RBGh is a synthetic, laboratory produced version of a hormone that cattle produce cyclically during their growth, maturation and lactation. It is administered to increase milk production in adult cows. RBGh has been strongly linked to several metabolic diseases both in dairy cattle and in humans consuming milk produced by cattle being treated with RBGh. Luckily, Canadian dairy farmers are not allowed to use RBGh on their animals.

The bad news – the Canadian government has slowly changed Canadian dairy regulations (in the face of pressures from GATT and NAFTA agreements) to allow freer access to Canada’s markets for American dairy products (including those from cows treated with RBGh). In an effort to reduce “protectionism” and to allow “market forces” to dictate what’s best for us, our dairy marketing laws have been slackened to allow access to our grocery shelves to U.S. dairy products. The American products allowed access to Canadian markets are dehydrated products. They are listed as “milk ingredients”, “concentrated skim milk”, “whey protein concentrate” or “milk protein concentrate”. Using milk products from cows treated with RBGh is a sneaky way to help keep the cost of your yogurt and other dairy products artificially low. Even in the U.S.A., many small farmers have stopped using RBGh on their cattle because they noticed the negative health effects. Most industrial farming operations (factory farms) still use this hormone as a way to keep production up and costs down. When you consume products with RBGh milk, you expose yourselves to serious health risks (cancer, thyroid and gonadal problems, allergy and inflammation problems) and you indirectly encourage poor animal welfare practices.

Read the ingredients and think don’t buy dairy products labelled with “milk ingredients”, “concentrated skim milk”, “whey protein concentrate” or “milk protein concentrate”. It’s that simple. Vote with your wallet, and when the next election comes to your neighbourhood – ask questions of those vying for office. Don’t blindly trust their good intentions.

Malthusian catastrophe - population growth outstrips agricultural production capacity

However, thanks to scientific and agricultural innovations, food production has thus far outpaced population growth. Economists and politicians have derided the Malthusian theory for years (it has even earned the name of Malthusian Fallacy), assuming that modern science would forever provide the increases in agricultural production needed to sustain an ever-growing population. The 1960′s Green Revolution, the advent of modern industrial agricultural methods, the use of chemical fertilizers, the development of genetically modified crops and the use of chemical pesticides and herbicides have allowed for the dramatic increases in crop yields between Malthus’ own 18th century and today, forestalling the catastrophic outcomes predicted by the Malthusian theory of population.

Despite, or perhaps because of the fact that the industrial model of agriculture has managed to sustain such a heady growth of population since the 1800′s (from approximately 1 billion to over 6.5 billion worldwide today), we have come to ignore how precarious our worldwide food situation has truly become. Several convergent factors now render this situation even more unstable – we may yet see the advent of the Malthusian prophesy…or at least significantly higher food prices and subsequent socio-political instability.

The industrial model of agriculture relies on two basic premises. Firstly, the commodification and compartmentalization of food production – where producers, produce and animals are treated like replaceable machine parts, independent and interchangeable. Secondly, the exploitation of “free” natural systems (commonly called resources to reduce their value in the eyes of consumers) and cheap “inputs” of chemicals, fuel and manpower. As we approach the natural limits of the food production system on Earth, these assumptions will become unsustainable.

The natural plant world is a complex system, where millions of organisms support each other and feed each other in a never-ending web of life. The compartmentalization of the industrial model breaks this system wide open, extracting resources at a rate that pulls down the capital of the natural system. The most flagrant example is how the planting of annual grains in an intensive monoculture system has rapidly eroded the topsoil in agricultural areas. Topsoil, a living ecosystem that takes thousands of years to build, has been depleted in a few centuries by our reliance on annuals and monocultures. The thinning of the topsoil reduces its water retention capacity and fertility.

