Our Diet of Destruction

[marmar]

via CommonDreams:



Published on Monday, June 16, 2008 by The Guardian/UK
Our Diet of Destruction
by Felicity Lawrence


Adapted from Eat Your Heart Out: Why the Food Business Is Bad for the Planet and Your Health, by Felicity Lawrence, to be published by Penguin on June 26.

* * *

Look at a few packets in a typical kitchen cupboard, and you will notice a disconcerting overlap between the labels of apparently completely different foods. A handful of ingredients, some of them barely used as food in the west before the second world war, crop up in everything from baby food to cat food to processed meals. The same half-dozen heavily subsidised commodities — soya, rapeseed, palm oil, corn, sugar and rice — are broken down into their individual parts and endlessly reconstituted. They are sold back to us as processed food or turned into animal feed to produce the factory meats that have conquered our diets in the past half-century. How did such a transformation come about?

When you look back at the origins of much of today’s industrialised food system, what you see is the ebb and flow of empire. First there were the British imperial ambitions that turned slave-produced sugar from the colonies into the engine of emerging capitalism during the industrial revolution. Later the prewar European powers developed and controlled new fats such as margarines. Today we are living with the postwar American model, a privatised form of empire that reached into every corner of world food supply in the second half of the 20th century.

The result has been a kind of food Fordism. We are fed a production-line diet that is homogenised and bolted together from standard commodity parts. The parts, many of them created out of American agricultural surpluses, are largely controlled by an oligopoly of US-based trading and processing companies — Cargill, ADM, Bunge — that are little known in the UK. All three companies are now expanding in China and heavily involved in spreading the western industrialised diet, with its unsustainable dependence on fossil fuels and extravagant use of grains. As the Chinese move up this processed-food chain, the diet-related diseases that have afflicted us in the west are growing there too.

It took a journey of more than 7,000km to the heart of the Brazilian rainforest for me to understand some of the power structures in this food chain. It was the rise of the humble soya bean that opened a window on the mechanics of today’s structure, and the environmental and social toll it exacts.

It is only from the air that you can absorb the vastness of the Amazon. What happens to the rainforest that surrounds the world’s largest river system will affect every single one of us, as experts in climate change constantly point out. A fifth of the planet’s fresh water is contained here, and the trees recycle it back into the atmosphere, from where it drives the world’s weather.

But Brazil is the new agricultural frontier, and forest clearance, much of it for soya production, has been taking place on a scale from which campaigners fear the forest may not recover. Greenpeace has been tracking deforestation and agreed to take me up in its spotter plane in 2006 as it was launching its fight to stop the food industry destroying the Amazon. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/06/16/9665/

[flvegan]

1. Uh huh..."The vast majority of soya is used to feed factory-farmed animals."

"Once the oil has been removed, the defatted soya bean meal, which is full of protein, can be fed to intensively farmed chicken, cattle and pigs to turn them into highly productive factory units — intensive dairy cows that can deliver ever greater yields of milk, chickens that grow to shop weight in just a few weeks, pigs and cattle that fatten faster than they ever could on grass or forage.

The vast majority of soya is used to feed factory-farmed animals. Chicken has a particular attraction for the livestock industry, which refers to the birds not as flocks but as “crops”, for the good reason that they grow fast enough to produce a return in little more than a month. For the commodity traders and processors, the livestock revolution has represented the best way to move up what they call the value chain. You can make a good margin on trading grain and soya, especially if you are a powerful enough presence in the global markets. But feed your surplus to animals — it takes about 3kg of protein feed to produce half a kilo of chicken protein — and you concentrate your resources. Persuade the world to eat vast quantities of this cheap meat, consumed preferably in a highly processed way that divides the parts and separates out the “high value” lean meat and treats much of the rest as waste - and you make far greater margins."

Good article. Shame what we're doing to this planet, all for greed.

[unpossibles]

2. what sucks is

I see a fair amount of articles bemoaning the evils of soy without looking into (as you have) the reasons for that soy. Most vegans and vegetarians I know do not eat a lot of processed foods, and frankly until recently there were not many options. But I have had meat eaters throw the "soya ruining South America" thing at me without even realizing they were damning themselves more than me.