The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved

There exists a strong link between the food we eat and the state of our health. That much is obvious. Sever people from traditional food practices and feed them overprocessed fats and sugars and their health—including mental health—will eventually suffer. The biggest killer epidemics of our time—heart disease, cancer, and type 2 diabetes—are all related to diet. There are many different ideas about the precise nature of the food-health connection; however, it is widely agreed that dietary factors can both contribute to disease and healing. Grandmothers, from time immemorial, have nurtured our growth and treated our ailments with chicken soups, miso broths, herbal brews, and various other concoctions intended to comfort and heal. These grandmothers and other wise women (and sometimes men) are passing on wisdom received through intergenerational tradition and reinterpreted through experience and adaptation to a rapidly changing world. This is “folk medicine,” and we are all folks. Just as people have always been integrated into the natural world as we seek sustenance, so have we been integrated into the natural world in our quest for well-being and healing.

This connection to nature as a source of food and medicine is always in a broader context and always unique in its details. Traditional diets and healing practices are quite varied; they are at the core of what makes cultures distinct and unique. Scientific rationalism seeks generalized, universal, verifiable answers, such as the correct or best diet. “How can I achieve optimal health?” is the million-dollar question. Best-seller lists are full of prescriptive diets, many related to slimming, all attempting to guide humans toward some ideal of optimal health.

I personally reject the idea of any prescriptive system for “optimal health,” and I think that many of the nutrition and lifestyle gurus out there exploit and feed our culture of narcissism, the desire for idealized beauty, perpetual youth, and eternal life. Health is an ebb and a flow. It’s wonderful to feel healthy and strong, and easy to take that state for granted. We all get sick sometimes, and we all are going to die.

Diet is absolutely a powerful tool for healing and staying healthy. However, there is no single best means of doing this. Many people have survived what doctors declared “incurable” cancers using macrobiotics, a simple grain-based diet in which foods are pressure-cooked, steamed, baked, or fermented but rarely, if ever, eaten raw. Equally dramatic cures have been achieved by people switching to all-raw diets. Some people find healing in a vegan diet; others follow their cravings back to meat at some moment of their lives when they feel the need to build strength. I agree with Annemarie Colbin, the author of Food and Healing, whose nondogmatic approach to nutrition influenced me long ago, and who said, “There is no one diet that is right for everyone all the time.”¹ After all, human beings are extremely adaptable, able to survive and thrive in many different climates, and this adaptability has yielded very different diets and very diverse healing practices all around the world.

Sometimes I think life might be easier with simple, straightforward, absolute answers, or a panacea, as heralded in Aajonus Vonderplanitz’s The Recipe for Living Without Disease or Dr. Hulda Clark’s classic The Cure for All Diseases. Who knows? Perhaps Vonderplanitz is correct that an all-raw, meat-centered diet is the solution to what ails us. Or perhaps Dr. Clark is correct that the chemical benzene—present in virtually anything processed by machine—is the root cause of most of our health problems and that we should go to great lengths to avoid exposure to it. However, I cannot believe that any single factor can be the cause of all disease. Such reductionism arouses the depth of my skepticism and makes me run the other way. The spectrums we all live through, periods of well-being and disease, are clearly multifactorial, with many and varied causes.

Despite our popular culture’s obsession with food and its effects on the body, our official health-care system barely acknowledges that a link even exists between eating and health. Most U.S. medical schools do not require any courses in nutrition; the topic receives a total of eighteen hours of attention in the average four-year medical program.² Indeed, most medical education, and our health-care system as a whole, is organized around a corporate agenda of pharmaceutical and diagnostic products. These technologies can be powerful and effective. But the whole health-care system is built around heroic treatment of symptoms, while ignoring nutrition, which underlies every individual’s health and well-being, or lack thereof.

Nutritionists I’ve encountered in the medical system mostly dispense soy-based, nutrient-enhanced energy drinks, as if these neutraceutical products were the singular solution to poor eating habits. And what could be more antithetical to healing than the overprocessed junk they serve as food in most hospitals? Our medical system denies that food has any qualities beyond a uniform set of quantifiable “macronutrients.” Fortified, reconstituted food products are regarded as the equivalent of fresh, nutritious whole foods. Synthetic nutrient encapsulation in the form of supplements is another presumed equivalency. The idea that synthetic powders in a capsule could really give us everything that food does is a delusion. Yet people spend billions of dollars—nearly $5 billion in 2003 in the United States alone—on vitamins and supplements.³

The same erroneous assumption of equivalence underlies chemical fertilization of the soil. If a chemical additive contains the essential plant nutrients of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium in appropriate proportions, then it is assumed to be the equivalent of feeding the soil manure and leaves and kitchen scraps. It just isn’t so. The soil is alive, and our bodies are alive, and these complex life processes require a huge variety of micronutrients in order to thrive. They cannot properly sustain themselves on the limited nutrients provided by synthesized chemicals. In both cases, the chemicals give rise to the need for more chemicals. Techno-problems are addressed with techno-solutions, which inevitably create unanticipated techno-problems, and so on, ad infinitum. The pharmaceutical corporations that promote drugs as the greatest hope for better health are not so very different from the chemical corporations that promote high yields from chemical agriculture.

In its 2005 Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals, the Centers for Disease Control tested for the presence of 148 toxic compounds (of an estimated 80,000 in commercial use today) in the blood and urine of 2,400 people. Thirty-eight of the compounds were being tested for the first time ever in a large sample. Among them, neurotoxic pyrethroids (used in pesticides) were found to be widespread, as were hormone-altering phthalates (used in plastics—including food packaging—and “beauty” products).⁴

Pyrethroids and phthalates, like many of the chemicals identified, were found in greater concentration in children than in adults. When young people’s developing bodies and minds are encumbered by chemically induced hormonal shifts and neurotoxins, this suggests a big problem. Even developing fetuses receive a steady dose of chemical exposure. The Environmental Working Group analyzed umbilical cords collected by the Red Cross and found the presence of an average of two hundred known toxic chemicals in them, pumped from mother to fetus.⁵ Fetal development is when life is at its most vulnerable. Fetuses and infants do not possess the blood-brain barrier, which in older children and adults prevents some toxins from leaving the blood and entering brain tissue, and therefore, when they are exposed to certain chemicals, “they are exquisitely vulnerable to vanishingly small amounts,” says biologist Sandra Steingraber.⁶

The classic approach to toxicology, which seeks to determine at what level a particular substance causes harm, was established in the sixteenth century, when a monk named Paracelsus coined the phrase “the dose makes the poison.” But at different stages, such as gestation and infancy, as well as adolescence and old age, sensitivity to toxins can be much greater. According to Steingraber, “Timing makes the poison as much as the dose . . . there are times in our human development when some biological event is unfolding, and if a toxic exposure occurs during that time, you have a disproportionate risk for harm.” This heightened risk is recognized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Guidelines for Carcinogen Risk Assessment: “The risk attributable to early-life exposure. . . can be about ten-fold higher than the risk from an exposure of similar duration occurring later in life.”⁷

All of the evidence suggests that the continued widespread use of synthetic chemicals has great costs and is damaging to human health. Unfortunately the present course seems likely to continue because there are great profits to be made in the business of pharmaceuticals and pesticides, and of course “free trade” cannot be restricted. Chemical agriculture feeds the market for chemical medicine; the search for magic bullets intensifies, as profits in both industries soar and we and our earth get sicker and sicker.

