In the last few decades, our food, agriculture and health traditions have been ignored or destroyed under the assault of reductionist science and industrial systems of agriculture, combined with globalisation and free trade. The industrialisation and globalisation of food systems as well as the promotion of fast food and junk food are driven by chemical and industrial food corporations, leading to a climate crisis, an agrarian crisis, the erosion of biodiversity in agriculture, an increase in toxics in our food and a disease epidemic. Twenty percent of GHG emissions are accounted for by processed and packaged food and the food miles associated with globalised supply chains. Ultra-processed foods are energy intensive and resource intensive; they also use synthetic ingredients that are harmful to health, but have not been adequately tested.
The agrochemical industry and agribusiness, the junk food industry and the pharmaceutical industry profit while nature and nations get sicker and poorer. Powerful chemical corporations, controlling industrial agriculture and medicine, have tried to displace the ecological discourse of interrelatedness and interconnectedness with the reductionist paradigm they have shaped. Violent, toxic tools of industrial agriculture, industrial processing and industrial medicine have been elevated as human ends and been made the measure of human progress. Instead of humans assessing tools on the basis of their impact on the well-being of the planet and of people, they are used to assess the status of humanity. This has led to the imposition of a mechanistic paradigm on nature, on our minds and on our bodies.
After impoverishing the biodiverse food basket and chemicalising our food (which then cannot be ingested properly, with the full range of nutrients and micronutrients, as our bodies are meant to ingest and digest systemically biological, not chemicalised, food), the agropharma industry comes forward with false solutions. We are offered supplementation which, as Dr Bhushan Patwardhan, distinguished professor of health sciences, biomedical scientist and ethnopharmacologist, says, ‘has not demonstrated much preventive or therapeutic benefit’. He goes on to add, ‘Rather than banking on exogenous antioxidant supplements, scientists are advising eating plenty of fruits, grains and vegetables, coupled with lifestyle modifications.…’1 The push to propose supplementation through genetic modification—of vitamin A rice or iron reinforced bananas—is fraught with non-results and the added risk of adverse consequences through the effects of genetic modification. Here again, biodiversity provides natural solutions.
It is not just our health that has suffered—it is also the health of the planet. Across India there is a water crisis because the so-called Green Revolution is extremely water intensive and has led to the diversion of rivers and the mining of groundwater for irrigation. More than 75 percent of our water resources have been destroyed and polluted due to chemical farming.
More than 90 percent of biodiversity in agriculture has disappeared on account of industrial agriculture, and with it, the diversity we need for a healthy and balanced diet. Chemical farming is based on cultivating monocultures of a few globally traded commodities.
As industrial agriculture and industrial food processing begin to dominate, epidemics of chronic, diet-related diseases start to spread. The Hopi describe this phenomenon as powaqqatsi—‘an entity, a way of life, that consumes the life forces of beings in order to further its own life’. The powaqqatsi phenomenon is clearly in evidence today—we are dealing with a destructive force. And if corporations have their way, our fragile web of life will be poisoned beyond repair, the diversity of species will be driven to extinction and people will lose all freedoms to their seed, their food, their knowledge and their decision-making.
In spite of its rich scientific and intellectual heritage, based on food as health, India is rapidly emerging as the epicentre of chronic diseases, including cancer, obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, largely related to the kind of food produced and consumed. Health and disease begin in food, and food begins in agriculture and the soil. Traditional civilisations understood the intimate connection between agriculture, food, nutrition and health. Indigenous systems of science and agroecology evolved as sciences of life for healthy living and were anchored in propagating biodiverse, seasonal and local food.
We are at a watershed in terms of our agriculture, our food systems and our diets. For many decades now, the world has undergone a drastic change in the ways in which food is produced, processed and distributed: in agriculture, it has mostly gone from organic to chemical; in processing, from artisanal to industrial; and in distribution, from mainly local bazaars to supermarkets stocking food from around the world in defiance of seasonality.
Food, above all, is life-giving and nurturing—and yet, in our lives, we find that this primary function has been vitiated. How has this happened? To start with, it may be a platitude, but we become what we eat; and since, directly or indirectly, our food comes from plants, the health of the plant will translate into the health of our bodies. So, the plants which have ingested the poisons from so-called fertilisers transfer these to all those who feed upon them and, as we have seen, these can have drastic consequences, such as poor nutritional intake, impaired digestive systems and cancer, to name a few.
