This might turn you into a healthy organic vegan eating, but think of all the weight you will lose and you'll stop feeling awful all the time.
The factory food coalition’s mission statement:
“Multiply the impact of separate efforts that build understanding of food production and technology issues among key stakeholders to balance the public dialogue on modern agriculture and large-scale food production.”
I’d wager that “balance” is not what they seek. Tipped scales are more like it. So, what has the “modern agriculture and large-scale food production” system done for the American people, their diets, waistlines, health, drinking water and the environment?
Let’s take a look.
2. Foodborne illness kills and sickens many Americans. At least 5,000 Americans – most of them young children, the elderly and the sick – die every year from eating contaminated food, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And about 76 million get sick from ingesting food-borne pathogens.
Our food system is so broken that for the first time since the 1930’s Congress
finally took some comprehensive steps that should dramatically reduce the cases of illnesses and deaths. The Food Safety Modernization Act, enacted last December, requires big food operators to produce and process their wares in the cleanest surroundings possible (
not like this peanut butter factory). Time will tell if it’s an effective solution.
3. Cases of allergies, asthma, ADHD and autism are surging among U.S. children. Since 1980, the number of kids diagnosed with food allergies has gone up 400 percent, a 300 percent increase in cases of asthma, 400 percent spike in cases of attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder. The number of children with autism has risen between 1,500 and 6,000 percent in that period.
Scientists are exploring whether these conditions are related to exposure to
toxic chemicals and allergens that are common
additives in most of the processed foods that fill our supermarkets, homes and school cafeterias.
4. Farming is a chemical endeavor that transfers toxic chemicals into human bodies and the environment. Pesticides aren’t chemicals designed to preserve life. To the contrary, they’re designed – and used – to end it (by killing weeds, bugs and fungus). Roughly 1 billion pounds of pesticides are sprayed and applied to crops, lawns and golf courses each year, with 70 percent dedicated for conventional agriculture.
In 2009, the CDC’s national biomonitoring program detected pesticides in blood and urine samples of 95.6 percent of Americans tested.
In 1999,
organophosphate pesticides accounted for about half of all insecticides used in the U.S. Their use was restricted the following year. Organophosphate pesticides have been shown to damage nervous system activity.
Children are believed to be at higher risk for permanent damage from organophosphates, but neurotoxins can harm people of any age. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 40 percent of children tested by CDC from 1999 to 2002 had levels of organophosphate in their bodies above standard margins of safety.
5. Our surface waters are more polluted thanks to toxic agricultural runoff. Run-off from crop and livestock agriculture operations is the number one source for contamination in the nation’s rivers and streams.
An award-winning series in the New York Times on the state of the nation’s water focused on the impacts big food production operations have had on the water millions of Americans drink every day.
Times reporter Charles Duhigg wrote:
There are 41,000 dairy cows in Brown County (Wisconsin), which includes Morrison, and they produce more than 260 million gallons of manure each year, much of which is spread on nearby grain fields. Other farmers receive fees to cover their land with slaughterhouse waste and treated sewage.
In measured amounts, that waste acts as fertilizer. But if the amounts are excessive, bacteria and chemicals can flow into the ground and contaminate residents’ tap water.”
6. The Gulf of Mexico has an oxygenless dead zone where no fish can live. Fertilizer run-off from corn and ethanol operations and feedlots along the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers
wind up in the Gulf of Mexico. As a result, a swath of the Gulf roughly the size of New Jersey has with no oxygen (yes, none) for much of the year. Important sources of food, like crab and shrimp, cannot survive.
7. U.S. biofuels policies contribute to higher food prices: The real gut punch over “modern agriculture’s” damage to our water is that taxpayers have helped finance this disaster through billions in federal farm subsidies; much of it spent expanding corn and soybean production for ethanol and biodiesel. It would have been better spent on food for the estimated 1 billion hungry people around the world
The U.S. government, pressured by agribusiness, mandated that by 2013, 40 percent of all corn be used for ethanol. By diverting nearly half the U.S corn crop each year from food to fuel, our policy has created a
global rise in food prices, one of the factors behind the recent uprisings in the Middle East. People around the world are now forced to spend more than half of their meager incomes on food.
8. Factory Farms: Large poultry, beef, pork, egg and dairy operations, defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as Concentrated Agriculture Feeding Operations, or
CAFOs, are some of the bleakest, most unsanitary places in U.S. agribusiness.
But that’s not the pretty picture the Alliance to Feed the Future plans to paint for you. Here’s a sneak preview, courtesy of its March 15 press release:
“The more consumers understand how their food is produced, the more they can appreciate the role modern agriculture plays in providing safe, affordable, and nutritious food” says Dave Schmidt, President and CEO at the International Food Information Council, who coordinates the Alliance.
Mr. Schmidt, what you’re missing – by a wide, wide margin – is that the more Americans (eaters, all) understand about how food is produced, the more worried they have become.
Very worried, in fact.
Of course, many of the problems with the nation’s food system can be fixed if the federal government’s farm policy focused more resources and attention to actual healthy food.
Congress is about to reauthorize the farm bill. If enough people rise up to demand change, they could actually produce legislation that takes the side of eaters over agribusiness, kids’ health over purveyors of junk food heavy on high fructose corn syrup, and everyone who would like drinking water without pesticides, fertilizer and animal waste. Now that’s a pretty picture.
Kernel Watch is a time-to-time AgMag series looking at the follies, excesses and outright distortions spouted by agribusiness and its PR and lobby arms. Their goal is to keep consumers in the dark about what’s in the food they eat, to fight needed reforms that would protect America’s land and water, and to preserve the flow of taxpayer dollars to the largest commodity crop producers.
