The post I was initially going to write–did write and did move to trash–was summed up in the last paragraph of this year-old bit of stuff. So if you want to read what I threw out, you can swing by my past.
Side Note Unrelated to Topic:The Weather Channel has painted a bullseye over Nashville today, which is the modern way to tell people that they are doomed. A few centuries ago you might have seen such thing over Pompeii or Johnstown. (A city I always mixed up with Jonestown. I could only keep it straight when I thought of a toilet overflowing and flooding everything. Great mnemonic. In fact it was so good that I learned the difference straight up so I could forget the grossness. And now I just reminded myself. Thanks, me.)
It’s also my husband’s birthday. I had planned a great many things in anticipation of the event and now instead of swanning about doing lunches and movies and happy road trips I find myself huddling in the basement watching the weather coverage like a crazy cat lady glued to a Royal Wedding. The abrupt change in plans is frying the circuits in my brain and the well-laid posts I had stored up are kind of melting together. I can’t keep them straight. At this rate I’ll write about the latest book I’m reading and why that book should vote libertarian.
Commence Actual Blog Entry
I usually keep a non-fiction book to read as my bedtime story. I like to fall asleep pondering the new things I learned; other than inventing things in my head, that’s my favourite way to lull myself out. I don’t ever get more than 3 or 4 pages through it before I stop to think myself to sleep, so my bed book can last me six months or better. Last year it took better than nine months to make it through George Washington. Now I’m wading into dreams with 1493:Discovering the New World Columbus Created, and that has me preoccupied with thoughts of agriculture. Which brings me back around to my musings about First World Problems. (See Paragraph One.)
The potato was responsible for the Industrial Revolution
So right now while I’m reading about things like The Malthusian Trap and The Great Potato Famine I find myself wanting to scream at the top of my lungs. Out of politeness I’ll do this instead.
I know you’ve got all sorts of great reasons for whatever you eat and why you eat that. I’m happy that it works for you; I’ve got food and food styles to which I’m attached as well. And I know the stuff they say in Wheat Belly about the “mutant” (i.e. genetically-engineered) wheat being poison. I’m not in on the Wheat Lobby or the Vast Wheat Conspiracy. I know how sad the life of a veal calf is. Yes, I do know how KFC gets their chicken. I know what They spray on apples. None of it is hearts and flowers. It’s all grisly and bloody or at the very least mad sciencey. But you know what? We ARE ALIVE. For the first time in the history of the world, thanks to Industrialised Agriculture, villains that they are, we are escaping the Malthusian Trap. We can make enough food to feed the people we make. Now I’m not saying ADM or Monsanto are angels. And I know there’s a lot about the way we grow food that could be improved. But food should be for everyone, not just the people who are cool enough or trendy enough to be able to pay the extra $ that it costs to get something grown the old fashioned way. Organic food is awesome. But when all food was organic…people died. The new wheat may have problems. But when we had the old wheat…people died.
Call me crazy, but I call myself pro-life. And from where I sit that includes finding ways to grow enough food to feed the lives on this planet.
If you want to look at the potato famine as a case study, you will find that mass starvation was caused by two major factors–lack of bio-diversity and control of resources by the moneyed/political elite. This is the problem with genetically-engineered food. It’s a threat to bio-diversity, plus somebody holds the patent to each new engineered model, which means somebody controls the resources. This is why I get bent out of shape over food issues. I don’t want my food controlled by corporations. I want the ability to choose what I eat, and I want my food labeled so that I can make informed choices. That these corporations in collusion with the FDA/USDA keep people uninformed and dump low quality crap on the market (GM soy and corn, for example) demonstrates how they view the populace. We are peasants to them–this is the way the wealthy landed gentry have always treated peasants.
People still die now that food is non-organic. People die from the new wheat. In fact, infertility is a major side effect of both gluten allergies and genetically-engineered foods. Because infertility is on the rise, at least in western nations, this all might become a moot point some day.
Agree with Jill, the potato famine is exhibit A of why it’s a bad idea to let Monsanto continue to sue the pants off of small farmers who are trying to grow things the old fashioned way. Human beings don’t have a great track record of predicting which traits will be most successful as we venture into the unknown future. Evolution dictates that bio-diversity is the best chance for survival. If we get too specialized for one set of circumstances and those circumstances change, that can easily mean an extinction event. Corn modified to resist Disease X may be fantastic (provided it doesn’t kill the people who eat it), until Disease Y comes along and we’ve taken all the Disease Y resistance out to make it more X resistant.
