Joana Blythman is Britain’s leading investigative food journalist who won the Caroline Walker Media Award for ‘Improving the nation’s health by means of Good Food’. In The Food We Eat: The Book You Cannot Afford to Ignore she makes the following points: “By dint of our collective buying clout, we can be tremendously influential in demanding high-quality food and changing for the better the future direction of food production.” “Organic farming is the only coherent, regulated form of agriculture capable of satisfying the consumer’s demand for natural, wholesome food, as well as finding solutions to environmental problems that are becoming ever more pressing.” “Most of the food in our shops is produced by what are known as ‘conventional’ methods. That description is a misnomer, since current ‘conventional’ farming techniques have been dominant only for the last 50 years. A clearer description might be ‘chemical-assisted’ or ‘chemical-dependent’ farming.” “The reason most food is not labeled this way is that growers and retailers think it might scare the public unnecessarily. This sort of logic has allowed chemically produced food to be seen as normal while organic farming is seen as out on a limb.” “Chemical-dependent agriculture is based on the idea that it is impossible to achieve the necessary yields to feed the world, provide food of the standard required by the modern consumer, or control pests, weeds and disease, without using chemicals.” “The traditional self-sufficient mixed farm, which rotated a range of crops and integrated that with rearing animals, becomes an ‘uneconomic’ way to produce food. It has therefore given way to large-scale, intensive farming.” “Soil that has been intensively farmed becomes exhausted and less fertile than it would be if traditional rotation of crops and resting of fields were observed. It is depleted of natural minerals and trace elements required to grow nutritious food, and chemical fertilizers are required to give it a boost. There are over 400 chemicals approved for use on crops in the UK. All of these are toxic to a greater or lesser degree.” “Advocates of chemical farming assure consumers that we have nothing to fear from ‘responsible’ use of chemicals, and that it is only the odd rogue farmer who misuses them. Nevertheless, in 1995 the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries (MAFF) was forced to issue health warnings on carrots grown in the UK after unexpectedly high residues were found.” “The history of agrichemicals is littered with toxic substances that were considered safe and then consequently withdrawn when they were shown to be dangerous, long after doubts had been raised about their safety. Many agrichemicals are potential human carcinogens, others are teratogenic (affecting unborn children) or are mutagenic. As far as the environment is concerned, agrichemicals are proving to be a disaster.” “Organic farming starts with the quality of the soil and its fertility; healthy soil produces healthy food. Organic farmers combine crop rotation with careful selection of plant varieties appropriate to local conditions to achieve a good harvest. Crops grown in fertile soil take up a better and more balanced nutrient supply from it. Men who ate organic food in Denmark were found to have twice the sperm count of men who did not.” “‘Conventional’ produce is cheaper largely because it is heavily subsidized by the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).” “There are 3,000 or so genetically altered or ‘transgenic’ foods that have to date been tested worldwide. Genetic engineering permits scientists to move genetic material – DNA – from one living organism to another, irrespective of the species barrier. These constructions of disparate genetic material have never before been part of the food chain and no one knows how they will affect it.” “Since transgenic foods are such a major departure it seems logical that they should be labeled as such. But the large transnational companies who dominate gene research think that consumers might be put off. They have argued that there is nothing to fear because transgenic foods are a harmless extension of traditional ‘improving’ techniques.”
THE FOOD WE EAT
THE BOOK YOU CANNOT AFFORD TO IGNORE
JOANNA BLYTHMAN
Michael Joseph London 1996
Joana Blythman is Britain’s leading investigative food journalist and an influential commentator on the British scene, as well as being the mother of two young children. She has won two prestigious Glenfiddich awards for her writing as well as the Caroline Walker Media Award for ‘Improving the nation’s health by means of Good Food’. She writes for the Guardian newspaper, and is a regular contributor to Scotland on Sunday, several magazines and radio 4’s The Food Programme.
Introduction
• This book is about food quality, and how to recognize good food when you see it, be it a piece of cheese, a leg of lamb, a melon, a packet of coffee or a bar of chocolate. The food we eat these days has never been more diverse, more sophisticated or more difficult to judge.
• Life used to be a lot simpler. Fruits and vegetables had seasons, hens ran around in farmyards, cows were out to grass, salmon was wild – an early summer treat – and bread was made to time-honored principles. Nowadays, seasons have become relatively meaningless, since you can buy raspberries at Christmas and Northern European peppers in January. Most of our egg-laying hens spend their lives in batteries, many of our cows have been transformed into milk machines who live indoors eating concentrated feedstuffs. Nearly all salmon is farmed, and traditional breadmaking has been largely superseded by push-button bread made in vast industrial plants.
• There’s a growing polarization in the type of food we eat. The good news here is the return to sound traditional principles of good animal husbandry and careful food production, which manifests itself in the growing number of producers, many organic, who are discovering tried-and-tested breeds of animals, flavoursome varieties of fruit and vegetables, and food made with artisan skills.
• The average shopper takes only a couple of seconds to scan a food label, often buying on trust or out of habit, without much idea of the true quality of the food on offer or the methods by which it is produced. The aware and concerned consumer scrutinizes the labels with increasing mistrust and rarely finds the answers to the questions asked.
