Health as Protest: Recent Episodes
Justin Steen
A podcast with a simple idea that choosing health could upend many of the broken systems that surround us.
The “50-Year Storm”. It’s what Patrick Swayze’s character (Bodhi) was chasing in the cult-classic film, Point Break. The storm was to produce once-in-a-lifetime waves that no bank-robbing surfer could possibly resist. So when Bodhi escapes the clutches of law enforcement in the film’s final heist-gone-wrong, undercover agent Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) knows where he’ll find his escaped friend/mentor/criminal target.
In the final scene of the movie, Utah tracks Bodhi to the point of the 50-Year Storm in Victoria, Australia. Seeking justice, Utah intends to arrest Bodhi, but the complicated relationship that he developed during his undercover work comes into play. Bodhi begs Utah for the chance to catch a wave, and as they peer out to the massive walls of water swelling about, they both know he’s asking for death doing what he loves verses a life spent in prison.
In the end, Utah let’s Bodhi catch his wave. It’s poetic. Water cleans us. And the massive swell of the 50-Year Storm washes away the messiness of Utah and Bodhi’s complicated relationship.
Today humanity finds itself in another complicated relationship. And this one has much higher stakes than that of Bodhi and Utah, because it involves how we coexist with the spinning rock that we call home, planet Earth. As we humans sprawl about, we harvest from our home and pollute with a tunnel-vision that mistakes profits for progress. And in our madness we’ve become comfortable with the paradoxical relationship that when we kill our host (Earth), we kill ourselves too.
But what if there was a wave coming about that could help clean the messy relationship that we’ve developed with our home?
Enter Eric Pasi.
Eric is a clean energy pioneer and the CDO of Impact Power Solutions, which is the Midwest’s largest commercial solar development company. With more than a dozen years of industry experience, Eric has become an important voice regarding the challenges that we all will face in a world where climate change remains unchecked. But unlike those that might dwell or wallow within the weight of what seems like an insurmountable problem, Eric is focused on solutions... specifically those that the clean tech sector has to offer.
I should also note that Eric is a longtime friend, and beyond that, we spent more than a decade together pursuing our love of music, playing more shows than I can remember, and birthing multiple EPs and albums along the way. But in Eric’s latest creation, he takes to the page... authoring the book CleanWave: A guide to success in the green recovery. Today we reunite within the studio (virtually) to talk about his book and why it’s a guide for what happens next...
Loading a Gun
We’ve seen it numerous times in film: an unhinged individual popping a single bullet into a revolver, spinning the cylinder, and brazenly raising it to their temple for a game of chance. As a viewer the tension becomes palpable…you feel the beat of your heart… the absence of breath. And between the moment that the revolver kisses the character’s head, and the slow squeeze of the trigger, you’re rocketed to the brink of that thin line between life and death.
Of course, I’m describing the game known as Russian roulette. A treacherous game that I assume most humans want to avoid. But what if we’re already playing a game and just don’t know it? This may be the case when it comes to the concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO) that produce nearly all the meat that Americans (and others) consume. We could talk about a variety of metaphorical bullets that CAFOs represent, but in the wake of COVID-19’s arrival, let’s focus on flu pandemic.
For decades experts have been warning that CAFOs represent a series of health threats to the public. Just one example is a conference that was held in Iowa City in 2004, where a global group of environmental scientists convened to explore the environmental impacts of CAFOs (link). Even then they knew that the ways in which livestock production changed in the 80’s and 90’s, moving to large scale feeding operations, was a threat in terms of air and water contamination, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and influenza outbreaks. So, it’s not exactly new to report that experts have been warning of the relationship between CAFOs and pandemic for a long time - it’s just more timely than ever.
Sometimes it’s hard to wrap your head around warnings like this when you’re removed from the source of the issue, or the consequences aren’t sitting at your doorstep. It’s like climate change - it’s going to get real for people when it’s undeniably messing with some element that’s directly in their purview. Life-altering pandemic is no different, and if you needed a taste of it to understand just how much you don’t want it, welcome to 2020.
There are those that will treat COVID-19 as an aberration, something that’s a once-in-a-lifetime event that we just need to get through. They’ll view it through the tiny lens of here and now, without perspective and nuance. But that’s the thing, this delicate web of life that we all inhabit is more nuanced than we can fathom, and it’s been going on for so much longer than our brains can really comprehend. If we fail to understand that we may be loading the “pandemic gun” with more bullets than necessary, then COVID-19 may be less of a onetime event, and more a harbinger of things to come.
Plagues and Peoples
Several years ago I read a book called Plagues and Peoples. Written by William McNeil in 1976, the book is an examination of human history through the lens of infectious disease. It points out just how dramatically plague and disease have shaped the history of the world. From the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire and their microscopic ally of smallpox, to the steamship network that rose in the 1870s and efficiently transmitted the bubonic plague around the globe, an examination of history and disease will have you wondering whether you’re ever paying attention to the right things… the things that truly shape the world as it’s known. With 2020 bringing me my first experience of life-altering pandemic, I couldn’t help but think back to the book and understand its lessons with a much deeper appreciation.
