Friday, January 30, 2015

History Lessons

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There was a time, during the late sixties and early seventies, when food hit the top of the agenda in the US. Part of the reason was the politicization of a wide swath of the "Boomer" generation, and part of it was the "inside the beltway" work of Ralph Nader and his crusaders.
The underground press, in conjunction with political bookstores and health food stores, spread the word among the newly politicized public, while Nader's appearances in front of Congress put the word out in the above-ground media. What is appalling is how many of the issues raised then are the issues that are still being raised, as this short excerpt from Harvey Levenstein's Paradox of Plenty shows:

[The
three major television networks] repeated charges such as that meat
packers relied on the “4D' animals—dead, dying, diseased, and
disabled—for processed meats. Realizing that public confidence in
all of their products was being shaken, the large meat packers, some
of whom owned intrastate packing companies, abandoned their
opposition to the bill [to enable the USDA to enforce standards at
state-level meat packing plants], enabling it to pass easily.

The
quick victory amazed the reformers. Rarely had a bill shot though
Congress in less than six months, particularly in the face of stiff
opposition in the key committees responsible for it. It showed, some
Naderites said, that American politics was not, as current
intellectual fashion had it, based on irrational appeals; the public
had been given the facts, and its representatives had been forced to
respond. Yet in fact the critics soon began to use food issues for
quite the opposite reason—their emotional punch. After all, the
news that hot dogs contained rat hairs and that breast milk harbored
DDT hardly provoked cool reasoning. The activists hoped that a public
emotionally aroused by issues such as these would support their wider
campaigns to protect the nation's health and welfare from the effects
of business greed. Nader was rather rueful about the packers' quick
cave-in. They had thereby managed, he said, to put the lid back on
the Pandora's box of other issues—chemical adulteration of meat,
microbiological contamination, misuse of hormones and antibiotics,
pesticide residues, ingredient standards—that would have been
useful in rallying the public to his larger crusade to curb corporate
abuses.

But
the food industries were hardly more successful than Pandora. After
confidently announcing to a skeptical audience of newspaper editors
in 1968 that food would become the top news story of the coming year,
Nader recruited enthusiastic young law and college students to ferret
through the food industries' dirty linen—combing the obscure
reports of government agencies, analyzing lists of ingredients,
asking chemists and biologists about their additives, assembling
statistics to document the continuing concentration of economic power
in fewer hands. By mid-1969 he was ready with enough evidence to
begin the massive assault along the broad food-processing and
agribusiness front he relished.

Appearing
before the Senate's new Select Committee on Nutrition and Human
Needs, he charged that the food industry was dominated by immensely
powerful oligopolies who cared only about selling their products, not
about their nutritive value. Their “manipulative strategies”
bilked the consumer; “the silent violence of their harmful food
products” caused “erosion of the bodily processes, shortening of
life or sudden death.” Geneticists feared that “the river of
chemicals that all of us use and breathe” might be causing genetic
defects among the newborn. Yet the “skilled salesmen” of the food
industries used “applied social science” to shape consumer
preferences in order “to maximize sales and minimize costs no
matter what the nutritional, toxic, carcinogenic, or mutagenic impact
may be on humans or their progeny.” Again, Nader cited the beloved
frankfurter as an example of corporate greed and irresponsibility.
They should really be called “fatfurters,” he said. They were
loaded with so much cholesterol that they were “among America's
deadliest missiles.” The oligopolies had also ruined the hamburger,
which was ofter so adulterated as to be worthy of the name
“shamburger.” Nor did baby foods escape nefarious corporate
influence. They were flavored with salt which would adversely affect
a child with a hereditary susceptibility to hypertension, and sugar,
which was “nutritionally poor, carcinogenic, and possibly
atherogenic [i.e., caused clogging of the arteries].” Why? Not to
please babies, said Nader, but to please the mothers who tasted the
food. The same went for modified starches, which added smoothness and
bulk to the baby foods, and monosodium glutamate (MSG), whose
flavor-enhancing properties were unappreciated by babies but which
seemed to pose dangers to their health. Strong congressional action
was needed to educate the public and combat this “multimillion
dollar fraud”with its “massive assaults on human health such as
fat content, unnecessary salt content, untested chemical additives.”
Congress must pass strict food labeling [sic] laws, greatly increase
funding for research on chemical additives, strengthen the FDA, force
the USDA to take the interests of consumers into account, and alert
the nation to the dangers it faced.Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern AmericaHarvey Levenstein pages 170-172

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Hitch-hiked across Canada in the mid-seventies, changing, in the process, from an Albertan into a Canadian. Entered post-secondary studies at Grant McEwan College in Edmonton, moving over to the U of Alberta a year later to read English Lit. Friends invited me out for a visit to Victoria, and a week later I had a job, place to live, and was enrolled at UVic. Married two years later, we had twins (a boy, a girl, and a vasectomy), moved back to Alberta where we ran an over-educated New Agriculture farm for fourteen years. After the kids moved out, moved back to Victoria where we discovered sea kayaking. Live quietly, trying to pursue a life of voluntary simplicity, although we occasionally fail to live up to our own ideals. Still married, 28 years later, to the same person--and quite happy about it. Currently working on a book about Canadian food security issues.