EATING ANIMALS
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
BACK BAY BOOKS 2009
PART VIII
Chapter 4: Influence/Speechlessness (Cont.)
More influences
Beyond the unhealthy influence that our demand for factory-farmed meat has in the area of food-borne illness and communicable diseases, we could cite many other influences on public health: most obviously the now widely recognized relationship between the nation’s major killers (heart disease, number one; cancer, number two; and stroke, number three) and meat consumption or, much less obviously, the distorting influence of the meat industry on information about nutrition we receive from the government and medical professionals.
- Since the 1990s, the American Dietetic Association (ADA) has issued what has become the standard we-definitely-know-this-much summary of the healthfulness of a vegetarian diet.
Here are the three key sentences from the summary of their summary of the relevant scientific literature.
One
Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for all individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.
Two:
Vegetarian diets tend to be lower in saturated fat and cholesterol, and have higher levels of dietary fiber, magnesium and potassium, vitamins C and E, folate, carotenoids, flavonoids, and other phytochemicals.
Three:
Vegetarian diets are often associated with a number of health advantages, including lower blood cholesterol levels, lower risk of heart disease (which alone accounts for more than 25% of all annual deaths in the nation), lower blood pressure levels, and lower risk of hypertension and type 2 diabetes. Vegetarians tend to have a lower body mass index (BMI) (that is, they are not as fat) and lower overall cancer rates (cancers account for nearly another 25% of all annual deaths in the nation).
- Vegetarianism is at least as healthy as a diet that includes meat.
The National Dairy Council (NDC), a marketing arm of Dairy Management Inc., is an industry body whose sole purpose, according to its website, is to “drive increased sales of and demand for U.S. dairy products.” The NDC promotes dairy consumption without regard for negative public-health consequences and even markets dairy to communities incapable of digesting the stuff.
What is hard to comprehend is why educators and government have, since the 1950s, allowed the NDC to become arguably the largest and most important supplier of nutritional-education materials in the nation. Worse, our present federal “nutritional” guidelines come to us from the very same government department that has worked so hard to make factory farming the norm in America, the USDA.
- Founded the same year that the ADA opened its offices, the USDA was charged with providing nutritional information to the nation and ultimately with creating guidelines that would serve public health.
- At the same time the USDA was charged with promoting industry.
As a public-health expert, Marion Nestle argues that food companies, like cigarette companies (her analogy), will say and do whatever works to sell products. They will “lobby Congress to eliminate regulations perceived as unfavourable; they press federal regulatory agencies not to enforce such regulations; and when they don’t like regulatory decisions, they file lawsuits. Like cigarette companies, food companies co-opt food and nutrition experts by supporting professional organizations and research, and they expand sales by marketing directly to children.”
In a striking example of food industry influence, Nestle argues that the USDA currently has an informal policy to avoid saying that we should “eat less” of any food no matter how damaging its health impact may be. Thus, instead of saying “eat less meat” (which might be helpful), they advise us to “keep fat intake to less than 30% of total calories” (which is obscure to say the least).
- The institution we have put in charge of telling us when foods are dangerous has a policy of not (directly) telling us when foods (especially if they are animal products) are dangerous.
- We have let the food industry craft our nutritional policy, which influences everything from what foods are stocked in the health-food aisle at the local grocery store to what our children eat at school.
- In the National School Lunch Program more than half a billion of our tax dollars are given to the dairy, beef, egg, and poultry industries to provide animal products to children despite the fact that nutritional data would suggest we should reduce these foods in our diets.
- Meanwhile, a modest $161 million is offered to buy fruits and vegetables that even the USDA admits we should eat more of.
The global implications of the growth of the factory farm, especially given the problems of food-borne illness, antimicrobial resistance, and potential pandemics, are genuinely terrifying.
Chapter 5: Slices of Paradise/Pieces of Shit
Chapter 6: I Do
Chapter 7: Storytelling
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
Reading Group Guide