One exploration that is particularly eye-opening in the book, is that of sickle-cell disease - an inherited group of blood disorders that affect blood flow within the body. As you might imagine, a disease that affects proper blood flow produces a number of complications and leads to a lowered life expectancy. So how does an inherited disease that can produce such debilitating affects make it’s way through the ages and into the twenty-first century amongst millions of people? As it turns out…Malaria.
Malaria is a disease caused by a parasite that infects and is transferred to humans through the Anopheles mosquito. When one of these mosquitos feeds on a human infected with malaria, they get their blood meal with a side of malarial parasites. These parasites then incubate within the mosquito and form a parasite called a sporozoite, which migrates to the mosquito’s salivary glands. The next time the infected mosquito goes to wet it’s whistle on a human, it transfers the sporozoite parasite. Once inside the human host, the sporozoite migrates to the liver and begins yet another series of transformations that result in a transfer to and infection of red blood cells.
So how does this connect with sickle cell disease? People afflicted with sickle cell diseases have hemoglobin molecules that distort the shape of the red blood cell into that of a sickle. In terms of shapes, think of a crescent moon. These sickled cells can break down prematurely and have a hard time traveling through blood vessels because of their shape. Remember, red blood cells are the little vehicles transmitting oxygen throughout your body, so when they break down, it’s bad news. But here’s the thing about these sickle cells - because of their premature breakdown, they can make it hard for the malarial infection to take grip in the red blood cells. Thus, despite the many health complications that sickle cell diseases represent, natural selection didn’t remove it because it was beneficial in the face of malaria.
If you look at where malaria transmissions are most common, which includes sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, you’ll find that people with sickle cell diseases are typically from, or have ancestry tying to the regions (link). And while the examination of the link between sickle cell disease and malaria is extremely fascinating, it’s taken to new heights when you consider how malaria likely became so prevalent in these areas.
As previously described, Anopheles mosquitos are the little vehicles transmitting malaria around from human to human, so it would stand that an increase in malaria transmissions is probably due to more of these mosquitos and humans. But the thing about Anopheles mosquitos, as McNeil describes in Plagues and Peoples, is that they’re a weed species of mosquito, which means that they shows up and sub-plant other mosquito species - many of which don’t feed on human blood. In the case of Western Africa, the proliferation of Anopheles mosquitos may be tied to humans clearing out swaths of rain forest for agricultural purposes.
Consider a linear view of everything that’s just been described. You have the advent of agricultural practices, which leads to deforestration of the rain forest. Deforestation interrupts long-standing ecological balances, which leads to more Anopheles mosquitos and humans in a cohabitation. These mosquitos begin transferring malarial parasites between every human who enters the area. Those humans with the sickle cell trait are less affected by malaria, which ensures the trait’s survival as a genetic advantage within the environment.
In examining the survival of the sickle cell trait, we get to see how man’s alteration of the environment has far-reaching results that are sometimes difficult to fathom within our individual lifetimes. And in the case of deforestation for the purposes of agriculture, it’s something happening today on much larger scales than those that may have resulted in the proliferation of malaria and mosquitos in western Africa. The common root of needing to feed a growing human population is what connects the story of mosquitos, malaria, sickle cell disease, and CAFOs. Man began clearing the rain forest to grow food, and today we grow food by cramming thousands of pigs, chickens, and cows into small spaces.
We have to feed people, right? That’s always going to be the argument in favor of these large scale feeding operations. But the more we alter the delicate balances of nature, the more we don’t know what nature’s reaction is going to be. Yes we need food, but are CAFOs the best way to grow it? Even if you enjoy the cheap meat, don’t mind the animal cruelty, and couldn’t care less about the environmental impact of these feeding operations, the idea of them as fuel for future pandemic may give you pause. So let’s dig into why they might be the source of future pandemics that are more deadly and destructive than COVID-19.
Drift and Shift
When a flu virus enters your body your immune system tries to identify it. If it looks similar to something that it’s encountered before, then it may be able to produce the correct immune response and block the infection. The way your immune system tries to identify a virus is by examining its antigens - these are the surface level proteins that encapsulate its genome. If it helps, think of the protein case as a little pill with two barcodes on it that our immune system tries to scan. If there’s a match, you’re probably in luck… if not, you may get sick.
The idea of the seasonal flu shot is meant to try and figure out what the antigen barcodes are likely going to be so that you’re immune system can get a sample and get ready. But what manufacturers of flu shots don’t know, is exactly which strains may become prevalent, and how they may change and mutate over time. Slow incremental changes of a flu virus are know as “antigenic drift”, and are the result of it replicating over and over. A virus that your immune system has seen before can have some level of antigenic drift and still be identified, but the small changes can add up and result in something that is foreign. Again, think of those antigen barcodes slowly changing or degrading over time so that your immune system can’t scan it and identify it as easily.
