Animal, Vegetable, Junk
A review of the New York Times bestseller
I recently finished reading Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal by Mark Bittman. In his book, Mark weaves a fascinating, complex, and often times sad and scary story of the evolution of our food. From real food provided by nature to creations made in a science lab that have no nutritional value. If you value your health and the planet, then this book is for you. It is in essence, the real history of America, and the world, that no one ever told. Our history is one of wealth, growth, and not the health of all of its people.
Evolution of food
Animal, Vegetable, Junk — how did we as a species, get from eating a diet rich in plants and animals that were so diverse that it is speculated that the average human consumed well over 100–150 varieties of plant life, to a diet based on modified wheat, corn, and soy with less than 10 other plant varieties consumed. The average person believes they have a diet full of different “foods” but in reality, the average American eats less than 10 different foods in a given day. The “different” foods they believe they are eating are really wheat, corn, and soy in different colored boxes.
From 2003–2004, the CDC used dietary intake data based on 2 days of dietary recall in a nationally representative sample of over 5500 participants, both adults and children in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. They compared fruit and vegetable intake against the guidance in the government’s MyPyramid recommendations (it has since been changed to MyPlate) which adjusts fruit and vegetable guidance so that it is proportional to calories. Across all demographics, fruit and vegetable intake was rock bottom and even educational status made no difference. Less than 1% of adolescents, roughly 2% of men, and only 3.5% of women met guidelines for both fruits and vegetables. They even counted jam, jelly, and orange juice as fruit, and french fries and ketchup as vegetables. Orange juice was the dominant fruit choice, and potatoes were the dominant vegetable across all demographics.
Our species evolved over millions of years to eat with the seasons and the regions in which we lived. Most of our ancestors thrived off roots, tubers, and other vegetables while limiting fruits and meats, although, in some areas of the globe, meat consumption was 50% of the diet. Until the development of agriculture, all humans got their food by hunting, gathering, and fishing. Of course, all these foods were not eaten every single day but followed a natural rotation with seasons. In fact, fruit was really only available in the summer and helped us pack on the pounds to survive winter. Fruit is healthy, it contains hundreds of phytonutrients as well as fiber, but if you are sitting down each night to a bowl full of grapes, (which are typically newer varieties bred for size and sugar content) you might want to rethink that habit. The sugar found in fruit (fructose) directly stimulates fat production and storage. This makes total sense if we have to get through winter with little food to no food. Millions of years of social and economic change have occurred but genetically we are still the same. The same mechanisms we have for the survival of the species are still at play today and because our food is radically different, we as a species are dying from a surplus of calories and sugar.
Monoculture
Over 10,000 years ago, as agricultural practices and technological developments progressed, farming became the dominant form of food production and the nomadic way of life has almost become obsolete except for a few remote Indian tribes in the Amazon, Africa, and remote parts of islands in Southeast Asia. Scientists are continuing to study these populations in the hope that learning how the ancient people are eating will teach us how a foraging lifestyle can perhaps minimize modern-day chronic diseases. These people do not have high blood pressure, diabetes, or age-related diseases like dementia and Alzheimer's. The question of which diet is best not only impacts the health of future generations but the health of our planet.
In Animal, Vegetable, Junk, Mark Bittman explains the progression of agriculture practices and how many ancient civilizations fell because of a lack of variety in foods and farms that grow only one crop (making it easy to lose an entire field during droughts or pests) that lead to famine and the subsequent fall of that civilization. Monocrops are not sustainable and deplete the soil of nutrients and allow for specific pests or bacteria to wipe out an entire crop. Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are mono-crops for livestock. Each hog CAFO generates waste equivalent to that of a town of ten thousand people. The manure is stored in massive lagoons where it can flood, poisoning the land and water. The barns have huge fans that propel ammonia, methane, and hydrogen sulfide outside to avoid poisoning their animals. People who live near CAFOs are more likely to suffer from a variety of diseases and incur premature death.
Monoculture runs counter to nature in every way. A modern cornfield is one species, everything else is killed by pesticides and herbicides and this crop can’t survive without human attention. In contrast, forests and meadows contain thousands of interdependent species and they thrive for millennia. Animals graze and roam and even though the wild buffalo had herds that numbered in the thousands, they survived by roaming the entire country. Animals even help promote the growth of soil by spreading seeds and fertilizing the soil. Bison were key to the health of the prairie and without them, soil erosion has become a huge problem in the midwest. Bittman writes about the decline of the bison as more Americans moved west and railroad tracks spanned the nation. Some trains even slowed through the prairie so passengers could shoot the buffalo for sport, heartbreaking. Dairy cows are milked twice a day and spend their lives in small stalls and feedlots. They are artificially inseminated to remain in a perpetual state of lactation. The dairy industry is no longer small family farms but is dominated by CAFOs. The United States processes about ten billion animals a year. No one knows how big these operations are because no government agency tracks them. So much of the wheat, corn, and soy are going to feed these animals (millions of acres needed) and many of the farms and CAFOs are owned by just a few companies. This system is taking a toll on our resources and a diet revolving around meat and dairy makes our planet and the human species sick.
Food for profit, not health
Our biochemistry runs on nutrients, not calories and in an effort to feed the planet, we have created a monster. We’ve allowed marketing, Big Ag, and governmental policies to tell us what we should eat and how much. Campaigns like “got milk?” and the food pyramid, the war on fat, and even the Coke and Pepsi war, have hijacked our food systems and caused confusion for the masses. But food policies and (habits) started to change even further back than most realize. Betty Crocker wasn’t a real person but a very successful advertising campaign to promote processed foods and easy quick meals for the working woman. These campaigns began even before our grandmother's time and shaped how our society viewed cooking, meal prepping, and common-sense choices. The standard American diet (SAD) is not based on science but on capitalism. The truth is we lost what it means to eat in a healthy, sustainable way and food companies drive policies and procedures for eating. The food system has developed into a profit machine that ignores the decline of the nation. When will it stop? When an entire generation of children grow up as diabetics before age 18?
Unchecked, the rulers of all big industries will extract wealth, at great cost to nature and to most humans. To the best of their abilities, they will fight for the “right” to ignore these costs, usually by buying politicians, fighting corrective policies, paying little or no heed to those that do exist, and absorbing costs that their behavior does create, as long as that behavior remains profitable. Capitalism depends on everlasting growth which is impossible according to both science and common sense. That growth is measured by GDP, which includes all money spent on goods and services. By these standards, war is an asset, because it stimulates production; clear-cutting a forest for farmland creates jobs and goods; growing corn and soy to produce sellable junk, and even healthcare costs resulting from that- all represent growth. The costs of this growth are then charged against the health and well-being of the majority of humans and the planet itself. (Bittman)
It starts with you
Mark Bittman takes us on a journey 1.8 million years in the making. The real history of our food system. Our current system isn’t sustainable and it is leading to chronic disease caused by excess calories and poor nutrition. This book will help you understand how we got here and also that there is hope. Change is possible through regenerative agriculture and policies that encourage a generation of healthy, and responsible eaters. Change starts with you. What you choose to eat and how you feed your family can impact the health of future generations and our planet.
References
- Bittman, Mark. Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2021.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2654699/
- https://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/evolution-of-diet/
- https://phys.org/news/2006-11-buffet-early-human-relatives-million.html
