Kristin Lawless - Formerly Known As Food: How the Industrial Food System Is Changing Our Minds, Bodies, and Culture

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To the people, who have the right to know.

The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts. In the words of Jean Rostand, The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.

RACHEL CARSON , THE SILENT SPRING , 1962

As a nutrition educator working with cardiologists in Manhattan, Ive made a lot of house calls and seen a lot of kitchens. Usually its not a pretty picture. One visit was to a woman Ill call Jennifer, who was struggling with her health and hoping to improve her diet. Coming into her kitchen, it was obvious what was wrong. Her shelves were full of highly processed food: Pop-Tarts, Frosted Flakes, and Oreos. She already knew she shouldnt be eating those foods, but she was shocked at my reaction when we opened her refrigerator and she showed off the contents: skim milk, fruit juice, a plastic bag of prechopped, prewashed broccoli florets, and Egg Beaters. These are all misguided ideas of how to eat well, I told her. The only consolation I could offer was that this is what most American kitchens look like. Jennifer needed to entirely rethink what she eatsas do most other Americans.

That night I went to dinner at a friends house, someone I considered more enlightened about healthy eating, and I was a bit startled to see her kitchen stocked with Kashi cereal, soy milk, low-fat flavored yogurt cups, organic fruit and vegetable squeeze packs, and Annies Macaroni & Cheese for her children. While these products are marketed as healthier options than Oreos and Pop-Tarts, the truth is they arent much better than what I had seen on Jennifers shelves that morning.

Its striking how quickly Americans have come to accept that its normal for almost everything we eat to come out of a plastic bag, carton, or cardboard box. Indeed, since the mid-twentieth century, when the food and agricultural industries took over our food supply and began influencing dietary guidelines and so-called commonsense knowledge about food, weve completely lost touch with what actual food is. Even the whole foods we buy have deteriorated in nutritional quality and are contaminated with environmental chemicals. And our health has suffered in direct relation to these changes. Industry-influenced dietary guidelines have fundamentally altered even the way that many experts approach food and health. While I was giving a nutrition lecture at a prestigious cardiologists practice in New York City a few years ago, I showed a slide defining the dangers of trans fats, those industrially produced fats in products like I Cant Believe Its Not Butter! or Benecol. I was explaining to the assembled group of patients and health practitioners that although weve long been told to avoid saturated fats like butter and replace them with these supposedly heart-healthy spreads, researchers now know that trans fats actually cause heart disease. I was in midsentence when a hand went up and an older man in the audience almost cried out in exasperation, But thats the stuff my doctor has been telling me to eat for years! As it happened, this mans doctor was also in the room. I gently explained that this was relatively new information (this was 2011, and industrial trans fats werent banned from the food supply until 2015), but, based on all the new evidence, people should avoid products with trans fats. The mans doctor was gracious and explained that nutrition was not part of his education or training, and he too was not aware of this cutting-edge nutrition informationwhich was why his office had brought me in.

I have spent more than a decade researching food, health, and nutrition, not only as a nutrition educator but also as an investigative journalist working strictly on food. Every year I interview dozens of biologists, chemists, toxicologists, and microbiologists doing groundbreaking research on the biological effects of the foods and chemicals that go into our bodies every day. Because of what I have learned from my research, I am increasingly alarmed when I go into peoples homes and see the foods they are feeding their families. Ive come to realize that we cant blame the eaters or even most of the doctors who mean well and are repeating official nutrition information from public health agencies and government dietary guidelines. But it is time to realize what our radically altered eating habits have done to our health. In just one hundred years a diet of packaged, processed, unhealthy food has become the norm for most of us. And even those of us who think we eat well are dining on fresh fruits and vegetables grown in depleted soils, often sprayed with pesticides, packaged in plastic that contaminates them, transported across great distances, and stored for weeks or months, all the while losing nutrients (like those broccoli florets). Because we have become reliant on these industrialized foods, our bodies are literally changing from the inside out, from the development of the fetus in the womb to the drastic changes in our microbiotathe trillions of bacterial cells that reside in and on us and are essential for good health. This dramatically new diet has also changed our brains, and has even altered our genes to the extent that what we eat now could affect our future children and their children, regardless of what they eat.

In fact, the explosion of research on the microbiota, a mothers diet and her breast milk, and the study of environmental chemicals that lace our food supply has suddenly called into question much of what we think we know about human health, the body, and our environment. Fundamentally, what we are learning is that over millions of years of evolution, humans have developed while in constant communication with our environment and the foods we eat. Until quite recently this system of response and adaptation served us well. Now, in less than one century, the industrialization of food production has completely changed nearly everything about the food we eatand, by extension, our bodies.

In just a few generations we have managed to completely upend thousands of years of traditional knowledge about food, health, and nutrition. And no matter what your background, and no matter how healthy you think your food choices are, the saturation of our environment with industrial chemicals, along with the deterioration in the quality of even our most basic foods, represents the biggest public health crisis facing us today. We are all test subjects in a massive experiment, the outcome of which we are not likely to know for generations to come.

Both Jennifer and my friendalong with the rest of ushave to live in this radically new food environment. This book describes how we got here, what we are learning about its dangers, and how each of us might think about trying to live in it more safely.

To many of us it seems like the food culture we have now is just the way it has always beenfood ingredients concocted in labs, manufactured in faraway processing facilities, shipped around the country, loaded with preservatives and additives, and packaged in plastic wrappers or cardboard boxes. But this actually represents a deep rupture in the way we have eaten for the vast majority of our history. The American diet once consisted of actual food: meat from animals raised on a real farm, vegetables grown in nutrient-rich soil and plucked from a backyard garden, locally milled grains grown by a nearby farmer and baked into a fresh loaf of bread by a local baker or family member. Indeed, only in the last seventy-five to one hundred years have Americans become reliant on a highly processed and industrialized food supply.