While it’s easy to see how antigenic drift is problematic, there is a much more dramatic version of change known as “antigenic shift”. This type of change is associated with Influenza A viruses, which are those that can travel between humans and animals. As you might imagine, if a virus resides in animals and then makes the jump over to humans, the antigens of the virus may be so different that the human immune system has no idea what to do. With antigenic shift, it’s not just that the antigens have changed, it’s that they may be completely new.
A recent example of antigenic shift was the “Swine Flu”, or H1N1 virus from 2009, which was classified as a pandemic. This particular H1N1 virus is interesting because it was classified as a quadruple-reassortant virus. What that means is that it contained genes from four different influenza sources. In this case, and as detailed by the CDC, the gene segments were a combination of those originating from human influenza viruses, North American swine influenza viruses, North American avian influenza virus, and yet another set of swine influenza segments that are typically found in Asia and Europe (link).
2009’s H1N1 is a good example of swine being vulnerable to human and avian influenza viruses (along with their own). This is an important point because humans are not frequently infected with influenza viruses from domestic foul, but swine are. And because transmission between swine and humans are frequent and common, and go both ways (human to swine and swine to human), swine are viewed as an intermediary and have even been described as “a mixing vessel” (link). Multiple viruses between different species enter the pig, they get to know each other in the pig, and could then pop out in a radically novel form and infect humans.
The pandemic of 1918 was another example of an H1N1 virus, which was a flu that contained avian (bird) genes. Unlike the 2009 H1N1, 1918 was more deadly and far reaching. According to the CDC, the 1918 pandemic infected an estimated 500 million people and resulted in an estimated 50 million deaths (link). Back in 1918, 500 million people was a third of the world’s population.
If you think that the 1918 pandemic was devastating, consider that there are viruses like H5N1 (a “bird flu”) circulating that have killed up to 60% of those infected (link). In the wake of COVID-19’s arrival and how drastically it’s altered life, consider if it was 50 to 60 times more deadly. What would the world look like?
Adding More Bullets
Bird flus have already resulted in mass death of birds on commercial farms in recent years. Back in 2015 an estimated 50 million birds were killed from a highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza (H5N2). As reported by PBS, “Nearly 90 percent of the bird losses were on egg-laying chicken farms in Iowa and turkey farms in Minnesota.“ In terms of economic loss, the 50 million dead birds resulted in the loss of an estimated 3 billion dollars.
With such large amounts of money at stake, you can bet that large-scale commercial operations care about these outbreaks, but it seems that they’re more interested in surveillance of an outbreak than addressing the fundamental truth that their operations are breeding-grounds for them. In a recent 2020 outbreak of another high pathogenic strain of avian influenza, more than 32,577 birds were efficiently euthanized after 1500 birds were killed from the virus. Surveilling for outbreaks in order to quickly euthanize bird populations seems a bit like treating the symptom verses the problem.
So, consider that we have poultry being grown within conditions that are ripe for high pathogenic bird flu outbreaks. Consider that swine are also grown in CAFOs and it’s common for them to get flu viruses from domestic fowl, and it’s also common for them (swine) to pass flu viruses to humans. And remember how swine are a mixing vessel that can combine swine, human, and avian influenza virus, which can create flu viruses that our immune systems have never seen. Does this sound like a scenario that’s ideal?
When we place cows, chickens, or hogs into confined spaces, by the thousands, we are undeniably tinkering with nature. These animals would never congregate in the fashion that they’re kept. They would never just stand in place within their own waste, cramming food down their mouths, snouts, and beaks, while being pumped full of antibiotics and growing at freakishly fast rates. When we so drastically alter ecological balances, we’re plucking the strings of life’s web, causing changes that reverberate in the near-term and long-term. Remember the story of deforestation, malaria, and sickle cell?
All of this is to say that when humans get a flu virus that contains genes from different species, our immune systems may have no idea what to do. And while we likely have no way of avoiding pandemic, or even avoiding antigenic shift, we definitely don’t want to be doing things that could make the prospect of it more likely. Unfortunately, that may be exactly what we’re doing with the continuation of concentrated animal feeding operations. And as one study suggested, an estimated 99% of our meat comes from these sorts of feeding operations - considering this, perhaps we’re playing Russian Roulette with a machine gun.
Will these operations change overnight, or just go away because they represent existential threats to humanity? Of course not, there’s too much money wrapped up in it, and frankly, it’s how most of the meat we’re eating is grown. But if you look at the current system and think it sounds cruel and gruesome, or you’re worried about it bringing us the next Influenza pandemic, there is something you can do about it: stop supporting this system. No step is too small in casting your vote for what you like and don’t like in this world. You could decide to cut out one fast-food meal each week, or source your meat and/or produce from a local farmer through a CSA program. Perhaps you decide to drastically reduce, or end your meat consumption all together. The beauty of making these sorts of changes is that we get to vote (often with our pocketbook) on the world we want to see and support each and every day. You don’t have to wait every four years for an election to cast your vote… you have the power to do something today, right now.
