Food Studio

The implications for health

In many of the pictures of families in so-called underdeveloped countries, the food was straight from the nature, mostly grown by themselves. Does this make them poor people? Like the family in Ecuador, they radiate pride and love of life. In the pictures from industrialized countries the food is packaged, mostly unrecognizable as a product of nature. The film “Super Size Me” was an experiment in pure industrial diet: too much fat, too much sugar and too much salt, in addition to corn-fed red meat. The results are only too obvious: diabetes, cardio-vascular illnesses and obesity, to name the most common. What goes into refined food products is often a secret of the industry. Not even chemists can understand all of the fine print which lists the ingredients. If we want to choose healthy food, we do well to follow the simple advice of the food journalist, Michael Pollan: “Don’t eat anything your grandmother would not recognize as food”.

… for farmers?
For farmers, the industrialization of food production means less and less pay for the food they produce. In Norway prices paid to farmers have decreased with up to 50 % the last 25 years. We have lost half of the dairy farms in the last 10 years. Farmers in underdeveloped countries suffer not only from low and unstable prices, but also from land grabbing, loss of rights (for example to grow traditional grains) and competition from cheap, subsidized surpluses which are dumped on their markets from the storage and waste bins of industrial countries.

…for use of energy?
Industrialized agriculture is heavily based on use of non-renewable energy resources. From a study on use of energy for an average family of four in Sweden, it was shown that the majority of 40 % was due to the means of production, processing, packaging, transportation, purchase and preparation of food. In his book, “Eating Fossil Fuels” the author Dale Allen Pfeiffer, cites a study which estimates that the energy used in the production of one day’s consumption of food in the US is the equivalent of the work of one man in his best age: 111 hours of work spent over 3 weeks for one day’s food consumption! While industrial food production uses on average one calorie of fossil energy for each edible calorie produced for plant crops, traditional food production using only manual and animal labor as well as the free energy of the sun could give a return of 30 times or more the invested energy.

… for biological diversity?
When the topic of biodiversity is mentioned in Norway, most people immediately think of distant rainforests or nearby butterflies and salamanders. Awareness of the loss of diversity among our cultivated crops and domesticated animals has not quite reached our shores. But the loss of biological diversity in plants and domestic animals is also very much a local problem. Where there were hundreds of different types of apples grown in Norway, today there are only a handful that can be found in the stores. It is difficult to know how many varieties of our grains, vegetables and potatoes have been lost. The UN organization for Food and Agriculture (FAO) estimated in 2010 that 75 % of the varieties of food plants were lost during the last 50 years the largest agro-chemical companies with Monsanto in the lead have bought up seed production at an alarming rate, creating monopolies which foster profits at the cost of diversity. Trade agreements are in the making (TPP) which will further limit the possibility of maintaining the biological diversity of food crops that we still have.