by Nick Taranto
We can all do better. This is the attitude that keeps humanity moving forward. If we can find money for gadgets, designer clothes, and vacations, we must be able to find the money to improve the quality of the food we eat. Our passions make us human. Cultivating a passion for good food will ultimately make us healthier, happier, and wealthier—at both an individual level and as a society.
It is crucial that we change our attitude toward food. The tobacco industry offers a useful example. As we learned that smoking caused cancer and killed, smoking became less socially acceptable, and in turn, smoking rates have declined. If people could come to view devouring Cheetos or liters of Mountain Dew in the same way, both our waistlines and our medical bills would shrink. Over one-third of American adults are not just overweight but obese. Obesity and the preventable chronic diseases that go with it cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars in lost GDP every year. I believe the psychological and social toll is even higher. But nutrition is rarely if ever tracked in most health care systems.
Getting our food problem fixed should be a top national priority—for all of us.
Afterword
While I was in South Dakota on my family’s farm, after Ron showed me his organic garden, Dawn told me she was annoyed that Ron had planted a row of swiss chard but he had no idea what to do with it and was thinking about giving it all away to his church group. I told him that I loved swiss chard and that I would come up with a recipe that we could eat alongside our steaks.
I Googled “swiss chard recipe,” and while five years ago I wouldn’t have even known where to start, I now had the confidence to take the cheesy swiss chard recipe I found online, use it as a base, and improvise with the handful of ingredients that were available in the farmhouse cupboard and refrigerator. We used the chard and some freshly pulled onions and garlic from the garden. Dawn works at the local dairy, and instead of using grated Parm, as prescribed, we used a half cup of local Colby cheese that Dawn had made by hand just a few hours earlier.
It was a pretty empowering experience to teach farmers how to cook something that they had grown and produced themselves, and pulled from the earth just minutes before. There is no way I could’ve done that prior to my journey with Plated.
After dinner, Dawn served fresh whole milk from the dairy that hadn’t even been pasteurized yet, alongside a plateful of her irresistible chocolate chip cookies. Instead of obsessing about the cookies and losing my focus on the conversation about our sprawling family tree, I let myself go, and I indulged.
After dinner and dessert, I set off for a four-mile run around the section with the setting sun. Thanks to my time in the metabolic chamber quantifying my own metabolism, I knew that thirty minutes of running hard would burn off those cookies. I had figured out a system that worked for me.
I also took a one-gallon Ziploc bag with me, and on my run, I stopped by Ron’s winter wheat trucks and filled up the bag with freshly reaped grains to bring home to mill, ferment, and bake bread from scratch.
I thought about how far we had come, the challenges we had already overcome, and all the challenges we still had ahead of us. We were up against some of the biggest problems that defined the modern world. As I ran down the dirt road that my family had been farming and managing for over a century, with the sun setting against the rustling corn, I felt strong and confident that we would succeed, no matter what the world threw against us.
Notes
*Please note some of the links referenced throughout this work are no longer active.
Introduction: Toward a Better Food Future
1 Chase Purdy, “‘Nature is not good to human beings’: The Chairman of the World’s Biggest Food Company Makes the Case for a New Kind of Diet,” Quartz, December 27, 2016, http://qz.com/856541/the-worlds-biggest-food-company-makes-the-case-for-its-avant-garde-human-diet/.
2 “A Life Less Sweet: Nestlé Looks for Ways to Boost Stale Growth as Consumers Snub Unhealthy Food,” Economist, January 7, 2017.
3 Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual (New York: Penguin, 2009).
4 “Bitter Fruits: As Incomes Become More Unequal, So Too May the Rate of Healthy Eating,” Economist, August 13, 2016, http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21704801-incomes-become-more-unequal-so-too-may-rate-healthy-eating-bitter-fruits?frsc=dg%7Cc.
5 In his October 2016 New York Times Magazine article, “Big Food Strikes Back,” Michael Pollan does a fantastic job of describing the relationships that make up the monolith oftentimes described as “Big Food” in the media.
6 In his book The Third Plate, chef Dan Barber explores in much more detail how the farm-to-table movement came to be and what his philosophy and approach are for making food more sustainable.
7 “21 Reasons Why Plated Changed My Life,” Spoon University, December 7, 2016.
1: Our Food Is Killing Us
1 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC, February 6, 2015: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm (accessed March 17, 2015).
2 American Journal of Public Health, “The Impact of Obesity on U.S. Mortality Levels: The Importance of Age and Cohort Factors in Population Estimates,” American Journal of Public Health 103, no. 10 (2013): 1895–1901.
3 Fed Up, directed by Stephanie Soechtig, produced by Atlas Films, 2014.
4 Overweight and Obesity, September 9, 2014: http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html (accessed March 19, 2015).