As a result, farmers increase irrigation to compensate for the reduced water retention and increase the application of chemical fertilizers to provide the soil with the lacking nitrogen, potassium and phosphate. The heavy application of chemical fertilizers is reliant on an abundant source of inexpensive petrol both for its nitrogen component and for its application. Petrol, a resource whose cost of extraction, whose availability, whose environmental cost and whose cost at the pump is only climbing. As if that were not enough, the phosphate component of fertilizer is either mined or extracted from animal carcasses. Along with petrol, mined phosphate is also rapidly becoming more expensive and scarce. The cost of doing business as usual is quickly increasing.

As the soil’s water retention capacity decreases, much of the irrigation water, pulled from the delicate underground water table at a rate faster than it can replenish itself, runs off fields to find its way into our streams and rivers, laden with much of the applied fertilizer. Additionally, the increased rate of irrigation leads to gradual salination of the soils (as the plants take up the water they need and leave the mineral salts behind), until the soils can no longer sustain plant growth. In several industrialized nations, as well as “Green Revolution” states such as India, underground water stores are getting shallower – making access more difficult and further concentrating the mineral salt content of the water pumped from the aquifers. The legacy of the Green Revolution is rapidly becoming one of salty sterile soils, depleted aquifers and ocean “dead-zones” where fertilizer runoff has resulted in oxygen depletion and the death of sea life.

In the past, when agricultural civilizations depleted such “natural resources” in their local area, they either died of famine or packed up and moved elsewhere. In a world where we are approaching limits of agricultural exploitation, when we poison or deplete our land – where will we move?

As food retailers and processors gain more and more economic control over farmers and primary producers, the economics of food is turning upside-down. Moving agriculture from a living, dynamic system into a market-driven commodity where uniformity of product and production capacity are demanded from farmers, no matter the environmental cost. Whereas agricultural markets were traditionally production dependant – consumers paid market value for whatever was available at the time of harvest, modern market structures impose retail demands on a natural system. No matter the weather, the season or the economy, we dictate that our tomatoes be ripe, red and uniform in January. As larger retailers (i.e. Walmart, ADM, Cargill) increasingly dictate prices to producers, the cost of produce has become decoupled from the cost of production, often with farmers loosing in the bargain. Farmers are forced to take what should be a natural system of growth, death and regeneration and artificially conform it to unsustainable standards of production and uniformity. Farmers, once over 50% of the population, are now nothing more than a token few interchangeable cogs in the industrial machine.

Additionally, increased reliance on genetically modified organisms, seeds with legal patent protection and restricted ownership rights belonging to large industrial corporations makes farmers economically dependent on these large corporations. Legally obstructed from growing their own seed for crops, farmers in many cases face an equivalent to indentured servitude to the seed companies.

Global population increases coupled with greater prosperity in populous countries such as Brazil, China and India provide a market ripe with possibility for Big Food. Using techniques honed in North America and Europe, Big Food urges consumers in these emerging economies to convert from their traditional foodways to a western “first-world” diet. This not only means eating more processed food, but usually includes eating greater numbers of animals. Just as in North America and Europe, a flesh-heavy diet drives factory farming, factory fishing and overfishing practices.

Vegans and vegetarians rightfully argue that the feeding of annual grain crops to animals in feedlots (and fish farms), most of whom are not suited to such calorie dense and starchy feed has many negative consequences. Sick animals and fish, a reliance on prophylactic antibiotics with all the downstream effects that this entails and a heightened demand on the artificially cheap (read – subsidized) production of annual grains are but a few of these negative effects. The hidden costs of the the industrial agricultural model are being felt in our hospitals (anti-biotic resistant strains of bacteria), in our waterways (toxic farm runoff) and in our food (eating sick animals = sick people). Moreover, overfishing and the toxic effects of farm runoff and poorly managed aquaculture are having the same effect on wild fish as on the sick farmed varieties.

