Eating Well Is Political
Eating fresh foods grown locally and avoiding toxic processed foods is the biggest political action most people can take
I’m halfway through a book by NYT food journalist Mark Bittman: Animal, Vegetable, Junk.
Bittman starts the book by discussing how food influenced human evolution. He makes a strong case that the hunter-gatherer ancient lifestyle, which featured varied foods consumed at varied times of the year, created human capacities for creative thought as well as human health and physical capabilities. But, Bittman says, the drive for food has led to a present-day environmental, social, and for many people, personal health disaster.
From the jacket blurb (and true — in the book as well):
the frenzy for food has driven human history to some of its most catastrophic moments, from slavery and colonialism to famine and genocide — and to our current moment, wherein Big Food exacerbates climate change, plunders our planet, and sickens its people.
I’ve received my — disappointing — Zoe nutrition results and am following the personalized food recommendations that Zoe has to improve my microbiome. The most nutritious foods for me are very similar to the foods that Bittman and his colleagues like Michael Moss recommend. They’re also amazingly similar to the foods recommended by my professional nutritionist walking partner — she and her husband eat a plant-based diet.
So mega-shocker, it is a plant-based diet for me, with some fish, poultry, and eggs.
Diane, my nutritionist friend, said she ate Brussels sprouts every day in large quantity and suffered no digestive issues.
“That would kill me,” I said — referring to my irritable bowel syndrome. I hadn’t been able to eat Brussels sprouts or any similar cruciferous vegetable for at least three or four years. My leafy green vegetables were exclusively of the lettuce and spinach variety.
“If you eat a lot of different plants, you’ll discover you can eat even more over time,” she said.
Well … here we are over two months into following Zoe Nutrition’s “eat 30 different plants a week” advice along with my friend’s guidance and …
I can eat Brussels sprouts.
I can eat broccoli. I can eat kale, dandelion greens, bok choy, collard greens, and … wait … wait …
APPLES
Yes, I can eat apples again, the cause of one of the worst, most debilitating IBS attacks ever.
Zoe Nutrition’s tests showed that while I did not have the absolute worst microbiome composition of all time, I was in the bottom 25% of Zoe participants. I’m willing to bet that now, two months later, my microbiome is a bit more diverse and better-functioning thanks to eating a wide variety of different plants each week.
Apocalyptic Non-Dangers While The Real Ones Assault Us Every Day
I think back to my conversations with Bruce about what he feared growing up in the late 50s and early 60s, and my different fears from the 60s and 70s.
Nuclear war was top of Bruce’s mind. And he was age 10 when JFK was assassinated. I was a toddler.
More recently, many people have been terrorized by Trump, transpeople, and I guess among the incel crowd, women over age 25.
Every time Bruce mentions some type of war fear, such as rumored attacks from Russia or China, I tell him, “It’s so weird that the arms industry seems to drive these endless conflicts when it’s not even in the top 10 of world industries.”
What might #1, #2, and #3 world industries be?
Food is #1. Isn’t that a shocker? And #2? Energy (fossil fuel) — we might even put this as a subset of #1. And ok, how about #3?
That would be clothing.
Followed by — in the industrialized or post-industrial parts of the world — “healthcare.”
In the U.S., of course, most organized Western medicine falls more along the lines of “sick care.”
We often hear that in capitalism, the “free market” will solve problems on its own.
Obviously, that’s untrue.
But I bet there’ll be quite a bit of disruption and change if people take their own action to stop eating the toxic corporate processed foods which aren’t just making three-quarters of us in the U.S. fat, sick, and nearly dead, along with half of the rest of the world’s population —
Bittman is correct that the corporations which make up what he calls “Big Food” are the primary forces that are poisoning our water, air, and using up vast amounts of natural resources. While you sit around and argue whether climate change is real or caused by humans, I would hope you have no doubt that 75% of U.S. adults are overweight or obese, half are pre-diabetic and have metabolic syndrome, and over 10% are super-obese with many serious health challenges.
I know the “conservative” answer to all of these issues is, “It is your own personal fault, all of it” (when it’s being denied in general).
Fair enough, right-wingers.
That means there is something every single person can do to improve matters for themselves and others.
Eat real food, just like these skinny guys like Michael Moss and Eric Schlosser (author of Fast Food Nation) say. They usually say “mostly plants” and that is the diet which is working for me personally right now.
