earlier. Second, corn is mass produced in Iowa owing to what George Naylor, a corn farmer featured in the book, calls “the Naylor Curve”. Farmers, believe it or not, actually lose money on every bushel of corn they make. In order to actually feed their families when the price of corn drops, they have to squeeze out more corn in marginal land using more heavily fossil-fuel laden nitrogen fertilizer (we will discuss this tomorrow) to try to make ends meet. Of course, this further drives corn prices lower, which compels farmers to make even more corn. The $5 billion a year in corn subsidies that the Federal Government supplies further supports this non laissez-faire economy.
All this cheap corn continues to be more and more prevalent owing to this vicious cycle, burning up heavy fossil fuels (estimated at 50 gallons of oil per acre of corn and not even a 1:1 calorie substitute of fossil fuel for food), plaguing the water supply with contaminated nitrogen from over-fertilized, marginal lands, and burning up the quality of the land year after year.
Stephanie Smith
Today, a quarter of the foodstuffs in our flourescent-illuminated grocery aisles contain corn. Is corn all that bad for you? First, it is filled with omega 6s as compared with omega 3s that could otherwise enter our food by way of grass-fed animals. Not to mention that animals that graze on grass are not used to eating corn so that their digestive systems are in absolute turmoil, necessitating antibiotics and also escalating the risk of e.coli exposure. It has been found that feeding cattle grass even for the last few days of their lives could reduce the risk of toxic e.coli that grows in the cows’ normally pH neutral stomachs (acidified by corn), by over 80%. However, we live in a world driven mainly by money not by thoughts of how food could actually benefit our environment and our bodies.
As an update to this blog post, here is an article about Stephanie Smith, a dance instructor, who is paralyzed for life at the tender age of 22 from eating contaminated e. coli meat, that I read from the New York Times on October 3, 2009. Here is also a frightening video about how we get our meat that appeared in the New York Times that I also posted on my Twitter account on November 3, 2009.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma Part 1 of 10: Introduction
November 17, 2009 by dr. lam · 2 Comments
For my faithful blog followers, you will recall that I covered Michael Pollan’s book In Defense of Food that literally changed my life and perhaps prolonged it in both quality and quantity. Since then, I have backtracked to read his seminal work on exploring how food gets to our table entitled The Omnivore’s Dilemma. This prodigious work attempts to explore 3 pathways of how food arrives at our table: the industrial, the organic, and more directly from the forest itself. These pathways as Pollan explores are actually quite a bit more complicated than what we esteem to be our food sources when we append romantic terms like “organic” to what we eat. Is it truly organic? What does that mean anyway? It definitely means higher price. I truly enjoyed his exploring ideas like “beyond organic” that gets closer to the third pathway of food, which is beyond a falsified notion of organic that is mass produced through major chains like Whole Foods. Nothing wrong with Whole Foods but let’s not glorify anything too much simply because we can throw fancy words that we don’t even know what they mean like “organic”.
The omivore’s dilemma as the eponymous title reflects concerns the age old question, “What shall we have for dinner?” The term comes from University of Pennsylvania psychologist Paul Rozin who coined the phrase and posed this existential question. Unlike a koala bear who simply eats eucalyptus leaves, we have a diversity in our menu selection that is bewildering and potentially fraught with risk. Pollan exposes the back end of what we are eating because what sits on our dinner table may be more than we bargained for. We should know how did what we got get there and what can we do differently in our lives to be more educated consumers of foodstuff. I think you will enjoy this intellectual and highly pragmatic journey into the world of food, yet again. Bon Appetit!