5 J. Cawley and C. Meyerhoefer, Journal of Health Economics 31, no. 1 (January 2012): 219–30.
6 I. Lee et al., “Effect of Physical Inactivity on Major Non-Communicable Diseases Worldwide: An Analysis of Burden of Disease and Life Expectancy,” Lancet 380, no. 9839 (2012): 219–29.
7 “Beyond Willpower: Diet Quality and Quantity Matter,” Harvard School of Public Health, http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/obesity-causes/diet-and-weight/.
8 Dan Barber, The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (New York: Penguin, 2014), Kindle edition, 11.
9 Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996).
10 Luke Runyon, “Are Farmers Market Sales Peaking? That Might Be Good for Farmers,” NPR, February 5, 2015, http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/02/05/384058943/are-farmer-market-sales-peaking-that-might-be-good-for-farmers.
11 “The State of the Specialty Food Industry 2015,” Denise Purcell, Specialty Food Association, https://www.specialtyfood.com/news/article/state-specialty-food-industry-2015/.
2: Eating Evolution, Part 1: Cooking Made Us Human
1 Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), Kindle edition, 11.
2 Kenneth Miller, “Archaeologists Find Earliest Evidence of Humans Cooking with Fire,” Discover, May 2013, http://discovermagazine.com/2013/may/09-archaeologists-find-earliest-evidence-of-humans-cooking-with-fire.
3 Steven R. James, “Hominid Use of Fire in the Lower and Middle Pleistocene: A Review of the Evidence,” Current Anthropology 30, no. 1 (February 1989): 1–26.
4 Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (New York: Basic Books, 2009).
5 Ann Gibbons, “Food for Thought: Did the First Cooked Meals Help Fuel the Dramatic Evolutionary Expansion of the Human Brain?” Science 316, no. 5831 (2007): 558–60.
6 Ann Gibbons, “Raw Food Not Enough to Feed Big Brains,” ScienceNow, American Association for the Advancement of Science, retrieved October 23, 2012.
7 Wrangham, Catching Fire.
8 Harari, Sapiens, 40.
9 Laura Biel, “Ancient Famine-Fighting Genes Can’t Explain Obesity,” ScienceNews, September 5, 2014, https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ancient-famine-fighting-genes-cant-ex
plain-obesity.
10 S. H. Ahmed, K. Guillem, and Y. Vandaele, “Sugar Addiction: Pushing the Drug-Sugar Analogy to the Limit,” Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition and Metabolic Care 16, no. 4 (July 2013): 434–9, doi:10.1097/MCO.0b013e328361c8b8.
11 Harari, Sapiens, 48.
12 Ibid., 48–9.
13 Nicholas G. Blurton Jones et al., “Antiquity of Postreproductive Life: Are There Modern Impacts on Hunter-Gatherer Postreproductive Life Spans?” American Journal of Human Biology 14 (2002): 184–205.
14 Richard B. Lee and Richard Daly, eds., The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
15 Louis Binford, “Human Ancestors: Changing Views of Their Behavior,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 3 (1986): 235–57.
16 M. Sahlins, “Notes on the Original Affluent Society” in Man the Hunter, edited by R. B. Lee and I. DeVore (New York: Aldine Publishing Company, 1968), 85–9.
17 Harari, Sapiens, 78.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).
21 Ibid.
22 Sean Carroll, “Tracking the Ancestry of Corn Back 9,000 Years,” New York Times, May 24, 2010.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Harari, Sapiens, 82.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., 85.
28 Alain Bideau, Bertrand Desjardins, and Hector Perez-Brignoli, eds., Infant and Child Mortality in the Past (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1997); Edward Anthony Wrigley et al., English Population History from Family Reconstitution, 1580–1837 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 295–6, 303.
29 Harari, Sapiens, 88.
3: Eating Evolution, Part 2: The Birth of Big Food
1 Michael Pollan, “Big Food Strikes Back,” New York Times Magazine, October 5, 2016.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 “Food Processing’s Top 100,” Food Processing, http://www.foodprocessing.com/top100/top-100-2015/.
5 When comparing PepsiCo 2014 revenue to gross domestic product against “List of Countries by GDP (Nominal),” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal).
6 Derek Thompson, “Food Is Cheap,” Atlantic, April 5, 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/food-is-cheap/255516/.
7 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 2009 report.
8 T. Colin Campbell and Thomas M. Campbell, The China Study (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2016).
9 Kim Bhasin, “15 Facts About Coca-Cola That Will Blow Your Mind,” Business Insider, June 9, 2011, http://www.businessinsider.com/facts-about-coca-cola-2011-6?op=1.
10 While a majority of women did not work outside the home in the early twentieth century, a significant minority did (some estimates as high as 40 percent), especially those women from low-income and immigrant communities. Their families needed two incomes in order to survive.