I am completely open to discussions about why I’m wrong. I’m at the front end of thinking through this problem and admittedly don’t know the full story. I had no idea until you left this comment that Monsanto was suing heirloom farmers.
I still maintain that there are sections of our society for whom the trendiest, most expensive foods are signifiers of status and personal worthiness. That I find hugely irritating
Pardon the brevity and the typos. This was sent from my iPhone.
I would have to agree with you on that one, especially since I just returned to my low-class town after visiting the wealthiest town in my state, with the highest number of millionaires. What I find interesting is that I visited a town built on science, where they tested the first atomic bomb, and the place is dotted with stores that sell gourmet and organic and yoga and herbal tinctures and . . . you get the gist–the non-science type of food and medicine. If I buy organic these days, it’s going to be at my local farmer’s market (much cheaper), or I’ll buy my own seeds for my own garden. I hope my first response didn’t sound hostile–this is simply an issue that’s very important to me.
Oh, and I thought I’d clarify–when I stated that infertility was going up, I didn’t mean that women were conceiving less than in the past. I don’t know if that’s actually true. What I meant is that male sperm counts in certain geographic locations around the world have been steadily going down for the last 50 years, and I don’t know if this has anything to do with diet. I’m not sure anybody knows the answer to that. However, GM foods have been shown to cause infertility in lab rats in successive generations, which means that the full impact might not show up in humans for a long time. This was what I thought of when I read and watched Children of Men.
I suspect you googled it for more info as soon as you read it (I think we are alike in that way), but in case not, what Monsanto has been doing is going onto private farms, without permission or any grounds to do so, harvesting (ie. stealing) a few plants to take back to their labs for testing, then, if they find their genetic marker in the crop (either due to cross pollination or, if one is prone to distrust big corporations, them just making it up considering they destroy the “samples” they take) they sue the farmer for patent-infringement. Most small farmers can’t afford to go up against Monsanto’s legal team even if they’re in the right.
But the biggest two concerns I have with GM foods are lack of information and cross pollination. I tend to fall on the side of educate and let people make up their own minds, but the problem is, that’s easy(-ish) to do with GM foods, not so easy with GM ingredients. If I buy a can of soup, the ingredient list is gonna say “corn” whether it’s GM, organic, or just modern farmed (after all, not all non-organics are GM by a long shot). That takes away my ability to decide what goes into my body, unless I AM extremely wealthy and can go out of my way to only buy organics, or non-GMs or whatever I decide. The other problem is cross-pollination. Plants pollinate one another. So, once GM plants are introduced into the environment, there’s really no way to keep even organically farmed produce free of GM genes. Combine that with lawsuit-happy GM producers and it accelerates that further by putting out of business people growing non-GM plants or forcing them to buy the GM plants to avoid being sued if cross-pollination occurs. All of it ends up taking away consumer choice.
I do agree that many people choose “organic” as a status symbol (and truly, “organic” is so loosely defined as a legal term that what you buy as “organic” stands a good chance of being no healthier for you than non-organic). However, GM foods aren’t all about beefing up the food supply either. There’s a fair bit of modification that goes into making foods pretty. And GM foods don’t necessarily produce higher yields. I was watching a documentary (I can’t remember it’s name but if I can think of it I’ll let you know) a while back which discussed a study that found organic farming methods actually produce a higher yield over time than to conventional methods. They under perform the conventional farms on good years, but they stay consistent whereas conventional methods are vary wildly due to changes in whether (droughts, hurricanes, etc), and over the longer term they can outlast conventional methods because organic farming techniques leave the soil with more nutrients where as conventional techniques strip the soil of nutrients which then have to be artificially added back to the soil in non-sustainable ways. Conventional farming is less about feeding people as it is feeding a corporations bottom line.
I think you’re bringing up several different issues with this post, and each of those issues alone is way too complex for a blog post or comments to do it any justice. So trying to take them all on at once has even less chance of success. (Not that it will stop us from trying!)
For example, intermingling the relationship between Americans eating organic food and how that relates to attempting to feed the population of the entire world — really? The social, political, and economic realities of our world are extremely complex from region to region, nation to nation, etc, and the relationships of those to what the people in any given region of the world eat are vastly different from locale to locale. Even on a micro-scale. So while it’s fun to stand back and try to see the world as a unified whole, in this sense it is not and will never be so. In many places, warlords or oppressive dictatorships are using food as a weapon. In other places, grass-fed and organic are the normal way things are done, and they don’t even know about factory farming and CAFO’s and GMOs and such.
