The Nation, May 19, 2021
Junk
Mark Bittman’s history of why we eat bad food.
By Bill McKibben
Mark Bittman writes the way he cooks: The ingredients are wholesome, the
preparation elegantly simple, the results nourishing in the best sense
of the word. He never strains; there’s no effort to impress, but you
come away full, satisfied, invigorated.
BOOKS IN REVIEW
ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, JUNK: A HISTORY OF FOOD, FROM SUSTAINABLE TO SUICIDAL
By Mark Bittman
From his magnum opus, How to Cook Everything, and its many cookbook
companions, to his recipes for The New York Times, to his essays on food
policy, Bittman has developed a breeziness that masks the weight of the
politics and economics that surround the making and consuming of food.
In Animal, Vegetable, Junk, his latest book, he offers us his most
thoroughgoing attack on the corporate forces that govern our food,
tracking the evolution of cultivation and consumption from primordial to
modern times and developing what is arguably his most radical and
forthright argument yet about how to address our contemporary food
cultures’ many ills. But it still goes down easy; the broccoli tastes
good enough that you’ll happily go for seconds.
Bittman starts Animal, Vegetable, Junk with the early hominins. As these
human ancestors learned to walk upright, they began to forage across
larger areas and hunt with comparative ease. Bittman notes that they
also started to develop more flexible diets: “a variety of fruits,
leaves, nuts, and animals, including insects, birds, mollusks,
crustaceans, turtles, small animals…rabbits, and fish.” Eventually, with
the nutritional boost of this new diet, they soon learned how to track
faster prey (which was easier to do in groups and thus produced more
social behavior) and to cook over fire.
With more nutrients and more advanced methods of gathering and cooking
food, the early hominins’ “already sizeable brains grew bigger.”
Hardwired to eat “what we can, when we can,” they had diets that
differed from place to place: “Some humans had diets high in fat and
protein, and some had diets in which carbohydrates dominated.” But
despite these differences, the emerging food cultures and diets had one
thing in common. The epoch of hunting and gathering produced “a period
of greater longevity and general health than in almost any other time
before or since.” Eventually it also produced a new trick: how to stay
in one place and grow crops whose surplus could be stored.
That transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture was welcome in
many ways, but it came at a price, Bittman writes. Yes, it supported
larger populations, but diets became monotonous and less nutritious,
life spans declined, and work hours increased. Bittman is not the first
to make this argument. Jared Diamond memorably called farming the
biggest mistake in human history, and so Bittman doesn’t belabor the
point, accepting that we now live on a planet where food is something we
raise, not something we hunt or gather.
For Bittman, the central drama of this story begins in the course of the
last century, as agriculture and food processing became mass industries,
and as we moved from having two types of food (plants and animals) to
being overwhelmed by a new third type—one that was “more akin to
poison.” These “engineered edible substances, barely recognizable as
products of the earth, are commonly called ‘junk.’ ”
This junk food has created, Bittman argues, a “public health crisis that
diminishes the lives of perhaps half of all humans.” Through its
dependence on an agriculture that “concentrates on maximizing the yield
of the most profitable crops,” it has done “more damage to the earth
than strip mining, urbanization, even fossil fuel extraction.”
Any number of data points illustrate this new reality, but let’s choose
a couple that show what happened to farming. In the decades since World
War II, chicken production has increased by more than 1,400
percent—while the number of farms producing those birds has fallen by 98
percent. This kind of industrialization is obviously unkind to animals
and to those who once raised them—the former live in tiny cages, and the
latter, depending on where in the world they reside, often move to
shantytowns on the edges of capital cities. And the damage to the
natural world is every bit as great. In Iowa, for instance, stock living
in CAFOs, or concentrated animal feeding operations, produce as much
waste as 168 million people, or 53 times the state’s population. This
manure is housed in giant lagoons that sometimes flood; it is perhaps
not surprising that the largest municipal water treatment plant in the
world is required to allow the people of Des Moines to drink the tap water.
The ability to produce massive quantities of a few commodities—wheat,
corn, and corn syrup—has enriched not farmers but a few giant middlemen
(companies like Archer-Daniels-Midland and Cargill) and implement
dealers (John Deere makes four times as much money providing credit to
struggling farmers as it does selling tractors). And it has created a
new problem: what to do with the massive amount of calories that this
commodity-focused agriculture produces. “The system,” Bittman explains,
now “delivers a nearly uninterruptible stream of food, regardless of
season,” and in the process it has created junk: the processed food that
now dominates the Western diet and, increasingly, many other diets
around the world. “Junk made it possible to encourage people to—really,
[made] it difficult for them not to—eat too much non-nourishing food
over a prolonged period.”
