intellectual properties

food (com)modification

a couple of weekends ago i went to see michelle simon speak about her new book, “Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back“. she talked about some of major corporate food supply problems, such as how food producers have the same shareholder issues as any other publicly traded company: you have to make your investors happy, you have to turn a profit – BY LAW, which makes it nearly impossible to do anything drastic. instead, what we get is “whole grain fruity pebbles”, the same products that they know people will buy, just slightly different to appease the new regulations and ease public qualms about unhealty food.

many people will argue to the end that health is a personal choice, and that everyone has the option to NOT buy junk food and that it’s their own free will that drives the demand for processed foods. what we know about marketing, however, and how insidious it is and how deceiving it can really be makes this argument fall flat. how can people be responsible for their own health with a market full of junk labelled as nutritious? think of all the “healthy” foods that are sitting in the aisles of grocery stores that are really NOT – “lean cuisine” frozen processed dinners, “low fat” potato chips, “diet” sodas full of sugar substitutes, weird “fruit flavored” waters and candies and juices filled with corn syrup.

HEALTHY does not (should not) just mean non-fattening, it means non-TOXIC and SAFE, which, unfortunately, most food in your average Safeway or Kroger isn’t.

Michele Simon stated: “We have an incredibly unhealthy population and we have the richest population in the world. There’s something wrong. There’s something wrong with how we’re being sold food, there’s something wrong with how food is being produced, there’s something wrong with selling children on the worst kind of food there is. All these things are really questionable and we have to do something about that.”

she also talked a lot about how not only is the average mass-produced food unhealthy but marketed as wholesome due to some “enrichment” of the products, the entire “health food industry” has a terrible method of focusing on single, targeted ingredients. you’ve walked into a GNC, right? hundreds and hundreds of bottles of pills, all supposed to increase this or that. the food industry does the same thing with ingredients – instead of focusing on whether the WHOLE food is good for you, they focus on ingredients, because it’s easier to manage. it’s easier to replace one ingredient in a food than find a new food. for example: the current war against trans fats. while it is a most excellent precedent that a government is attempting to rid such an unhealthy ingredient from the food supply, the better argument here is whether the battle against trans fats is the best use of focus and resources in terms of public health. you can bet hundreds of thousands of dollars are being invested in this campaign – but what’s the next step? the food industry is just going to create a replacement ingredient that will probably not be any better for you in the long run – just different.

there are serious issues with this “ingredient-based” approach to public health and FDA management. are “trans fat free cheetos” really better for you? and not only that, but targeting one ingredient in wholly unhealthy food actually creates marketing for these super-processed food producers. they don’t even have to come up with their own “new and improved” marketing campaigns anymore- the FDA does it for them. ingredient X is found to be harmful and/or getting bad press, so replace ingredient X with new fabricated ingredient Y and presto! “new and improved, ingredient-X free! now with ingredient Y!” they barely had to change a thing, and suddenly they’re marketing a new, “healthier” food.

so yay for the landmark action in NY, which sets a necessary precedent but doesn’t do much else unless it’s taken a step further, but i honestly don’t think it will make much of a difference in our nation’s overall health. just like whole-grain Fruit Loops aren’t good for your kids, trans fat-free french fries still aren’t good for you. this is all a really big waste of time if the FDA isn’t willing to actually put pressure on the food industry to change their WHOLE food system, which will never happen because, as mentioned, our food sources are currently corporately controlled and thereby beholden to their shareholders to turn profit, and the only way to continually turn a profit is to produce cheaper and cheaper food. sure, if General Mills started only producing whole grain, marshmallow and artificial color-free cereals, consumers would be in for a bit of a culture shock for a while. but how long? a few months, maybe? people would get over it. people have to buy food at stores, and the food producers and distributors control what’s on the shelves. therefore, they’re much more responsible than the consumers for heading up the change on this front.

don’t get me wrong, consumers still have a lot of power to choose and support healthy foods. but for how long?

for example, in other food commodification news, there’s this:
FDA approves cloned food?!

for those of you still eating meat, does this not FREAK YOU OUT?? this article in the Chron the other day made an interesting argument about how people are always complaining about the government making decisions about health based upon ethics (like the morning after pill, for example), and since the recent FDA decision to OK cloned meat and dairy for the consumer market assumes that there is nothing scientifically wrong or “weird” (for lack of a more scientific term) with cloned animals, basing an FDA decision on whether it’s ok to sell them for food based on ethics or morals would be wrong.

“The FDA decision is based on a substantial cache of data from rigorous studies, all of which have concluded that milk and meat from cloned animals is virtually identical to such products from conventional animals. Scientists have also been unable to detect health problems in laboratory animals raised on clonal food.

By contrast, studies have found that consumers’ discomfort with the idea of eating food from clones is largely based on vague emotions. Indeed, polls have repeatedly found that the public understands little about what cloning really is.

That raises the issue: Should decisions such as this one be based solely on science, or should officials take into account public sensitivities, which may be unscientific but are undeniably real?”

the FDA says consumers are confusing cloning with genetic modification, and that’s why they’re upset. but no – some of us know the difference. so, outside of moral/ethical/creepyness issues, what are the potential scientific complications (medical, genetic, or otherwise) with selling cloned meat and dairy that they’re not telling us? they’re telling us that clones are “exactly the same” as the parents, and that this process will help breed only the yummiest, strongiest, healthiest animals for consumption. but wait… really? no problems with clones? let’s see…

the CBC recently did a story on cloning that addresses this issue:

Cloning also raises health concerns. Researchers have found that cloned mammals tend to die soon after birth. Those that survive often show genetic abnormalities that cause problems to their tissues and organs. Dolly the sheep, for example, aged faster than normal. She developed premature arthritis and progressive lung disease. Dolly, 6, was euthanized in February 2003; sheep normally live to about age 12.

other problems with clones, besides shorter life spans: compromised immune systems, which means they’re on high levels of antibiotics which are then put into the food chain when you eat them, and developmental problems. not to mention all the things at the genetic level which might be hidden and won’t be seen for a few more generations…

so now, just like with produce where the producers of NORMAL food have to write “NON-GMO” on their products to differentiate, not the other way around, the FDA has said with this announcement that they don’t see a need for labels telling consumers about the cloned food. so, meat eaters, in the very near future, unless your meat/dairy says “CLONE-FREE“, assume it’s clone.

what does that leave us with, then? the majority of our non-organic vegetables are GMO, and our non-organic meat and dairy is soon to be cloned. those of us with access to organic food are truly in the minority in the world, so how much choice does the average american really have then, when they walk into an average supermarket, to buy safe, healthy food? not much.

as a side note: in the past few years i’ve tried to narrow down my interests into things of which i could conceivably go back to grad school for and make a career. right now, i have a good JOB with the environment, but i do not have a CAREER with the environment, and i’m not actually sure that i want to. i have been thinking over the past year or so that instead of fighting toxics in our rivers, i’d rather be fighting toxics in my food. i mean, yes, they are all related: you can’t have clean food without a clean environment, but things like the cloning issue and how the FDA does not even consider that consumers need to KNOW what they’re eating really poses a specific threat, i think, and i have been increasingly considering public health/food ethics as a focus for my future.

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