My point here is simply that the “rich people eating expensive organic food vs. the poor being forced to eat genetically modified crap which is cheap because the government subsidizes commodity crops” argument is far removed from the issues involved in feeding the entire world.
Honestly, it’s a big red herring anyway, because I don’t think we can go back to the people in the U.S. raising their own livestock in pastures and growing their own crops organically, or buying the same from local farmers and ranchers on a large enough scale to bring down the CAFOs and such. The corporations involved are too powerful, financially and politically, and the offspring of that power is a way of life that is too deeply embedded in our culture and way of life to be reversed on a massive scale anytime soon (barring some unthinkable global catastrophe or whatever).
But, in the immediate context of the discussion, it can be proven, based on what is currently happening to the food markets, that consumers can make choices that change the minds of the producers. The increased demand for organic fruits and veggies and pasture-raised and grass-fed animals is driving a huge growth market right now. Though it’s still a drop in the bucket, you’ll notice that many of the bigger companies have taken notice, if nothing else by hedging their bets and buying parts of those smaller companies. It’s a very legitimate argument that part of the reason healthy organic food is expensive, and unhealthy processed food is cheap, is indeed due to government subsidies, and the same government making horribly flawed (in my opinion) dietary recommendations which just happen to align with those subsidies.
Also, I don’t believe that a “paleo” type diet or similar diets are necessarily all that involved in the discussion about organic food and grass-fed meat, even though the adherents to such diets often consume and recommend them. It’s more about the elimination of grains and legumes, processed sugars and vegetable oils, and the consumption of real whole foods. Most people could eat CAFO meats and non-organic fruits and veggies and avoid the bad things, and still be 90% better off health-wise. The perfect need not always be the enemy of the good.
But anyway, I think it’s great that you’re thinking about this stuff and open to discussions about it. I really do. I grappled with many of the same thoughts about these things, and initially had many of the same objections you’re offering up. These are not anywhere near settled matters in my mind, and I’m always open to new studies and ideas to help shape and refine my own.
“Also, I don’t believe that a “paleo” type diet or similar diets are necessarily all that involved in the discussion about organic food and grass-fed meat, even though the adherents to such diets often consume and recommend them.”
Agreed. Living in Montana, there have traditionally been only three months or so where we could eat truly organic food grown in our own garden (and enjoy the huge decrease in the grocery bill that goes along with it). The rest of the time, if we wanted fresh fruits and veggies, we had to go to the store and buy them. I know they weren’t organic and most of them had been shipped in from long distances, but at least they were not processed.
We’re working to stretch that out by having built a greenhouse, and I can put up foods by drying and freezing and canning them, but all of that takes time (and costs money, at least initially). Last summer I canned virtually nothing because I had just started a new full-time job. So I “went Paleo” last fall knowing full well that I wasn’t going to be getting grass-fed beef and organic veggies over the winter, but that didn’t stop me from doing it. Everything is a trade-off. There are many days I wish I could just pop a pizza in the oven, because cooking from scratch takes a LOT of time.
This year we have a greenhouse. We bought a whole processed cow from our neighbors (and it’s worth noting that we have bought processed cows a couple of times in the past from other people and some of the meat has been great and some has been pretty awful). One of my friends has kids in 4-H and they are going to raise a hog for us. I discovered, almost by accident, that the local health food store is selling #2 Honeycrisp apples from a local farm for less than half the cost of #1 apples from that same local farm sell for at the grocery store where I shop. We don’t care that they have a few blemishes. These are all steps in the process.
Our prime motivation for all of this isn’t trying to be trendy or save the planet or even wanting to be healthier–the being healthier thing has been a great side effect. Our prime motivation is truly trying to be self-sufficient enough that if the world collapsed around us tomorrow, we and our neighbors would have more than a snowball’s chance in hell of making it through. I often marvel at how the people who lived where I lived 100 years ago managed to survive when they only went to town–which is “only” 17 miles away–two or three times a year.
I’m not sure what I am trying to say other than it IS big and complicated and thank you for talking about it. And I am glad you survived the weather.
I just got around to flipping the wall calendar in my office to March and as soon as I saw the comic, I had to rush here to post a picture of it to this post
http://cl.ly/0G101Y3L232S1v2u0H45
That is too hilariously perfect!
Pardon the brevity and the typos. This was sent from my iPhone.