Consider this: In 1989, for the first time, the U.S. economy directed greater resources toward health care than toward food. In 1960 the average household spent 17.5 percent of its income on food and 5 percent on health care. In 2003 the average household spent less than 10 percent on food and more than 15 percent on health care.⁸ As we spend less and less on food, we spend more and more on health care, and many of these health-care expenses are caused by the poor quality of the food we are eating. One study I came across systematically calculated the “diet-related medical costs” of six diseases—coronary heart disease, certain cancers, stroke, diabetes, hypertension, and obesity—and found that they exceeded $70 billion in 1995.⁹ A more recent calculation, by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in 2005, found that annual health-care costs associated with obesity alone amount to $78.5 billion.¹⁰ If we spent more on food—that is, if we valued quality in food more highly, becoming more connected to the sources of our food, the land, and local producers—we wouldn’t need to spend nearly so much on health care.

Despite the huge chunk of our economy that fuels it, our high-tech health-care system is not always safe or effective. A 2000 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association calculated that the third leading cause of death in the United States, behind heart disease and cancer, is the medical system itself, by way of unnecessary procedures, hospital-acquired infections, medical error, and adverse drug reactions. The journal of the medical establishment acknowledged that the U.S. medical system causes 225,000 iatrogenic (caused by medical care) deaths per year.¹¹ Another 2003 analysis calculated as many as 750,000 iatrogenic deaths in the United States each year,¹² suggesting the possibility that the health-care system itself is the greatest single threat to our health. Both counts agree that 106,000 of these annual iatrogenic deaths involve reactions to prescribed drugs. Like pesticides, PCBs, and all the other synthetic chemicals in our lives, these magic-bullet solutions can be dangerous. And they impact not only the individuals who take the drugs but all of us via their growing presence in the water supply from unmetabolized drugs in human and livestock excrement as well as household, hospital, and industry disposal.¹³ Pharmaceuticals become pollution.

Recipe for a Health-Care Crisis (and Enormous Profits) By Sally Fallon

Ingredients:

Greed

Envy

Ignorance

Manipulation

Cunning

Extortion

Lies

Fraud

Instructions:
Conspire to convince the populace that the natural whole foods that have nourished mankind for millennia (such as eggs, butter, whole raw milk, and red meat) are dangerous and unhealthy.

Train the medical profession to advocate antibiotics, vaccinations, fluoride, and fabricated foods as scientifically proven methods for preventing illness.

Ignore or suppress healing methods that work; claim that real diseases have no cure or do not exist.

Define normal human conditions such as menopause and average cholesterol and blood pressure levels as illnesses, which must be treated with expensive drugs that create serious sideeffects.

Stew, broil, half-bake, or boil as the occasion requires.

Serves 260,000,000

Excerpted from “The Oiling of America,” PowerPoint presentation, Weston A. Price Foundation conference, November 12, 2005. Used by permission.

Your health is not at the top of any corporation’s agenda—not a pharmaceutical corporation or an agricultural chemical corporation or a food-processing corporation or a seed corporation. The primary agenda of corporations is return on their shareholders’ investment. If they can get you to drink three liters a day of their soft drink, which will surely have health ramifications over time, they will. If they can get your doctor to prescribe—and your insurer to pay for, and you to take—their revolutionary new wonder-drug that will mitigate the problems caused by all the soft drinks, they will. Corporations always try to present themselves as being socially concerned. Indeed, they may possibly even be run by decent people with good intentions, and many fund important philanthropies. However, such gestures of goodwill are by definition secondary to their primary mission.

After all my ranting about the superiority of whole-food nutrition to pharmaceutical symptom control, it may surprise you to learn that in my own healing odyssey I’ve taken prescription medicines every day for seven years, in an anti-HIV “cocktail” of protease inhibitor and anti-retroviral drugs. I am a bundle of contradictions, and in a period of health crisis, when nothing seemed to be stopping my downward spiral and death seemed potentially close, I opted for medications I had seen help other friends with AIDS. The drugs seemed like my best chance, and in some situations, they are.

AIDS crept up on me slowly. I had several role models who had lived with HIV for years without getting sick, and I intended to be one of them. I was determined to demonstrate that an active outdoor country life, with fresh, homegrown, organic food, good springwater, and positive thinking, would save me from developing AIDS. After a decade of living quite well with the HIV-positive death prophecy and refusing drugs that some doctors pushed very aggressively, I found myself sinking into a state in which I felt hopeless, disconnected from people, lethargic, and unmotivated. I had less and less energy, and my outlook was grim.

As I languished in this state of uncharacteristic despair, sometime in the spring of 1999 I lost my appetite. It was the strangest thing. I have always enjoyed a tremendous appetite, always been thinking about my next meal, always derived extraordinary pleasure from food. It seemed consistent with my general state of misery that I developed a persistent nausea that made food in general unappealing. Suddenly the smell of food could make me gag. I’d take tiny portions and not be able to finish them, and sometimes I couldn’t eat at all. When I went to the doctor I discovered that I had lost fifteen pounds.

I thought a change of environment might do me good and set off to visit friends in Maine. The drive from Tennessee to Maine depleted my energy profoundly. Once I arrived at Ed’s house, I was barely able to get myself off the couch. I felt wiped out all the time. I couldn’t walk far—and only very slowly. I had no reserve of energy to call upon when I needed to exert myself, say to lift something heavy. I felt like an old man—like my grandfather before he died at age ninety-four. I’d gingerly push myself off the couch, requiring my arms for this maneuver, generally only for meals, and afterward I’d quickly return to the couch to rest my neck, sore from the hard work of sitting in an upright position.

I experienced frequent light-headedness. My balance felt precarious. On one occasion I blacked out and fainted; on many others I felt the faintness coming on and lay down before I fell. I also became aware that I was losing mental acuity. Having been a math whiz from a very young age, it stunned and terrified me to discover that I had to think long and hard to do the subtraction to keep my checkbook balanced. I started having other weird symptoms as well. One day I experienced chest tightness and worried that I might have some heart infection. Urination was difficult. I felt like I was falling apart, descending into the abyss of AIDS.

Still I resisted the obvious medical options. I didn’t want my life to become “medically managed” for the duration. I hated with passionate conviction the idea that for the rest of my life I’d be taking high-tech synthetic chemical drugs, with unknown long-term side effects, that had been developed by corporations driven by profit. These drugs are antithetical to everything I believe and the values I’ve devoted myself to. I regarded them as dangerous, potentially more damaging than the virus itself. As long as I felt healthy, I never even considered the drugs.

From their earliest introduction in the late 1980s, I had doubts about the anti-HIV drugs. They were enthusiastically embraced because people with AIDS were dying in droves. The sick were scared, and desperate for something, anything. But when otherwise healthy HIV-positive people started taking the early high doses of AZT, it often made them ill. The drug caused crippling nausea, anemia, muscle pain, and weakness. Many previously healthy people suffered debilitating symptoms from this drug.

In addition, I wasn’t completely sold on the lone-assassin HIV theory. I believed, as I continue to believe, that the story of AIDS is more complex and multifactorial than a single rogue retrovirus. Some factors must account for the many anomalies, like the people who test positive for HIV but never develop AIDS, and others who develop AIDS symptoms but never test positive for HIV. What are those factors? Are they genetic? Behavioral? Environmental? In the AIDS activist group ACT UP¹⁴ that I was part of in the late 1980s, we saw that expressing rage, feeling solidarity, and believing in the possibility of change were all therapeutic cofactors that helped people stay healthy. What other factors might explain individuals’ widely varying disease progression?