Recent articles in the New York Times, Foreign Policy and Grist/Mother Jones highlight the short term economic costs of these policies. With global population slated to reach over 7 billion before 2020 and pressures rising on agricultural production – Thomas Malthus may yet have the last laugh. In any case, we should brace ourselves for significantly higher food costs (budget around 30-40% of your income) in the next few years.

World Population - with projections from U.N. 2004

What can be done? Many possible options offer paliative “Band-Aid” solutions. However, the only long-term solution is population control coupled with sustainable agricultural practices. However, government policies to directly curb reproduction rates are highly unpopular and have only been successfully implemented by authoritarian governments – since any democratic government proposing such measures would quickly lose popular support.

Investing in the education of young women and girls has shown dramatic effects in reducing the number of children per family in developing nations. Conversely, in countries where the education rate of young women is already high, tax and career support (e.g. paid maternal leave) promoting child bearing is highly popular, and is rationalized as a way to maintain the tax base (protect retirement plans) and local culture in the face of immigration or assimilation (as in Québec). When food prices begin to rise and political upheaval such as that exhibited in the recent events in the Middle East starts to spread around the globe, young couples must seriously contemplate before bringing children into this world – especially second or third children. For those of you thinking of having children in the near future, keep these thoughts in mind – and remember that one more child will become one more teenager with an appetite to match. With food prices predicted to double or triple in the next 3-5 years, that extra mouth could become a surprising economic burden…

Small questions like “is this fish almost extinct?” can add up to cumulative economic choices which will influence changes in the commerce of food. Greenpeace has researched the fishing and processing practices behin canned fish giant CloverLeaf and found an extreme disregard for sustainable fishing practices and much waste in their catching and processing practices – waste of other vulnerable species along with the at-risk tuna.

Check out the article HERE and start asking questions at your grocery store. Your interest and your dollar are the driving forces that will help produce positive change. Be the change you wish to see. (Credits to Greenpeace for the image)

What is the secret? To understand this difference, we must look no further than Sir Albert Howard who was knighted for his contributions to agronomic research. Sir Howard (1873-1947) spend over 30 years researching agricultural techniques in the then British colonies in India and thé West Indies.

Sir Howard provided the philosophical foundations for organic agriculture in his bocks An Agricultural Testament (1943) and The Soil and Health (1947), books that remains a watershed reference to this day. He believed that we must treat the ” the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal an man as one great subject.” There can be no separation of the crop health and the health of the soils in which they live. He saw one of his favourite topics, composting, as a major element in soil fertility cycle and human health and he spent much of his treatise expounding on the benefits and methods of optimal composting in agricultural production. His works were published in thé years preceding the Green Revolution of thé 1960’s and the growth of industrial agriculture

Just as we are starting to see the bacterial colonies that share our bodies as integral to our health, we must recognize the importance of the microflora and microfauna in the topsoil as priceless in the health of our life-sustaining agricultural and wild natural systems.

David Suzuki, in his 75th anniversary 10-part CBC radio program “The Bottom Line” underlines the complexity and importance of this living system in the two part show dedicated to soil and soil health (Listen to episodes 4A and 4B). All conscientious farmers see themselves as stewards of this layer of soil and its living systems.

In the great book Feeding the Future (compiled and edited by Andrew Heintzman and the CBC’s own Evan Solomon), authors David Wheeler and Jane Thompson illustrate how conventional agriculture’s reliance on chemical inputs rather than soil stewardship progressively degrade the topsoil. In fact, the World Resources Institute estimated in 2002 that 28% of the Earth’s land surface is devoted to agriculture, of which 31% as crops and 69% as pasture. However, with current intensive agricultural practices, 49% of this agricultural land is either moderately or strongly degraded and therefore required higher levels of chemical inputs and fertilization in order to produce the necessary yields. Earthtrends research in 2003 indicated that fertilizer consumption per hectare of crop land has increased since 1960 from 10 kg per hectare (KG/HA) to more than 50 KG/HA in 2000

David R. Montgomery, a geomorphologist (geomorphology is scientific study of landforms and the processes that shape them), in his book Dirt : The Erosion of Civilizations, that soil is humanity’s most essential natural resource. Since all our food energy is based on plant transformation of solar energy into carbohydrates, fats and proteins that humans consume directly or feed to animals, several historical cases exist where soil health was neglected until crops failed leading to the collapse or weakening of the civilization in question. In the past, when soils became un-productive, populations moved on, a solution which is not an option for future generations, Montgomery warns: there isn’t enough land.

