The Compost Pile

I know this article is long in the 140 character universe but I’ve been finding tweeting wholly unsatisfying for anything other than linking to well-written articles elsewhere. I’ve had two very strong reminders in the last little while that we all experience life from our own relative viewpoint and it is virtually impossible for us to be truly unbiased and impartial, regardless of how much we protest that we are. The first was while reading Eintstein’s Theory of Relativity while on vacation (actually I cheated – I downloaded it as a podcast and listened to it. booksshouldbefree.com has most of the classics that are now in the public domain, read by volunteers and most are very good quality). In this case, the simple illustration used by Einstein is that of a ball that is dropped while on a train and the differences in how you see the ball fall whether you are on the train or stationary at the side of the track. Nothing changes about the path of the ball, only your point of observation changes. Yet two people would argue that the ball followed two very different paths and possibly conclude that the other person was an idiot – unless they either switched places with them or came to understand the impact of the different viewpoint on the information set that was gathered. The second reminder came this winter as I battled fairly severe depression. My viewpoint had declined so gradually over the course of many years that I did not believe that I was perceiving the world any differently than I always had. Eventually, Silvia convinced me to see a doctor and I’m now on my way to being restored. The reminder about relative viewpoints came during the period when the doctors were trying to find a medication that was helpful. I went through several periods where my mood changed dramatically in the space of hours and my reactions to similar events changed dramatically as well. The time frame was such that I began to see it myself. It was a good reminder that before we draw conclusions, we need to understand if other people have a viewpoint that gives them a different information set. Not an incorrect information set but a different information set that should be considered.
Silvia reminds me that I have a very different information set from the majority of the population simply because I was raised in mainstream agriculture and schooled in main stream agriculture (I’m not sure I’ve fully recovered from the 7 years I spent institutionalized in Guelph – I’ll let you imagine the institution but I’ll let you know that a penitentiary, a mental health facility and the Univeristy are all within walking distance of each other.)
I’ll give you some examples of where my vantage point ensures that I see the same events differently from you and differently from the regulators/well-intentioned government folks:
1. Schneiders is advertising an “All Natural” line of hot dogs, bacon and processed meats with no added preservatives. Since I studied some food science during my university days, I know that sodium nitrate is used as the primary preservative in these types of products because it is one of the few that is effective against Clostridium Botulinum (Botulism) and that a secondary health concern in consuming too much of these products is too much nitrate and too much salt in a person’s diet. But I read the label and note that there is celery extract on the ingredient list but no nitrates. I know from my plant science classes that celery contains one of the highest concentrations of nitrates of any vegetable and the farmer needs to manage nitrogen applications to prevent the nitrate levels from being too high. Putting two and two together I concluded that Schneiders is still using nitrates to preserve the meat, they are just sourcing it from a “natural” celery extract. I do some online research and find a couple of studies that concluded there was no difference in nitrate levels between “natural” products using celery extract and products using sodium nitrate straight. The government regulator however, looked at the defined list of things called “preservatives”, looked at the official definition of “natural” and concluded that celery extract was not a preservative in the regulated sense and that celery extract met the definition of natural and approved Schneiders use of the terms. In enforcing the regulations they allowed the public to be mislead. The only difference between the two bacons is the price point. Oh, and the packaging looks a little prettier.
