Food and the body politic
Today's methods of food processing are bad for our health, economy and environment, says the co-author of a new book on organic eating.
By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published October 4, 2006
ST. PETERSBURG
"We've collectively been the guinea pigs for a totally radical experimental diet," Anna Lappe says.
"It's not hyperbole to say it's killing people."
Lappe is not talking about science fiction or some wacky diet craze. She is speaking to an attentive crowd of several hundred students and boomers at Eckerd College about how most of America eats - and how it can do better.
Lappe is the co-author, with chef Bryant Terry, of Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen. The book is part Food Politics 101, part handbook for novice cooks and part sensual seasonal recipes for dinner parties, complete with suggested soundtracks.
Lappe grew up hearing about food and all its cultural, economic and political implications. Her mother, Frances Moore Lappe, is the author of Diet for a Small Planet, one of the most influential food books of the 1970s. Her late father, Marc Lappe, was a toxicologist and medical ethicist.
Anna and her mother founded the Small Planet Institute and co-wrote Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet in 2002.
Dressed in jeans, flowered blouse and green jacket, the slim, fresh-faced Lappe is a poster girl for healthy eating though not a prim purist, judging by the Starbucks cup in her hand. At 32, she could easily pass for one of the Eckerd students she spoke to last Wednesday.
Grub is aimed at readers ages 18 to 35, she says. "We really wrote this book for ourselves. We wanted to address the question of what's wrong with how we think about food and offer some practical steps to a healthier relationship with food."
Lappe wrote the first portion of the book, which distills extensive research into a short course on industrial agriculture and its effect on our bodies and our body politic.
"I have a sense of urgency about this because the way we eat has changed so radically and so fast," she says. "And our bodies have changed so fast."
A couple of generations ago, ingredients such as trans fats and high fructose corn syrup didn't exist. Now they're a major component of our diet: The average American consumes 63 pounds of high fructose corn syrup a year, 15 to 20 percent of total caloric intake.
Studies show that it is processed by the body differently from other sugars, which may mean it increases weight gain and risk of heart disease.
Lappe notes of the recent spinach scare that the virulent form of E. coli that caused several deaths is a byproduct of feedlot meat production, first identified in 1982. "Cattle evolved to eat grass. When you feed them grain to fatten them up, they get all kinds of illnesses," which can be passed along the food chain.
In the same time frame as the explosive growth of industrial farming, the percentage of overweight and obese Americans has soared, as have rates of weight-related illnesses like diabetes.
"They used to call Type 2 diabetes 'adult onset diabetes' because kids didn't get it," Lappe says of the form of the disease often associated with excessive weight. "Now the Centers for Disease Control predicts that as many as one in three children being born today will become diabetic."
Lappe says she talked recently to schoolteachers who told her they are seeing children in their classrooms who have never learned to use utensils to eat. "If you eat at McDonald's, do you need a fork?"
But, she says, it is "a myth that everyone chooses" to eat junk food.
Obesity and overweight rates are highest among the poorest segments of the population. "Some people look at how low-income people eat and raise their eyebrows," Lappe says, "but if you're food-insecure, you have to look at calories per dollar."
Many of the poorest Americans live in what are called "food deserts," neighborhoods where grocery stores are scarce and fast food is the main option.
Lappe is a passionate advocate for organic farming, and she bristles at the suggestion that organic foods are too expensive to be a good solution for many people.
"People say it's elitist, but the status quo is so damaging to the most vulnerable populations that the most elitist stance is not to demand change."
Cheap food isn't so cheap when the enormous costs of health care for food-related illness are considered, she says. And industrial agriculture is subsidized by billions of taxpayer dollars annually while organic farming receives not a dollar of government subsidy.
Changing how people eat at every level, from government policy to personal choices, won't be easy. But, Lappe writes in Grub, just two generations ago, her grandmother's doctor recommended that she take up smoking cigarettes to calm her nerves.
Maybe someday, she writes, industrial farming and our processed food diet will seem just as misguided an experiment.
Lappe, who lives in Brooklyn, talks about visiting an organic farm there that some friends started on a few acres of unused parkland. High school students raised in the city come to learn about raising crops.
The kids tell her that until they started working on the farm, the only fresh vegetables they had ever eaten were the lettuce and tomato on fast food burgers.
A 16-year-old named Jonathan takes her on an enthusiastic tour, and she asks him what his favorite veggie is now.
"Hmm, arugula?" he says. "Or mustard greens? No, borage. It's definitely borage."
Lappe grins. "Here's this big 16-year-old holding up this little lavender flower and telling me it's his favorite. Borage. That story to me is a sign of hope."
Colette Bancroft can be reached at (727) 893-8435 or bancroft@sptimes.com.