Food, Inc.: How Industrial Food is Making us Sicker, Fatter and Poorer – And What You Can Do About It by Karl Weber.

3/5 rating. 270 pages.

Book #29 of 2021. Read April 6, 2021.

This is a collection of essays and writings to accompany the acclaimed documentary of the same name.

When most people think about our food system today, they have a cheery idea of wide-open fields dotted with happy cows munching on grass, next to a nice red barn with a beautiful white fence. This is about as far from the reality as possible. In the last 50 or so years, we have completely changed the way that our food is grown. (Nearly) all conventional food is grown using heavy chemicals, animals are locked in cages, kept inside where they are so packed together that they can hardly move. They are kept standing in their own excrement with low-doses of antibiotics as the only way to keep disease from running rampant.

Karl does a great job of not only bringing together experts who can speak on this part of our food system, but more importantly, the small, but growing group of farmers who are choosing to buck trends. Organic, cruelty-free, and sustainable farms are presented between talks of how important nutrition, wages, and labor are to our present and future health of a nation (and world).

This book is kind of an amalgamation of a lot of disparate topics about food: from seeds, to growth, to the choices we make of what to eat, and its effect on our health and climate change. I think that probably watching the documentary would be more beneficial for most people, but this book had some interesting facts and ways to make a difference.

As Michael Pollan said so beautifully: “Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will.”

Quotes:

“For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that one-third of all American children born in the year 2000 will develop diabetes as a result of poor diet and lack of exercise. So when we talk about bringing healthy food to every American – yes, it probably means spending more money on food. But you can spend that extra money on food now, or spend a lot more money later, treating heart disease and diabetes.”

“We shouldn’t have a society where the only food that’s readily affordable is unhealthy food.”

“If the government’s going to subsidize any foods, it should be healthy foods: fruits, nuts, and vegetables – not high-fructose corn syrup and corn-based cattle feeds.”

“A reformed food industry would in many ways be more economically efficient. The obesity epidemic is now costing us about $100 billion a year. The medical costs imposed by the fast-food industry are much larger than its annual profits – except the industry isn’t paying those medical bills.”

“According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, seventy percent of all antimicrobials used in the United States are fed to livestock. This accounts for twenty-five million pounds of antibiotics annually, more than eight times the amount used to treat disease in humans.”

“U.S. corporations are very conscious of how they’re perceived, and worry about it a lot. That gives consumers a lot of power – if they’re prepared to inform themselves and then to make smart decisions based on what they learn.”

“All of humanity ate organic food until the early part of the twentieth century, yet we’ve been on a chemical binge diet for about eighty years – an eye blink in planetary history – and what do we have to show for it? We’ve lost one-third of America’s topsoil; buried toxic waste everywhere; and polluted and depleted water systems, worsened global warming, and exacerbated ailments ranging from cancer to diabetes to obesity.”

“If we are really committed to saving the world, we’ll stop questioning motives and start applauding every big company that makes the effort to change course and embrace organic methods.”

“Even if all the corn grown in America were turned into ethanol, it would supply less than six percent of America’s total oil needs.”

“The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol would feed one person for a full year.”

“According to the Environmental Working Group, between 1995 and 2006 federal corn subsidies, which are provided through myriad programs, totaled $56.1 billion. That’s more than twice the amount given to any other commodity, including American mainstays like wheat and cotton, and 105 times more than was paid to tobacco farmers.”

“In that case, each gallon of domestic ethanol required the consumption of about 132 gallons of water.”

“According to the EPA’s ‘Guidelines for Carcinogen Risk Assessment,’ children receive fifty percent of their lifetime cancer risks in the first two years of life.”

“In blood samples of children aged two to four, concentrations of pesticide residues are six times higher in children eating conventionally farmed fruits and vegetables compared with those eating organic food.”

“Yet the global system for producing and distributing food accounts for roughly one-third of the human-caused global warming effect. According to the United Nation’s seminal report, Livestock’s Long Shadow, the livestock sector alone is responsible for eighteen percent of the world’s total global warming effect – more than the emissions produced by every plane, train, and steamer ship on the planet.”

“Globally, one-third of the world’s arable land is dedicated to feed crop production. Poorly managed pastures lead to over-grazing, compaction, and erosion, which release stored carbon into the atmosphere. With livestock now occupying twenty-six percent of the planet’s ice-free land, the impact of this poor land management is significant.”

“In 1965, eight billion livestock animals were alive on the planet at any given moment; ten billion were slaughtered every year. Today, thanks in part to CAFOs that spur faster growth and shorter lifespan, twenty billion livestock animals are alive at any moment, while nearly fifty-five billion are slaughtered annually.”

“Globally, thirty-three percent of the world’s cereal harvest and ninety percent of the world’s soy harvest are now being raised for animal feed.”

“In the United States and Canada, half of all synthetic fertilizer is used for feed crops. In the United Kingdom, the total is nearly seventy percent.”

“By one estimate, converting 10,000 medium-sized farms to organic would store as much carbon in the soil as we would save in emissions if we took one million cars off the road.”

“In one of the largest studies of sustainable agriculture, covering 286 projects in fifty-seven countries and including 12.6 million farmers, researchers from the University of Essex found a yield increase of seventy-nine percent when farmers shifted to sustainable farming across a wide variety of systems and crop types. Harvests of some crops such as maize, potatoes, and beans increased one hundred percent.”

“While most workers won historic labor protections through the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 – which set minimum wage requirements, overtime laws, and child labor laws – powerful lobbying by agribusiness succeeded in excluding farmworkers from protection under these laws. The minimum wage now applies to farmworkers in most cases, but overtime provisions still do not.”

“Estimates vary, but at least fifty percent of the [farm] workforce is not authorized to work in the United States.”

“University of California at Davis agricultural economist Philip Martin has computed that farmworker wages and benefits levy a total cost of $22 per year on each American household. Furthermore, he found that to raise average farmworker wages by forty percent, bringing workers from below the poverty line to above it, would cost the average household only $8 more for produce each year.”

“As a culture, if all we did was rediscover our kitchens and quit buying prepared foods, it would fundamentally change the industrial food system.”

“Organics may be somewhat healthier to eat, but they are far less likely to damage the environment, and that is reason enough to choose them at the supermarket.”

“In a study conducted in Cincinnati, the incidence of type 2 diabetes in adolescents increased tenfold between 1982 and 1994.”

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