The End of Food: How the Food Industry Is Destroying Our Food Supply

The End of Food: How the Food Industry Is Destroying Our Food Supply — And What You Can Do About It

Almost everything we eat has lost much of its former nutritional value in the pell-mell drive for profits and cheaper consumer goods — and it's our own fault
Jun. 4, 2006 STUART LAIDLAW, Toronto Star
The End of Food by Thomas F. Pawlick, Greystone, 256 pages, $24.95 Amazon.com

Six summers ago, seed giant Seminis decided, as a cost-cutting measure, to eliminate one-quarter of the seeds in its inventory — effectively rendering extinct varieties of fruits and vegetables it had acquired through years of buying other companies, and for which it now held the patents.

The plan worked. The company became more attractive to investors and last year was bought by the even bigger Monsanto Corp. for $1.4 billion (U.S.).

For Thomas Pawlick, such actions are unforgivable. "To deliberately throw away, and cause to be lost forever, thousands of unique plants whose possible value to future generations may now never be known, is worse than irresponsible," he writes in The End of Food. "It is an environmental sin."

The theme is set. The big companies that have taken control our food supply are to come under stinging attack — and deservedly so.

Pawlick, a magazine writer and farmer living in rural eastern Ontario, categorizes the declining nutritional quality of our food as agriculture has become more and more industrialized. Chicken has lost more than half of its vitamin A since 1963, while fat content has gone up by almost a third in white meat and by more than 50 per cent in dark. Sodium has also jumped.

Cottage cheese, often marketed as a low-fat source of calcium, has lost 36 per cent of its calcium and 53 per cent of its iron, while gaining 7.3 per cent fat and an eye-popping 76 per cent sodium since 1963.

Tomatoes, potatoes, broccoli, lemons, cabbage, bread: Pawlick finds food after food that is less nutritious for us than they were for our parents. The United States Department of Agriculture has been tracking the trend. It hasn't done anything about it, but it's been tracking it.

Pawlick puts the blame squarely on the industrial food system on which most of us rely for our food. Fruits and vegetables are bred to meet the processing and transportation needs of the big food companies, not consumers.

Pawlick called around to food industry business people and scientists to get their lists of priorities for food breeding. They listed yield, size, firmness (the better to transport), disease resistance, uniformity and heat and cold tolerance.

"No one mentioned the two characteristics that any ordinary consumer would likely put at the top of his or her list, namely: flavour and nutritional content," he writes. "These were simply not there, not important, not even worth mentioning." The food industry's response to such charges is always the same: consumers want cheap food. In other words, it's your fault. Pawlick wants us all to do something about it by shunning the big food stores, buying local, eating organic and planting our own backyard gardens. It sounds nice, but if the problem is systemic — as Pawlick effectively argues it is — shouldn't the solution also be systemic?

I'm tempted to think it has to be. As the recent move into organics by companies such as Sara Lee and Wal-Mart points out, the industrial food complex is capable of sucking Pawlick's solutions into its orbit. The same grocery store that Pawlick would have me shun will sell me the tomatoes for my backyard.

Attempts to use consumer power to build a better world means buying into the very consumer culture that is responsible for so many of our problems.

The real solution eludes me, as it does Pawlick. But at least he offers a good and approachable look at the problem.

Toronto Star reporter Stuart Laidlaw is the author of Secret Ingredients: The Brave New World of Industrial Farming (McClelland & Stewart).