the omnivore’s dilemma our national eating disorder “what should we eat”: a q the country is...
TRANSCRIPT
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
• Our National Eating Disorder
• “What should we eat”: a Q the country is neurotic about– Atkins: Carbophobia vs. previous lipophobia
• Why do we pay politician’s to argue over an official government food pyramid?
• Why are diet books an million 4 industry?
• AND WE ARE STILL FAT.
100-Mile Diet control Abs DietAlkaline diet Atkins diet Best Bet Diet Blood Type diet Body for Life Breatharian diet Buddhist diet Cabbage soup diet The Cambridge diet Candida control dietChristian VegetarianismCretan dietDetox dietDiabetic dietDiet for a New AmericaThe Diet Smart PlanDASH Diet
Dr. Hay diet Fat Resistance DietFeingold dietFit for Life dietFlexitarian dietFood combining dietFruitarian dietGerson dietGluten-free, casein-free diet Glycemic Index dietThe Graham DietGrapefruit dietHacker's dietHalal dietHallelujah dietHigh protein dietJenny CraigJoel Fuhrman dietKosher diet
Lacto vegetarianism Living foods dietLow-carbohydrate dietLow-protein dietMacrobiotic dietMaster CleanseMediterranean dietMontignac dietNatural Foods DietNegative calorie dietNo-Grain DietOkinawa dietThe Optimal Diet Organic food dietOrnish DietOvo-lacto vegetarian dietPaleolithic-style dietPerricone dietPescetarian diet
Plant-based dietPollotarian dietPritikin dietRastafarian dietRaw foodismRice Diet/Duke University dietScarsdale DietShangri-La Diet Slimming World diet
Sonoma dietSouth Beach dietStillman dietSubway dietVegan dietVegetarian dietVery low calorie dietWeigh Down dietWeight WatchersWestern pattern dietZone diet
Does A=B=C?
• Some cultures don’t have diet books decide what to eat based on pleasure eat heavy creams, fats, and meats, and are still healthier than us.
• The French: They eat foie gras!
• We’re omnivore’s so we’ve got choices
• What should we eat?• Koala’s don’t have this
problem: It’s all eucalyptus all the time.
• We’ve got complicated equipment– Remember what’s poison?– What’s a bitter alkaloid?– Why bother to feel disgust?
• Does America’s melting pot / abundance leave us with no discernable culture of food?
• Does it leave us susceptible to food scientists/marketers/advertisements
• Organic/conventional?• Local organic/imported organic?• Wild fish/farmed fish?• Trans fats/butter/ “not-butter”?• Carnivore/vegetarian?• Lactovegetarian/vegan/pescatarian?• “heart healthy, no trans fats, cage-free,
range-fed, natural grill flavor, artificial flavor, TBHQ, xanthan gum, flavinoids, aspartate, riboflavin
• Are there moral/psychological implications to killing/preparing/eating a wild animal?
• Where we fit in the food chain determines what kind of creature we are.
• You are what you eat and how you eat.– For us that’s mostly
processed corn derivatives
• Body & soul• Is our omnivory at the
root of our savagery/ civility?
• Mr. Creosote
• As tool users we reinvent the food chain & so “y.are.w.y.e.” includes society as a whole.
• There’s 3 principle ways humans get food– Industrial– Organic (post-
industrial)– Hunter-gatherer
(fishing/mushrooming)
• In all 3 the health of one end affects the health at the other
• We’re all competing for Sun’s energy as captured in complex C molecules.
• Those cal. get passed around.
• Industrialization has moved source of E from the sun fossil fuels– Way more food available– But we’ve still got problem
of choice
• Eating is our most profound engagement with the natural world. – Coevolution– A choice of desires– Ecological choice– Political choice
In Grizzly man, the guy engages nature but in a way that strikes us as some how wrong
• So in the supermarket we can identify some species
• And there are some things that are clearly processed
• everything relies on some plant growing somewhere even the animals
• Sometimes it’s easy to know where food came from, sometimes not.