As food travels from the fields to our tables, it goes through two more stages: processing and retailing. Traditionally, processing was in women’s hands and was artisanal for the most part. Women cleaned the wheat, washed it, dried it and then proceeded to grind it by hand for flour; till about twenty years ago, one could still go to a chakkiwala (local flour mill) and have one’s wheat ground into flour. However, with the advent of the likes of Cargill and Pillsbury, shops now retail industrially-processed atta (flour) from which most of the nutrients have been stripped, having gone through high-intensity processing machines that heat up and thus destroy precious nutrients. This, of course, works to the advantage of the food industry, which can then get into the ‘fortification’ business.
Industrial processing uses high-intensity processing machines for grinding as well as for extruding and applying pressure, all of which lead to structural changes in the food with negative consequences on health. Most industrially-produced snacks are subjected to these denaturing processes. Moreover, many oils, e.g., soyabean oil and canola oil, are subjected to denaturing processes in order to extract the maximum volume.
If we look at foods like packaged cereal, snacks, confectionery and suchlike, their processing contains a cocktail of chemical additives in the form of: preservatives, to prevent them from rotting; colorants, to make food more attractive or ‘natural’; taste enhancers and flavours, to increase palatability or to impart a certain flavour; texturants, to give a particular texture to the food; and stabilisers, to increase shelf life. To make matters worse, processed food manufacturers do not always list all the additives used on their labels, especially as consumers are now more savvy at decoding them.
The industrial meat industry is another danger zone where not only are animals kept in cruelly dismal and inhuman conditions, but are also fed heavy doses of hormones or antibiotics against disease and to increase yield, producing more dead and toxic food.
Before food reaches the supermarket shelves, it has to be packaged; very often the packaging consists of plastic bags or containers or aluminium foil, highly unecological as well as sources for further contamination of the food they contain, since the chemicals in plastic and aluminium always leach into the content. It is ironic that this food, contaminated in more ways than one with chemicals at the processing levels and chemicals from the packet/containers, is considered safer than what is sold in the open. Research by eminent scientists, such as the French molecular biologist Dr Gilles-Éric Séralini and others, points to the fact that food which has become less and less natural, not to say denatured altogether, interferes with our brain function when consumed. It can cause inflammation in our body, can become addictive and, in short, can lead to foodstyle diseases. Dead food results in dead metabolism.
Following globalisation and liberalisation, the market, everywhere in the world, has become a world market; throughout the year, goods from all over the planet adorn its shelves. As Marion Nestle points out in her book Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, a veritable food strategy is put into place by the food industry to entice people into consuming more and more, regardless of the maximum intake considered healthy, fuelling obesity which, in any case, is already imminent via processing and the use of high fructose corn syrup, trans fats, etc. After all, the excess food produced has to find takers to satisfy the high-volume model of production.
Then there is the expiry date battle. Given that liberalisation means countries that have produced in excess or are producing items no longer popular in their markets can dump their goods on markets in the South, there is a big expiry date scam in practice. Often, consumers who are not attentive to such details will buy food that is no longer fit to be consumed.
Another consequence of globalisation/liberalisation is that all food items, from mangoes to melons, which are actually seasonal, are available throughout the year. Our bodies are tuned to eat as per the seasons; but, additionally, there are socio-ecological effects, since local farmers are often marginalised. Unaware consumers seek the exotic over the local—items that have a very heavy ecological footprint, having accumulated large amounts of food miles.
The spread of junk food was a result of dismantling the regulatory frameworks that countries had evolved to protect the livelihoods and health of their citizens. The Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Agreement of the WTO, drafted by the junk food industry, forced open the markets of the world to the sale of ultra-processed food. They altered the science of food production and food processing, and they neutralised the regulatory framework. Sales of processed food increased, and with it, the non-communicable chronic disease pandemic.
In such a scenario, what is the consumer, the co-producer of agriculture, to do? Nestle says, ‘[Choose] food according to freshness, taste, nutrition and health, but also social and environmental issues.’
