What Happened to Real Food?
by Graham Harvey

My quest for real food started with a bunch of organic bananas. I bought them in a wholefood shop. They hadn't looked particularly promising - a sort of washed-out, grey colour - but I felt sure that they would ripen up once I got them home.

A week later, they were starting to go soft and the skin had turned more grey. I peeled one and took a bite. It wasn't that it tasted bad. Quite the opposite. There was no discernible taste of any kind. I might as well have been eating cardboard.

This came as a shock. If it had been the usual chemically-grown stuff, I'd have understood - but we're talking organic here. These bananas had been grown without any chemical sprays and nourished with barrow-l0ads of good old-fashioned compost - or so I imagined. They ought to have been full of flavour.

Then again, maybe I shouldn't have been that surprised. I'd experienced tasteless organic produce before - the carrots that hardly registered on the taste-buds; apples with all the sweetness and flavour of household soap.

The sad truth is that most fresh foods - organic or otherwise - no longer taste of much at all. Many are deliberately harvested whilst under-ripe to extend their shelf life. More significantly, they've been robbed of many of the healthy trace elements they once contained.

A revolution in the way they're grown has taken away the very nutrients that once promoted good eating and good health. Our staple foods have been 'dumbed down' As a result, Britain, like other industrial countries, is suffering a tidal wave of sickness.

It's cruelly ironic. Today's farmers feed twice as many people as they did before World War II. Never in our nation's history has so much wheat poured into the grain silos; never have so many milk tankers lumbered up and down the motorways. Yet amid all this plenty, the British people are ailing. The conditions that afflict us are not the great diseases of old - cholera, typhoid, diphtheria and TB. Instead, we are succumbing to what health authorities term 'the diseases of civilisation'. In other words diseases that result not from invasion by pathogenic organisms but from a collapse in our bodies' support systems.

The names of today's illnesses are frighteningly familiar: coronary heart disease, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, osteoporosis, Alzheimer's and depression. Hardly anyone in Western society remains untouched.

In Britain - as in the United States - one in three of us will develop cancer. Half the population is likely to suffer from heart disease during their lifetime, and one third of the population will develop an allergy. Despite this grim litany, health statistics show we are continuing to live longer. What the figures don't reveal is the massive increase in medical intervention it takes to keep us going.

Could food really be responsible for the health catastrophe that has overtaken the Western world? It seems scarcely credible. Yet the fact is that Britain is 50 years into a mass experiment in human nutrition. We are all eating foods that have been stripped of the antioxidants, trace elements and fatty acids that once promoted good health. Is it any wonder that our body maintenance systems are breaking down?

The causes of this catastrophe lie in the soil. Whenever I take the train north, I pass a series of intensive vegetable fields strung out along side the railway. The sight of this invariably fills me with gloom. In the summer months it's mostly planted with salads or vegetables - laser straight lines of cabbages, carrots or iceberg lettuce. From the train you can see the tramlines, the spaced tractor - wheel marks that show the pesticide sprayer is frequently taken through the crop.

In the winter the ground is bare. There's not a weed to be seen. When the weather's wet, pools of water lie on the surface, unable to drain. Even from the train you can see this land is sick. It is so drenched in chemical sprays and fertilizers that its normal function has virtually broken down.

The soil's robust crumb structure, which allows water and air to pass through its top layers, has disappeared. Beneficial creatures such as earthworms have been suffocated. The only way plants can be induces to grow here is with constant spraying of pesticides.

Who will buy these vegetables I wonder, washed and packed for a supermarket somewhere? Perhaps it will be some harassed young mother, cajoling her youngsters into trying a carrot or a floret or two of broccoli with their chicken dinosaurs. It'll do them good, she'll promise.

But she'll be wrong. There'll be precious little in those vegetables to help her kids grow up to be strong and healthy. Judging from the abused and miserable soil that grew them, it's hard to imagine they'll produce any sort of nourishment. And the tragedy is that with a season or two of care and attention, those fields beside the railway tracks could grow the sort of food that would make her children as strong as lions.

It's sometimes hard to comprehend the pace and scale of the revolution that has overtaken the countryside.

Anyone born before 1960 will have been raised largely on natural foods, grown by traditional methods. Most people born after that time will have grown up on fake food: unwitting victims of a mass dietary con-trick.

The world I was born into at the tail end of World War 11 was largely organic……our milk was local…..our butter - from the Co-op grocers at the end of the road - was a deep yellow colour, showing that it, too, had come from cows eating little but fresh grass. The chances are that it was richly endowed with fat-soluble vitamins and essential fatty acids. ……..

Almost everything else we ate travelled no distance at all. My grandfather, Tom, grew it in the back garden. It was in that little garden that I learned 'the law of return', the guiding principle observed by growers down through the ages.

Every so often, my grandfather would spread the ground with 'muck' - manure from the chicken run, crumbly compost from the bin behind the tool shed, or farmyard manure scrounged from heaven knows where. In return for these gifts the ground would pay us back handsomely. Most days there'd be something to take back to the kitchen: a milky white cauliflower; a bunch of carrots, feathery tops still attached; or a bowl of bright red tomatoes.

Today, food is different…….Oh yes, most of it looks attractive enough - especially the fruit and vegetables. Supermarkets like to make a big show out of fresh produce. It makes them appear caring and responsible.

The moment you push your trolley through the automatic doors, you're confronted with a colourful display of plump, unblemished apples, leafy salads and king sized carrots and potatoes. But it's all a sham.