Unfortunately, the discussion of HIV causality has grown extremely polarized. The mainstream medical establishment, as well as the AIDS service providers for the most part, view questioning the conclusion that HIV is the cause of AIDS as preposterous and in complete contradiction with reality. They suggest that because effective strategies for long-term treatment have been devised according to this model, it must be correct. My knee-jerk skeptic’s question is, What if HIV is not the whole story? What if the varied symptoms we categorize as AIDS are triggered by other factors as yet undetermined? Knowledge is imperfect and always evolving.

The public face of HIV skepticism devolved into its own dogma, as certain that HIV does not cause AIDS as the medical establishment is that it does. HIV dissidents became known as “denialists.” I’m left feeling wary of both dogma and counterdogma, angered by the arrogant certitudes of both camps, still questioning and trying to remain open on the middle road.

But as I watched myself spiral downward and my situation felt increasingly desperate, I had to do something. I decided on a last-ditch herbal therapy for intestinal parasites, on the theory that this was a condition other than generic AIDS which could be causing my wasting. The herbal regime was extreme. It gave me diarrhea and made me feel even weaker.

After years of refusing the pills, I felt I had no choice but to try them. My rejection of them was based on ideology. Though my ideas hadn’t changed, my reality had. I had classic AIDS wasting and it seemed that my brain function was deteriorating. I didn’t know what else to do or where else to turn. My rejection of the pills was no longer a healthy person’s rejection of a suspect diagnostic category and treatment but a sick person’s refusal of what appeared to be my best chance for recovery and survival. Though I am very devoted to ideas, and it is a noble thing to die for one’s ideas, I was not ready to die for these ideas. If the perverse technology of my time could keep me alive, I’d gladly swallow my words along with handfuls of pills. I embraced flexibility, let go of my rigid ideas, and started taking Viracept and Combivir.

I anticipated that my body would reject the pills, as my mind had for so long. As I prepared to swallow that fateful first dose, I made sure a receptacle was nearby to receive the convulsive vomiting I imagined would immediately follow. Of course it was anticlimactic. The pills went right down, and taking them became an easy twice-a-day routine. Not that I didn’t experience side effects; in fact, my first weeks on the “cocktail” were full of intestinal distress. I was bloated, horribly constipated (though I had been told to expect diarrhea), and felt like I was carrying a lead weight in my gut. I’d been warned that the drugs could be difficult to adjust to, and that initial side effects often go away after a couple of weeks. But I had no way of knowing whether these painful sensations were from the drugs or from some scary opportunistic infection, and, if they were from the drugs, whether they would really go away or how much I could tolerate. As I pondered these questions I kept taking the pills—on “the road to adherence” as a promotional video phrased it—and waiting for them to work their magic. It was difficult for me to imagine my vigor restored.

Then, slowly, I felt better. The nausea subsided and my appetite returned; I discovered great pleasure, once again, in the realm of food. One day I felt like going out for a walk. I picked up an ax and found the strength to chop some wood. I experienced erections for the first time in many months. I was shocked at how “normal” I was beginning to feel, and as time has passed much of my strength, stamina, and resilience have returned to me. Years later, I sometimes think about stopping the drugs, or at least taking a break from them, but thus far I have not done so. I am scared to. I’d prefer not to find myself back in that harrowing downward spiral. My ambivalence about being a pharmaceutical miracle notwithstanding, I am happy to be alive.

Just as I myself am a critic of the drugs I take, so I have encountered many critics of my decision to take the drugs. One of my friends, an herbalist and healer, refused to treat me because he felt I was killing myself with the drugs. His judgment was not helpful; I needed his encouragement and healing skills. He softened and came around to treating me. A friend in crisis needs to be supported, even if you think they are making wrong decisions.

Having publicly identified myself in my book Wild Fermentation as a person living with AIDS and taking antiretroviral medications, I receive a steady trickle of mail from well-intentioned people who feel it is their duty to let me know what a terrible mistake I have made. You are “suffering from some self-deception,” wrote a reader named Peter. “If you have HIV/AIDS you have nothing, and have let yourself be fooled by lies and disinformation. . . . Whatever caused your condition or suffering, it was never any HIV.”

What really irks me is the tone of absolute certainty. Peter evidently sees everything clearly and suffers no self-deception. He knows. One of my biggest pet peeves (I have many) is when meteorologists predict a 100 percent chance of rain. I would feel so much better if they expressed a 99.9 percent chance and left open the door to the possibility that their knowledge is not all-encompassing. I myself still question the drugs I am on and wonder how long my liver can sustain them. I question the lone-assassin HIV theory and wonder what as yet unidentified cofactors might be involved. However, these are abstract questions compared to the all too real experiences that got me on the drugs in the first place. I can believe that my recovery was a “placebo effect” or that the right herbal treatment or lifestyle change or dietary regime might have worked instead; but, for better or worse, it was the medical treatment that was most accessible, and it seemed to me like my best bet.

This experience has given me occasion to reflect on the dramatic treatment decisions that people are forced to make at times of health crisis. Take a deep breath. Don’t panic. Stressing out will not improve the outcome. Go through the experience with courage and do what you have to do. One form of treatment does not have to preclude others. Health-care decisions are difficult and can be overwhelming. There is generally not a single best answer. Be kind to yourself and be kind to other people. Be open to guidance from intuition or unexpected sources. One important source of guidance for me comes from plants, and the plants that I love and that love me have made it abundantly clear that their nourishment and medicine are still sustaining me right alongside the six pills of synthesized chemicals that I swallow every day. Chickweed and burdock and milk thistle and cleavers and yellow dock and persimmon care for me no less because of my chemical ingestion and dependence on the medical-industrial complex.

And dependent I am, dependent on patented technology that comes at a high price. The drugs I take cost an astronomical $1,500 each month. Even though most of the basic molecular research for these drugs has been publicly funded, drug manufacturers use the research costs to justify high prices, while showing greater rates of profit than any other industry. I can afford this $50-a-day habit only by virtue of the willingness of the state to keep transferring this sum to the pharmaceutical corporations, which seems unlikely to continue for long. As I write this, in 2005, Tennessee’s state health-care program, TennCare, is being dismantled. Some 325,000 people, including many of my friends living with HIV and AIDS, lost their coverage altogether; the lucky remaining recipients (myself included) have had their prescription drug coverage significantly reduced.

My friend SPREE, who was precariously close to death ten years ago when the protease-inhibitor drugs were first released, now depends upon eighteen different prescription medications. He has been terminated from TennCare, denied coverage for the drugs that have kept him alive all this time. He’s managing to buy some, and he obtains others through bureaucratic ingenuity and considerable effort, but sometimes he has been unable to procure all the medications he needs. Who knows how SPREE will fare? I also wonder whether, by the time you are reading this in a year or more, the “safety net” will still provide me with these expensive drugs. Will the shrinkage of government services—other than homeland security and the war on terrorism—make health coverage for people with chronic illnesses a thing of the past? Even if you have oodles of money, if you have HIV you can’t buy an individual insurance policy, at least not here in Tennessee. The only way SPREE and I and other friends with HIV got accepted into TennCare in the first place was by applying for private policies and being rejected. Now the system is tossing us aside. Will my medical miracle come to a budget-driven demise? Whatever decisions you make, it’s sure nice to have choices.

We are all dependent and vulnerable when health-care systems and practices revolve around corporate pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, and hospitals. The globalized pharmaceutical-driven medical system is no more sustainable than the globalized chemical-driven food industry. The food industry creates health crises that are business opportunities for the chemical industry. The earth and our bodies suffer, while corporate earnings skyrocket. Health care—like food—must be reimagined as community-based. We have to create accessible local health-care alternatives, as well as health-care education and the sharing of healthcare information and skills, wherever we are.

