The cancer or the beetroot?

 I made this home-grown 
1 kg beetroot into a big 
pot of borscht -

nutritious and delicious.

I once saw a German postcard which showed a class of rather mutinous-looking early twentieth century school children, inscribed with the words (my translation) “Teachers are the people who help us solve the problems we wouldn't have without them.”

I was reminded of this when reading a story in my local paper about yet another scientific attempt to make industrial food slightly less dangerous. Researchers at the University of Aberdeen are investigating including an extract of beetroot in hamburger patties. This is part of a wider Scottish Government funded project being undertaken at the Rowett Research Institute of Nutrition and Health, investigating the potential health benefits of Scottish produce.

According to the university's media release on the subject the Rowett researchers believe that beetroot (which contains antioxidants) stops the body from absorbing the ‘bad’ fat found in burgers. The lead researcher, Professor Garry Duthie, says that “Processed food forms a major and increasing part of our diet. Consumption of high fat convenience foods in Scotland increases year by year. We are looking to identify if adding a vegetable extract to processed food can actually protect the body from absorbing the ‘bad’ fats which exist in these types of products.”

Those fats contain compounds which contribute to causing cancer. Other carcinogenic compounds are formed when meat is cooked, or preserved using the common preservatives, such as nitrites. This is the reason why the second expert report on food, nutrition, physical activity, and the prevention of cancer produced by the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute of Cancer Research in 2008 (The Second Expert Report on Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity, and the Prevention of Cancer: a Global Perspective) recommends that the public health goal for meat consumption should be a population average consumption of red meat of no more than 300 g (11 oz) a week, very little if any of which should be processed meat. For adult individuals the recommendation is to eat less than 500 g (18 oz) of red meat a week, and very little or no processed meat.

There are other reasons why reducing meat consumption is good for your health – many of them documented by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which focuses on improving health by improving nutrition. One wonders whether the scientists at the Rowett Research Institute of Nutrition and Health are aware of these reasons, or of the studies on how to improve adult diets effectively. It certainly does not look like it, if Prof. Duthie can so sanguinely accept that high fat food consumption in Scotland is already a major problem, that it will continue to increase, and that the 'solution' to it is technological tinkering with rubbish foods.

Even if this particular bit of tinkering proves successful and it is possible to create a non-carcinogenic hamburger patty by lacing it with beetroot extract – what then? Is the Scottish government going to make it mandatory for all patties sold in Scotland to be so laced? How will the multinational burger chains like that? The more one thinks about it, the sillier it gets. Also, if this is supposed to be part of an investigation into the health benefits of local produce – where's the produce?

Health comes in whole foods, not in medicinal extracts. In comparison to meat, fresh whole beetroot is highly nutritious, fat-free and safe to eat in amounts well in excess of 500g per week. Cooking it does not create carcinogenic compounds. It can be made into salads, soups, main and side dishes and even cakes. I am sure that it is served regularly at Henderson's, the outstanding vegetarian restaurant in Edinburgh, which is about to celebrate its 50th anniversary. The majority of Henderson's regular customers are not vegetarians – they go there because the food is so good.

The Scottish government needs to note from the Henderson's example that Scots will eat their veges if they are properly prepared, and from American intervention studies that if they are taught how to do vegetable selection and preparation for themselves they will make significant nutrition and health gains. If I were the Scottish government and wanted the Scots to eat better, I would not be wasting money on the food fiddlers at the Rowett Institute, who are doing nothing that will help the public eat less meat and more fresh produce. Until governments are prepared to study and fund what really works in improving diets, and/or take notice of existing research that provides evidence on what is already working - this includes more/easier access to fresh produce, higher taxes or other disincentives on 'bad' foods, targeted education interventions, free fresh fruit in schools, stopping the sale of junk foods and drinks in schools, bans or heavy restrictions on junk food advertising and sponsorships, fresh food gardens and kitchens in schools, and urban/peri-urban agriculture - the Scots and other nations will continue to get fatter and sicker.

It took more than thirty years from when the role of tobacco smoking in causing cancer and other diseases was proven for governments to start acting to protect the public health by banning smoking in public places, banning or restricting tobacco advertising and sponsorships, restricting tobacco sales to minors, and so on. Tobacco-related deaths and disease rates are now starting to fall in all countries which have taken these measures.

It took so long to get action because the tobacco industry fought back in all sorts of ways, from hiding the truth about the dangers of its product to fiddling with cigarettes to make them 'safer'. This 'deny and fiddle' phase is the one we seem to be in now with regard to the industrial diet. Big Tobacco was very generous to politicians then; Big Food is very generous to them now. Some multinational corporations (e.g. Philip Morris) cover both products and both eras, and were and are working against the public interest on both fronts.

To ensure that you are still here when good people fighting for good food win out – eat the whole beet, not the dodgy meat.

Agri-chemicals - a global toxic legacy

Healthy cabbages and yacon thrive with a mulch of dead weeds. See
Weeds are our friends  
for how toxic agri-chemicals
reduce natural productivity,
and weeds can be part of replenishing it.

Just how big a mess have toxic agri-chemicals (pesticides and herbicides) made of farmland, natural ecosystems, fisheries, wild flora and fauna - and people's lives - around the world, since the chemical companies started pumping them out big time in the middle of the twentieth century?

