What is Happening to our Food?

Introduction

I believe that if we went back to basics that there would be almost no need for ‘medicines’ herbal or allopathic.

Part of my work as a landscape consultant involves designing lifestyle blocks and much is devoted to designing blocks of land for personal food production.

I thought I might share some interesting facts gleaned from Michael Pollan’s book “In Defence of Food”. A fabulously unbiased book written by a journalist with no hidden agendas and not connected to any organization or scientific body.

Every trip to the supermarket these days requires us to navigate what has become a truly treacherous food landscape. Tip: don’t buy product from middle isles if you want to avoid processed Franken-foods.

Firstly let us look at what has happened to food production in the last 30 years. Michael Pollan claims that the idea that eating should be about bodily health, is new and destructive brought about by government policy and politics.

Some facts:

• Government ideology ‘speak not of food but nutrient value” which means food is no longer food but a list if nutrients.
• Introduction of food labeling laws in 1973. This meant that food was promoted in terms of nutrients couched in unpronounceable scientific names and numbers.
• That we must eat ‘scientifically’ and under the guidance of ‘experts’.
• The science of nutrition created unwarranted fear of some food groups  ie  lipo-phobia (a cute term meaning fear of fats). This paradoxically has coincided with the low fat diet and a dramatic increase in obesity and diabetics.
• Now another one- carbo-phobia (fear of ? you guessed it carbohydrates)
• Further this has created a nation of orthorexics (ortho meaning right and rexic meaning diet or appetite) who have an unhealthy obsession with food.
• Totally missed is that” whole foods are the sum of their nutrient parts” and that whole foods consist of components that act synergistically that simply cannot be explained using current diagnostic tools. For example when beta carotene (found in yellow fruits and vegetables) acts in concert with other plant chemicals it provides beneficial protection but in isolation becomes a pro-oxidant as shown in the increase of tumours in some cases.
• That 17,000 new processed ‘food imposters’ are introduced into super market shelves worldwide every year.
• In the American Midwest, sustainable ecosystems have been lost as 10 billion bushels of cheap corn are produced annually.
• This over production of corn has introduced a vast new stock of biomass into the environment. This needed to be used thereby creating a whole new food chain all containing corn or corn by-products
• One such product is High Fructose Corn Syrup that has crept into almost all processed foods and is partly responsible for the epidemic of obesity and all that goes with it.

There is no need to be unduly influenced by the ‘experts’ because you don’t need to fathom the particular food’s complexity to reap its benefits.  

If the experts acknowledge that they got it spectacularly wrong, we all will come to the conclusion that the “Emperors of Nutrition” (Michael Pollan’s apt term) have no clothes and we would never listen to them again

This unhealthy obsession with healthy eating takes away the simple pleasures of eating and more importantly producing and cooking or own food. Nutritionism is the official ideology of the western diet clothed in science and driven by captive markets.  In other words eating is now scientific…..