Community-based traditions of plant healing were systematically destroyed in the witch hunts of the Inquisition. According to Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, “In the Witch-hunts, the Church explicitly legitimized the doctor’s professionalism, denouncing nonprofessional healing as equivalent to heresy: ‘If a woman dare to cure without having studied, she is a Witch and must die.’”¹⁵ This action by authorities seeking to expand their power severed many traditional practices and drove surviving practices and practitioners underground. It also made people dependent on professionals. Health care departed from the realm of community self-sufficiency and entered the realm of experts. In the words of activist and author Starhawk, “Activities and services that people had always performed for themselves or for their neighbors and families were taken over by a body of paid experts, who were licensed or otherwise recognized as being the guardians of an officially approved and restricted body of knowledge.”¹⁶

This is not a simple historical act that took place hundreds of years ago. It is a process that continued through the ages of colonialism and imperialism, as occupiers banned various indigenous healing practices. It also continues in our time, with laws that restrict plant knowledge and usages (see chapter 7) and ongoing cases of biopiracy, which force people to pay for biological resources that they have traditionally used for free (see Intellectual Property Laws, Genetic Pollution, and Biodiversity). As we’ve seen in the preceding chapters, this same process of replacing community-based self-sufficiency with dependence on centralized systems has also been happening with food and seeds, and our future hinges on whether we are able to reverse this trend.

I am encouraged by meeting many people who are creating community-based health care by learning and practicing various healing traditions. My friend L. recently completed her training in acupuncture. Every Monday she runs a clinic from her rural home ten miles down the road from us, with payment on a sliding scale. I love going to see her and getting “needled.” I love to feel the energetic impulses released by the needles, and after each treatment I feel reborn. L. has a gentle and reassuring bedside manner, and it is such a pleasure to watch an old friend grow into a new role as a community healer.

Any community is healthier when it has access to healers. Likewise, any healing path can be a form of activism and community empowerment if the skills and knowledge are shared in ways that are accessible to people with limited resources. Lisa’s rural acupuncture clinic is an example of this, as are the peer-trained medics who help keep people safe and healthy at demonstrations, direct actions, and other organized events. A group called Katuah Medics offers a twelve-day course combining a wilderness first-responder program with protest medicine (such as treating pepper spray and tear gas) and herbal first aid. According to the group’s description of the training, “Whether you are involved in direct action environmental protest, mass action street demonstrations, or extended, community resistance campaigns—and even, recently, solidarity relief with disaster victims—emergency medical training has proven a very valuable skill in our collective toolbox.”¹⁷

Knowledge of the healing powers of common plants especially lends itself to easy diffusion and holds out the potential for anyone to become an empowered lay generalist. Just as gardening and eating wild plants empower you and integrate you into your environment, so does learning to access these plants as healing allies. Very often the very plant you need is right outside your door.

Susun Weed, an herbalist whose books have influenced me greatly, writes of three healing paths: scientific, heroic, and wise woman. The medical system—with double-blind, placebo-tested pharmaceuticals, endless specialization, and high-tech diagnostics—is a manifestation of the scientific tradition. Many healing systems commonly referred to as “alternative” make up what she terms the heroic tradition, or “the way of the savior,” in which the patient is told by the healer, “Trust me,” and healing is accomplished through purification and other means of error correction. The wise woman tradition contrasts with these two expertise-based healing traditions, in that the person to trust is yourself.

Not every health problem can be adequately treated by home remedies. It’s important to know your limits and to learn to recognize when more expert intervention is necessary. But most routine health concerns can be treated at home. “Most of the health caring done worldwide, and most of the health care in your own life, is part of this third, invisible tradition,” writes Susun. “The wise woman tradition of health care focuses on prevention and on remedies which are accessible, inexpensive, effective, and safe. It is time now to recognize and support the wise old woman in ourselves, our communities, and the global village.”¹⁸ The wise woman way is not restricted to women; even men can find the wise woman inside ourselves. We each need to empower ourselves, and together we need to empower our communities, with more healing skills.

As I was writing this chapter, a small sore started festering on my foot. My friend Merril took a look at it and thought it was either a bite from a venomous brown recluse spider or a staph infection. Merril is a gardener who makes the fullest use of what she grows of anyone I know, constantly drying herbs for both culinary and medicinal purposes. She dressed my sore with echinacea root powder, showed me how she did it, and sent me home with extra powder. The infection quickly cleared up; in a week all signs of it had disappeared. And now I have a technique to effectively treat a festering sore.

My friend Granite saved my life several years ago with a gallon of water. I had just been released from the hospital, where I’d been for testing related to an abscess growing on the wall of my intestine. In the hospital I was subjected to a battery of invasive internal explorations, and then I was sent home on triple-antibiotic drug therapy. I was scared and compliant and so happy to be home, but that first night at home was endless and sleepless. My kidneys hurt so badly that I couldn’t get comfortable, and I really felt ready to give up and die. Granite saw how miserable I was and brought me a gallon of water. He sat with me while I drank the whole thing, and it flushed my kidneys. The pain subsided and life went on. As it turned out, the abscess persisted for as long as I took the antibiotics (several months!), then mysteriously disappeared a couple of weeks after I stopped. Hallelujah! The point of this story is that water—hydrotherapy—enabled me to endure those toxic drugs, and this simple treatment solves many conditions. The lesson learned is that people around us, like Granite and Merril, often have knowledge and skills to help us. We need to share and spread these healing skills.

I have no greater healing skill to share than simple techniques for the fermentation of vegetables. Sauerkraut, kimchi, and pickles will not cure every ailment, but they will contribute to overall well-being. Whether you are the healthiest person in the world, are facing a life-threatening health crisis, are living with a chronic disease, or are just aging like everyone else, live-culture (unpasteurized) fermented foods improve digestion, absorption of nutrients (especially minerals), and immune function. Fermenting vegetables preserves them with their nutrients intact, “predigests” those nutrients into more accessible forms, and generates additional nutrients, both vitamins and obscure micronutrients only just beginning to be identified and understood.

Live ferments also contain lactobacilli and other related bacteria, which repopulate and diversify the intestinal microflora. Our bacterial symbionts provide us with immunological protection by creating a densely populated, biodiverse, and thus competitive bacterial ecology in which pathogens have a difficult time establishing themselves. This is well established in medical and scientific literature, and it has been confirmed by my own experience and anecdotes from people I meet.

People regularly report that eating live-culture ferments generates improvements in all sorts of digestive disorders. I’ve also heard reports of cancers resolved by live-culture ferments. In Australia, a Russian-born woman told me about healing her husband’s skin cancer by applying topical sauerkraut poultices. This treatment came to her in a dream, shortly before her husband was scheduled for surgery. In her dream she saw her grandmother applying a sauerkraut poultice. The wise woman tradition spoke to her through her dream, reviving the wisdom of her grandmother in spite of the disruption of migration and the passage of many decades. Her husband’s cancerous growth disappeared after a few days of kraut poultices, and he never needed to undergo surgery.

Bacteria are not our enemies; however, our culture has declared a foolish all-out war on them, overdeploying antibiotic drugs, chlorinated water, and antibacterial cleaning products. The war on bacteria is like the war on terror or the war on drugs: an unwinnable exercise in futility. Winning the war on bacteria would be our demise. Though certain bacteria can cause disease under the right (or for us, wrong) conditions, bacteria are our partners in life. They are our ancestors and they can be powerful allies in healing.

