...plus c'est la même chose

I'm reading Jan Poppendeik's book, Breadlines Knee-Deep in Wheat and, early on in the book, she looks at the early days of the US' Great Depression. In 1930-31, the breadlines had formed in almost every city, town, and village in America. 1931 saw the first great drought—though not yet the extended “Dustbowl” drought—of the depression. As Amartya Sen has written, when a famine occurs, there are three alternatives for people: First, get a new, or additional, job. As this was the Great Depression, this wasn't possible. Second, rely on extended family. By 1931, this option was pretty much exhausted. And third, rely on charity.
This was the position of most of the jobless in the US. When the drought hit, it was also the position of a great many farmers. Charity was being administered by local governments (primarily at the municipal level) and the Red Cross. There were a patchwork collection of programmes and initiatives across the country; some, like the relief gardens which were planted (and the surplus canned by civic, fraternal, and religious organizations), encouraged by members of the federal government. But most programmes were only local and, under Hoover, the US federal government wanted nothing to do with relief programmes.
Except, of course, when they did. By 1931, there was two billion dollars (that's two billion depression-era dollars) budgeted for business and financial sector relief. And a couple of years earlier, farm price supports had been instituted, with the US government buying up wheat and slowly releasing it into the international market, to slow price fluctuations, and try to ensure that the American farmers got a livable price for the grain they were growing. Which makes sense; if your crop all comes in at once, prices tend to tumble around harvest. Farmers able to store large volumes of grain can take advantage of the price differential between fall and spring, but most people needed money by the end of the growing season. Mostly because that's when the operating loans are due.
The problem in the US was that the government had accumulated a very large storehouse of wheat; by 1931, a hundred and sixty million bushels. Which cost money to store—about $0.18/bu/year.  The US also had a significant population reliant on charity—in particular, reliant on charity for food. To various politicians and reformers, it seemed like a no-brainer to release a portion of the wheat stores held by the federal government for relief.
The Hoover administration was never too open about it's opposition to releasing the wheat. But they certainly encouraged opposition. The big roadblocks were two: concern about the release of "free" wheat on the US market, and the belief, at least among the more conservative members of Congress and the Senate, that reports of hunger in the US were overblown.

Pandora's Lunchbox

After reading Michael Pollan's Cooked, I thought that Melanie Warner's Pandora's Lunchbox: How processed food took over the American meal  would be a quick read, going over the same old ground. I was very pleasantly surprised.


PBS interview with author Melanie Warner

Ms. Warner starts with leaving food around her office past its "best before" date and then wanders back through the history of processed food in America from Kellogg to current trends. And she makes it an interesting ride.
She's not the first person to note the disconnect between what food scientist's do and what they eat (most don't eat the "food" they design), but she's very careful not to be too condemnatory. In the end, despite all she uncovers about the actual nutritional value and consequences of manufactured food-like substances, she still cannot call for an outright moratorium on the consumption of processed foods. Instead, she calls for a proportional reversal: from 70% processed and 30% home cooked, to the reverse, with 70% of our food being made from raw ingredients in the home kitchen.
With Ms. Warner maintaining a conversational "mom-to-mom" tone throughout, this book would be great to introduce friends or family to the concerns we have with processed foods.  there's not a lot that's actually new in this (although she does a good bit of original research and reporting), but it is very well presented. Kudos, Ms. Warner.
BTW, you can check out the Kirkus review here.

Books!

I read what seems to be a lot of books. I don't really think it is--I read around 80-100 books a year, mostly non-fiction, and mostly about food issues. When compared to my Significant Other, the writer Paula Johanson (author of, among others, Fake Foods: Fried, Fast and Processed and Fish: From the Catch to Your Table and the codifier of Johanson's Law: "When a system achieves the same outcome regardless of stated goals and altered tactics, then the outcome is the goal"), I really don't read all that much--she probably averages 200 books a year. Even among my peer group, I don't read all that much--but my peers aren't exactly a statistical snapshot of "average" Canadians.
I mention this only because I've had a pretty good run, recently, of interesting reading. Michael Moss' Sugar, Salt Fat started the run.

 I really enjoyed the read--Moss looks in depth at the way in which each of the three titular ingredients affects the "food" we eat. Along the way, we get a history of the industrialization of food and an excellent example of how Johanson's Law can be applied: for all that the food companies claim to want to serve us safe, nutritious food, we still get food that is addictive, damaging to the environment and the public, and very very profitable. Thus, the stated goal is the smokescreen, the desired outcome is the one we are dealing with. After all, why would food companies want us to eat a nutritious and balanced diet? There's no real money in it. Maximizing profits, that's the real goal.

Pandora's Lunchbox Author Interview

Regretfully, not an interview I did. Rather, Amy Goodman, the public face of Democracy Now!, interviews Melanie Warner, the author of Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal.



If you don't want to watch the interview, I'll post the transcript below:

March 1, 2013

 

AMY GOODMAN: As we continue deep inside the $1-trillion-a-year "processed-food-industrial complex," we turn to look at how decades of food science have resulted in the cheapest, most abundant, most addictive and most nutritionally inferior food in the world. And the vitamins and protein added back to this processed food? Well, you might be surprised to know where they come from. That’s the focus of a new book by longtime food reporter Melanie Warner, author of Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal.
Melanie, welcome to Democracy Now! She’s joining us from Denver, Colorado. Vitamins, vitamin-added food. You think you go to the grocery store, and you want to get a little added punch, and you want to ensure that your kids, that your family, has added vitamins. What’s the problem with that?
MELANIE WARNER: You know, one of the things with processed food that I found while doing this book, is not only that it has an abundance of the things that Michael was talking about—salt, sugar, fat—it’s also what it’s lacking, which, it turns out, is naturally occurring nutrition, in many cases. So that’s vitamins and minerals and fiber and things like antioxidants.
So, you take something like cereal—you know, you walk down the cereal aisle, and you’re bombarded with health messages: It’s high in vitamin D, a good source of calcium, fiber, antioxidants. You see these things all over the package. And one of the things—one of the questions I asked myself when I was starting to work on this book was: Why is it nearly impossible to find a box of cereal in the cereal aisle without vitamins, added vitamins and minerals, in the ingredient list?
And it turns out, because most cereal has very little inherent nutrition. And this is in part because of processing. The processing of food is very intensive. It’s very—it’s very technical, and with cereal, can be very damaging to naturally occurring nutrients, especially vitamins and oftentimes fiber. So, what manufacturers do is they add back in vitamins. So, essentially, you see all these wonderful claims on the package, but essentially—and you look at the panel, and you’re getting 35 percent and 40 percent of your recommended daily allowance of these vitamins, but they’re essentially added in like a vitamin pill, which many people maybe are already taking in the morning.
And I was really surprised to learn where some of these vitamins come from. I never really thought about it in much detail, as probably most people don’t. But it turns out that they’re—these vitamins are not coming from the foods that contain them. Like vitamin C does not come from an orange, and vitamin A does not come from a carrot. It’s very far from that. They come from things that really aren’t actually foods. Vitamin D, for instance, was probably the most shocking. It comes from sheep grease, so actually the grease that comes from sheep wool. You have giant barges and container ships that go from Australia and New Zealand over to China, where most of—a lot of our vitamins are produced. About 50 percent of global vitamin production comes from China inside these huge factories, very industrial processes. A lot of vitamins are actually chemical processes.
[More after the jump]