Tag Archives: Food

Cancer in the Air, Food, and Water

Lyndsey Layton writes in the Washington Post that:
An expert panel that advises the president on cancer said Thursday that Americans are facing “grievous harm” from chemicals in the air, food and water that have largely gone unregulated and ignored.
Somebody noticed!

The President’s Cancer Panel called for a new national strategy that focuses on such threats in the environment and workplaces.

Epidemiologists have long maintained that tobacco use, diet and other factors are responsible for most cancers, and that chemicals and pollutants cause only a small portion — perhaps 5 percent.

The presidential panel said that figure has been “grossly underestimated” but it did not provide a new estimate.

“With the growing body of evidence linking environmental exposures to cancer, the public is becoming increasingly aware of the unacceptable burden of cancer resulting from environmental and occupational exposures that could have been prevented through appropriate national action,” the panel wrote in a report released Thursday.

Federal chemical laws are weak, funding for research and enforcement is inadequate, and regulatory responsibilities are split among too many agencies, the panel found.

The problem is not too many agencies. Here’s the problem: Continue reading →

Hamster Roundup: sterility and infant mortality


Image by Adrisbow Photography
Jeffrey Smith writes in Huffingtonpost about Genetically Modified Soy Linked to Sterility, Infant Mortality in Hamsters:
“This study was just routine,” said Russian biologist Alexey V. Surov, in what could end up as the understatement of this century. Surov and his colleagues set out to discover if Monsanto’s genetically modified (GM) soy, grown on 91% of US soybean fields, leads to problems in growth or reproduction. What he discovered may uproot a multi-billion dollar industry.

After feeding hamsters for two years over three generations, those on the GM diet, and especially the group on the maximum GM soy diet, showed devastating results. By the third generation, most GM soy-fed hamsters lost the ability to have babies. They also suffered slower growth, and a high mortality rate among the pups.

Not just a little higher: five times highher infant mortality.

And it’s not necessarily the soybeans themselves: Continue reading →

School Food: How to Change It

The hardest part of what Jamie Oliver wants to do to fix how we eat is to reform school food. Fortunately, there’s somebody already doing it: Ann Cooper already showed us how she does that three years ago:

Well, the CDC has gone further to say that those children born in the year 2000 could be the first generation in our country’s history to die at a younger age than their parents, and it’s because of what we feed them.
And who teaches us to feed them that?
Big companies spent twenty billion dollars a year marketing non-nutrient foods to kids…. They spent 500 dollars marketing foods kids shouldn’t eat for every one dollar marketing healthy nutritious food.
She feeds school children in Berkeley. You might think that would be easy, but when she started, it was just as bad as anywhere else:
…extremo burritos, corn dogs, pizza pockets, grilled cheese sandwiches, everything came in plastic, in cardboard, the only kitchen tools my staff had was a box cutter; the only working piece of equipment a can crusher.
So she set out to fix it, and did. And if she can, we can.

Jamie Oliver on Food Education

Jamie Oliver is a cook from England. He’s trying to organize an intervention into the food system that’s killing us.

We spend our lives being paranoid about death, murder, homicide, you name it, it’s on the front page of every paper, CNN…. Look at homicide at the bottom, for God’s sake!

Every single one of those ones in the red is a diet-related disease. Any doctor, any specialist, will tell you that.

The top three are heart disease, cancer, and stroke. Number 6 is diabetes. Those are the ones in red on Jamie Oliver’s graph. Homicide is number 15. See CDC for numbers. ( In 2006 72,449 people died of diabetes and 18,573 of homicide. You’re almost 4 times as likely to die of diabetes. And about 40 times more likely to die of heart disease.)
I want to show a picture of my friend Brittney. She’s sixteen years old. She’s got six years to live. Because of the food that she’s eaten. She’s the third generation of Americans that hasn’t grown up within a food environment where they’ve been taught to cook at home or in school. Or her mum. Or her mum’s mum. She has six years to live!
More pictures of people with very round faces and rounder bodies:
This is a normal family, guys!.
We need to change normal. That’s what Jamie Oliver wants to do.

Obesity leads to diabetes and heart disease. And what leads to obesity? Lack of exercise combined with food stuffed with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), salt, and fat in massive portions.

Fast food has taken over the whole country, we know that.
Time to take it back.
I wish I could come up here today and hang up a cure for AIDS or cancer, you’d be fighting and scrambling to get to me. This, all this bad news, is preventable. That’s the good news. It’s very preventable.
How? Vote with your food purchases. Demand a food ambassador in every supermarket. Demand big food businesses back food education. Get the government to work with the fast food purveyors to wean us off the fat, sugar, and salt. Schools, ages 4-whenever: proper fresh food cooked from local sources on site. Every child should leave school knowing how to cook ten recipes that will save their life. Corporate American should feed their staff properly. You can care and be commercial.

That’s his prescription. Doesn’t sound so hard, does it?