Isn’t it curious that we use the word culture to describe both the bacteria in yogurt and sauerkraut as well as language, art, science, and the totality of human endeavor? Cultured foods are not culinary novelties. They are found in infinite variation in culinary traditions around the world and are often invested with profound symbolic meaning. The earliest writings all refer to ferments, and folklore around the world has long associated good health and longevity with such diverse live-culture ferments as sauerkraut, kimchi, miso, yogurt, kefir, and vinegar.

Medical science has documented the healing power of live cultures in hundreds of controlled studies, and today probiotics are among the fastest-growing segments of the nutritional supplement market. But any nutrient you can obtain in a pill or a powder you can get better from a whole food. Fermenting with spontaneously occurring local organisms integrates us into the web of life of our environment and adapts us to the local microbial ecology.

Fermented foods and drinks have always been a community-based production, up until the past few generations. As I have traveled with my Wild Fermentation road show, I have met hundreds of people who shared recollections of a grandparent with an annual fermentation routine. Like so many survival and self-healing skills, fermentation needs to be revived as something people do on a community scale.

Most ferments available commercially today are pasteurized for ease of transport and long shelf life. The pasteurization, however, destroys the beneficial bacteria. I am pleased to report that there is a small revival of community-based vegetable fermentation happening, and “artisanal” sauerkraut has been added to Slow Food USA’s Ark of Taste. What you get from local ferments is local culture, quite literally: the unique community of microbial subspecies that inhabit a particular place. The local Lactobacillus, and the motley company it’s found with, replenish your gut microflora, which probably need regular replenishment, given the prevalence of broad-spectrum antibacterial chemicals. The particular lactobacilli that inhabit your environment are uniquely adapted to that particular place. There is no simpler way to invite these bacterial allies into our lives and share them with the people around us than by becoming food producers and fermenting some vegetables ourselves at home.

A head of cabbage forgotten on an obscure shelf of your pantry will not spontaneously transform itself into sauerkraut. Vegetables left exposed to air start to grow molds, and if left long enough, those molds can reduce a head of cabbage to a puddle of slime, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to crunchy, delicious, and aromatic sauerkraut.

The simple key to successful vegetable fermentation is to make sure your vegetables are submerged in liquid. That’s it, the big secret. Usually the liquid is salty water, also known as brine, but fermentation can be done without salt, or with other liquids, such as wine or whey. Typically, when fresh vegetables are chopped or grated in preparation for fermentation—which creates greater surface area—salting pulls out the vegetable juices via osmosis, and pounding or tamping the vegetables breaks down cell walls to further release juices, so no additional water is required. However, if the vegetables have lost moisture during long storage, occasionally some water is needed; if brine hasn’t risen to submerge the weighted vegetables by the following day, add a little water. In the case of vegetables left whole (cabbage heads, cucumbers, green tomatoes, string beans, okra, zucchini, eggplant, peppers—try anything), the vegetables should be submerged in brine.

The huge variety of vegetable ferments you can create all exist along the spectrum from shredded and salted to whole and submerged in a brine. Sometimes you use elements of each style, as in kimchi recipes that call for soaking vegetables in a brine to soften them and leach out bitter flavors, then pouring off excess brine and mixing in spices. In some cases the liquid is what we’re after, flavored by the vegetables and fermentation.

Pretty much any vegetable can be fermented. Use what is abundantly available and be bold in your experimentation. Seaweeds are a wonderful addition to ferments, as are fruits, though mostly fruit ferments go through their process very quickly. I’ve even made delicious sauerkraut with mashed potatoes layered in with the salted cabbage, as well as kimchi with sticky rice layers. The sharp fermented starches are delicious. The spicing of vegetable ferments is quite varied, too. Kimchi typically includes red chili peppers, garlic, ginger, and scallions. Sauerkraut might include caraway seeds (my favorite), juniper berries, apples, or cranberries. New York–style sour pickles are spiced with dill, garlic, and sometimes hot peppers. To keep cucumbers crunchy, add to the brine some grape leaves or leaves of horseradish, oak, currant, or cherry.

How much salt do you use? Traditionally vegetables have been fermented with lots of salt. In addition to pulling water from the vegetables, salt hardens pectins in the vegetables, rendering them crunchier, and discourages the growth of bacteria other than lactobacilli. By inhibiting competing bacteria, salt enables the vegetables to ferment and to be stored for longer periods of time. Since preservation has historically been one of the important motivations for fermentation, ferments have tended to be quite salty. But for health-conscious people interested primarily in flavor and nutrition, less salt can be better. Salt lightly, to taste. It is easier to add salt than to take it away, but if you oversalt, you can dilute by adding water and/or more vegetables. There is no magic proportion of salt the process requires—it’s just personal preference. As a starting point, try 3 tablespoons of salt per 5 pound of vegetables. More salt will slow the fermentation process; less (or none) will speed it up. Ferments with less salt may be more prone to surface molds. You can leave out the salt or use various mineral-rich substitutes such as celery juice (my favorite salt-free variation) or seaweed. Just be sure the vegetables are submerged in the liquid.

Some people promote the idea that salt-free sauerkrauts contain more beneficial organisms than salted krauts. I don’t believe that. The most specific beneficial bacteria we’re after, Lactobacillus, is salt-tolerant and abundantly present even in salty krauts; arguably, salt-free ferments are more biodiverse, but this diversity often results in mushy textures. Though it is possible to ferment vegetables without salt, a little salt results in far superior flavor and texture—and just as much beneficial bacteria. So again, salt to taste.

What kind of vessel should you use to hold your ferment? Avoid metal, as salt and the acids created by fermentation will corrode it. Heavy ceramic cylindrical crocks are the ideal fermentation vessels, though they can be hard to find and expensive. Glass containers work well, especially those with a cylindrical shape or with a wide mouth, and so do nesting bowls. Crock pots with ceramic interiors make effective fermentation vessels and can often be found in thrift stores. In a pinch, you can use plastic, but even food-grade plastics leach toxic chemicals.

The reason a cylindrical shape is desirable is for ease of weighting down the fermenting vegetables to keep them submerged rather than floating to the top. I generally use a plate that just fits inside the vessel, weighted down by a full jug of water, and I drape a cloth over the top of the vessel to protect against flies. I call this the “open-crock” method. Containers in other shapes can work with improvisation, or you can manually press the vegetables to submerge them in the liquid.

If the vegetables float to the top and remain exposed to air, they are likely to develop mold. Sometimes, especially in hot weather, your ferment may develop a film of white mold on its surface. This is very common and will not hurt you or the kraut. Scrape off the mold as best you can, don’t worry about particles that mix into the vegetables, and enjoy the delicious ferment beneath. Specially designed Harsch crocks eliminate this problem by creating an oxygen-free airspace around the ferment. These German crocks are elegant but expensive. Another way to avoid mold is by weighting the ferment in the vessel with water contained in a double layer of plastic bags. The water will spread to cover the entire surface, protecting it from aerobic surface molds. The downside of this method, of course, is that your food comes into prolonged contact with plastic, which leaches chemicals into the food. I prefer to use the open-crock method and remove mold as necessary.

Whatever type of vessel you use, pack the vegetables into it with some force (unless they are whole), in order to break down cell walls and release juices. I use a blunt wooden tamping tool. You can improvise with a piece of wood or your fist, or you can manually massage and squeeze the vegetables, as described in the recipe for massaged kale (see Recipe: Massaged Kale). Once the vegetables are weighted down, the salt will continue to pull moisture from the vegetables for many hours yet. If, by the following day, the vegetables are not submerged, add a little water.