• What this book aims to do is simplify that task by putting through their paces all the foods we routinely buy. It looks how each one matches up to the standards that modern consumers are increasingly demanding – safe, high-quality, wholesome and nutritious food produced with respect for animals, workers in the food industry and the environment. The aim is to empower the interested consumer with the necessary background information so that she or he can make an informed, positive choice from the sometimes baffling array of foods on sale.
• Knowledge is power. My hope in writing this book is that by becoming better informed we can slightly redress the balance of power in favor of the consumer. By dint of our collective buying clout, we can be tremendously influential in demanding high-quality food and changing for the better the future direction of food production.
• Organic farming is the only coherent, regulated alternative form of agriculture capable of satisfying the consumer’s demand for natural, wholesome food, as well as finding solutions to environmental problems that are becoming ever more pressing.
• If you follow the advice in this book, you may have to pay more for some foods, but you will receive better value for money and your health may improve. Many of us could eat better for the same financial outlay by adjusting our priorities.
• The consequences of the UK’s love affair with cheap food can be seen in spindly, tasteless chicken, bland Golden Delicious apples, watery tomatoes and breads of such staggering uniformity and absence of character that they are hardly worth eating. Given the hidden cost to our health, the environment and animal welfare and the toll taken by the soulless, dehumanizing jobs created by modern methods of food production, are these foods so cheap after all?
• We need to develop the notion of value for money. Price should reflect the integrity of ingredients and the skill and care with which food was made, reared, caught or grown. Viewed in this way, the foods recommended in this book make good financial sense.
Chapter 12: The Bigger Picture – Some Issues to Think About
Chemical-dependent farming and the organic alternative
• Most of the food in our shops is produced by what are known as ‘conventional’ methods. That description is a bit of a misnomer, since current ‘conventional’ farming techniques have been dominant only for the last 50 years – a drop in the ocean of global food production since history began. A clearer description might be ‘chemical-assisted’ or ‘chemical-dependent’ farming.
• The reason most food is not labeled this way is that growers and retailers think it might scare the public unnecessarily. This sort of logic has allowed chemically produced food to be seen as normal while organic farming is seen as out on a limb – despite the fact that even in its most modern forms, organic production has far stronger links with tried-and-tested farming methods, developed over time and with detailed human experience.
• Chemical-dependent farming represents a relatively new experiment in our approach to agriculture and the environment. How this chapter in the history of food production will end up is anybody’s guess.
• Chemical-dependent agriculture is based on the idea that it is impossible to achieve the necessary yields to feed the world, provide food of the standard required by the modern consumer, or control pests, weeds and disease, without using chemicals. When food production is geared up to quantity in this way, farming must necessarily become big business.
• The traditional self-sufficient mixed farm, which rotated a range of crops and integrated that with rearing animals, becomes an ‘uneconomic’ way to produce food. It has therefore given way to large-scale, intensive farming. Intensive farms open up the possibility of much higher yields – producing more food faster in one place. However, they are also much more vulnerable to pests and disease because they have moved away from the natural ecosystem, which protected the small farm through its mix of crops and activities. This means that pesticides become necessary.
• Soil that has been intensively farmed becomes exhausted and less fertile than it would be if traditional rotation of crops and resting of fields were observed. It is depleted of natural minerals and trace elements required to grow nutritious food, and chemical fertilizers are required to give it a boost.
The risks of chemical farming to human health and the environment
• There are over 400 chemicals approved for use on crops in the UK. All of these are toxic to a greater or lesser degree. There is no disputing that humans can become seriously ill when overexposed to them, nor that they have the capacity to upset the delicate ecological balance of our land and waterways for a substantial period of time. In other words, we are playing with fire.
• Advocates of chemical farming assure consumers that we have nothing to fear from ‘responsible’ use of chemicals, and that it is only the odd rogue farmer who misuses them. The argument goes that the application of agrichemicals is carefully monitored, that such chemicals are thoroughly tested, and that there is a system of spot checks to ensure that pesticide residues do not go above certain ‘safe’ limits (maximum residue limits, or MRLs).
• Nevertheless, in 1995 the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries (MAFF) was forced to issue health warnings on carrots grown in the UK after unexpectedly high residues were found. These residues come from highly toxic organophosphate pesticides used to control carrot fly, an endemic pest that seems immune to even the strongest treatments. Even where MRLs seem acceptable they are based on the notion that pesticides are safe until proven harmful, which means that we may only be wise after the event.
• The history of agrichemicals is littered with toxic substances that were considered safe and then consequently withdrawn when they were shown to be dangerous, long after doubts had been raised about their safety. It is worth remembering that many agrichemicals are potential human carcinogens, and that there is no such thing as a harmless level of a carcinogen. Others are teratogenic (affecting unborn children) or are mutagenic.
• Both the acute and chronic effects of pesticides in our food chain may not be proven either singly or cumulatively, until many decades after exposure. A significant number of agrichemicals are long-persistence chemicals, which means they linger on in the environment and the food chain long after they are used.
