Eat Your Heart Out

EAT YOUR HEART OUT: Why the Food Business is Bad for the Planet and Your Health

By FELICITY LAWRENCE

Penguin Books, 2008, 339 pp, $26.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Breakfast cereals so high in sugar they may as well be confectionary; beef whose water and carbon footprint is stomping the planet to environmental ruin; ‘good bacteria’ yoghurts which don’t have any good bacteria; fish stocks spiralling to extinction; bad fats in everything; massive government subsidies for ingredients for unhealthy food. This, says British journalist Felicity Lawrence in Eat Your Heart Out, is the degraded state of our corporate food industry.

The debacle begins with breakfast. In 2006 in the UK, three quarters of big-name cereals were found to have high levels of sugar and a fifth were high in salt. Of those cereals targeted at children, 90% were high in sugar. All up, UK children on average get 17% of their calories from processed sugars, a 40 kg a year habit equal to 1,000 cans of cola or 11,800 sugar cubes. Breakfast cereal manufacturer, Kelloggs, carries the banner for the ‘empty calorie’ industry in opposing moves to restrict TV advertising of obeso-genic products like sugary breakfast cereals to children.

US Government largesse fertilises the growth of cereal grain profits. Of total US agricultural subsidies of US$165 billion in the decade to 2005, corn creamed $51 billion, with three quarters of this going to just 10% of the largest corporate farms. US (and European) subsidies keep breakfast cereal grains cheap for a handful of transnational food corporations. This, says Lawrence, is agribusiness welfare for the big grain processors, the export companies that trade in them, and big corporate farms.

Hooking people on sugar begins well before the breakfast cereal-pushers enter the scene. Baby food is heavy on the sweet stuff. Milk formulas are highly sweetened. The addiction is maintained through energy-dense, nutrition-light, processed foods and soft drinks. High sugar content lurks behind many a health-conscious ‘fat-free’ label. Like opioids and nicotine, each sugar fix leaves you craving more.

Our sugar habit has not been formed by chance, says Lawrence. Sugar subsidies encourage overproduction of this addictive drug and keep profits high but damage our health through obesity and diabetes. In 2003, the US sugar industry lobby stifled a World Health Organisation (WHO) strategy to reduce the maximum sugar content of foods down from 30% to 10% by calling in political pressure from their paid White House stooges who threatened WHO’s US$400 million a year Washington funding.

Another beneficiary of the subsidy gravy train is soya bean production. Soya is a key ingredient in the fried and oiled junk food market, and 60% of all processed foods in the UK contain soya in some form, much of it exported from the US. Soya is ubiquitous in the intensive livestock industry as an animal feed – 90% of the world’s soya beans end up as animal feed. Amazon rainforests are illegally deforested to plant more soya, which, although a valuable plant protein, is wasted through the food chain by the time it gets to us. It takes 6 kg of soya protein to produce just 1 kg of poultry protein, and 16 kg of soya grain to produce just 1 kg of beef protein.

These protein conversion inefficiencies of a meat-based diet threaten ecological disaster, says Lawrence. Growing grain for animals rather than for us wastes land – it takes seven times as much land to produce grain-fed beef protein as grain protein for direct human consumption. A third of all grain goes to feed livestock. If China and India were to eat meat in quantities like the West, there would need to be three planets to grow the requisite animal feed. We should, says a contrite, steak-loving Lawrence, be eating lower on the food chain.

Beef farming also has a large global warming toll. It takes three litres of oil to produce half a kg of beef steak and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation warns that livestock is responsible for a bigger share of CO₂ greenhouse gas emissions than all of global transport, whilst farmed ruminants account for a quarter of anthropogenic methane greenhouse emissions. “Meat is a planetary luxury”, concludes Lawrence.

Intensive meat-farming also changes the nutritional composition of meat. Fed high-energy grains and kept confined, animals become obese. A modern chicken, for example, has three times the fat of its 1970 ancestor and a third less protein. Iron levels in cows’ milk have dropped 60% in 60 years. Omega-3 essential fatty acids (which are essential to brain functioning and foetal growth, and preventive of heart disease and some cancers) are now less than one-sixth of what they used to be in grass-grazed cows.

Meat’s future looks bleak, and should look bleak, says Lawrence, in the world of post-oil agriculture without the steady supply of cheap fossil fuels that have powered industrial, fertiliser-based and fossil fuel-heavy farming.

Fish have also fallen prey to industrial farming. Wild seafood will be gone in fifty years if current exploitation from large, hi-tech bottom-trawlers continues. The devastation of our oceans is tragically abetted by wasteful fish food conversion inefficiency – up to 40% of the world fish catch is converted to fishmeal and fish oil, largely for the production of animal feed, fertiliser and manufacture of products such as margarine.

The world’s best source of omega-3 essential fatty acids, oily fish, are running out and fish-farming as an alternative to ocean-fishing has its own problems. Like other industrial food enterprises, the aim of aquaculture is to maximise production and cut costs – at the expense of healthy food. Un-natural and overcrowded conditions promote diseases in the farmed fish and require unhealthy chemical and pharmacological treatments to control the diseases.

Good fats, like omega-3, may be in trouble but the supply of bad fats is abundant, most of them invisible in processed foods and fast foods, which like their salt and sugar colleagues, stoke the silent epidemics of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer.

In response to a growing health-consciousness, the food industry invents new but bogus ways to market itself. So, the food shelves are flooded by highly processed foods such as ‘pro-biotics’ and yoghurt drinks (like Yakult) which claim added strains of beneficial gut micro-bacteria. These premium-priced yoghurts, with a massive advertising budget, are now drunk in 60% of all UK households, with profit margins as high as 40%. They are, however, high in sugar (up to 18%), are of doubtful efficacy (the bacteria, if the yoghurt even has them, poorly survive digestion in the lower intestine) and are a pricey alternative to eating complex carbohydrates high in fibre which is the best way to encourage beneficial gut bacteria. The only value ‘pro-biotics’ generally add is to shareholders’ dividends.

To understand why the food industry delivers food which is unhealthy to humans and planet, says Lawrence, we need to look at the power structures that control the food supply. Food manufacturers operate within a market system which operates under the rule of cheap commodity input and maximum product profit which sees good food (like fruit, vegetables and whole grains) crowded out by highly processed food such as snacks, biscuits, soft drinks and confectionary. When this crude economic law meets distorting state subsidies, world trade rules and the concentration of agribusiness power, the shape of our food supply looks sick, and, concludes Lawrence, beyond the solution of just shopping more ethically.

Good food and the profit principle don’t mix, she concludes. The outcomes are bad for our health, bad for the cheap labour (frequently migrant) that makes processed food so profitable, and bad for the diets and economies of poor countries where heavily-subsidised produce from Western countries is dumped, squeezing out domestic food production which can not compete with the cheap imports.

The cause of all this is the evil genius of “contemporary globalised capitalism”, says Lawrence, approvingly citing Karl Marx’s 1867 insight – “All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the workers, but of robbing the soil”. Lawrence’s book offers rich food for thought, and has many useful ingredients for a socialist food policy.