• What species of organism is in a poptart, twinkie, cheezewhiz,or gogurt?
• But you can trace where all the ingredients in a twinkie come from.
• If you can’t tell where it came from it’s industrial food.
• Corn is at the basis of many industrialized foods
Zea Mays: A giant tropical grass
• Feeds all the meat, even fish.
• All the dairy is from cows eating corn
• Chicken nugget: Chicken ate corn, corn starch holds it together, corn flour in batter, fried in corn oil, more on next slide
• Soda? Have some corn with your corn.– High Fructose What Syrup?
Corn Syrup.
• Starch, glucose syrup, maltodextrin, crystalline fructose, ascorbic acid, lecithin, glycerides, coloring, citric acid, lactic acid, lysine, MSG, polyols, xanthan gum
• Corn is in coffee creamer, Cheez Whiz, frozen yogurt, TV dinner, Canned food, ketchup, candy, soups, snacks, cake mixes, frosting, gravy, waffles, hot sauce, mayo, mustard, hot dogs, margarine, shortening, toothpaste, cosmetics, diapers, trashbags, cleaners, charcoal, vegetable wax that covers other plants, coating for cardboard, linoleum, glues, and the twinkie.
• About ¼ the items in the store
• In S. America corn can be ~40% of calories.– Mayans have used it
for 9K years– It’s adapted to every
microclimate in the West
• Why don’t we think of ourselves as corn people?
• Considering there are more that 10K new food products every year that are just rearranging the molecules.
• Corn’s a C-4 plant.• Malate, one of the intermediates
has 4 C• As part of the Calvin cycle it
converts CO2 and RuBP into useable sugars– Takes in more CO2 every time it
opens it’s stomata• This is more come complicated
than C3 plants, takes more E, but is more efficient in tough conditions
• represent 5% of Earth's plant biomass and 1% of its known plant species.
• However, accounts for 30% of terrestrial carbon fixation
• Sugar’s another species of C4
• 1493 Columbus is all “hey check out maize.”– Corn used to mean any kind of grain
or salt (hence corned beef)
• 1621 Squanto: Stop starving to death colonists, here’s how you plant it.– Colonists: Get off our land, here’s
how you ferment it. Now we’re going to sell corn to Africa for slaves. Capitalism rawks.
– 1800’s General Philip Sheridan is all “hey the Indians need corn let’s wipe it out.”
Corn by itself is messed up
• There’s no wild corn, it’s descended from a pretty dif. Plant.
• Plant a whole cob and any seedlings that wriggle out of the husk will crowd themselves to death.
• Girl organs ½ down the stalk wrapped up
• Boy organs at the top in the tassle
• The two don’t really meet.
Corn sex
• Self-fertilized, wind pollinated.
• Tassles at the top release millions of pollen grains that have to get to female flowers down near the corn’s crotch.
• Each flower sends a silk strand out of the tassle.
• If pollen hits silk strand it divides into two parts. 1 part bores a hole down to the flower and the other slides down the hole.
• Then the hole borer forms the big starchy part of the kernel
• Every kernel is the product of an intricate menage a trois.
• Nubbins at the tip of a cob are flowers that didn’t get pollen.
• None of this happens without human intervention.
The perfect industrial crop
• Corn can be bred to gorw upright, stiff stalked and uniform in height.
• It grows fine in petrochemical fertilizer and can survive lots of chemicals we throw at it.
• Corn seeds will breed true for a generation, then the grandkids are pathetic. So it’s good for patenting.
Iowa• 2 feet of aluvial loam.• Decaying prairie grass will
leave another inch or 2 every decade
• It was probably once 4 feet deep, but dust storms and erosion take their toll
• Imports 80% of its food.• So much land is given to
corn grown by so few that it takes 4 high schools to field a football team.
• Ashton Kutcher’s from there.– Sometimes people confuse
me with him.