Food as Energy

Richard Manning writes in Harpers, February 2004, The oil we eat: Following the food chain back to Iraq, that most plants live in diverse stands of many species, because that way they protect each other and provide services to each other.
There is a very narrow group of annuals, however, that grow in patches of a single species and store almost all of their income as seed, a tight bundle of carbohydrates easily exploited by seed eaters such as ourselves. Under normal circumstances, this eggs-in-one-basket strategy is a dumb idea for a plant. But not during catastrophes such as floods, fires, and volcanic eruptions. Such catastrophes strip established plant communities and create opportunities for wind-scattered entrepreneurial seed bearers. It is no accident that no matter where agriculture sprouted on the globe, it always happened near rivers. You might assume, as many have, that this is because the plants needed the water or nutrients. Mostly this is not true. They needed the power of flooding, which scoured landscapes and stripped out competitors. Nor is it an accident, I think, that agriculture arose independently and simultaneously around the globe just as the last ice age ended, a time of enormous upheaval when glacial melt let loose sea-size lakes to create tidal waves of erosion. It was a time of catastrophe.

Corn, rice, and wheat are especially adapted to catastrophe. It is their niche. In the natural scheme of things, a catastrophe would create a blank slate, bare soil, that was good for them. Then, under normal circumstances, succession would quickly close that niche. The annuals would colonize. Their roots would stabilize the soil, accumulate organic matter, provide cover. Eventually the catastrophic niche would close. Farming is the process of ripping that niche open again and again. It is an annual artificial catastrophe, and it requires the equivalent of three or four tons of TNT per acre for a modern American farm. Iowa’s fields require the energy of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year.

And what’s the net benefit? Continue reading →

Radical Food Rethink for Britain?

According to Peter Griffiths in Scientific American, 10 August 2009, Britain wants “radical rethink” on food production:
LONDON (Reuters) – Britain must find ways to grow more food while using less water, energy and fertilizers to help feed a growing world population and offset the effects of climate change on agriculture, the government said on Monday.
OK, that makes sense. But where’s the radical part?
Farmers will have to adopt new methods to grow bigger crops while being more careful with increasingly valuable commodities such as water and fuel for machinery and fertilizers, Benn said.
OK, less water, fuel, and petrochemical fertilizers; good. But why a few farmers growing bigger crops? As The Institute for Optimum Nutrition points out,
Good food seems to have been erased from our cultural identity, yet Britain was once considered the gastronomic centre of the world.
I would bet Britain didn’t do that by cranking out bigger crops.

How about more small farmers, as well, plus urban gardens?

Monsanto Farm Bill: HR 2749

Here’s something that’s widely opposed by both the right and the left: the so-called “Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009”. And for many of the same reasons, including:
  • HR 2749 would impose an annual registration fee of $500 on any “facility” that holds, processes, or manufactures food. Although “farms” are exempt, the agency has defined “farm” narrowly. And people making foods such as lacto-fermented vegetables, cheeses, or breads would be required to register and pay the fee, which could drive beginning and small producers out of business during difficult economic times.
  • empowers the Dept. of Health and Human Services to micro-manage the raising and harvesting of crops (you might have assumed that Congress would’ve handed the U.S. Dept of Agriculture this terrible power.)

Here’s how your representatives voted when this thing passed the House. The vote didn’t break down neatly by party lines. However, if you look at the cartogram, it looks like city Representatives tended to vote for it, while rural ones tended to vote against. Maybe some rural reps realized that this bill isn’t about safety: it’s about Monsanto and big argribusiness driving small farmers out of business. There’s still time to stop it in the Senate, or when it comes back to the House after being reconciled with whatever the Senate passes.

Roger Ebert review of Food, Inc.

bilde.jpeg A brief excerpt:
All of this is overseen by a handful of giant corporations that control the growth, processing and sale of food in this country. Take Monsanto, for example. It has a patent on a custom gene for soybeans. Its customers are forbidden to save their own soybean seed for use the following year. They have to buy new seed from Monsanto. If you grow soybeans outside their jurisdiction but some of the altered genes sneak into your crop from your neighbor’s fields, Monsanto will investigate you for patent infringement. They know who the outsiders are and send out inspectors to snoop in their fields.

Food labels depict an idyllic pastoral image of American farming. The sun rises and sets behind reassuring red barns and white frame farmhouses, and contented cows graze under the watch of the Marlboro Cowboy. This is a fantasy. The family farm is largely a thing of the past. When farmland comes on the market, corporations outbid local buyers. Your best hope of finding real food grown by real farmers is at a local farmers’ market. It’s not entirely a matter of “organic” produce, although usually it is. It’s a matter of food grown nearby, within the last week.

Remember how years ago you didn’t hear much about E. coli? Now it seems to be in the news once a month. People are even getting E. coli poisoning from spinach and lettuce, for heaven’s sake.

Why are Americans getting fatter? A lot of it has to do with corn syrup, which is the predominant sweetener. When New Coke failed and Coke Classic returned, it wasn’t to the classic recipe; Coke replaced sugar with corn sweeteners.

High fructose corn syrup, bringing obesity, diabetes, and heart disease to a third or more of the U.S. population.

Perhaps it’s time to do something about this.

Before you say “there’s nothing we can do” consider that even Wal-Mart has changed its food buying habits due to customer demand. We vote every time we buy food, and the one thing big corporations don’t want to lose is customers.