One way to measure the nutrient content of fresh foods is to taste them. Foods that seem bland and tasteless are almost certain to be low in essential minerals. In fact good food often tastes sweet.

We've come to associate sweetness with unhealthy junk food and confectionary. But in nature, sweetness has long been associated with strength and vitality. It is often linked to rich sources of essential trace elements such as zinc, magnesium, copper and boron.

Sugar content in fruit and vegetables also correlates with a range of valuable materials such as amino acids, proteins and phytonutrients. For early man - the hunter-gatherer - there was an evolutionary advantage in developing a sweet tooth. It was a means of selecting the ripest foods which would be at their most nutritious. Today, fresh food no longer tastes sweet and it's a sign that something is very wrong.

……Organic food crops are produced without pesticide sprays or chemical fertilizers, but that doesn't mean the soil they're grown in will contain the right balance of minerals and trace elements to grow healthy produce. Indeed, as the organic market expands, more crops are being grown on land 'converted' after decades of chemical farming. A change to organic methods doesn't automatically revive these devastated soils.

Of course, it's not just human who suffer through poor quality crops - farm animals are affected too, which then stores up more problems for us when we eat them. Take the degradation of beef. For the past 30 years or so, farmers have sown most grass fields with a single species: perennial ryegrass. They've been persuaded by the Government advisers and the chemical industry that by growing a monoculture and plastering it with large amounts of nitrogen fertiliser, they'll get more grass to the acre…….. It's a kind of ruminant 'fast food' unbalanced in its mineral content. Until the arrival of cheap modern fertilizers, no self-respecting livestock farmer would have dreamed of sowing a new pasture without including at least half a dozen new species.

Now the grasses fed to cattle have all the mineral content of over-boiled cabbage. As a result, consumers are supplied with sub-standard meat, lacking the full complement of vitamins and minerals it used to contain.

Meanwhile, industrial farming has mounted a second attack on the health giving properties of British beef: feeding cattle on cereal grains. While small amounts of grains do little harm, large quantities make ruminants such as cattle ill. On too rich a diet, the animal will die. But before that happens, it's likely to put on flesh at a rapid state - which is what appeals to farmers.

Most American beef is fattened on grains in huge meat production factories called feedlots. Feedlots on such a scale are rare in Britain, but a country which was once famed for its beef still manages to produce its own unhealthy, cereal fed variety.

……..What farmers don't realise is that taking beef cattle off pasture and feeding them on cereal rich rations, has had dire consequences for the nation's health. It has exacerbated a crisis that according to Professor Michael Crawford of North London University, is more serious than obesity. It's the sickness caused by an imbalance of essential fats in the national diet.

To remain healthy, human beings need a variety of essential fats including two types of polyunsaturated fats - omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids It's the proportion of these two fats that's crucial. In a healthy diet, that ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 should be no higher than four to one, and preferably lower. In the diets of our stone-age ancestors, it is believed to have been equally balanced In most modern Western diets, the ratio can be as high as 20 to one. One of the main reasons is that the polyunsaturates in cereal-fed beef contain too high a proportion of omega-6 fats, which have been linked to a range of inflammatory diseases including asthma and rheumatoid arthritis.

Feeding dairy cattle on cereals is just as damaging. Milk from grass fed cows contains high levels of essential fatty acids, particularly something called conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), which has strong anti-cancer properties. But when cows are fed on small amounts of grain the CLA level in milk falls dramatically.

The content of our milk has also been changed by today's emphasis on high yields. In the 1960s, the average yield of a British dairy cow was a 3,500 litres a year. Today, the average is double this, with some herds notching up 10,000 litres or more. However each animal is able to transfer only a fixed amount of vitamins to her milk. The greater the milk volume the more dilute its vitamin content.

And what of wheat a food as old as civilization itself? Whole grains such as wheat, barley and oats, are an important part of the human diet, and in my local supermarket there seem to be plenty on offer - whole wheat bread and pasta, or whole grain breakfast cereals. What the packaging doesn't tell you is that the grain is likely to be depleted in minerals and carrying the residue of pesticides applied to the growing crop.

Some grains come from soils so damaged by chemicals and fertilizers that their nutrient content is dramatically reduced. Some of the biggest villains in this story are nitrogen fertilizers. These artificial compounds - the products of a worldwide chemical industry - are the powerhouse of modern farming. And it's these small white pellets that have degraded our everyday foods most of all, and led to the upsurge in ill-health.

Drive around the countryside in spring and you'll see, stacked up in almost every farm yard you pass, squat 'dumpy' bags of the kind that builders' merchants deliver small amounts of gravel in. Inside are nitrogen fertilizers waiting to be spread on our fields. The trouble is that while they appear to be a magic wand to boost crop yields, these fertilisers actually weaken plants by stimulating excess growth of sappy tissue with thin cell walls. The crops that are grown this way are more prone to disease, which is why they need constant spraying with chemicals to keep them standing. Instead of solving problems, nitrogen fertilisers actually create them.

The pity of it is that there was once a time when the British were rather good at farming. As far back as Roman times, these islands off the north-west coast of Europe were exporting wheat to the rest of the Continent. We had been blessed with deep, fertile soils and a mild climate.

Somehow, we have contrived to squander those advantages. I will look at what can be done to win them back.
Daily Mail, 15th February 2006
Extract from 'We Want Real Food' by Graham Harvey. Published by Constable Robinson, 2006