• Turn of century ¼ of Americans farmed
• Now 2 mill out of 300 mil (0.6%) of us farm
• Each farmer feeds ~ 130 people, in a sense (output per worker) the most productive humans ever.
• You can fit 30K hybrids onto an acre. It used to be 8K. (clones/monculture)
Does wood’s American Gothic, painted in 1930 satirize or honor Farmers?
Do you see any patterns in it?
The Government’s role in pimping corn.
• Some farmer’s call corn the welfare queen.
• Post WWII the gov had extra ammonium nitrate from munitions plants, this is also good fertilizer.
• Nitrogen in the soil no longer limited the number of years in a row you had to plant corn– (Had to rotate legumes (soy) in to
get N back)– Farmer’s also put down lots extra
which gets washed into Des Moines river
– In water Nitrates convert to Nitrites which can tie up a baby’s hemoglobin causing “blue baby” alerts
– Eutrophication
50 lbs of NH4NO3 fuel was used to blow up this car
’95, OK city bombing was the deadliest attack before 9/11
5,000 pounds (2,300 kg) of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, nitromethane, and diesel fuel mixture
Fritz Haber
• Haber-Bosch process was able to “fix” atmospheric nitrogen into fertilizer– 2/5 of the people alive today have food because of
this extra fertilizer.
• Haber (Jewish guy (later converted)) also helped Germany keep making munitions in WWI after UK cut off nitrate mines in Chile– Realize in WWI many Ger. troops were jewish.
• Made Zyklon B• Wife killed herself
• Synthetic fertilizers, tractors, harvesters, require fossil fuels
• An acre of industrial corn needs ~ 50 gal of oil. – It takes more than a
calorie of fuel to make a cal. of corn.
– Thank god oil is so cheap and the middle east and Sudan loves us so much to sell it to us.
• Today the price of a bushel is ~ 1$ lower than the cost of growing it. Great for everyone but farmer.
• So why plant it? • Since Nixon gov
programs drive down corn prices and drive up production amounts.– It is subsidized = corn
welfare
Trouble of being a group of farmers
• Great year = too much food, no demand
• Bad year = No supply• In the bible they made
programs to store grains.– There’s some around in
bad years, farmers can sell excess to the reserve in good years.
30’s New Deal
• Give corn a target price based on cost to produce
• If market cost drops below this farmers have a choice.– In a good year, take out a loan with crop as
collateral, use loan to store crop until prices supply shrinks
– If corn stays cheap he gives the gov his corn and keeps the loan.
• This is hardly laissez-faire economics
• It has critics• Why are farmers dif?
Why are they supported by the gov?
• When productivity became so good adversaries made their move against farmers
Earl “Rusty” Butz
• Nixon’s secretary of Agriculture– Big time old school racist
• ’72 Rus buys 30 mil tons of US grain.– Also a bad year for grain
• ’73: supply is down and food prices go up to all time high. Protests at markets, Cows cost too much to feed.
• Butz is all, “plant way more!”• Forget the target price. No loans, flood the market and
the gov will make up some of the difference• Pushed for big farms.
• Instead of keeping corn from flooding the market, he set up rules to encourage selling corn at any price & the gov would pay the dif from the target price.
• But they’ve since lowered the target price so the Farmer’s don’t get as much for selling corn below the target price– Big purchasers of grain had a
hand in shaping these rules
Corn farmers got burnt
• Why do farmers choose to
grow corn when people pay less for it now?
• A farmers success is measured in bushels per acre.– In terms of rep among farmers– The only buyers in town are
buying corn.– Corn is the most efficient way
to make calories on the land• That’s what buyers are looking
for, cheapest calories.
Results• America has a HUGE surplus
of corn. • We find easy ways to get rid of
it• Feed it to our meat, even if the
meat doesn’t normally eat corn– Cows & salmon
• Put High Fructose Corn Syrup in everything– Cheap unhealthy food makes
people fat• Export it• Put it into cars
– If it takes oil based fertilizers to grow corn how does ethanol offer an alternative to gas?