2. The North American-wide trend to replacing Pop machines with healthier alternatives in school. The question is always centred on which products should be in the pop machines. A better question would be “do we need pop machines in schools?” Back in my day, we had these amazing inventions in schools – water fountains. My elementary school had several – two were the newfangled ones that had a built in refrigerator and pump so the water was always “brain freeze” cold and spurted up nice and high. Some how the debate has switched to which sweetened beverage do we want to use to fatten up our kids and give them diabetes. Coke doesn’t care – they’ll sell you whatever you want. In fact they’ll even take that water that I used to drink straight from the fountain, wrap it in chemical leaching plastic and sell it to you for more per litre than those outrageous gas prices. So where’s my different viewpoint in all this? I live in a world of “outlier” famillies with really weird kids that prefer water and milk to pop, even when offered a choice. They will sneak into the garden and “steal” vegetables (its amazing how good something tastes when you think your parents don’t want you to have it). I almost cut Rebekah’s fingers off one day when she was reaching up onto the cutting board stealing slices of pepper while I was preparing dinner. I don’t have to worry about changing what the school serves, because my kids are wise enough not to eat there regularly. My point is that you can condition your child to have a taste for anything. A child’s preferences for food always flow from what their parents feed them you can take any baby at birth and place them in any culture and they will develop a “taste” for the food of that region. Not that I want to brag but my kids eat homemade artisanal style whole grain bread and the crust doesn’t have to be cut-off – and their friends follow their lead when in our home. Back to the opening point – I wouldn’t be arguing about which sweetened beverage should be served. Ask any diabetic, a sugar is a sugar regardless of whether it’s refined or from a “natural source”. Also, some of the deadliest poisons on this planet are 100% natural – asp venom, curare, digitalis, etc. It’s not how the beverage is sweetened that counts, it’s the fact that it is sweetened.
3. Most people don’t get too excited about their food. The government tells them that it’s the safest in the world. They’re not lying – from their narrow definition of “safe”, it is. But it’s also the unsafest – the average North American diet, if consumed consistently will shorten your lifespan. Not might, as in you might get sick if you eat meat contaminated with salmonella. But you will as in it is almost 100% guaranteed that you will live fewer years than you could have if you had made better diet choices. Where’s my different vantage point in all this? I know that everything you consume is covered in bacteria. Our bodies are designed to deal with it. Our food preparation has more to do with our chance of getting food poisoning than anything done by anybody upstream. Cook properly and don’t cross-contaminate and don’t let somebody else cook for you – they’ll add more fat and salt than you ever would just to ensure that you walk away thinking that you ate a good meal.
4. I often get asked how I can farm without antibiotics. It’s a fair question if your frame of reference is human medicine where antibiotics are only given when a doctor has identified a threat to the patient’s health that can be countered with an antibiotic. Antibiotics are prescribed infrequently within the bulk of the population and then under strict instructions to limit the chances of developing an antibiotic resistant strain. My frame of reference is conventional animal agriculture where antibiotics are regularly fed at a sub-therapeutic dose (a dose too low to cure a disease) not because the animals are sick but because research showed that animals gained faster when fed anitbiotics continuously (over 70% of the antibiotics consumed in North America are fed to animals). Especially in confinement barns. If you were setting out to create a bacteria that was resistant to an antibiotic this is probably the most cost effective method you could choose. Furthermore, there has been scientific evidence (reputable scientist, replicated study with controls) since 1976 that that is exactly what would happen with this practise. I know of two chicken farmers in Ontario in just the last 5 years that have contracted MRSA from a simple cut on their hand. In one case, his three young children attended his funeral, in the other case the family spent a lot of time at her hospital bedside but she eventually recovered. I can farm without antibiotics because the majority of antibiotics used in agriculture aren’t used to treat disease. We give animals more space and access to fresh air and sunshine. Need I say more?
5. People ask me what the big deal with GMOs is, farmers have been breeding bigger, better crops and livestock for generations. If I’m in a snarky mood I’ll retort with why are we worried about Iraq getting nuclear weapons when they’ve had slingshots for generations? There is one big flaw with science – it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. I’ll give you a couple of examples and then return to the question of GMOs. CFCs were a vast improvement over the amonia-based refrigeration systems – they worked at lower pressures, didn’t blow up nearly as often and when they leaked they didn’t kill everybody in the room. Then somebody said “I think CFCs are creating a hole in the ozone layer”. Everybody laughed. No it’s true. Everyone laughed and ridiculed. Today, CFCs have largely been banned the world over because eventually enough “scientific” evidence accumulated to lead us to the conclusion that CFCs were creating a hole in the ozone layer and in a truly ironic twist, we were going to be baked by an unforeseen consequence of our efforts to stay cool. Second example, introduction of insecticides in the first half of the 20th century – a great boon to defending crops from insects. Then Rachel Carson wrote a book called “Silent Spring” hypothesizing that the insecticides were accumulating in the food chain and their use was leading to thinner egg shells and devastating pre-hatch mortality in song birds. Everyone laughed. Eventually, enough scientific evidence accumulated to “prove” the hypothesis and now new insecticides have to show that they are not prone to bioacumulation. So, back to GMOs. First, let me describe the current techniques in non-technical terms. New genes from other species are inserted into the DNA of an organism by loading it on gold particles and firing it at the nuclei of cells. To put it in layman’s terms. They’re hoping to give you a new heart by loading a pig’s heart in an RPG and firing it at you. If they do it enough times, there will be an “event” where you live. The other primary technique involves loading the DNA into a virus and hoping that the virus will accidentally leave the new DNA behind once it has finished forcing the cell to replicate the virus’s DNA (we have some techniques to improve the odds so it’s not completely an accident but you get the idea). The question now becomes how do you prove that the plant or animal that was created is “safe” for human consumption. You can’t. You can only show that it does not contain any of the things that we might expect to find that are harmful. Until enough people have eaten GMOs for long enough we won’t know what the disease causing profile of GM crops is. Congratulations, you just volunteered for the largest human feeding trial in history. The good news is that we only have about 10 years left until researchers will have a solid two decades of longitudinal data to dissect. Sound implausible that the GMO plants or animals (we have GMO fish, pigs, goats and cows – not being fed to humans yet) could contain something harmful that science doesn’t know about. One word – “trans-fats”, the word is ubiquitous but the majority of the population doesn’t have a clue what it means other than they’re bad for you. Trans-fats have an identical twin called cis-fats. They are isomers – that is they contain exactly the same elements arranged in almost identical patterns. The only difference is that the configuration of the double bonds on the carbon molecules leads to a fairly straight molecule in the case of trans-fats and a curved and “squiggly” molecule in cis-fats. Oh yeah, and nature doesn’t produce any trans-fats. All naturally occuring fats have the cis configuration. It took researchers a long time to prove that such a miniscule change could lead to so much heart break. When the first researcher postulated that as a hypothesis, everyone laughed. Still comfortable eating food that has been modified at the genetic level by blasting some crap that doesn’t belong at it and hoping something sticks? Oh and by the way, Canadian researchers have proven that the products of the first GMOs are in your bloodstream and cross the placenta into the fetal bloodstream. One other thing, not sure if it’s related but an international team of researchers has demonstrated a strong correlation between an increased use of GMO soybeans and birth defects. Anyone laughing?
That’s a lot of heavy crap to lay on you in one read, it’s basically a summary of the several hundred tweets I blasted out in the past couple of months. So what can you do about it? The good news is, this is completely in your hands (and mouths). You eat at least three times a day and you can choose what you eat. You have the greatest amount of food choice of any person in history. You also have the least amount of choice – everything that isn’t certified organic and has undergone some form of processing contains at least one ingredient that was derived from either GMO corn or GMO soybeans, or GMO sugarbeets, or …. Start saying no to GMO at the grocery till. Get involved in alternative food systems that allow you to directly communicate with the farmer. Buy food that is as minimally processed as possible. Obviously you’re not going to drive up a farmer’s lane and ask him to put a live steer in the back of your SmartCar. Somebody needs to do the butchering. But don’t go for all the pre-flavoured crap. Even though I sell a lot of high-quality sausage, you’re allowing someone else to decide what goes in it. Buy the ground meat and season it yourself and eat a sausage patty rather than links.

By all means get involved with activist groups to amplify your opposition but understand that the choices you make at the grocery till speak far louder than any speech you can give in front of Queen’s Park.

1. Foodkin (http://www NULL.foodkin NULL.ca)
   9:38 pm on July 20th, 2011

   yes. yes & yes. Brilliant. Alot was said, yet the overall message is quite simple. Eat real food.

   Thanks!