Industrial Nutrition

Good food guru Michael Pollan was recently interviewed on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now show. You can watch, listen, or read the transcription on the Democracy Now website. In the interview, he mentions having to revise the rules he urged readers to consider when choosing real food (as opposes to edible-food-like-substances- think yogurt vs. gogurt.) in his book “In Defense of Food- An Eater’s Manifesto.” Apparently, food industry marketers read his book too: in response to Pollan's rules urging folks not to eat any food with more than 5 ingredients and to avoid high fructose corn syrup, the ever clever marketers have come out with products that co-opt these ideas: he names Hagen-Daz "5", and the “real sugar” (not HFCS) campaigns of Snapple and soon Coke. What this all means is “business as usual”: bad products still get sold and our real underlying problems don't get addressed.

While the food industry continues to deliver new and improved products that promise to bring consumers health and happiness with some even claiming to be "green", this status quo approach does little to address the underlying problems related to the general public's food illiteracy or our environmental woes. Most people have little understanding of where food comes from or how our food system impacts the planet, let alone their own health. As a registered dietitian, I've taken it upon myself to add this type of basic food system education to my job description as a nutrition educator. By exploring the very foundations of our industrial food system, we all can better understand all the ways in which this system fails to deliver healthy, sustainable, and delicious food for everyone. When health professionals learn the basics of the food system, they can more effectively address the compound issues their clients and communities are facing. What follows is an explanation of certain key issues related to health and the food system and resources for further information.

Industrial Nutrition 101: A system both inefficient & unsustainable

Our modern, industrial food system has become increasingly complex since the industrial revolution. This energy intensive, heavy input system creates huge amount of waste—each step in the elongated process of getting food to mouths requires the use of fossil fuels, fertilizers, and/or chemicals and ends up creating waste problems in the form of CO2, trash, chemical run-off, and animal manure. One problem that exemplifies this system’s inefficiencies is the problems that result when manure becomes a waste product instead of valuable farm input. In an almost ironic twist, the nitrogen that makes manure such a great fertilizer makes it absolutely devastating to rivers, lakes, and streams when large amounts of untreated animal waste from factory farms is allowed to seep into our waterways. But at each step, this system operates without regard to climate change and as if the earth’s resources are inexhaustible—which they most certainly are not.

Not only is the industrial food system energy intensive, wasteful, and convoluted- it is inefficient at it's very core. The US food system uses more energy than it creates. Over 7 times more—meaning that when you eat food produced in the industrial food system, for every kilocalorie of food you eat, 7 kilocalories (or equivalent) have been used up to produce and transport that food to you. See the University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Systems Fact Sheet, “US Food System” for further details on this and for references.

These ineffieciencies can’t go on forever. The twin problems of climate change and peak oil force us to change strategies. You know about climate change certainly, even the most skeptical scientists will acknowledge its existence, if not it's cause. But what is this epic problem "peak oil," you might ask. It’s simply the peak amount of oil we can produce within nature and humankind's limit. Peak oil is an un-debatable physical phenomenon- the only piece of this reality that can be debated if when its going to happen and who it will hurt first. Some peak oil experts say the peak of our ability to produce oil has already occurred, others forecast it in the next few years. The end of our oil based economy doesn’t just mean we have to wean ourselves off big cars- it means we have to change the way we farm, produce, and procure our food- or many more people in the world go hungry. It means that we will have to change the way we go about our lives- from buying presents to building homes to accessing healthcare.

Industrial Nutrition: Public health takes note

The world of public health is beginning to take peak oil seriously- not only for concerns surrounding food security and hunger, but also healthcare delivery. This past March, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health hosted a conference on Peak Oil and Health. Speaker’s included a congressman, the director of the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health, economists, and public health officials. The conference aimed to connect the dots between peak oil, climate change, the built environment, and declining ecosystems, to describe the potential impacts of peak oil on the public health sector, and to explore solutions. Presentation slides are available online.

Industrial Nutrition: Resources & Solutions

Interested in learning more about peak oil? Check out the Oil Drum- an important resource for peak oil activist's whose opinion I hold in high esteem. This will link you to an Oil Drum article on Ecological Economics and the Food System. For communities and people interested in building resilience and finding solutions; Transition Town offers a construct to help people, neighborhoods, cities, and so on to work together to address issues relating to transitioning to a more sustainable human-scaled economy.

Sustainable Nutrition Bottom Line: The industrial food system has little to offer in the way of real solutions to our health and planetary problems. It is essential we begin working to drastically change the dynamics of our food system. What can you do? Learn. Build your local, sustainable food economy by supporting local farmers using low energy intensive growing methods. Plant food. Connect with others in your community and work collectively to find creative ways to address climate change, peak oil, and health.