Inception
In 2010 the film Inceptionwas released by Warner Brothers. Directed by Christopher Nolan, and starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the skilled thief (Dominique Cobb), the film descends into a multi-layered dream-world where information is stolen from the minds of unsuspecting targets. Set to the backdrop of corporate espionage, the film takes shape when Cobb is asked to achieve “inception”, which involves planting an idea in the mind, verses the extraction of information.
When presented with the task, Cobb devises a plan to achieve inception by planting a seed of an idea that could organically grow into the intended result. In this case, leaving the heir of an energy conglomerate breaking up the the family business in order to build something of his own.
A recent viewing of Inception left me wondering how much of our world view is really shaped by true inspiration from our mind, and how much may have been coercively grown from the seed of an idea?
If the film is viewed as an allegory for questioning what ideas are our own, then it’s not much of a leap to see the barrage of marketing and ads we all endure as a method of inception. And while marketing is wrought with mind-exploiting science, there is, at some level, an understandable competition that is happening between companies. But what if the marketing is less about which product you should buy, and is instead meant to sew doubt in your mind as to whether a product is going to kill you? These are the very types of seeds that Big Tobacco perfected, and Big Food (amongst others) adopted.
If the idea of comparing the tobacco industry to the food industry seems dramatic, let’s go back in time to an event that sparked a seventy-year tradition of lying to, and harming the general populace, in order to make a buck…
Cancer by the Carton (Readers Digest)
During the early 1950s an abundance of evidence began to mount regarding the relationship of smoking and lung cancer. Something that the majority of us probably look back on and wonder why it took so long to connect the dots. Although Americans understood that tobacco use came with a certain health aggravations, they simply hadn’t connected smoking to lung cancer.
While many publications began trickling information about the correlation of smoking and lung cancer, the most historically popular seems to be one from Readers Digest, which was published in December of 1952. The article, titled “Cancer by the Carton”, opened with a straight-forward message reading,
“For three decades the medical controversy over the part played by smoking in the rise of bronchogenic carcinoma, better known as cancer of the lung, has largely been kept from the public notice. More than 26 years ago the late Dr. James Ewing, distinguished pathologist and leading spirit in the the organization of the American Association for Cancer Research (now the American Cancer Society), pleaded for a public educational campaign.”
An important part of the article’s opening is an acknowledgment that there had been, for more than a quarter century, experts calling for public education about the dangers of tobacco. Sound familiar? Compare this dynamic with any of today’s looming crises (health epidemics, pandemics, climate change, dying oceans) and the experts painted as alarmists by some. Unfortunately, truth ends up being nothing more than a weak inconvenience against the juggernaut of societal norms, especially those laced with seeming enjoyment and addiction.
So while the medical community was connecting the dots of smoking and lung cancer, Americans were smoking and using more tobacco, while dying (according to “Cancer by the Carton”) at a rate of about 24,000 people annually. Thankfully articles like “Cancer by the Carton” did get through to the general populace and, at long last, placed the correlation of smoking and lung cancer in the public’s eye.
Of course, we all know what happened next: Big Tobacco earnestly, and with a great deal of shame, apologized to the public for producing a product that kills, and simply closed up shop. Wait, that didn’t happen at all!
A Frank Statement To Cigarette Smokers
If you were the CEO of a corporation, embedded within one of the most lucrative industries in the world, and your customers found out that your product kills them, what would you do? The answer is fairly obvious: you get out of your coffin, avoid the sun (traveling by the cover of night) and huddle up with the other blood-sucking vampires to develop a game plan. The simple goal of the game plan would be to create doubt… doubt that the research was conclusive, doubt that there was consensus amongst the scientific community, and doubt that the tobacco industry would ever do anything to jeopardize public health.
Just two years after “Cancer by the Carton”, Big Tobacco released its counter to the damning scientific evidence mounting against their product in the form of an advertisement titled, “A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers”. The article opens,
“Recent Reports on experiments with mice have given wide publicity to a theory that cigarette smoking is in some way linked with lung cancer in human beings.
Although conducted by doctors of professional standing, these experiments are not regarded as conclusive in the field of cancer research. However, we do not believe that any serious medical research, even though its results are inconclusive should be disregarded or lightly dismissed.
At the same time, we feel it is in the public interest to call attention to the fact that eminent doctors and research scientists have publicly questioned the claimed significance of these experiments.”
Other quotes in the article do not age well considering what we now about the industry, including:
“We accept an interest in people’s health as a basic responsibility, paramount to every other consideration in our business.”
“We believe the products we make are not injurious to health.”
“We always have and always will cooperate closely with those whose task it is to safeguard the public health.”