Many of our present agricultural and pollution problems can be linked in whole or in part to the reduction of topsoil health. As topsoil degrades, rainfall and wind leads to greater erosion – a process that is usually limited by the microfauna and residual root systems in a well managed soil – this erosion leads to congestion and restriction of waterways (e.g. congestion problems in the watershed of the Mississippi and Amazon rivers) . The augmented porosity and water retention of healthy soils helps reduce the need for irrigation as well as increasing drought resistance in crops planted in these soils. Monitoring of groundwater levels in intensively farmed areas in North America and India show ongoing depletion as farmers pump more and more this groundwater up for irrigation of soils that retain less and less irrigation. As runoff of weak soils increases, so does the runoff of soil nitrogen – even the added nitrogen used in chemical fertilizer. As this nitrogen (organic and inorganic) runs into the downstream watershed, it increases the incidence of algae blooms and the occurrence of oxygen deplete dead-zones where fish cannot survive.

As an individual you can help support more conscientious soil stewardship in agriculture by personally insisting on organic foods at your local grocery as well as explaining to your friends and family the importance of choosing organic and sustainably farmed produce and meats. Many economists and policy makers see organic agriculture as a luxury for the rich when in fact the short term investment we make in proper stewardship of the essential resource that is the soil will quickly pay back in crop productivity, the health of our waterways and our groundwater resources. Don’t underestimate your influence and the impact you can have when you chose action and activism – do your part today. The present federal elections present a great opportunity for activism – ask tour local and national candidates what their policies are on sustainable agricultural practices and economic support for organic farming!

Food companies, especially those involved in transformation of cheap, high energy grains into “added value” products as well as those companies involved in food marketing have long understood, though perhaps indirectly, many of the influences which drive food consumption and eating behaviour. Recent research in neurology illustrating the function of mirror neurons, as well as a close relationship in the brain between brain areas responsible for responding to taste and smell sensations and those areas responsible for storing emotional memories indicate to us that direct neurological effect of advertising on our desires when it comes to food. Even in primates, mirror neurons have been shown to fire associated reward and taste circuits when the animals saw lab workers eating ice cream cones. Frequent bombardment by visual, auditory and multimedia stimuli to drive us to eat more processed food strongly strengthens desire for this food in the brain. When you consider that an average North American child is exposed to approximately 10,000 TV advertisements per year, mostly for soft drinks, fast food, sugared cereals and snacks foods; is it any wonder that these foods become primary choices in their diet as they grow older?

Understanding market forces and becoming marketing literate is not sufficient to counteract these subtle neurological effects which anchor already biologically tempting foods (containing high levels of sugar, fat and salt) in our brains through marketing. When we see someone enjoying an ice cold Coke, smiling and enjoying the company of good friends, our brain inevitably puts us in their shoes through the magic of mirror neurons and anchors a sensation of drinking the beverage with the enjoyment that we imagine they must be feeling. Later, when deciding what to drink we reference these memories in order to make a choice and the more often we have seen these marketing messages the stronger their influence will be on our choices.

