Tuesday November 3, 2009

Perils on our plates

Review by TAN CHENG LI

Food, Inc.

Editor: Karl Weber

Publisher: PublicAffairs, 320 pages

GET ready to lose your appetite. At the end of this book, you may no longer want to chomp on that piece of fried chicken or burger. Like many recent documentaries and books on industrial food production, Food, Inc explores how modern farming has not only given us meatier chickens, insecticide-resistant soya bean and tomatoes that don’t go bad, but also resistant strains of bacteria, obesity and other diet-related illnesses.

The book accompanies the much-raved about similarly titled documentary, in which filmmaker Robert Kenner reveals shocking facts about industrial food production. The over 20 essays in this book explore in more detail, topics covered in the film: issues ranging from big business controlling our food supply to the risks from consuming genetically modified “Frankenfoods”, factory farms where animals are kept in crowded facilities and fed growth hormones, global hunger, turning crops into fuel instead of food, nutrition, exploitation of farm workers, exposure to harmful pesticides and food production that worsens global warming.

The book relies on an eloquent array of writers (Eric Schlosser of Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollan of The Omnivore’s Dilemma), activists and farmers to enlighten us about unhealthy eats.

It serves up plenty of scary – and appetite-killing – information, such as this one: if humans grew as fast as today’s store-bought chickens, broilers which have been raised through a diet of growth-promoting antibiotics, we’d weigh 158kg by our second birthday.

Another alarming fact: apples grown in the United States can be sprayed up to 16 times with 36 different pesticides, residues of which are now found in the blood of 95% of Americans tested. Exposure to organophosphate pesticides is linked to hyperactivity, developmental delays and motor dysfunction.

Many people might be unaware that food systems are driving up global temperatures – fertiliser production, transportation of food, land use changes, livestocks and decaying food waste in landfills all emit greenhouse gases. In fact, some 18% of the world’s global warming effect is associated with “land use changes”, such as when rainforests and peatlands are cleared for oil palm plantations, pasture for cattle and cropland for feed.

And did you know that cattle, by nature, were never meant to eat corn? But that’s what they’ve been taught to eat instead of grass, because it fattens them up quicker. However, the gut of a cow fed on corn breeds the deadliest strains of Escherichia coli; which explains the sudden rise in E. coli outbreaks and massive meat recalls over the last decade.

The book contains many such gnawing details about farming today. Sure, many of the topics have been comprehensively discussed in other books but their compilation in one tome makes for a good primer on the troubling practices used to stock supermarket shelves with meat, potato chips and soft drinks. And being able to read any essay at any one time makes this book more digestible; otherwise, it will read like one long, boring scientific report.

The final part of this book covers what you can do about the sad state of affairs. Suggestions include skipping meat one day a week and ways to go about starting a community garden. One essay offers questions consumers can ask to determine whether food labelled “organic” is really that, while another spells out which food is good or bad for kids.

Throughout the book, the issue of “food sovereignty” – the principle that people have the right to define their own food and agriculture system – rings through. But that’s unlikely to happen in an uninformed society. People want convenience, and they do not read beyond the price tag.

What’s needed then is to educate ourselves on the impact modern food production has on our bodies and the environment, and then use our purchasing power to change things for the better. The solution sits in the ends of our forks.