The Matrix Redux: Food, Inc.

Earlier we blogged about the state of our food system as prophesied in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. We described Vandana Shiva’s grassroots efforts in India to battle corporate greed, monocultures and genetic engineering. Is it already too late for North America?

That is why Food, Inc., just released, is so important.

In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on America’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that’s been hidden from consumers with the consent of government regulatory agencies.

The US (and Canadian) food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, insecticide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won’t go bad, but we also have new strains of e. coli. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.

What happened to nutrient-dense food that leaves us satisfied, healthy and safe?

Featuring Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield Farm’s Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms’ Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals shocking truths — about what we eat, how it’s produced, who we have become and where we are going from here.*

But Is It Journalism?

Kim Honey, a Toronto Star food scribbler, managed to generate readership for her employer this past week by regaling us with her dispatch of a little bunny at a foodie survival get-together.

Well, it wasn’t a survival course, exactly. It was a cooking class for locavores. That’s last year’s trendy buzz in these anxious days of global warming. Since it wasn’t rabbit hunting season, the writer bought a farmed one, although one not yet committed to a neat, square styrofoam package. So it was left to the writer to do the deed.

All beings tremble before violence. All fear death, all love life. See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do? ~~ Buddha

After cuddling the creature to calm it, and telling us that grown men, soldiers even, broke into tears when faced with the choice of killing a defenseless animal, the writer failed to render the bunny senseless on her first try. She handed it over to the chef, who humanely clubbed it another three times.

We’re not sure what redeeming qualities Kim’s rambling article had. We doubt that it was intended to enlighten us on the obscenity of factory farms, slaughterhouses and speciesism. Was she advocating that Torontonians eschew the strip mall foodmart and, instead, trap raccoons for the stewpot because it’s somehow trendier? We think so. Why else would a locavore drive all the way from the Big Smoke to Hanover at today’s gas prices, to learn bunny bashing?

The city is overrun with cottontail rabbits. You can’t walk out the back door without staring down a couple of haughty raccoons, and Lake Shore Blvd. is like Canada’s Wonderland for geese. ~~ Kim Honey

We checked out a few of her other foodie scribblings for further clues. She’d written a couple of times about the orgasmic glories of foie gras, but she didn’t mention participating in the inhumane gorging of the goose. She just loves eating fat. And cake icing.

She also did a piece for the Globe awhile back about abusing animals in art for shock value. She mentioned some of the more notorious pieces, including the Toronto Casuistry incident.

At the crux of the controversy is the question: What is the definition of art? And who decides what is art…? Is it up to the individual who creates the piece to declare it as art, or should society decide whether the work has any validity? ~~ Kim Honey

We’re guessing her rabbit piece wasn’t a whole lot different.

Sadly for Kim, not everyone was in breathless agreement with her article. Her editor allowed her space the following day to whine about the emails she’d received. It was silly. We’re surprised the Star ran it.

Let’s hope she sticks to rhapsodizing over cake icing.

Read more at Taste T.O.

Resistance is Fertile

Most people don’t realize that genetically engineered foods have quietly slipped into much of the North American food supply.

The Future of Food, a chilling documentary created by Deborah Koons Garcia, uses archival footage and interviews with farmers and agriculture experts to argue that GMO foods are jeopardizing our food safety.

At first, Garcia thought about doing a film on pesticides. But her research led her to the genetic revolution of agriculture. Biotech breakthroughs allowed the gene-splicing of plants from different species or even plants and animals to create crops that resist disease or can withstand pesticides, even the “terminator” gene that kills off crop seeds after one season.

“It became clear that GMOs are really a much bigger issue.” That is, corporate control of the food system and the patenting of life.

She sets her stage with nostalgic, black-and-white shots of traditional farming, before the “green revolution” of fertilizers, chemical pest-killers and mono-cropping grew out of World War II weapons research. Agriculture became industry, and then recombinant DNA technology upped the ante in the 1990s. Chemical companies like Monsanto created Roundup Ready canola, and Bt corn with a spliced-in gene that makes its own insecticide. The chemical companies succeeded in first patenting their own GMO seeds, and then slapped patents on a huge number of crop seeds, patenting life forms for the first time without a vote of the people or Congress.