How long do you ferment the vegetables? I wish I had an easy answer to this question. “Ferment until ripe,” many recipes advise, but ultimately you will have to decide when it is ripe. Sour flavor—from lactic acid—develops over time. Longer fermentation translates to tangier flavor. This happens more quickly in warm temperatures than in cool ones. If you start your ferment at harvest time, in the autumn, as temperatures are dropping, it can ferment for six months or longer. This is how people survived before refrigeration and globalized food. Many people, however, prefer the flavor of a mild ferment to that of a strongly acidic one. When you are first experimenting, taste your ferments early and often. Serve some after three days, then three days later, and again three days after that. Familiarize yourself with the spectrum of flavors that fermentation can create and see what you like.

For the first time ever demographers are seeing a decline in U.S. average life expectancy.¹⁹ The food most of us eat is of such poor nutritional quality that it is killing us. And food-processing and marketing corporations spend billions of dollars promoting lies and confusion about nutrition.

In fact, nutritional truth is very simple: Whole foods are more than the sum of their parts. Eating the whole apple offers more complete nutrition than drinking the juice pressed from the apple. Each food’s many nutritional qualities are contextual; that is, they exist in a complex web of relations with all the other properties of the food, including qualitative factors determined by how it was produced.

Profitability truth is simple, too: processing adds value to food. Farmers have long processed agricultural products into “value-added” foods such as pickles, cheeses, wines, cured meats, and jams. As we have seen in chapter 4, more and more farm-based and home-based food processing is being outlawed. Food processing has moved from the community scale to the global scale. The more processed the food, the greater the potential for profit. Each stage of processing is an opportunity for marginal earnings—and for nutrient loss. The handful of global food processors and marketers want you to consume more of their products.

Confusion reigns in the marketing wars among products aimed for our bodies. One contemporary strategy that both exploits and feeds this confusion is the phenomenon of functional foods, or neutraceuticals. In these engineered food products, whole foods are deconstructed and fragmented, and certain of their parts are then conjoined with medicinalized nutrients, which are often deconstructed from other foods. For example, chocolate and other candies are now being marketed with added nutrients. Candy giant M&M/Mars has launched a new division: Mars Nutrition for Health & Well-Being. Its CocoaVia line of chocolates, fortified with sterols from canola oil, is being marketed as a functional food for cardiovascular health; two servings a day are recommended for maximum benefit.

Such health claims have been permitted on food labels only since 2002. Prior to that, health claims on labels had to be based on scientific evidence and evaluated by the FDA. The new policy, supported by the food-processing industries, permits health claims regardless of scientific evidence, so long as they are accompanied by a disclaimer in small print qualifying the claims with language such as “limited and inconclusive.”

So ketchup is now being marketed as an antioxidant, based on the presence of lycopene in tomatoes, and retail coolers are full of high-fructose-corn-syrup-based soft drinks augmented by echinacea, guarana, ginseng, ginkgo, and various other herbs and nutrients. Fortification with herbal extracts and nutrients marks these drinks as “healthy” and “nutritious,” yet even extracts of the most potent medicinals cannot possibly salvage high-fructose corn syrup from its nutritional (and economic) void.

High-fructose corn syrup is today the most widely consumed of processed foods. It is present in sodas and almost anything mass-produced and sweet, especially beverages. Corn is wholesome, so presumably corn syrup is too, right? And fructose sounds fruity, so it must be a more benign sugar than cane sugar, right? Wrong on both counts. High-fructose corn syrup is popular as an ingredient because it is marginally cheaper than cane sugar (at least with corn subsidies and sugar import tariffs in place, which the World Trade Organization is not likely to permit much longer). Fructose is also sweeter than glucose, so it enables more sweet flavor to be concentrated.

The process of converting corn into high-fructose corn syrup is complex and involves many steps. It’s not something you can make at home. The transformation requires fermentation by the fungus Aspergillus, the same organism used to make miso, saké, and amazaké. Liquid chromatography is used in the process, and at two different steps, genetically modified enzymes are introduced. A lot of work goes into transforming that corn into fructose. The process was first engineered in the late 1960s and then steadily refined. High-fructose corn syrup consumption in the United States rose more than 1,000 percent from the 1970s to 2000²⁰; today in the United States, average consumption of high-fructose corn syrup is more than fifty-five pounds per person per year, nearly ten pounds more than the average consumption of refined cane and beet sugar.²¹

Unfortunately, fructose does not metabolize as easily as glucose. “Every cell in the body can metabolize glucose,” says Dr. Meira Field of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who studied rats on a high-fructose diet. “However, all fructose must be metabolized in the liver. The livers of the rats on the high-fructose diet looked like the livers of alcoholics, plugged with fat and cirrhotic.”²² According to a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, fructose fails to stimulate a number of key chemical signals that regulate appetite and food intake. “There is a distinct likelihood that the increased consumption of [high-fructose corn syrup] in beverages may be linked to the increase in obesity,” the authors conclude.²³

Experience tells me that sweet drinks can be powerfully addictive. I rarely drink them these days, but I am no purist, and I know that after I drink a soda or other beverage sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, all I want is another one. As we know from the tobacco industry, addiction is the ultimate marketing scheme.

Rivaling high-fructose corn syrup as the miracle of modern food processing most responsible for our collective health crises is hydrogenated vegetable oil. Hydrogenation is a chemical manipulation of fat molecules that makes otherwise liquid oils hold a solid form. This process was pioneered early in the twentieth century to create improved vegetable-based imitations of butter (margarine) and lard (shortening). These imitations were initially marketed as such, replacing traditional animal sources by reason of shortages, lower prices, or (later) perceived health benefit (for more on the vilification of animal fats, see chapter 8). The U.S. Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 regulated these foods by defining them as imitations: “There are certain traditional foods that everyone knows, such as bread, milk and cheese, and that when consumers buy these foods, they should get the foods that they are expecting . . . [and] if a food resembles a standardized food but does not comply with the standard, that food must be labeled as an ‘imitation.’”²⁴

Once they were introduced, these highly processed imitations came, in just a few decades, to be more widely consumed than the animal fats they were imitating. Today virtually all processed foods contain hydrogenated vegetable oils, and their consumption more than tripled from the 1960s to the 1990s. Oil processors and their sponsored science were able to convince the public that hydrogenated vegetable oils are healthier than animal fats, even though heart disease and cancer are rare in traditional cultures using animal fats, and the rise in prevalence of these diseases has paralleled the introduction and spread of hydrogenated oils.

The story of the imitations’ fast rise to dominance of the American food supply sounds just like the story of genetically modified foods (see chapter 2). Both were accomplished by regulatory coups in which corporate agendas guided policies that presumed nutritional equivalence between the newfangled creations and traditional foods—those coups carried out by the revolving door between food-processing industry lobbyists and regulators.

Peter Barton Hutt, a Washington, DC, lawyer who long represented the edible oil industry, was appointed general counsel to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1971. He argued that the word imitation in the 1938 food law was outmoded, that it ignored advances in food-processing technology that produced foods “not necessarily inferior to the traditional foods for which they may be substituted.” Until this point, the law always considered certain traditional foods as real, in contrast to imitations. The 1970s revisions to the law eliminated this distinction. Fabricated and fortified fragments of foods became the legal equivalents of traditional whole foods. Once the food-processors’ lawyer completed his term of government service, the word imitation had virtually disappeared from FDA regulations, and realness in food has since become increasingly elusive.

