Mindful Eating: Off the Corporate Food Grid

Jill Davies, director of Sustainable Living Systems, is a pure food activist living in western Montana. She speaks and writes on current trends in the production of foods and medicines with a focus on GMOs, and on organic agriculture and seed saving.

Part 1

Over the past few months, as our nation engaged in the election process, we heard a lot of talk about how to fix our ailing health care system. But I would ask what is our primary resource for maintaining good health? Agriculture is our primary health care system. We are made of plant stuff and the choices we make regarding what to consume, of both food and beverages, will largely determine our state of health. And to make the healthiest choices we need to know a lot about how our food is produced, what’s in it, where it comes from and how various foods, and drugs for that matter, affect our bodies.

Before WWII most communities were close to their food source. Farms were diverse and marketed their products locally and regionally. Every town had a number of butcher shops. In Montana, 70 percent of the food consumed was produced in-state and food processing was our state’s number one employer. The Bitterroot Valley was the breadbasket of Montana, providing nearby populations like Butte and Helena with much of their food.

Now, 90 percent or more of the food we consume in Montana is from somewhere else, often many, many fossil fuel miles away. And our communities have lost nearly all of their capacity to process and store food.

It’s the same all over the country, and it did not just happen by chance. After WWII our government encouraged the conversion of the munitions industry to fertilizer, and the conversion of nerve-gas research and production to pesticides. The government also began subsidizing commodity crops, telling farmers to “get big or get out.” That meant getting mechanized and resorting to monocropping. Thus “industrial agriculture” was born.

To me the term “industrial agriculture” is an oxymoron, that is, a figure of speech in which an adjective that means the opposite of the noun that it describes is used, (e.g. a planned coincidence, jumbo shrimp). “Agriculture” is cultivation of the land, the soil and the organisms that live there. It requires extensive knowledge of ecosystem dynamics and whole systems thinking.

“Industrial” refers to man’s production of goods under a reductionist, machine-like model where efficiency and profit are the only factors that guide the process. Living organisms, including the soil, do not respond well to a reductionist, exploitive industrial model and chemicals have replaced ecosystem knowledge. The food now produced in the industrial agriculture system has lost its capacity to maintain health.

One of these losses is in trace mineral content. A book: “The Healing Power of Minerals” has extensive information about this derived from many studies, some by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Decreases in mineral content (calcium, iron, magnesium) measured in a range of vegetables, fruits, grains and meats from 1963 to 1992 is shown from around 10 to 80 percent, and if averaged overall would be somewhere around 50 percent.

Vitamin content from 1963 to 1992 has also shown a marked decline, especially vitamin A in chicken and beef. Industrial agriculture crops are depressed, fatigued, with depleted immune systems, overly vulnerable, and kept alive with artificial food (chemical fertilizers) and drugs (pesticides); and so are we.

The first effects of broad-spectrum nutritional deficiencies in humans are usually felt in the emotional life and energy level: depression, anxiety, insomnia, mental imbalance and fatigue. Compounding this is our high sugar (including high fructose corn syrup, HFCS) consumption. Government subsidized HFCS is now in nearly all processed foods and drinks.

Sugar depresses the immune system, hinders calcium and magnesium absorption, exhausts the body’s chromium supplies, and causes the body to start stealing minerals from bones and teeth. Sugar stimulates the pancreas to produce insulin, which is needed to metabolize sugar. The pancreas wears out, or most likely, runs out of the minerals it needs to produce hormones, and diabetes is the result. We are now seeing an epidemic of obesity and diabetes in our nations’ children. It is ironic that we are both obese and starving.

The secondary effects of mineral deficiency are the organic, systemic Western diseases: heart disease, cancer and stroke. “Western” because these diseases are rare or nonexistent in indigenous societies, but appear in such societies when the native people switch to a Western diet.

In order to maintain optimum health, we need to eat healthy, fresh, nutritious foods. Make connections with farmers and ask how they produce their crops and maintain soil fertility. We still have a lot of good natural farming in the Bitterroot Valley [and Whatcom County] and we could have a lot more if people decided to get off the corporate food grid. §

Refined Fats and Oils

Part 2

In the previous article I talked about “industrial agriculture” and how it is the product of a reductionist, mechanistic way of thinking. I must also introduce the term “industrial nutrition,” as the combination of the two have created the foods in our Western diet that are directly linked to our Western diseases — cancer, stroke, obesity, diabetes, heart disease.

We are great believers in what our experts say and sometimes for good reason. Our scientific knowledge has given us a good understanding of infectious diseases and so with improved sanitation and the use of antibiotics we have largely defeated those nasty little microbes.

But science has not given us freedom from chronic, systemic disease. In fact, just the opposite is true. In our gullibility, we have confused “corporate” science with objective science and been led down a very unhealthy path. Chronic illness has now reached epic proportions causing three out of four deaths in the U.S. Tragically, these diseases which were extremely rare only a few generations ago now strike people in the prime of life, and also even children. Have we forgotten that we should be whole, vibrant and healthy? It seems we are losing faith in that expectation.

It used to be that people cooked and food was what they ate. Today the supermarket shelves are loaded with other “food-like” substances that you can’t pronounce and the packages are decorated with elaborate health claims. Those health claims may be the signal to start reading the ingredient list to see how much real food is in the package.

Take margarine, the first important synthetic food to slip into our diet. A few decades ago (1960s) it was declared by our diet experts (corporate scientists, food industry marketers and compliant government agencies) that animal fat was bad for us. Along came margarine made from vegetable oils treated in a factory in a long series of processes to make them solid at room temperature, resistant to going rancid and artificially flavored to taste like butter. The oils were derived from the now burgeoning, subsidized, industrial soy and corn monocultures in the Midwest that needed to find a market.

“Better than butter” margarine (and shortening) became the norm in the kitchen. If a vitamin was found missing it was simply synthesized and added to the vat. Food became something from a factory rather than from the soil or hoofs on the soil. (Hoofs on feedlot muck don’t count.) But the food scientists’ ingenious method for making soy or corn oil solid at room temperatures by blasting it with hydrogen turned out to produce what we now know as deadly “trans-fats.”

The proof is in the pudding. If milk, butter and other animal products containing saturated fats and cholesterol were the culprit, the change in diet should have shown a corresponding decrease in chronic disease. The opposite is what happened.

All fats and oils, whether of vegetable or animal origin. are a combination of saturated and (mono- or poly-) unsaturated fats. Saturated fats like butter, and also mono-unsaturated fats like olive oil are relatively stable and do not go rancid or change when heated and so are good for cooking. Vegetable oils, mostly poly-unsaturated fats, remain liquid even when refrigerated, are highly reactive, go rancid easily and change when heated. (Coconut oil is the exception, being 92 percent saturated.)

Most of the fats in the American diet are from soy oil, also corn and canola. Cooking and processing with these oils creates “free radicals,” that is, small compounds that are extremely reactive and attack tissues in the body. These are the fats to be avoided.

I was amazed to see the butter shelf in the grocery store that I recently visited to have four-fifths of the space occupied by various synthetic spreads and about one-fifth by real butter. That means people are still buying the food industry’s potions. If you want to be healthy, avoid all processed foods containing hydrogenated fats and also deep fried foods from fast food restaurants. Use as much good quality butter as you like. Try coconut oil for pie crusts and general baking and use extra virgin olive oil for occasional frying. §