Garcia tells the David-versus-Goliath story of Saskatchewan grain farmer Percy Schmeiser. He’s one of hundreds of grain farmers sued by Monsanto after the company’s Roundup Ready canola drifted into his field. He fought the suit where many other farmers settled, but lost, and must pay Monsanto to plant his next crop from his own seed.

Ultimately, the film is a call to action — for people to think more about the consequences of their food choices and to use their consumer power to push for labeling and regulation. Labeling might just drive GMO foods off the market, as it has in Europe.

“Someone needed to make this film, because if this technology isn’t challenged and if this corporatization of our whole food system isn’t stopped, at some point it will be too late.”

There are seven parts to this film. Watch them all.

The Future of Food

Check out Greenpeace’s handy guide to help you avoid GM ingredients.

Dinner at Beaver Cleaver’s

The pet food recall brought home to some of us the changes in animal nutrition that have taken place since the mid-20^th century. Rover’s and Fluffy’s table scraps were replaced by scientifically-formulated slop and kibble that aimed to provide optimum, all-life-stages nutrition.

We know that this is a highly profitable way of reusing the waste from the human food industry. Ground up and rendered bits that are not fit for human consumption, including 4-D and euthanized animals, can be reformulated into big bucks chow. Kind of like enriching potato chips with vitamins and preservatives, only a lot worse.

Read Ann Martin’s “Food Pets Die For” to find out why Rover and Fluffy are running up such big vet bills.

Food Pets Die For

Anyway, to the topic at hand, it is no surprise that the agro-food chain presents us humans with more choices to become fat and sick too. Or not.

Here’s a vintage photo from Life Magazine of what the American poster family ate in the 1950’s.

“In this remarkable picture of plenty, Steve Czekalinski, his wife Stephanie and his sons, Stephen and Henry, are surrounded by the food they will have eaten this year – 2 ½ tons of it. The photograph, made for the Du Pont company’s magazine Better Living, is based on statistics on the American diet supplied by the Department of Agriculture.”

The story is here:

Dinner in the 1950s

When Harold Evans was writing his history of the hundred years from 1889 to 1989, The American Century, he sifted through something like thirty thousand photographs, paintings, and cartoons, and chose the Czekalinski family picture.

“I am drawn to Alex Henderson’s carefully posed 1951 descriptive photograph of the Du Pont worker Steve Czekalinski with his wife and two boys. They are framed amid a cornucopia of good food, the 669 bottles of milk, 578 pounds of meat, 131 dozen fresh eggs, 440 pounds of fresh fruit, the coffee, cereal, flour, and so on that the typical American family enjoyed in the booming mid-fifties. It’s a materialistic and commercial image, and some will object to that, but the pursuit of plenty has been an American preoccupation—and the business of America is business, is it not? I admit I hesitated long before nominating the Czekalinski, but it also has something of the American character—it is an honest, unpretentious boast—and it suggests the central story of America in the twentieth century. Here is a man of Polish descent standing proudly and happily with his family, enjoying a prosperity never before known in the history of the world. A photograph that hints at a fulfillment of the American dream is not a bad way of marking the end of the millennium.”

Image of the Century

More recently, CNN ran a pictorial comparison of what people around the world eat in a week and what they spend on their groceries.

Family Dinners Around the World

An interesting study of choices, particularly for those affluent enough to have so many.

Unnatural Selection

Summer Reading:

O Devayani, you thought they would never die.
You bought a bag of tomatoes in October,
and ate most of them
half ripe, as they always are,
from the grocery store.