The issue of food safety is progressively looming larger and larger with the hyper industrialisation and globalisation of food. According to Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University, London,
Incidence of food-borne disease has in fact risen during the era of the productionist paradigm. In West Germany cases of S. Enterites infections rose from 11 per 100,000 head of population in 1963 to 193 per 100,000 in 1999, while in England and Wales formal notifications of the same disease rose from 14,253 cases in 1987 to 86,528 in 2000.
For his part, Colin Tudge, a British biologist, observes,
The modern food supply chain is convoluted and so long that it allows endless opportunities for malpractice of all kinds—including many that beggar the imagination of those who are not criminally inclined… Sometimes though, it is not at all easy to draw a line between outright villainy (like the adding of contaminants) from the standard, legitimate practices of the modern food industry.2
The early 2000s saw several epidemics arising from the way food is produced industrially: in the UK, the mad cow disease jumped from cattle to humans. New strains of E. coli led to thousands of food poisoning cases in the US, causing the death of 5,000 people. The swine flu fever in Asia caused havoc, leading to millions of pigs being killed, with the new Nipah strain killing hundreds of pig-farm workers. The spectre of avian flu raises regularly its head.
New food safety laws are deregulating large corporations while overregulating small-scale, self-organised economies. We cannot impose the same laws for toxic and GM foods and for local, artisanal processing as well as small kiosks and outlets; the former need stricter laws than the latter, which are not a toxic threat or consist of centralised producers needing centralised regulation.
These new laws are the basis of the WTO’s SPS Agreement. India’s diverse, decentralised edible oil industry offers an example of how inappropriate standards were used to destroy this sector. August 1998 saw the introduction of a new packaging order for edible oils on grounds of food safety; its consequence was the shutting down of millions of small-scale local oil mills. This had a huge impact on local edible oils like mustard oil, which was, in fact, banned. Combined with the WTO trade rules that remove import restrictions, false food safety laws flooded India’s markets with oil from genetically-engineered soyabean and palm oil.
India has a variety of oilseeds such as coconut, groundnut, linseed, mustard, sunflower and sesame; biodiversity going hand in hand with cultural diversity. The main consequence of the mustard oil ban and the ban on selling edible oils in unpackaged form was an adverse impact on our oilseed biodiversity and the diversity of our edible oils and food cultures. It was also a destruction of economic democracy and economic freedom to produce oils locally, according to locally available resources and locally appropriate food cultures.
Since indigenous oilseeds are high in oil content, they can be processed at household or community level, with eco-friendly, decentralised and democratic technologies. They therefore mean freedom for nature, our farmers, our diverse food cultures and the rights of poor consumers.
By contrast, soyabean oil signifies concentration of power and the colonisation of nature, cultures, farmers and consumers from the seed to trade, processing and packaging. Because of its low oil content, the extraction of soyabean oil needs heavy processing which is environmentally unfriendly and unsafe for health.
Monsanto controls seeds through its patents and ownership of seed corporations. Cargill, Continental AG, and other trading giants control trade and milling operations internationally. The manipulation of oil prices and the restrictions placed on indigenous oilseed processing and sales forced Indians to consume soyabean and palm oils, further strengthening a monoculture and monopoly system.
Free trade and economic globalisation have been projected as economic freedom for all. However, as the case of the mustard oil crisis and soyabean and palm oil import reveals, so-called free trade is based on many levels of the destruction of small producers, processors and poor consumers.
The application of food safety regulation clearly demonstrates how unequally small and big players are treated. The government of India was prompt in immediately banning mustard oil but did nothing to prevent the dumping of toxic, genetically-engineered soyabean. Be it India, the US or countries around the world, governments do not penalise global players for the toxicity of their food. The simple act of buying edible oils, or even other food, reveals the degree of unfairness and lack of democracy as far as food production is concerned.
The ‘choice’ of junk food by societies was in a way facilitated by the deregulation of authentic food safety laws and their replacement by corporate-written laws favouring industrial food production, as well as policing and criminalising local, indigenous, artisanal production and processing.
Europe is not exempt from food safety laws that are heavily tilted towards big corporations. There, too, such laws were threatening small producers of typical foods. To protest this, the Slow Food Movement organised half a million signatures that forced the Italian government, for example, to amend a law that would have compelled even the smallest food producer to conform to the pseudo hygienic standards that suit corporations like Kraft.