As Bittman notes, the calories have to go somewhere, and—thanks in no
small part to the advertising industry, which attached itself to the
food industry like a remora to a shark—they went inside us; we look the
way we do because of the need for the Krafts and Heinzes of the world to
keep their profit margins growing by finding new ways to get us to
consume their limited line of basic commodities. “Global sugar
consumption has nearly tripled in the past half-century,” he writes, and
so has obesity; the number of people worldwide living with diabetes has
quadrupled since 1980. “Two thirds of the world’s population,” Bittman
tells us, “lives in countries where more people die from diseases linked
to being overweight than ones linked to being underweight.”
It’s not just our bodies that suffer from this commodity agriculture; it
does huge damage to communities as well. Bittman discusses how small
Black farmers, especially in the South, have been systematically
sidelined by federal policy and how a fairly stable system of peasant
agriculture in Mexico was destroyed by the North American Free Trade
Agreement, which dismantled the economic protections that allowed it to
persist and flooded the country with cheap American grain. Since it took
17.8 labor days to produce a ton of corn in Mexico, and 1.2 hours to do
it on industrialized farms in the American Midwest, the result was never
in doubt. Now the United States supplies Mexico with 42 percent of its
food, which should give you some idea of why so many people needed to
come north. Adds Bittman: “NAFTA also brought junk food to Mexico.
Imports of high-fructose corn syrup increased by almost 900 times, and
soda consumption nearly doubled,” making Mexico the world’s fourth
largest per capita consumer of soda. It also now “leads the world’s
populous nations in obesity, and diabetes—almost always caused by a
modern Western diet—is among the country’s leading killers.” This
amounts to a “domination” more subtle than the Opium Wars or the
overthrow of Central American governments—but not by much.
When something this big has gone wrong for this long, it becomes hard to
imagine alternatives, or at least to imagine how those alternatives
might possibly overcome the power of the ruling system. In the United
States, for instance, there are 15 or 20 states whose senators largely
represent corn; that’s why the Farm Bill, each time it’s renewed, is a
gift to the industrial combines that control those states.
Bittman does discuss some interesting initiatives that are taking hold
in different parts of the world and beginning to have a larger impact.
Countries from Uruguay and France to South Korea and Taiwan have passed
laws limiting junk-food advertising to kids, and they seem to work.
Quebec, which banned such ads 40 years ago, has fewer overweight
children than other parts of North America. In 2012, Chile—where half of
6-year-olds were overweight or obese—passed the world’s strongest food
labeling and advertising laws. Any processed food high in calories,
sodium, sugar, or saturated fat carries a “stop-sign-shaped ‘black
label’” and can’t be advertised to kids under 14 or sold in schools;
“almost instantly Chilean children went from seeing 8,500 junk food
advertisements a year to seeing next to none.”
Mexico has also fought back as best it can; a tax on soda has driven
consumption down 12 percent. Bittman cites more notable successes on the
local level. Belo Horizonte, Brazil’s third largest metropolitan area,
has bankrolled “People’s Restaurants” that sell high-quality lunches at
affordable prices and cooked-from-scratch school meals emphasizing more
vegetables and fewer processed foods; the government also subsidized
farmers’ markets that sell staples at reduced prices and funded urban
gardening programs. As a result, hunger in the city has been “nearly
eliminated…while fruit and vegetable consumption and farmer income have
risen.”
Even in the United States—the belly of the beast, as it were—Bittman
finds some interesting developments. He describes the Good Food
Purchasing Program, which began in Los Angeles in 2012 and sets
standards for nutrition, animal welfare, environmental sustainability,
and treatment of the labor force. When LA schools signed on, their main
distributor started reaching out to wheat farms that could meet the new
standards, which led to 65 new full-time, living-wage jobs. Cities from
Boston to Oakland have signed on to the GFPP, and New York is about to join.
But more dramatic change will only come with initiatives like the Green
New Deal, which “with carbon neutrality as a starting goal…would
necessarily support…sustainable agriculture.” In fact, by the end of the
book, Bittman uses the food crisis much as Naomi Klein did the climate
crisis in her landmark This Changes Everything: as a lever for
thoroughgoing change. “Instituting fairness in race and gender means in
part undoing land theft, racial and gender-based violence, and centuries
of wealth accumulation by most European and European American males,
wealth accumulation that is still being compounded. This means land
reform, this means affordable nutritious food regardless of the ability
to pay…. This means wholesale change.” Indeed it does. “What’s for
dinner?” has always been among the most basic of human questions. Now,
asked honestly, it’s among the most unsettling and the most explosive.
Bill McKibben is the founder of climate change campaign 350.org, a
scholar in residence at Middlebury College, and the author of the new
book Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?.
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