The advertisement concludes with a commitment from the industry to fund their own research regarding health and tobacco use, creating the Tobacco Industry Research Committee. The research would be lead by, “…scientists of unimpeachable integrity and national repute.” So while they’re calling into question the decades of research conducted by the world’s leading experts, and finding some other scientists of unimpeachable integrity, the general public should sleep easy knowing that the tobacco industry would objectively conduct it’s own research.
It’s hard to believe that an industry would objectively produce research that results in its’ own demise, and of course the tobacco industry didn’t. Instead, they spent the next fifty years denying and obscuring truth from everyone, which is nicely summarized in an article by The Atlantic titled, “Contesting the Science of Smoking”.
Fast forwarding through the years of lies and deceit, we find the law finally catching up to Big Tobacco in 2006, when a landmark ruling was issued by Judge Gladys Kessler . The ruling indicated that the tobacco industry had engaged in racketeering efforts to hide the truth about the dangers of smoking from the public. An excerpt from the 1600+ page ruling provides a sobering picture of the tobacco industry…
“It is about an industry, and in particular these Defendants, that survives, and profits, from selling a highly addictive product which causes diseases that lead to a staggering number of deaths per year, an immeasurable amount of human suffering and economic loss, and a profound burden on our national health care system. Defendants have known many of these facts for at least 50 years or more. Despite that knowledge, they have consistently, repeatedly, and with enormous skill and sophistication, denied these facts to the public, to the Government, and to the public health community.”
From a historical perspective, “A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers” isn’t just about cigarettes. It’s an important moment that marks a tactical approach in the development of doubt in consumer’s minds - doubt that is meant to suppress knowledge and truth in order to make profit. What’s the cost of this practice?
Today, and per the CDC…
“Cigarette smoking kills more than 480,000 Americans each year. In addition, smoking-related illness in the United States costs more than $300 billion a year, including nearly $170 billion in direct medical care for adults and $156 billion in lost productivity.”
Keep in mind that this is the cost of smoking today, in a world where there seems to be a general consensus that smoking can kill you. But what about all the people who lived through the deceit, and paid the ultimate price of death because they chose to believe the lies of Big Tobacco? And what if general consensus was never achieved? Would we be burying 3 million people a year unnecessarily?
A Frank Statement to Food Eaters
If we’re tempted to look back on the epidemic of lung cancer and wonder why common sense didn’t connect it to smoking, to critically judge the generations before us, then we must ask ourselves why we disregard our own common sense in the face of today’s epidemics and crises. We must ask ourselves if it will take another 50 years to conclude that Big Food is actively manufacturing doubt in our minds about what to eat, and if their products are contributing to the deterioration of our health, much as smoking did.
Before drawing parallels between the practices of Big Tobacco and Big Food, it may be helpful to anchor our point of view in some simple economics:
First, the more you eat, the more you spend, the more a food corporation makes. If you’re a food corporation, you want every mouth on this planet testing the elasticity of their body. It’s simple dollars and cents: the more we eat, the more they make.
Second, a food corporation can make even more money if what they’re selling you is cheap and addictive. Not only will you be inclined to buy more of it, but it’s cheap for you because it’s cheap for them to make. Things like High Fructose Corn Syrup end up making their way into so many products because it’s produced from inexpensive government-subsidized corn.
Third, packaged food goods can be sent around the world, sit on shelves, and then sit in a pantry for a long time. You know that spinach you bought two days ago? It’s already gone bad. If you think about food as a product, it makes sense to develop something that has a long shelf life.
All of this is to say that food corporations want to make cheap products, which last a long time, and are eaten in abundance. This formula seems to work well - Grand View Research estimated the US packaged food market size at $806.3 billion in 2016, with projected year-after-year growth to follow. We could dig into many statistics on the segmentation of Big Food, but the main takeaway is that there’s an astronomical amount of money at stake for these corporations.
The Pesky Truth
In the 1950s, Big Tobacco knew that it stood to lose staggering amounts of money if the truth got out about its product, which is why it went to such great lengths to suppress it. Big Food has been in a similar situation for a while. Google “link of processed food and health” and you’ll find many studies and articles from institutions detailing the nasty relationship. Just one example from BMJ concluded that a high consumption of ultra-processed foods was associated with a 62% increased hazard for all cause mortality. Another study from them showed a causal relationship between ultra-processed foods and higher risks of cardiovascular, coronary heart, and cerebrovascular diseases.
In case you’re wondering what qualifies as “ultra-processed”, it’s mostly staples of the American diet and includes things like: ice cream, reconstituted meat or fish products, packaged baked goods and snacks, sugary cereals, ham, hamburger, potato chips, and carbonated drinks. The list goes one, but we’re talking about foods containing high levels of added sugar, fat, and/or salt, but lacking in vitamins and fiber. BMJ includes a breakdown of unprocessed to ultra-processed here.