Different foods have different risks and need different safety laws and systems of management. This is why Europe has different standards for organic, industrial and genetically-engineered foods. Organic standards are set by organic movements, while standards for genetically-engineered foods are set at the European level through the Novel Food laws. In addition, there is the movement to protect the cultural diversity of food through the classification of ‘unique’ and ‘typical’ foods. These standards are cultural, based on indigenous science and community control, not on industrial ‘science’ controlled by governments manipulated by food giants like Cargill, ConAgra, Lever, Nestlé or Phillip Morris, as well as gene giants like Monsanto. Carving out these spaces of freedom has been the contribution of the Slow Food Movement.
Ideally, India, like Europe, should have had three different levels of regulation for three different systems of food production: one at the local and community level for small-scale processing; a second for industrial processing, geared to the prevention of food adulteration, updated periodically to prevent new food hazards; and a third, a GMO food law, controlling imports, labelling, segregation, traceability and so on.
We, however, now have the 2005 Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) which caters to all three categories. This kind of centralised law represents the worst form of license and inspector raj and operates like food fascism, based on a food mafia serving global corporations. Our food freedom, livelihoods, our food safety and diversity are all at stake with the FSSAI. It can be used to criminalise every small roadside restaurant owner and street vendor who is not introducing obesity or diabetes, cancer or heart disease; they provide affordable dal and roti to millions of working people.
How food is processed determines its quality, nutrition and safety. Home-processed bread is not the same as mass-produced industrial bread. They are not ‘like products’, in WTO jargon; they are quite different in terms of their ecological content and public health impact. A factory chicken is not the same as a free-range chicken, both in terms of animal welfare and in terms of food quality and safety. GMO corn is not the same as organic corn. The former contains antibiotic resistance markers, viruses used as promoters and genes for producing toxins such as Bt. Regulating Bt corn for safety needs a different system than that for organic corn, just as factory farming needs different regulatory processes from organic farming.
A pluralism of production processes and products needs a pluralism of laws, and science that is appropriate for the safety issues and governance systems that a product or production process demands. Chemical processing needs chemistry labs and chemists; GMOs need genetic ID laws; and organic processing needs indigenous science and community control. But in the case of GMOs, there are no international standards. There are European laws on Novel Foods and an absolute deregulation of GM foods in the US.
On May 13, 2003, the US, together with Canada and Argentina, challenged Europe’s moratorium on GM crops and foods. Arguing that their GM products were being unfairly discriminated against, they challenged the precautionary principle in decision-making about GM crops that is embedded in European decision-making.
The EU regulations take into account the EU’s international trade commitments as well as the requirements of the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, with respect to the obligations of importers. The EU’s regulatory system for GMO authorisation is in line with WTO rules: it is an attack on the use of the precautionary principle with clear, transparent and non-discriminatory information. There is therefore no issue that the WTO needs to examine.
Many countries are now looking at EU regulations to develop their own policies. The US fears that several countries will adopt a similar approach to regulate GMOs and GM food and feed products. The Swiss GM legislation that came into force on January 1, 2004, is a good example.
The Swiss law is more stringent than current EU legislation on liability and co-existence aspects, and is based on the precautionary and ‘the polluter pays’ principles (Article 1). It aims to protect the health and security of human beings, animals and the environment. It also aims to permanently maintain biological diversity and soil fertility, and to allow freedom of choice to consumers. The EU Moratorium represents the will of its people not to be force-fed. It crystallises (as the patent on seeds still does) the worldwide mobilisation of people against the reinterpretation of national security and sovereignty to facilitate the global control by US corporations over resources and markets.
If Europe had not suspended its approvals process in 1998, there would have been some very undesirable consequences, as the indirect effects of growing GM herbicide-tolerant (HT) crops on farmland wildlife would not have been taken into account. There would not have been a requirement for monitoring environmental or human health, consumers would not have been able to make a choice regarding products derived from GM crops and no labelling and traceability requirement would have been introduced.
Food in India is processed variously for consumption. There is the first level of artisanal processing, which has been in existence for many years. Wheat was processed into flour in stone grinders, first operated manually and then mechanically, with minimum power. So, too, with pulses, and oilseeds were similarly cold pressed into oil. As far as snacks and pickles were concerned, they were mostly processed as a home industry under the supervision of women. These activities still continue at various levels: whether for a niche community of aware consumers or for those who can only afford home processing.