But — having momentarily lost
the taste for tomatoes –
you set two aside to ripen.
Week after week they remained
on top of the refrigerator,
not quite ripe,
yellowish-red, their skins firm,
their flesh smooth.
They didn’t ripen and they didn’t rot.
Months went by,
they remained the same as the day

you put them atop the refrigerator.
You laughed with your friends about them,
you speculated on the horrors
of genetically altered foodstuffs.
You thought of the half dozen you had eaten.
Would they stay in your stomach

month after month,
unchanged, forever, like the two tomatoes
on top of the fridge?
You read an article that said irradiating
vegetables
keeps them in a state of not quite ripe.
It didn’t say forever, but…
Irradiated food. One month,
two months
three months
four months

five months –
possibly in the sixth month,
first one and then the other tomato
began to rot.
They soon began to smell abominably.
Is this food?
Two tomatoes,

two immortal tomatoes.
O Devayani,
do you wonder
that you fear the sustenance
of this society:
fear, anxiety, permanence, insurance,
the desire to forego change
and death?
O Devayani,
a wise woman would fear to eat
anything at all.

Two Tomatoes, by Jan Haag

FlavrSavr tomatoes, thanks to Monsanto and friends. StarLink corn too. But their best shot was the Terminator.

Corporate multinationals like Monsanto could change the way farmers around the world have operated for millennia. Bent on controlling the food chain, their “technology protection system” rendered seeds sterile. It would protect their intellectual property – mostly herbicide tolerance and insect resistance. Farmers would be forced to buy their seed at every planting.

So much for the myth that commercial biotechnology’s aim is to Solve World Hunger.

Dinner at the New Gene Cafe

Seeds of Deception

NDP tables a ban on Terminator seeds and technology

In related news, NDP agriculture critic Alex Atamanenko introduced a bill on May 31 banning “terminator technology” and committing Canada to sustaining farmers and the farming industry.

According to Jack Layton, “For generations, the world’s farmers have harvested seeds from their crops to replant for the next season. Yet this practice, which is crucial to farmers both here in Canada and in developing countries, is being threatened by multi-national corporations who seek to control the world’s food supply. We must not let this happen in Canada.”

Details of the campaign to support Bill C-448 and transparent GMO labelling at the following links:

• It’s time to put Canadian farmers first
• Canadians demand Harper support ban on terminator seeds
• Alex Atamanenko’s site and Bill C-448
• Genetically modified food: No more s

The Pet Food Recall That Wouldn’t Die

Melamine, cyanuric acid, aminopterin, amilorine, amiloride, and now acetaminophen. What is this stuff doing in pet food anyway, and what else have they simply not reported yet?

According to Pet Connection, the FDA is investigating imported Chinese wheat gluten, corn gluten, corn meal, soy protein, rice bran and rice protein concentrate, in both the human- and pet-food systems. These products are widely used in human food production, in breads, pastas, “meat”-substitutes, pizza, baby formula, protein drinks and bars and more. The tainted pet food has also been fed to hogs, poultry and farmed fish.

The first recall had more than 60 million containers of cuts and gravy style food that turned out to have wheat gluten tainted with melamine, which is used in the manufacture of plastic countertops, cleaning agents, glue and fertilizer. The products were all made by Menu Foods under almost 100 different brand names at all price points. Subsequent recalls have included dry foods, and foods containing rice protein concentrate and corn gluten. At time of this writing, companies continue to pull products.

The Veterinary Information Network’s extrapolation indicates that pet deaths are in the range of 2,000 to 7,000, affected pets in the tens of thousands, with veterinary costs in the range of $2 million to $20 million.

To find out what foods have been recalled, what to do if your pet is sick, and how to prevent trouble, check out Itchmo’s pet discussion site, which focusses on the recall.

Alternative pet foods are emerging as the primary beneficiaries of the recent pet food recall crisis, and could enjoy double-digit growth rates over the next two years, according to a new study by market research firm Packaged Facts. Packaged Facts estimates there will be a brand shift in the market worth $1.3 billion to $4.3 billion in pet food sales. The report identifies the main beneficiaries in this brand-switching trend as “high-quality pet foods chosen as alternatives to traditional brands”.