Like waking from a bad dream

This post is tied to one Dan had regarding coffee and beer.

We as a society are coming to grips with some very shortsighted decisions about what we eat. The decisions were ones that consumers accepted whole heartedly as they jumped on the 'better living through science' bandwagon, and also the result of the massive industrialization that occured as a result of World War II.

World War II was a war fought on a massive scale. A scale that dwarfs all those wars fought before it. Mobilizing that many troops required an enormous change in the way that those troops were fed. So while Rosie the Rivetter and all the industrious folks who stayed at home toiled to build the machines of war, there were those that spent their time figuring out how to generate huge amounts of easily transported and durable foods. Huge scale canning, preservatives and countless other industrial process were developed to meet this need, and when the war was over, the companies that controlled that equipment and those ideas wanted to continue to benefit. A reasonable desire.

But what that set in motion, and the American people accepted, was that heavily processed food that was easily prepared and stayed 'fresh' almost forever, was equal to actual fresh and locally grown food. This was an era of great optimism and overflowing with trust that large institutions (including the government) had nothing but our best interests in mind. The US had emerged from the second world war as a superpower of enormous industrial/political and economic power and where this power would take us seemed nearly unlimited. Food went along on a ride that perhaps it never should have.

In additon to the great expanse of inustrialization of food, what also occured was that the women who had worked so hard in fighting the war at home, were now more empowered and encouraged than ever before to continue to work outside the home. This phenomenon didn't happen overnight, but the war kicked open the door to dual income families, and the food industry was happy to provide food that required less preparation so that the family could receive a 'healthy' meal even if mom wasn't there to slave over it. Guilt is a powerful force.

Economies of scale helped to push small local producers out of busines as they failed to compete with the ever-growing corporations that gobbled up marketshare and pushed prices down. In order to achieve this, these corporations adopted assembly line practices for meat production and even produce. Developments in medical science helped to reduce the incidence of disease in animals kept in huge numbers in close quarters and all sorts of growth enhancers helped to bring animals to market faster and faster. All of this continued to drive the cost of products lower and lower.

The explosion of the fast food industry fed on all of these trends, starting from small local shops using local meat and produce to enormous multi-national corporations with intricate food distribution chains and making use of all the available practices to keep costs down. The convenience of this as a means of feeding your family fed into the already well established trends mentioned above. The incidence of fast food consumption in our modern society is almost mind boggling. Over the course of my childhood, my family went from eating fast food (or pizza) no more than probably once a month to generally eating it once a week, on Friday, as a treat. Part of this was due to my brother working at Godfathers and getting us cheap pizza. That said, we had nothing on people today. Anyone who's see Supersize Me has heard the statistics on fast food consumption, and they are startling.

Most of the food that is the product of these drastic changes is bad. It contains high levels of fat and sodium and in no way provides the recommended allowances of vitamins and minerals. That's not to say that it's not damn tasty. Of course it is. It has been designed to be nearly addictive. And when I say designed, I mean systematically put together to achieve one particular end, much as you might assemble a jigsaw puzzle. Read Fast Food Nation if you don't believe me. For example - most of the 'flavor' in fast food is from chemicals that have to be back added to the food after it has been processed. These chemicals are designed and developed in New Jersey (mostly), The Garden State.

So, we've spent 50 years allowing the foods we put into our bodies to be treated like any other product. As a result we have almost no idea what the long term consequences are, except that we are really fucking fat, and getting fatter. We know the consequences of obesity - greater incidence of heart disease and diabetes and the resultant increase in health care costs. We don't know what the consequences are of being exposed to all sorts of 'unnatural' chemicals and biological agents. Bill Moyers did a great show where he had his blood tested to determine what sorts of things were floating around in his system. What did he find? Traces of 84 chemical compounds, some of which had been banned for more than a quarter century. Our bodies spent millions of years developing ways of dealing with the things it was likely to ingest. In the last 100 years we have exposed our bodies to such drastic changes that it has no way of dealing with the things it has found. It can't even just crap it out. Would you be surprised of you had your blood tested and discovered there was DDT in it? It's possible.

Society does seem to have turned the corner on this. The redevelopment of 'organic' foods marks a return to the way things were for most of human existence. It's certainly ironic that we look on this phenomenon as principally for those with means, when every family in the US could look back 2 or 3 generations to a time when ALL the food their families ate was 'organic'. It's a trend that I can't imagine slowing down, and as the quantiites of foods produced with thoughts towards health and long term sustainability increase, more and more people will have the option to eat the old fashioned way.

What does this have to do with beer and coffee? The generation that was most willing to eat weird industrial foods were also the generation that adopted mass produced beer and coffee. In the same way that people in the past would have been likely to have eaten 'organic', they may have also been more likely to drink locally brewed beer, if they drank beer at all. Coffee I'm not as sure of. Coffee isn't from here (the US - at least not in a significant way) so all those old cowboy movies where they're carrying big sacks of coffee around may be somewhat erroneous. Were they carrying bags of unground coffee? Presumably, since more often than not it's shown to be a burlap sack, which would have had little success in keeping coffee grounds inside. Did they grind the beans or just boil them whole? Where did their coffee come from? Central America? This would probably be a fascinating book. As would this.