In this modern, multimedia marketing world, is there a solution to this dilemma? Government health agencies seem to think that fighting fire with fire is the way to go — by advertising healthy foods to displace the unhealthy ones in our emotional memory. This only adds to the noise and confusion while increasing the forces that push us to eat more. I believe that one of the few solutions open to us is to reduce our exposure to marketing messages. Don’t forget that though the medium may be the message, the product being sold to those paying to produce the media is YOU! When companies sponsor the production of television, movies or any other media it is an indirect way of buying your attention, your energy and your time. When you understand the implications of mirror neurons and emotional anchoring in the mind, you also understand that they are paying for direct access to your brain and influencing your behavior in ways that are invisible to your conscious mind. Will you freely sacrifice your time, your energy, your life (or that of your kids) to these vultures?

“Hi kids, when you see “Ad Break” it means you are viewing a commercial message designed to sell you something. Remember, if you are under 18 years old, you should get a parent’s permission before you submit any information about yourself or try to buy anything online.”

This on a page who’s sole purpose is clearly to sell cookies. What? Do they truly expected 12-year-old kid in the middle of surfing the web to stop and say “Mommy! Mommy! This website is trying to sell me something! Please, help me! What do I do?” Seriously, they even have a little logo which is supposed to pop up and warn people (especially kids) that they are being sold something. Everything about the website screams marketing, it says, no screams “BUY MORE COOKIES! EAT MORE COOKIES!”

Either this is something that the legal department from Nabisco cooked up after having eaten a few too many special cookies, or the marketing department really thinks that we won’t be able to tell that the whole website is designed to sell more cookies. I’ve never seen this type of announcement at the bottom of a billboard. Who are they fooling?

Dr Freedhoff’s post got me thinking. I believe that each of us should spend some time and examine what constitutes “the good life” for us. Greek philosophers spent years investigating this question in their quest to live well, yet we are happy to let marketers tell us what it should mean to live well. Hallmarks of the marketing ideal of the “good-life” are spending more money (because they are always selling you something), eating more and doing less. Following this trajectory will bring us closer to the nightmarish vision of the future portrayed in the Pixar’s animated feature film WALL-E, were monstrous blobs of flesh are hauled around on personalized floating lounge-sofas so they never have to leave the mind-numbing “gavage” of marketing messages and junk food fed to them by the sofa’s integrated screens and accessories.

If slowly poisoning ourselves is the “good life”, we will not feel good for long. Let’s get back in touch with a lifestyle that truly makes us feel better – not what industry makes us believe is the fat-cat luxury life we supposedly “deserve”. If we swallow that clap-trap we will truly get what we deserve in the end – all we will be able to do is eat, drink and watch TV because we will be too out of shape to do anything else.

Mrs Bruso, who writes a nutrition blog called BabyBites on children’s food issues, left a McDonald’s Happy Meal on a shelf in her office to observe and blog about as it aged. As she cites in her blog, her husband “worried that when the food began to decompose, there would be a terrible odour in our home. He also worried the food would attract ants and mice.” In fact, the meal did not even attract fungus! It remained on the shelf (as Mrs Bruso admits – the Colorado air is very dry) and just… well it just sat there. It seems that no one wanted it; not the mice (assuming she had mice in her house), not the insects, not even the microfauna; and we feed this to our children?

Economists sometimes use the level of competition for acquiring a given item as a good sign of the value of an item. The more people are willing to compete to get something (demand), the higher the price becomes – and the winner in the competition is usually the individual (or group) willing to exchange or sacrifice the most for it. The same principle applies with most foods. The more intrinsic nutritional value a food has, the greater the competition is to gobble it up before someone else gets to it. We see this in action with fresh fruits, veggies and meats if they are left unprotected. It is not long before insects, microfauna and microflora (fungi and bacteria) and animals munch it down.

