Mmm… Food

Swindled: The Dark Hisotry of Food Fraud, From Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee.  By Bee Wilson

What a read. Nowadays in the the U.S. some of the biggest “swindles” seem to focus on organic food as an escape from the “adulteration” of our foods with pesticides. (There are of course all the additives, flavourings, colorings and preservatives in processed foods, but that’s a whole other story) The book talks about this kind of adulteration but also gives us a rich background of adulterations of food with things like arsenic, plaster of paris, bark and clay. Things that have no nutritional value and some things that will kill you. While they don’t occur very often in the US they aren’t completely gone. but there are still food scares that happen nowadays that are more like some of the historic examples in the book. Panics like the melamine in milk coming from China being one of the most recent.

The book gives a great history of the swindles that have been carried out over the histories of England and the US. Bee Wilson argues that worries about swindles arose as societies moved from an agrarian to an industrial culture. As people became further and further distanced from their food stuffs they were more and more and liable to be given something false, of lower quality, substitutions in general crappier products. Really to be living in this day and age in the US where food Nutrition labels are on most everything, detailing out ingredients, calories, fats, proteins, sugars. It really is amazing. You used to get something and have no idea what they might be putting in it. Coffee laced with chicory, bark and acorns. Bread made with alum (to make it whiter and more desirable). Candies coated with lead and copper compounds which gave them bright green yellow and red colors.

After reading this book the drive to eat more “whole foods”, things that come from nature and have an easy name like chicken, peppers, apples, asparagus, eggs and milk is even stronger. (These items still have the ability to be swindled in the way they are grown and raised but they still rate much higher than any processed foods). We have been doing this quite well for a while now, and it just makes so much more sense to me. Eating this way makes grocery trips so much easier, and reasons out why I like small markets like Devon Market and Harvesttime foods. When you eat more “whole foods” you end up doing most of your shopping in the produce and meat and dairy sections. The exceptions for other aisles include getting items like olive oils, beans, pasta and rice. But really that’s only 2 additional aisles I need to travel down. In general when you buy and eat this way you know what you’re getting. There is of course processing for milk and yogurt and there are additives in these foods, but the lists are much shorter than what you might find on the side of a box of oreos. I mean really, what is in an Oreo?? You would be hardpressed to make something like it at home, although, as the book points out, there is a website where people try to make giant at home versions of processed foods. The results are strange and kind of mystifying. Check this one of giant Oreo at www.pimpthatsnack.com.

Four Stars. Read this Book!!!

Diet For a Small Planet : Frances Moore Lappe

One of the first things to know (which may be obvious by the look of the cover) is that this book is not a current title. Originally published in 1971, I read a 20th Anniversary Edition, which while still adds some updated and revised information via 1991, that’s still 18 years ago!!! I wanted to add this book to the list because it does feel like one of those pivotal food books that has ever been published, especially in recent memory. While trying to remain open minded, I admit I went into it thinking everything would sound outdated and not applicable to the world we currently live in where the new food push seems to be all about organic and local. I thought this book would be all about vegetarianism. While some of my preconceived notions were true, I was more surprised at the things that weren’t true, and those things that felt like they could have been published now! It doesn’t feel like an old outmoded movement as a way of eating. Kind of scary.

First, she isn’t trying to promote vegetarianism. She wants a return to a more “natural” way of eating, where the majority of our food consumed is plants and meat appears only briefly as a supplement. She wants people to eat whole grains and vegetables and fruits. Un-processed foods. The further we get away from the initial starting ingredients the worse our food becomes and it become less and less about food, and more about profit margins for corporations and power over the food supply and therefore the people. The return to natural grains echoed what I had read in the South Beach Diet. The thing that continually gets me, is it seems so obvious! Whole grains have all the fiber and nutrients that your body needs. You feel full. And there are so many different kinds of foods to eat you can hardly believe it at first.

So much of the book actually seems to focus on power. And the lack of power by many people to control the foods available to them. Why are there starving people when there is so much food? We feed so much grain to livestock to provide meat for an elite world class while millions starve and don’t have enough sustenance to live. Lappe argues people to do starve because there is not enough food. The solution is not ramping up our production. The solutions lie in what food gets to what people. Can we forget the masses and only think of ourselves?? Lappe feels that choosing to eat in the reduced meat way that she provides is responsible and a start to addressing the real problems involving the needs of the powerless. Starting here will you get you interested there, learning more, becoming informed, no longer turning a blind eye, doing something about it. Change can happen. She wants it to happen. We can make it happen.

Here’s a little video she’s got on the website http://www.smallplanet.org

2.5 stars. Interesting informationt that helped push me more to think about where the food movement has been and where it is now to where it is going. But no revolutionary new information that you can’t find in something newer and perhaps more relevant to today’s food systems (such as “The Omnivores Dilemna” which I read a couple years ago, or what I am guessing will be “In Defense of Food“. (which I plan on reading soon) Michael Pollan seems to be the new mass media published voice for a new way of thinking about our food).

Ooh, this quick articleMichael Pollan published in 2008 in Newsweek sums up a lot of the ideas from this book which are still a problem today!!!