Considering that we largely have a nation of people eating ultra-processed foods filled with added sugar, salt, and fat, the levels of cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, shortened life expectancy, and rising health-care needs shouldn’t come as a surprise. In the worst case scenario, the general populace doesn’t have any negative connotations associated with processed food, and if they do, they may only revolve around unwanted weight-gain and physical appearance. The pesky truth is that, much like smoking and it’s eventual association with lung cancer, a diet composed of ultra-processed foods seems to be more about disease and death, than a few unwanted pounds.
Adopting the Tobacco Playbook
Using Big Tobacco as precedence for what an industry will do to suppress truth and foster doubt in the name of profit, and having laid out the colossal amount of money wrapped up in our food industry, along with the mounting scientific evidence against their products, let’s take a look at the strategies being used by Big Food to plant seeds of doubt in our minds through just one of many topics - sugar consumption…
To start with, just like Big Tobacco, Big Food funds it’s own scientific research that often times debunks, or at least muddies the waters of truth regarding its products and adverse health affects. NPR ran a story on one example, which showed up in the Annals of Internal Medicine, titled, “The Scientific Basis of Guideline Recommendations on Sugar Intake”. The study concludes that,
“Guidelines on dietary sugar do not meet criteria for trustworthy recommendations and are based on low-quality evidence.”
In other words, the recommendations being made that you consume less sugar, are based upon junk science. So, keep eating sugar.
Now at face value, you would probably assume that an article published in the Annals of Internal Medicine is unbiased. And in the case of this particular study, even if you decided to see who funded the research, you would see that it was the Technical Committee on Dietary Carbohydrates of the North American branch of the International Life Sciences Institute. That’s a mouthful, and based on name alone, sounds like a completely unbiased organization that is just trying to get the truth out.
If you decide to look up the Internal Life Sciences Institute, you’ll find that it’s a non-profit, headquartered in Washington, D.C., was founded by a former Coca-Cola executive, and is financed by the likes of Coca-Cola, Nestle, McDonalds, and other similar companies. How tricky is that, and what chance does the average consumer have of following the paper trail to see who paid for a study? In this case, the companies that sell you sugary products, funded the research that says you shouldn’t pay attention to the recommendations to consume less.
If you distill this sort of industry funded research down to its practical use, it can be a talking point for a cable news pundit who’s lobbying on behalf of the industry they represent. They get to say something like, “The Annals of Internal Medicine published an article saying that the recommendations to lower sugar consumption are based on junk science.” For most people, that’s a pretty compelling statement to hear, and if you’re already consuming a lot of sugary drinks, it confirms to you that you don’t need to worry about the adverse health affects.
Another way that you control the narrative around your products, is to shape public policy through lobbying efforts. As we know, Big Food is flush with cash, which means it has an army of lobbyists who translate government policy into a vehicle of ensured economic security. Just one example is the American Beverage Association. As you might guess, it’s board includes Coca-Cola and Pepsi executives.
Back in 2009, a lot of chatter began to develop around taxing sugary drinks because of public health concerns and their links to things like obesity, diabetes and heart disease. NCBI published a manuscript from the New England Journal of Medicine detailing the links and benefits of taxation. The policy idea, of taxing sugary drinks as method to lower consumption, has precedence for working and brings us back to the parallels of smoking. Coincidentally, that same year the estimated lobbying efforts of the American Beverage Association (as reported by OpenSecrets.Org) spiked, approaching $19 million.
As states consider bringing sugar taxes to the ballot box, they’re met with formidable opposition from the beverage industry. As NPR reported,
“In California, where four cities have soda taxes, the beverage industry pressured lawmakers this summer into accepting a 12-year moratorium on local taxes on sugar-sweetened drinks.”
It’s simple calculus that a tax on sugary drinks would cost corporations like Coca-Cola and Pepsi a pretty penny. In addition to the lobbying efforts, it’s no surprise to see organizations like the American Beverage Association publishing article after article speaking out against the soda tax, and with headlines that read, “The Bottom Line - Soda Taxes Don’t Work”. Well, if they don’t work, why do you care so much? What they want you to believe is that they’re standing firmly with the American public to keep grocery costs down, but they’re clearly scrambling to stop progress, slow change, and keep folks guzzling sugar so that they make their money.
Corporations purporting a firm stance against things like the soda tax, because of supposed concern for everyone’s grocery bill, ties nicely into one final tactic that Big Food uses to distract us. Instead of everyone rising up and demanding that our food industry give us, well, food that doesn’t make us sick, they want to frame the issue around personal choice and responsibility. They want to seem as though they’re protecting us from government tyranny (like the soda tax), by ensuring everyone’s American right to eat themselves into oblivion, even if that means more sickness, death, rising healthcare costs, and economic burden on the government.
A beautifully shameful example of industry-funded science, mixed with the tactic of personal responsibility, comes in the form of Coca-Cola and their relationship with the now defunct Global Energy Balance Network. The Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit formed more than 50 years ago by MIT students and scientists, published an article in 2017 detailing the nefarious relationship. The article exposes Coca-Cola funding a research institute, picking the executives, choosing academics who previously received their funding, and even drafting the organizations mission statement.