I can't answer that question quantitatively, but today I heard Dr Ron McDowall, an expert on both the quantitative and qualitative horror caused by these chemicals, tell some tragic stories about what he had personally witnessed, or heard about, while working as consultant engineer for the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in charge of cleaning up toxic waste sites in Africa, South America, and Eurasia. Small personal tragedies – children dying in agony from drinking pesticides stored in Coke bottles, rural women using pesticides to commit suicide – and long-term, large-scale social tragedies, such as the children still being born with deformities in Vietnam over thirty years after American forces left dumps of Agent Orange (dioxin) behind.

Dr McDowall has also seen the total destruction of farm land caused by such chemicals. An article on him and his work records that there is an estimated 100,000 tonnes of toxic chemical waste to be cleaned up in Africa alone. Most of it is unwanted pesticides that have been banned from sale or are past their expiry date. You can listen to the Radio New Zealand interview with Dr McDowall here, and read more about him and his work here.

We are fortunate that there are people with Dr McDowall's courage and expertise to do this awful work, and enough money in the UNEP budget to fund it. There's no justice in that, though, since it was chemical corporations, not the countries which fund the UNEP, that made this filthy stuff, and sold it to people who did not have the means or knowledge to store or dispose of it safely. Before they profit from selling any more, I'd like to see the owners, boards of directors and senior managers of these companies made personally liable to pay compensation for any deaths, illnesses and clean-up costs resulting from their products - and send them out to do the clean-ups as well.

Soil and empire - a review

 The fertility of the soil in my vegetable garden is constantly renewed and improved using the systems researched and taught by Albert Howard - compost, green manures, animal manures, and organic mulches. 

It is not hard to make soil - it is very easy to lose it.

 I recently read two books, written sixty-three years apart, which cover different aspects of the same two-sided problem – the destruction of soil by export-oriented agriculture, and the destruction of human health as a result of eating the food produced by such agriculture and/or by having insufficient access to nutritious and affordable locally-produced foods. Sir Albert Howard wrote The Soil and Health. A study of organic agriculture at the end of his life as an agricultural scientist, farmer, and farming advisor. Published in 1947, it sums up the principles on which his life's work was based, the great results achieved by following those principles, and the great dangers of flouting them.

Howard's first chapters look at the profligate loss of soil fertility and its relationship to war, starvation and population collapse in ancient times, before moving on to the problem in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Commenting on the contemporary situation he writes:

“ The phrase mining the land is now recognised as a very accurate description of what takes place when the human race flings itself on an area of stored fertility and uses it up without thought for the future. In the mid-nineteenth century this began to take place on an unprecedented scale. For if agriculture was, so to say, the nursemaid of industry, she was persuaded to learn one salient lesson from her nursling. This was the lesson of the profit motive.”

The profit motive and where it leads when applied to food is the underlying theme of the book Empires of Food. Feast, Famine and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations by Evan D.G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas, first published in 2010. Leaping centuries and continents to illustrate this theme, they look at long-distance food trading, its relationship with imperial conquests and the maintenance of armies, and where it has historically ended – in malnourished populations and weakened defence forces in the imperial heartland that are easy prey for invaders, and in soils which take centuries to recover enough fertility to support urban as well as rural populations.

The Roman empire is the best documented example of this process, and is covered by Fraser and Rimas, although to round out their picture I would also recommend reading what David Montgomery (2007) has to say on the subject in Dirt: the erosion of civilisations, and also Thomas Homer-Dixon's (2006) account in The Upside of Down of the food energy required to build and run the Roman empire, and what happened when it ran out. Fraser and Rimas lay bare the historical imperial construction of today's global food trading system, and the social impacts of states no longer producing (and storing and releasing at affordable prices) enough food to weather climatic or political storms. They also look at the heavy environmental burdens that the modern empires of food are imposing on nations in addition to the loss of soil and its fertility. These include toxic chemicals, greenhouse gas emissions and noxious wastes.

Fraser and Rimas pay particular attention to the situation of China today, which has moved from storing rice to exporting it and other profitable foods, while systematically destroying the soils on which export (and locally-consumed) production depends, whether by paving them over with roads and cities, drowning them under the dams formed by huge hydro projects, or poisoning them with agricultural chemicals and heavy metals from industry. (A report released on 7 November 2011 by China's Ministry of Environmental Protection said that one tenth of China's farmland is now so polluted by heavy metals such as lead and zinc that people are regularly suffering from poisoning.)

The upside of the high connectivity of the current global food system is that there probably won't be a repeat of invasions from the outside as there was in the past; the downside is that the collapse will be much more widespread than it was for the Mesopotamians or the Mayans. Fraser and Rimas think that a hybrid system of more local but some global food will still be possible (and desirable) in the foreseeable future. But that will depend on whether there is the political will to protect soil fertility at home rather than mining it abroad, and so far there is little evidence of this occurring in any of the great food producing states. On the contrary, they continue to negotiate and sign neo-liberalised trade and investment agreements that will make the problem worse. Therefore, the electoral advice that Albert Howard gave to 'the man in the street' remains as pertinent now as it was in 1947.

“3. He must use his vote to compel his various representatives – municipal, county and parliamentary – to see to it: (a) that the soil of his country is made fertile and maintained in this condition: (b) that the public health system of the future is based on the fresh produce of land in good heart.”