The process of hydrogenation creates fat molecules that are fundamentally different from the saturated and unsaturated natural fats found in traditional foods. Mary Enig is a lipid biochemist who has studied trans fats for decades and challenged the idea that hydrogenated vegetable oils are healthier than animal fats. In an essay she coauthored with Sally Fallon, they explain:

Most of these man-made trans fats are toxins to the body, but unfortunately your digestive system does not recognize them as such. Instead of being eliminated, trans fats are incorporated into cell membranes . . . your cells actually become partially hydrogenated! Once in place, trans fatty acids with their misplaced hydrogen atoms wreak havoc in cell metabolism because chemical reactions can only take place when electrons in the cell membranes are in certain arrangements or patterns, which the hydrogenation process has disturbed. . . . Altered partially hydrogenated fats made from vegetable oils actually block utilization of essential fatty acids, causing many deleterious effects including sexual dysfunction, increased blood cholesterol and paralysis of the immune system. Consumption of hydrogenated fats is associated with a host of other serious diseases, not only cancer but also atherosclerosis, diabetes, obesity, immune system dysfunction, low-birth-weight babies, birth defects, decreased visual acuity, sterility, difficulty in lactation and problems with bones and tendons.²⁵

Dr. Enig’s critique of trans fats has become increasingly accepted. “Today, most scientists and nutrition experts agree that trans fat is America’s most dangerous fat,” wrote the New York Times in August 2005, as New York City asked restaurants to voluntarily switch from hydrogenated to nonhydrogenated oils.²⁶

The rising consumption of anti-nutrients such as hydrogenated oils and high-fructose corn syrup is contributing to a rapid decline in American health. The path of least resistance is eating overprocessed synthetic junk. What else do many people know? “There is profit in poisoning the population, and lethal food peddling, unlike lethal drug peddling, is legal,” observes The Nation. “A go-getting, job-creating ad agency entrepreneur can make a hell of a lot of money teaching children how to grow fat and kill themselves.”²⁷ A third of Americans are currently obese (as defined by a body-mass index of 30 or more), double the rate of thirty years ago.²⁸ One Harvard University study concluded that each additional soda a kid drinks on a daily basis increases his or her risk of obesity by 60 percent.²⁹ Obesity causes 325,000 American deaths annually, more than motor vehicles, illegal drugs, alcohol, and firearms combined³⁰ (though not quite half as many as iatrogenic causes).

Considering obesity as an epidemic is not about condemning fat or overweight people. Certainly the cult of thinness is an oppressive force all unto itself. Healthy bodies come in many different shapes and proportions, and as a culture we need to recognize that. Nonetheless, at the macro level of demographics, the explosion in obesity rates suggests serious social problems. Obesity at this unprecedented scale is a result of sedentary lifestyles and dietary changes, largely manufactured by the food-processing and marketing industries. Another factor in the growing levels of obesity may be the organophosphate chemicals used in agriculture, which slow metabolism.³¹

The plague of obesity, and its twin diabetes, is not evenly distributed among the population. Native Americans exhibit dramatically high rates of diabetes. They have not always lived with this disease; their indigenous diets and lifestyles sustained them well and protected them from it. However, as their traditional foods have been replaced with the hydrogenated, high-fructosed, anti-nutrient foods that are the staples of the standard American diet, a vulnerability toward obesity and diabetes has emerged in Native communities. More than 17 percent of Native American adults are diabetic, double the rate of the adult U.S. population as a whole. African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians also show higher-than-average rates of diabetes and obesity.³²

Beyond being cut off from traditional diets, people with fewer economic choices generally have easier access to aggressively marketed junk foods than to fresh, wholesome foods. This is true in rural areas as well as in inner cities. Affluent areas may have Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, but poor people get convenience stores. Food processors spend $33 billion annually promoting their products in the United States,³³ with much of this advertising targeted at kids. Marketing anti-nutrient foods is a brilliant strategy, because you eat them and you’re still hungry, still craving more. The insidious nature of junk-food marketing is well illustrated by soft-drink “pouring rights” in schools. Pouring rights are exclusive contracts between soft-drink marketers and schools, or school districts, or entire cities, where the schools get cash (and some free soft drinks) in exchange for the soft-drink manufacturer having exclusive marketing rights. Carbonated soft drinks are the ultimate anti-nutrients, vehicles for high-fructose corn syrup and even more troubling artificial sweeteners. Yet their consumption just keeps increasing. Soda production in the United States was fifty-four gallons per person in 2004, or about 576 twelve-ounce servings,³⁴ more than a soda and a half per person per day. “Our strategy is ubiquity,” boasts a Coca-Cola spokesperson. “We want to put soft drinks within arm’s reach of desire.”³⁵

A manufacturer having pouring rights in a school means that the manufacturer has not only vending machines stocked with its brands—but its logos pasted throughout the school, sales quotas, and incentives for higher-than-target sales, turning school administrators into brand-loyal pushers of high-fructose corn syrup and students into captive audiences. “It must be the dream of marketing executives,” speculated an Advertising Age op-ed. “The law requires your future customers to come to a place 180 days a year where they must watch and listen to your advertising messages exclusively, your competitors are not allowed access to the market. The most important public institution in the lives of children and families gives its implied endorsement to your products.”³⁶ In one telling incident, a Georgia school held a “Coke Day” rally, and an iconoclastic student who wore a Pepsi tee-shirt that day was suspended.³⁷ In response to the twin epidemics of obesity and diabetes, parents and public health activists in some localities are putting an end to pouring rights and banning junk food in schools altogether. Seattle enacted such a ban in 2004; New Jersey and Maine have passed similar bans that will be implemented in 2007, and bills have been introduced in Congress to establish such a ban in schools nationwide.

Desperate to divert public scrutiny away from the harmful effects of their products on children’s health, soft-drink manufacturers have begun sponsoring health education programs in schools. Coca-Cola is spending $4 million to bring its “Live It!” curriculum to middle schools, Pepsi is sponsoring a program called “Balance First” in elementary schools, and Ronald McDonald is visiting schools in the role of “ambassador for an active, balanced lifestyle.” “What better way to deflect attention from your unhealthy products than to promote exercise?” asks Michele Simon, director of the Center for Informed Food Choices.³⁸

The junk food giants have been the targets of many notable political actions. McDonald’s in particular has inspired opposition because it uniquely epitomizes globalization, with all of the homogenization and diminishment of culture that comes with that. The Slow Food movement was born of Carlo Petrini’s rage against McDonald’s, and French farmer José Bové drew international notoriety for a 1999 action in which members of his local Farmers’ Confederation and Union of Ewe’s Milk Producers dismantled a McDonald’s in Millau, France. Every year since 1985, October 16 (United Nations World Food Day) has been a day of anti-McDonald’s actions; this practice was initiated by Greenpeace in 1985 and by 1999 had spread to 345 cities in twenty-three countries.³⁹

Helen Steel and Dave Morris—the “McLibel Two”—participated in some of the London anti-McDonald’s actions, standing in front of a McDonald’s handing out a Greenpeace flyer titled “What’s Wrong with McDonald’s? Everything They Don’t Want You to Know.” The flyer criticized McDonald’s from many perspectives, including the poor nutritional content of its food, its deceptive marketing practices, its destructive environmental impact, and its poor labor practices. In 1990 Steel and Morris were sued by McDonald’s for libelous statements in this flyer. British libel law places the burden of proof on the accused, who must demonstrate that the contested statements are true, rather than on the allegedly libeled party to prove that the statements are false (as in the United States). McDonald’s spent an estimated £310 million in legal fees pursuing the case; Steel and Morris represented themselves in court, and their defense of the truth of the criticisms of McDonald’s contained in the flyer text resulted in the longest trial in English history, lasting 314 days.