Why call it corn fed beef?
• Cows don’t naturally eat corn.
• But corn fattens them up quicker so we have more cheap available meat.– 1950’s cow was 2-3 y.old
before slaughter– We get it to that weight
now in less than 1 ½ years.• That’s 80 1,000 pounds
– Speedy, efficient & gov approved.
• Now cows live on this diet in crowded conditions for ~ 5 months
• That’s about all they can stand
• So they’re on antibiotics the whole time
• Resistant super bugs could evolve.
• In the past: you’d feed animals on your farm waste plants, and use the animal waste to fertilize plants
• Now plants are fertilized with oil, and animal waste pollutes water.– Broken cycle
Globally
• There’s money to be made in tearing down the rain forest
• Swallow this: Tearing down the rain forests will stop global warming
• Biofuels are popular to stop our use of oil so… – Gov will subsidize you
Trade offs• As Americans grow more
corn for ethanol, Brazillians will grow soy on forests since Americans aren’t and there is still soy demand.– And who are we to tell poor
Brazillians they can’t cash in?– They want what we have, and
they’ll do what we did to get theirs.
– Consider that if we use food for fuel, then other people will go hungry.
• tippingpointtippingpointtippingpointtippingpoint tippingpointtippingpointtippingpointtippingpoint
What’s a policy maker to do?
• Politicians are giving us what we asked for right?– They’re all pretty much in
agreement that we’re going to use more corn based ethanols.
– They’re giving your taxes for this
• Iowa’s agridustrial infrastructure is changing in prep for this ($ to be made) Democratic monarchy
A problem with the idea of biofuels
• Good thing: biofuels take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and put it in plants we’ll grow for fuels.
• Bad thing to grow plants for fuels we’ll cut down lots of forests that stored way more carbon than crops did.
So… too much corn
• Humans evolved elastic appetites, and we accommodate the corn in our diets– If there’s more food we’ll eat
past the point of satiety– Why does that make
evolutionary sense?
• Wallerstein figured out that people feel piggish about going back for seconds– But if they can supersize
they’ll get seconds when they get firsts and not feel bad
A bit on vegetarians• ~10 mil Americans (~3% of
the country)• Choose between a severely
handicapped human and a normal chimp
• Choose between lots of pigs and the development of the artificial heart– Morally justifiable choices
• Choose between an animals life of suffering and you feel like eating meat– Tougher to justify morally
without being selfish
Do they suffer or just feel pain?
• distinguish pain which animals feel and real suffering which we have as sentient beings– Does this justify eating meat?
• Does our ability to have language make pain worse for us? Does it give us a stronger weapon to deal with pain?– Castration for animals vs us
Just look• I’m not saying its right or
wrong, that’s for you to decide.• But how does it sound when
you just read how it works…– Put 12 laying hens in a cage
too small to move– some cannibalize each other,
others rub their skin off on the cage
– ~10% die– When a hen starts to lay fewer
eggs she is denied food, light and water for several days, this stimulates a last set of eggs before death.
• Is this cruel? Do we have to be blind to it to eat food?
Using pictures of animal cruelty is a paradox.
• Do humans generally want to look at explicit pictures of animal suffering?– Not dead animals, but living animals that have been starved,
fought, tortured.
• What emotions does it cause? – Revolt, disappointment, disgust, anger,
• People show these kinds of pictures because it moves them, and they want it to stop, and they think the pictures will convince others. But does it convince or make you look offensive & radical? – Not just animal cruelty, abortion, death penalty, war
• It might be that only those who voluntarily look because they want to know are most affected by these pictures.
• So how do you live your life, ignorant of what goes on?
• Bottom line: as Earth approaches carrying capacity for humans every acre we use to grow crops for fuel is an acre we don’t use to grow food
• And the idea of an untouched wilderness is paved
• Justify a parking lot or golf course when there are 15 billion people.– I’m rich– Okay good justification, you’re
the best Christian ever.