You don’t and won’t have to worry about politics or an argument. And, it’s hardly a government solution, is it? Or is it suddenly a right-wing value to make people buy and eat certain foods? Whenever I see somebody defending junk food or saying, “it’s just calories in-calories out,” they usually support foods which are provided to us cheaply and in massive quantity, which are also the ones …
Most heavily subsidized by the U.S. government (those must be only “Democrat” tax dollars going to ADM, Monsanto, and Frito-Lay). Here’s an example of where your tax dollars go …
I know for a fact, not just from my personal experience but from the groundbreaking science conducted by Zoe Nutrition scientists and others, that what most well-trained nutritionists also know from their experience and knowledge of metabolism:
Toxic Corporate Processed Food kills. It addicts and kills slowly, destroying our quality of life as surely as OxyContin would cause dependency and slowly lose efficacy, and end up leaving those who used it as prescribed by a physician shells of their former selves. And — those who used opioids long term would discover that they eventually ended up in excruciating pain that could only be relieved by even stronger opioids, or could not be relieved at all.
Mark Bittman makes a larger point in Animal, Vegetable, Junk. As the toxic processed corporate food enriches a few individuals, it does so not just at the expense of the health of those who consume it, it also is only able to exist because of the extreme exploitation of the humans whose labor makes the food production possible. They are immigrant workers in meat processing and snack food factories. They are packagers, cleaners, shippers, and sorters. They could be chicken farmers with near-slave arrangements with processors like Perdue. They could be hog farmers with arrangements with processors like Smithfield.
They could be families living near a Smithfield hog farm.
As you enjoy your delicious Smithfield ham or bacon, picture this:
I think the idea behind all of these faux foods and all of these many, many intertwined and related poor practices, from the Smithfield hog farms and Farmer John meat processing plants to massive fields of GMO corn and huge factories extruding junk foods —
Think about those Cheeto packages. I always used to use Cheetos as an example of a classic junk food in class. The powder is a byproduct of the worst industrial dairy processes. It contains toxic dye to achieve its brilliant colors, especially Red Dye 40, which has been linked to numerous negative health effects, from ADHD symptoms to depression and asthma.
From the NIH:
Red Dye 40 is a synthetic food colorant or dye produced from petroleum.
Yes, that’s right. Every time you shove one of those Flamin’ Hot Cheetos into your pie hole, you’re getting “negative carbon credits.”
The base product itself is a slurry of ground corn, salt, and hydrogenated vegetable oil. You know: the worst kind for you. To this are added a huge list of chemicals designed to keep the product “fresh” for —
Hell, these things will probably outlive the Zombie apocalypse. Yum!
Bruce is a former Fortune 100 process engineer, and his highest profile job was improving the Oreo line at Kraft’s Philadelphia snack cracker plant (now closed — all union jobs moved to Monterrey, MX — starting pay there .60 cents/hour). He knows where these ingredients, components, and processes come from such as Red Dye 40, lecithin, and all the other chemicals that produce the packaged materials that are presented to us as “nutritious food.”
It almost doesn’t matter where you look on this “food chain.” Somewhere, anywhere, there is a processed food product that’s either bad for you, someone else, another part of the world, the environment, or most likely, all of it, all together.
Every dollar you spend buying real food grown locally and every minute you spend preparing this real food at home in your own kitchen is a dollar less for the Toxic Planet Killing Food Merchants.
You can’t “vote them out.” The “political solution” is impossible — the article I used for the Smithfield hog farm feces and urine pollution made it clear that legislators always side with Smithfield (now owned by a Hong Kong investment group — since 2013).
Would you trust a politician to …
Well, let’s put it this way. Would you let your least favorite politician do your weekly grocery shopping and cook your meals for you?
I certainly wouldn’t!
And it is your choice. I think that any of us, as individuals or as families, can do the most possible to save our environment, preserve our natural resources, improve our lifestyles and wellbeing —
By buying as much fresh, locally grown food as possible and focusing on the simple, nutritious meals that we can make ourselves at home. Kids at school: bring nutritious lunches from home. The rest of us? Do as I and Bruce do.
As we improve our health, everything else is going to improve as well. Naturally —
How radical is that?
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