What you see in this example, is a corporation lining everything up to produce a result. In this case, they wanted studies that supported the idea that weight gain could be reduced, or prevented through exercise verses lowered calorie consumption. In other words, keep drinking our products, and if you find your rear-end infinitely expanding, just move it more. While we all know exercise is important, the problem with the argument, and why Coca-Cola felt the need to fund research to strengthen it, is that their products are extremely calorie dense and can be consumed in minutes. You couldn’t come up with a better recipe for obesity.
Extraction
In Christopher Nolan’s film, implanting an idea (inception) was the difficult task, but in our world, extracting one is the real challenge. As children we were endlessly infatuated with the idea of getting a toy in our McDonald’s Happy Meal, and we loved the cartoon character’s practically jumping off the front of cereal boxes to play with us. From the “Be Like Mike” Jordan/McDonald’s campaign, to Coca-Cola sponsoring the pinnacle of athletic completion in the Olympics…our most treasured athletes and supposed role-models are associated with brands that deliver us unhealthy food options. How does one extract the false association of fast food as a viable option for what you should eat?
In full disclosure, I write all of this as someone wanting to reap the benefits of a largely unprocessed, plant-based diet, yet I can’t seem to shake the overwhelming urge I periodically have to hit up a drive-through and cram hot garbage down my throat. It’s cheap, fast, addicting, and difficult to avoid in its abundance.
When it comes to food, we might not be able to just unlearn a lifetime of what is considered normal, but we might do well to remember the Dr. James Ewing’s of the world, crying out for public education about the dangers of smoking 25+ years before it entered the mainstream. We might do well to consider the idea of today’s “health nut” as the equivalent of someone in 1950, who’s telling a friend that they read a concerning article on the dangers of smoking. We might do well to consider that the alarming number of health issues Americans face, are just not normal. If we can change how we view our food system in this country, and the corporations delivering it to us, perhaps a new seed can be planted - one that grows into something much more powerful than the obligatory piece of knowledge that processed foods are bad for you. Perhaps then, inception is possible.
A Magic Trick
When we enter a grocery store, sit in line at a drive-through, or go into a restaurant, food just seems to magically appear. Always. It’s just there. It’s as if a mustachioed man with a devilish glint in his eye shows up each morning and wills food into existence through the darkest of magic. A beautiful, yet frightening sight, I assume.
Of course, we know there’s no magician, but the question of where all that food comes from persists. Along with the origins of our food, why has grocery shopping become so much more complex? Why do food labels look like science experiments, and why does something simple, like buying a chicken, now include deciphering between organic, free-range, air-chilled, and “natural” chickens? Are people eating “unnatural” chickens? Does it give them powers?
Let’s peak behind the curtain of the U.S. industrial food system, and find out what’s going on…
Farms Changed
If you’re confused about our current food landscape, the root cause may be as simple as this: our farms changed. They got larger, more efficient, and more specialized, which is to say that the number of farms reduced, and those remaining got really good at growing a smaller variety of commodity crops (like corn). To give some perspective, from 1910 to 2000, there was a reduction in the number of US farms from over 6 million, to 2 million. During this same time, the number of farm workers decreased from almost 14 million, to less than 4 million (chart link).
The reduction in the number of farms is only part of understanding what changed. To begin to fully grasp and appreciate the transformation, you need to understand just how large some of the remaining farms became, and the sales represented by them. According to the 2017 Census of Agriculture, 75% of all sales came from just 5% of farms and ranches (census link). With such a staggering marketshare, across so few producers, one can’t help but imagine the type of deep specialization that must be required… one that must be similar to a factory churning out widgets.
Enter Monoculture
Traditional polyculture systems started to give way to monoculture systems over the past century. Instead of growing a variety of crops in the same place and time (polyculture), many farmers moved over to a single crop (monoculture). Why? Technology allowed them to do so, and government incentivized them to do so through subsidies and legislation (The Farm Bill). In short, producing commodity crops like corn and soy is where the money is for farmers.
Okay, so there’s this huge shift from polyculture to monoculture, and as a result, we get loads of commodity crops like corn. Corporations then spin that corn into thousands of other products. Our food labels start to get really complex, and terms like High-Fructose Corn Syrup become mainstream.
There is another crucial piece to understand about polyculture though, which is that it includes a number of inherent benefits that a monoculture has to try and make up for. Simply put, polycultures reap the benefits of diversity, which help to control pests, weeds, disease, and maintain soil health. Sounds good, right? Monocultures, on the other hand, lack these sorts of inherent benefits and make up the difference with synthetic fertilizer (restoring nitrogen) and pesticides (controlling pests/weeds).
In a way, monoculture aims to sidestep a diverse and harmonious ecosystem through chemistry and toxins. It requires the Monsanto’s of the world (now owned by Bayer) to develop genetically modified crops that can handle being doused in pesticides like Roundup - a product that many would assume is safe. It’s not.