11 Michael Pollan, Cooked, Netflix documentary series, 2016, https://www.netflix.com/title/80022456.
12 PBS Frontline, “Fat.”
13 Some experts have gone so far as to preach that Big Food is as guilty as Big Tobacco. Kelly Brownell, a Yale University professor of public health, says, “As a culture, we’ve become upset by the tobacco companies advertising to children, but we sit idly by while the food companies do the very same thing. And we could make a claim that the toll taken on the public health by a poor diet rivals that taken by tobacco.”
14 Michael Carolan, The Real Cost of Cheap Food (London: Earthscan, 2011), 74.
15 Pollan, Cooked.
16 Tom Philpott, “What the USDA Doesn’t Want You to Know About Antibiotics and Factory Farms,” Mother Jones, July 29, 2011.
17 Thompson, “Food Is Cheap.”
18 Barber, The Third Plate, 9.
4: “City Boy Goes Country”—Farming and Food Production
1 “Giants in the Earth,” SparkNotes, http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/giants/context.html.
2 “Corn Palace,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Palace.
3 Andrew F. Smith, “Farm Subsidies, Duties, Quotas, and Tariffs,” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, http://www.oxfordreference.com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/view/10.1093/acref/9780195154375.001.0001/acref-9780195154375-e-0294?rskey=TEB1hc&result=272.
4 “Agricultural Policies Versus Health Policies,” Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, http://www.pcrm.org/health/reports/agriculture-and-health-policies-ag-versus-health.
5 Harari, Sapiens, 101.
6 AgFunder’s AgTech Investing Report (2015), https://research01.agfunder.com/2015/AgFunder-AgTech-Investing-Report-2015.pdf.
7 Beth Kowitt, “Can Monsanto Save the Planet?” Fortune, June 6, 2016, http://fortune.com/monsanto-fortune-500-gmo-foods.
8 “Factory Fresh,” Economist, June 9, 2016, http://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2016-06-09/factory-fresh.
9 “David Hula Makes Record 532 Bushels Per Acre to Top NCGA Yield Contest,” Southeast Farm Press, December 18, 2015, http://southeastfarmpress.com/grains/david-hula-makes-record-532-bushels-acre-top-ncga-yield-contest.
10 The FBN data gets interesting when you have a whole bunch of farmers who are FBN members around you. You can see on your soil types what your potential yield could be by looking in a database for all the farmers who are growing on a similar soil type with the same seeds and chemicals. They can say, “Hey, the average yield for Pioneer P1151, a particular variety of corn, is so many bushels per acre, and by the way, you also have 75 percent of this particular field with the same soil type, so take a look at that particular seed variety, and here’s the average yield that we’re seeing.” It’s a way for farmers to uncover performance information for their products where they can realize 11–12 percent yield increases by simply optimizing what they’re already doing. For the average farmer, this translates into $25,000 in savings per year, just on seeds.
5: The CRAP Trap
1 Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer, 1975–2014, http://www.cancer.gov/research/progress/annual-report-nation (accessed May 30, 2017).
2 “Agricultural Policies Versus Health Policies,” Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.
3 George A. Bray, Samara Joy Nielsen, and Barry M. Popkin, “Consumption of High-Fructose Corn Syrup in Beverages May Play a Role in the Epidemic of Obesity,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 79, no. 4 (2004): 537–43.
4 Ibid.
5 Michael Moss, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2013), Kindle Edition, locations 367–70.
6 Lindsay H. Allen and Andrew Prentice, Encyclopedia of Human Nutrition, 3rd edition (Cambridge, MA: Academic Press, 2012), 231–33.
7 Moss, Salt Sugar Fat, locations 379–81.
8 Ibid., locations 383–90.
9 Ibid., locations 687–95.
10 Ibid., locations 2678–86.
11 Ibid., locations 2692–701.
12 “Changes in Consumption of Omega-3 and Omega-6 Fatty Acids in the United States During the 20th Century,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 93, no. 5 (2011): 950–62.
13 In 1993, a scientist named Adam Drewnowski examined the problem of bingeing, or compulsive overeating. Drewnowski knew there were links between sugar and addiction to opiates; studies showed, for instance, that sweets sometimes eased the pain of heroin withdrawal. So he treated his subjects as if they were drug addicts. He gave them a drug that co
unters the effect of opiates. This drug, naloxone, is given to people who overdose. Drewnowski offered his subjects a variety of snacks—ranging from popcorn, which was low in sugar, to chocolate chip cookies, which were loaded with sugar, as well as fat. His findings: The drug worked best in curbing the appeal of the snacks that were highest in both. Drewnowski published his study “Invisible Fats” in 1990, and it showed that fat was a double-barrel shotgun when wielded by Big Food.