[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Our diet of destruction

[Bill Totten]

Huge areas of the Amazon rainforest are being cut down to satisfy global
demand for soya. But how did this crop and a handful of others come to
dominate our diet so completely? In an extract from her new book,
Felicity Lawrence investigates the faceless trading giants who really
decide what goes on our plates.

by Felicity Lawrence

The Guardian (June 16 2008)


Look at a few packets in a typical kitchen cupboard, and you will notice
a disconcerting overlap between the labels of apparently completely
different foods. A handful of ingredients, some of them barely used as
food in the west before the second world war, crop up in everything from
baby food to cat food to processed meals. The same half-dozen heavily
subsidised commodities - soya, rapeseed, palm oil, corn, sugar and rice
- are broken down into their individual parts and endlessly
reconstituted. They are sold back to us as processed food or turned into
animal feed to produce the factory meats that have conquered our diets
in the past half-century. How did such a transformation come about?

When you look back at the origins of much of today's industrialised food
system, what you see is the ebb and flow of empire. First there were the
British imperial ambitions that turned slave-produced sugar from the
colonies into the engine of emerging capitalism during the industrial
revolution. Later the prewar European powers developed and controlled
new fats such as margarines. Today we are living with the postwar
American model, a privatised form of empire that reached into every
corner of world food supply in the second half of the twentieth century.

The result has been a kind of food Fordism. We are fed a production-line
diet that is homogenised and bolted together from standard commodity
parts. The parts, many of them created out of American agricultural
surpluses, are largely controlled by an oligopoly of US-based trading
and processing companies - Cargill, ADM, Bunge - that are little known
in the UK. All three companies are now expanding in China and heavily
involved in spreading the western industrialised diet, with its
unsustainable dependence on fossil fuels and extravagant use of grains.
As the Chinese move up this processed-food chain, the diet-related
diseases that have afflicted us in the west are growing there too.

It took a journey of more than 7,000 kilometers to the heart of the
Brazilian rainforest for me to understand some of the power structures
in this food chain. It was the rise of the humble soya bean that opened
a window on the mechanics of today's structure, and the environmental
and social toll it exacts.

It is only from the air that you can absorb the vastness of the Amazon.
What happens to the rainforest that surrounds the world's largest river
system will affect every single one of us, as experts in climate change
constantly point out. A fifth of the planet's fresh water is contained
here, and the trees recycle it back into the atmosphere, from where it
drives the world's weather.

But Brazil is the new agricultural frontier, and forest clearance, much
of it for soya production, has been taking place on a scale from which
campaigners fear the forest may not recover. Greenpeace has been
tracking deforestation and agreed to take me up in its spotter plane in
2006 as it was launching its fight to stop the food industry destroying
the Amazon.