Mrs Bruso as well as the host of media that have followed and re-transmitted her story have suggested that the stability of the McHappy Meal’s ingredients after a year of shelf life (at least on first visual appraisal) are signs of their poor nutritional quality. While true in such cases as the fresh fruits, vegetables and meats, in this case, this is an oversimplification of a complex system. If a food’s inhospitableness to bacteria or fungi are indications of its lack of nutritional value, then such stable foods such as cheeses, dried fruit, nuts and honey which are generally unattractive to fungi and bacteria due to their relatively low levels of moisture (and subsequent high concentrations of fats and sugars) should be considered altogether unhealthy. Often, as in this case, the low levels of water present in some foods make them an environment which does not support the growth of fungi, bacteria or or the micro-organisms. The fries in the happy meal are so well cooked that they attain a level of moisture low enough to preserve the potato starch and oil for years. Even the meat in a McHappy Meal, which is cooked to USDA well-done standards of 70ºC at the centre (otherwise known as boot leather), has such low levels of moisture that nothing will live in it. This is the reason for condiments (very high concentrations of sugars and oils) – otherwise the burgers and fries are practically inedible.

If the attractiveness of the food to other animals is an accurate indication of its value, then what is to be said of the millions of rats, racoons, seagulls and bears who gorge themselves regularly on McHappy Meals, Whoppers and french fries in containers behind fast food joints across the world? The fact that Mrs Bruso’s McHappy Meal survived in such excellent condition is more a tribute to her housekeeping skills (no rodents and not enough bugs) and the dry air in Denver than to any thing to do with the nutritional value of the “meal”.

If we seek to argue against these foods, we must rely on solid, logical and thorough arguments that cannot be so easily countermanded as I have just done. Fast food has been sometimes cited as a good value-for-money offering that should be praised (The Gospel of Food by Barry Glassner) for providing disadvantaged and stressed families with food options. We must educate those that we love in the true value of food – a value that cannot simply be calculated on a volume or calorie per dollar basis. Food’s true value combines the life-energy it embodies with the labour of love that it carries from those who grow and prepare it for us. When we reduce its value to a calorie per dollar equation, we devalue all of these important factors. By providing more attractive choices to those we love we will reduce demand, value and economic power of such low-value fast food.

If we want people that we love to resist foods such as the McHappy Meal, we must consistently produce foods that compete favourably with such enhanced and tweaked products. I believe that in order to reduce the power of such food industrials, we must work to make our food better choices truly better. It is our responsibility to provide our families with choices that they will prefer to these engineered experiences. Our reasons for choosing these healthier foods must convince logically, morally and emotionally.

Ingredients

1 medium onion
3 green onions
4 small tomatoes
beef or chicken broth
175 mL peanut butter
500mL cooked millet
1 dried chili pepper
1/2 teaspoon cumin
1/2 teaspoon peppercorns
1 teaspoon coriander
1/2 teaspoon Aleppo pepper
3 stalks fresh coriander
1/2 tablespoon coconut oil

Instructions

In the frying pan sauté the dry spices until they become aromatic.
Grind the spices in a mortar or coffee grinder.
Roughly chop the onions, green onions and the stalks from the fresh coriander.
In a frying pan over medium heat, add the coconut oil, onions, green onions, coriander stalks and spices.
Sauté over medium heat until the onions are softened.
Add the millet and cook until the millet has absorbed some of the juices from the onions.
Cut the four small tomatoes into cubes.
Add tomatoes and cook over medium heat until the tomatoes are completely softened.
Add the peanut butter and stir in chicken broth until desired consistency is achieved.
Serve with chopped coriander, some spicy oil and freshly ground pepper leaves as a topping.

Though I might believe that we can combine the process of creating our meals with family leisure time and that these small projects can become common ground for communication, a better understanding and an exchange of love – it does take a certain degree of organization. 12-step Gourmet recipes may sell many cookbooks and cooking shows, but when cooking daily for a family, the work-results tradeoff just is not there.

Read Sierra Filucci’s story carefully as well as the comments posted by readers on the Sacramento News and Review’s site as well as here on the Utne Reader (who also reported the story). What do you think? Do you find that the pressures of modern life limit your capacity to invest the time or effort in your family’s nourishment? Do you believe that it’s simply a lack of organization or is it a waste of effort?