In 2014, a research paper was released from BioMed Research International (link), which detailed the effects of major pesticides on human tissue. According to the publications abstract, “Despite its relatively benign reputation, Roundup was among the most toxic herbicides and insecticides tested. Most importantly, 8 formulations out of 9 were up to one thousand times more toxic than their active principles.”
That last bit about formulations verses active principles is important. Regulators determine the acceptable daily intake (that which is deemed to be safe) based upon the active principle alone. Unfortunately for humans, what’s in products like Roundup and other pesticides is more than just the active principle… it’s a formulation that contains other adjuvants, which can make the product both more effective in it’s intended purpose, but potentially a thousand times more toxic for you.
If you’re wondering if that means it’s cancer causing, you should know that, as of 2020, Bayer AG (who bought the producer of Roundup in 2018) has an estimated 125,000 U.S. based cancer lawsuits in process (link). They set aside 10 billion dollars to handle the lawsuits.
A Move to Factory Farming
The transition from polyculture to monoculture isn’t just about crops though, it’s also about livestock. As farms became more specialized, cows, chickens, and hogs started to find themselves displaced from the idyllic farm that many of us envision in our heads. Instead, they find themselves in tight quarters on factory farms where they are simply grown as fast and as cheaply as possible.
The technical terms and qualifications for what is colloquially referred to as “factory farming” are defined by the EPA, and are broken into Animal Feeding Operations (AFO) and Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO). Per the USDA, “AFOs congregate animals, feed, manure and urine, dead animals, and production operations on a small land area. Feed is brought to the animals rather than the animals grazing or otherwise seeking feed in pastures, fields, or on rangeland. ”
Sounds gross, huh? How about those special concentrated versions? An AFO becomes a CAFO if they confine 1000 + animal units for 45 + days, and/or discharge waste into streams or waterways.
So that’s where our meat comes from. And if you’re wondering how much comes from these conditions, and if that meat entered your mouth…
The 2017 Census of Agriculture (Table 12) revealed that .10 % of farms represented 19% of all cattle and calves inventory. Yes, that’s right, a tenth-of-a-percent of farms account for 19% of inventory. Add some of the other larger farms to this mix and you’ll find that 9.6% of farms represented 69% of all cattle and calves inventory. Sentience Institute conducted an analysis of the same census and concluded that around 99% of farmed animals live on factory farms.
Let’s not forget about the massive crop production from monoculture, it contributes to the fast and cheap growth as feed. According to the USDA, “About a third of America’s corn crop is used for feeding cattle, hogs, and poultry in the U.S.”
If you like a good corn-fed steak, you’re in luck. But if you’re a cow, it’s not so great. Not only are they confined into small spaces, standing in manure and urine, potentially with a few dead-cows nearby, but they’re also being fed something (corn) that their bodies can’t digest. Common sense would tell anyone that these conditions make the animals sick, which it does. And so, much like synthetic fertilizers and pesticides are used on our crops, livestock disease and sickness is combated with antibiotics and a race to grow them for slaughter before they die.
Again, this is where our meat comes from. The juxtaposition of a crimson well-marbled steak in the grocery store, and the conditions from which that piece of meat originates, is hard to square. But that’s kind of the point of all of this: we are so disconnected from our food.
A Magic Trick Revealed
We need food… there’s no getting around that. But while food has a habit of just magically appearing for us, it does so with some hidden costs: from nutrient depleted and eroding soil, to genetically modified crops, to pesticides that get in our food, air and water, to farmers that tirelessly work day and night to produce, but need government subsidies just to make a living, to the animals that are sick, grown in place, and pumped full of antibiotics, to “food” that is processed and chalked full of salt, sugar, and fat, to the destruction of our health, nature, and planet… the list goes on.
When you start to unpack the industrial food system, you begin to dispel the magic. If you like magic, but never get a little curious about how a trick works, then continue bearing witness to the masterful and destructive illusion of our food system. Continue to accept that the ingredient list in our packaged foods looks like a science experiment. Continue to assume that the meat you eat comes from animals that happily grazed and were treated with one ounce of compassion. Continue to accept that we’re surrounded by food choices that have given rise to sickness and health epidemics like obesity, heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. And at the end of all of this, accept that the corporations delivering this food to you continue to become more rich, more powerful, and more controlling of our government. Accept that you, along with all life on earth, are collateral damage in an effort by the rich to have more, while the rest of us get less...less money, less health, less good days enjoying the one life we get.
If you accept all of this, that is one hell of a magic trick.
Food: What is it? Like most things these days, it seems to be the source of arguments. From what is classified as “food”, to what you should eat, how much of it, and during what interval of the day. It’s an argument between vegans, vegetarians, pescatarians, and the parent that desperately wants you to let them eat their burger in peace. It’s the paleo diet verses those seeking the sweet sweet bliss of ketosis. It’s, it’s… really confusing.