Corn as Commodity By Betty Fussell

Today the corn synthesizers can transmute substances at will. “The primary message,” the National Corn Growers’ Association declared in 1987, was that “anything made from a barrel of petroleum can be made from a bushel of corn.” . . . Joining the chorus are the nation’s nine giant wet-millers, the kings of corn processing known as the Corn Refiners Association, the archdeacons of pumping and squeezing, who proclaim, “Corn refiners constantly search for new technologies and more uses which will squeeze even more value out of every bushel of American corn.”

Today, the way to squeeze money out of corn is to squeeze the molecule and manipulate its structure in the tee (for total) commodification of corn, in which farmers are replaced by marketers, millers by refiners, and machinists by biochemists. From the perspective of industrial farmers, corn is of value only as it can be transformed chemically into whatever commodity is most in demand. The methodology of nineteenth-century chemistry underlies the refining of corn as it does the refining of oil: analyze the system, fragment the parts, quantify the parts and synthesize at will. In such a system organic plants are but raw material for the processor, who fabricates products for which the manufacturer creates demand. Equally, consumers are raw material for processing and consumption by the manufacturer. The consumer becomes the consumed.

Excerpted from The Story of Corn: The Myths and History, the Culture and Agriculture, the Art and Science of America’s Quintessential Crop (New York: North Point Press, 1992). Used by permission.

The court’s ruling was mixed. It found many of the flyer’s statements to be unambiguously true: McDonald’s has “pretended to a positive nutritional benefit which their food (high in fat and salt, etc.) did not match”; does “exploit children” with its advertising strategy; is “culpably responsible for animal cruelty”; and does “pay low wages.” Nonetheless, the court was not convinced that every single statement on the flyer was correct and ordered Steel and Morris to pay McDonald’s £40,000 in damages. The pair refused to pay McDonald’s and appealed the decision. The appeals court found that further flyer statements were true; for instance (as the 2004 documentary Super Size Me later starkly illustrated), “if one eats enough McDonald’s food, one’s diet may well become high in fat, etc., with the very real risk of heart disease.”

But the court still upheld the damages, so Steel and Morris appealed to the European Court of Human Rights. Sometimes higher authorities, with broader jurisdictions, are better able to grasp the big picture than local officials more beholden to specific financial or ideological interests. In 2005, fifteen years after the trial first began, the European Court ruled that the trials had been unfair, that the protestors’ freedom of expression had been violated, and that no damages were due to McDonald’s. The court championed the “strong public interest in enabling campaign groups and individuals outside the mainstream to contribute to the public debate by disseminating information and ideas on matters of general public interest such as health and the environment.”

From neutraceuticals to McDonald’s, the food marketing industry twists facts and manipulates consumer desires—with grotesque results. The results are no less grotesque when marketing and advertising drive our health-care choices. The growing trend toward advertising pharmaceutical products directly to consumers—ask your doctor about (fill in the blank)—begs people to tap into the deep well of pain and malaise and perhaps pursue a particular product as a solution. In 2003 pharmaceutical manufacturers spent more than $3 billion on direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising,⁴⁰ a practice that was considered unethical until the 1980s.

Total expenditures for prescription drugs, expressed as a percentage of gross domestic product, almost tripled between 1980 and 2000, the period in which DTC drug advertising became widespread.⁴¹ (They had remained constant from 1960 to 1980.) The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America claims that DTC drug advertising “enhances consumer knowledge” and “improves public health.” But two Harvard medical professors, both former editors of the New England Journal of Medicine, counter that “DTC ads mainly benefit the bottom line of the drug industry, not the public. They mislead consumers more than they inform them, and they pressure physicians to prescribe new, expensive, and often marginally helpful drugs, although a more conservative option might be better for the patient.”⁴²

Predictably enough, the most-advertised drugs become the most prescribed. According to an analysis in the journal Health Affairs, prescriptions for the fifty most heavily advertised drugs rose an average of 25 percent between 1999 and 2000, while prescriptions for less heavily advertised drugs rose an average of only 4 percent.⁴³ The most-advertised drug at the dawn of the new millennium was Vioxx, which treats symptoms of arthritis. The ads paid off, with twenty million people taking Vioxx in the United States between 1999 and 2004.⁴⁴

Unfortunately for Vioxx’s manufacturer, Merck, the self-described “global research-driven pharmaceutical company dedicated to putting patients first,”⁴⁵ that cash cow had to be recalled after a study determined that the drug dramatically increases the risk of heart attack for the people who take it. The Wall Street Journal reported that Merck knew as early as 2000 about the problem but worked hard to conceal it by distorting statistics.⁴⁶ By the time Vioxx was recalled in 2004, the FDA estimates that more than 27,000 people had died from it.

Health care by corporate advertisement is McMedicine. McFood feeds McMedicine, and we need to liberate ourselves from both profit-driven monsters. Our well-being is not on their agendas; selling things to us is. We must reclaim our health and our power, both as individuals and as communities. We all must be healers—for ourselves and for the people we know. Information is plentiful if you know how to seek it out. In fact, in the search for health-care information you will always find contradictory opinions, from doctors, drug or nutraceutical ads, herbalists, acupuncturists, nutritionists, or diet gurus. Many people feel like they’re drowning in information. Ultimately it is up to you to decide which paths to follow. Vibrant health is not the result of a single factor. Healing doesn’t come about by rules or dogma; it’s about learning what works for you. My own health care regime is a patchwork that includes pharmaceuticals and acupuncture, but along with them weed-eating plant medicine and homegrown food. For me loving the plants is a healing in itself. They nourish and heal me every day, and they give me the comfort of knowing that in the end my fate (like that of all life forms) is to nourish them. The earth has abundant food and medicine to sustain us.

Colbin, Annemarie. Food and Healing: How What You Eat Determines Your Health, Your Well-being, and the Quality of Your Life. New York: Ballantine Books, 1986.

Cook, Christopher D. Diet for a Dead Planet: How the Food Industry Is Killing Us. New York: New Press, 2004.

Cooper, Ann, and Lisa M. Holmes. Bitter Harvest: A Chef’s Perspective on the Hidden Dangers in the Foods We Eat and What You Can Do about It. New York and London: Routledge, 2000.

Eisenstein, Charles. The Yoga of Eating: Transcending Diets and Dogma to Nourish the Natural Self. Washington, DC: New Trends, 2003.

Fallon, Sally, with Mary G. Enig. Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook That Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats. Washington, DC: New Trends, 1999.

Fitzgerald, Randall. The Hundred Year Lie: How Food and Medicine are Destroying Your Health. New York: Dutton, 2006.

Fussell, Betty. The Story of Corn: The Myths and History, the Culture and Agriculture, the Art and Science of America’s Quintessential Crop. New York: North Point Press, 1992.

Nabhan, Gary Paul. Why Some Like It Hot: Food, Genes, and Cultural Diversity. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2004.

Nestle, Marion. Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

———. Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Pichford, Paul. Healing with Whole Foods. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1993.

Price, Weston A. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. Lemon Grove, CA: Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation, 1939.

Sams, Craig. The Little Food Book: You Are What You Eat. New York: Disinformation, 2004.

Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

Simon, Michele. Appetite for Profit: Fighting Corporate Control and Spin in the Nutrition Wars. New York: Nation Books, 2006.

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Third National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals. Atlanta, GA: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2005. Available online at www.cdc.gov/exposurereport.

Weed, Susun S. Wise Woman Herbal: Healing Wise. Woodstock, NY: Ash Tree, 1989.

McLibel. Directed by Franny Armstrong. London: Spanner Films, 2005; www.spannerfilms.net.

Super Size Me. Directed by Morgan Spurlock. New York: Morgan Spurlock and The Con, 2004; www.supersizeme.com.