• Particular worries relate to children, who are not taken into account when it comes to calculating risks because these are worked out on the basis of an average for the whole population. According to the US National Academy of Sciences, children may be exposed to two or three times the adult equivalent of chemical residues, at a time when their immature bodies are less able to cope with them.
• As far as the environment is concerned, agrichemicals are proving to be a disaster. This expresses itself in the pollution of rivers and lochs by toxic effluent from aquaculture (fish farming) and agriculture, the loss of wildlife and natural habitat, and an abnormally neat and tidy landscape dominated by intensively farmed swathes of land while previously extensively farmed land lies fallow.
• The contribution of agrichemicals to our food choices is also dubious. The visually perfect blemish-free produce we see all round us is only made possible by the use of chemicals.
You cannot wash off agrichemicals
• You can always pick a slug off your lettuce or rinse the leaves to remove greenfly but unfortunately, you cannot buy ‘conventionally’ produced food with an opt-out clause – the chemicals are an integral part of the deal. By removing the rind from fruit and vegetables, you will be able to avoid any post-harvest chemicals on it. However, at the same time you are discarding the part containing most of the valuable fibre and nutrients that keep us healthy.
• Other agrichemicals are in the cell structure of the fruit or vegetable. Over 60 chemicals are permitted for use in apple growing in the UK for pest, weed or disease control and that’s not counting fertilizers. In theory, they should not be detectable in mature produce, since they are meant to be used well before harvest so that they ‘disappear’ before we eat them. In 1994, a government spot check on British winter lettuces revealed more than a quarter of them were contaminated with illegal, or excessive, levels of pesticides.
Organic farming
• Organics is a natural farming method which aims to harness natural biological processes in soil, plants and animals in order to produce healthy, wholesome food. The end goal is optimum quantities of high-quality food, not maximum outputs.
• Organic farming starts with the quality of the soil and its fertility; healthy soil produces healthy food. Organic farmers combine crop rotation with careful selection of plant varieties appropriate to local conditions to achieve a good harvest. While land is rested it produces no income – the principle reason why organic food is often more expensive.
The benefits of organic farming for human health, animal welfare and the environment
• Because agrichemicals are so persistent in our environment and food chain, it is impossible to say that no organic food will contain any agrichemicals whatsoever. But there is no doubt that in most organic produce, levels will be miniscule or non-existent.
• Organic food may be richer in natural health-giving vitamins and trace elements. Crops grown in fertile soil take up a better and more balanced nutrient supply from it. Men who ate organic food in Denmark were found to have twice the sperm count of men who did not.
• Organic meat, milk and eggs offer an impressive guarantee that the animals have been well looked after. The environmental benefits of organic food are obvious. ‘Conventional’ farming is one of the biggest culprits when it comes to pollution of our waterways and our land.
The cost of organic food
• ‘Conventional’ produce is cheaper largely because it is heavily subsidized by the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).
Halfway-house agriculture
• ‘Environmentally conscious cultivation’, Integrated Crop Management (ICM) and Integrated Pest Management (IPM) are essentially halfway houses between chemical-dependent and organic farming and represent an honest attempt to reduce the more obvious excesses of chemical-dependent farming, but they can resort to pesticides and sprays if all else fails.
Differentiating ‘natural’ labels
• When you buy food without any information about how it has been produced, you can assume that it has been grown with the aid of chemicals. Own-brand ‘natural’ labels need to be treated with care. Organic labels can be trusted provided they bear the logo of a certifying body. Unlike the halfway-house alternatives, organic agriculture is the only system whose rules are the same worldwide and which is transparent, open to scrutiny and legally enforced.
Genetically Engineered Foods
• There are 3,000 or so genetically altered or ‘transgenic’ foods that have to date been tested worldwide. Throughout history, special breeds or strains of crops and animals have been developed. The Aberdeen Angus was developed to produce beef with excellent eating qualities. Cross-bred strains of potato have desirable characteristics such as good keeping and eating qualities.
• Unlike traditional breeding, genetic engineering permits scientists to move genetic material – DNA – from one living organism to another, irrespective of the species barrier. The genetic engineer can introduce human genes into animal ones and in the future ‘transgenic’ foods may contain genes from hundreds of unrelated species of animals, insects, plants and bacteria.
• These constructions of disparate genetic material have never before been part of the food chain and no one knows how they will affect it.
• Since transgenic foods are such a major departure it seems logical that they should be labeled as such. But the large transnational companies who dominate gene research think that consumers might be put off. They have argued that there is nothing to fear because transgenic foods are a harmless extension of traditional ‘improving’ techniques.
• There is one course of action for the concerned consumer. Write to your supermarket and ask it to guarantee that any transgenic food it sells will be labeled.
Food irradiation.
• Food irradiation is a controversial technology which consists of exposing food to high doses of radiation. It does not make food measurably radioactive but it brings about chemical changes. It extends shelf-life, acts as a preservative, while also killing some harmful bacteria and any insects present or breeding in the food.
• All large spice companies have refused to use the technique and thus tarnish their good names by association with what is widely seen as a very dubious technology. Supermarkets and major food retailers see no use for the technology at the present time.