At the same time, there is the industrial-scale food processing of wheat and other grains, the polishing of rice, the production of white refined sugar, refined oils and so on. This mode of food processing relies heavily on fossil fuels, chemicals and packaging material made of plastic or aluminium foil.
In 2005, the Indian government drafted a Food Safety and Standards Bill as an ‘integrated food law’, prepared with the intention of being contemporary and comprehensive, ensuring better consumer safety through food safety management systems, while setting standards based on science and transparency and also meeting the dynamic requirements of international trade and Indian food, trade and industry. It soon transpired, however, that the law actually helps to lubricate international trade and the expansion of global agribusiness. In a way, the 2005 Food Safety law legalises the adulteration of our entire food system with toxic chemicals, various additives, food colours, stabilisers and taste enhancers for processed and ultra-processed foods. It reinforces a centralised mode of production over decentralised, more ecological ones, and ignores the most distinctive aspects of India’s food systems: indigenous science, cultural diversity and local economic livelihoods, even though a sizeable percentage of our food is processed naturally and locally for local consumption and sale.
In the early 2000s, a case was filed against Coca-Cola and PepsiCo regarding the presence of high levels of pesticides in their beverages, which led to the creation of a Joint Parliamentary Committee to look into the matter. Their report, as well as other studies, clearly indicated that both soft drink manufacturers were using significant quantities of very harmful chemicals in their drinks to make them more addictive, in blatant disregard of public health. These chemicals included large amounts of phosphoric acid, caffeine high fructose corn syrup, all known to have increased the prevalence of Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD), as well as sugar, ethylene glycol and carbon dioxide. Yet, despite an order by the Rajasthan High Court to disclose the contents of their beverages, both companies refused on the pretext of safeguarding trade secrets. Earlier Prevention of Food Adulteration Acts (PFAs) required companies to disclose the ingredients of all packaged food on their labels. However, in 2004 the Supreme Court stayed the Rajasthan High Court order and Coca-Cola and PepsiCo were let off the hook.
The results of the deregulation of food safety are there for all to see. Instead of being regulated, corporations like Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Kellogg’s and the Gates Foundation are now sponsoring the Annual Conference of the Nutrition Society of India.3
In India’s diverse, decentralised plural economy, a centralised, integrated law is inappropriate on many counts. One law for all food systems is a law that privileges large-scale industrial commercial establishments while discriminating against and criminalising the small, the local, the diverse. It places kitchens and kiosks, cottage and household industries in the same category as the Nestlés, Cargills and ConAgras. Domestic and local consumption, including not-for-profit food provisioning, should not be on par with the import of hazardous GMOs. This unscientific system serves the purpose of disease-spreading, and of unecological MNCs, at the cost of decentralised, plural food systems that are both healthy and ecological, while at the same time destroying millions of livelihoods and millennia of diverse gastronomic traditions.
The Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006 creates a culture of ‘food fascism’. Article 16 (6) of the Functions of Food Authority states: ‘The Food Authority shall not disclose or cause to be disclosed to third parties confidential information that it receives for which confidential treatment has been requested and has been acceded.’
Risk assessment in the hands of centralised, corruptible agencies offers no protection for consumers, as the disease and health epidemic in the US linked to over-processed, industrial foods has shown. Even while the US is at the epicentre of food-related public health crises, the US government works to export its food laws elsewhere, to deregulate the food industry and over-regulate ordinary citizens and small enterprises.
Industrial foods need chemical labs, genetically-engineered foods need genetic ID labs, but cooking fresh dal and roti does not need testing for toxic chemicals and transgenes. The risk and safety standards for lassi (sweet yoghurt drink) in a roadside eatery and a synthetic milkshake at a fast-food chain must be treated differently. In his bestseller, Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser presents a list of the deadly cocktail contained in the artificial flavour of Burger King’s strawberry milkshake, which includes amyl acetate, amyl butyrate, amyl valerate, anethole, anisyl formate, benzyl acetate, benzyl isobutyrate, butyric acid—the list goes on.
Pseudo safety laws prevent any act of private community feeding, such as at church gatherings, for example. In India, there are plural community feeding practices—langar in gurudwaras, zakat in mosques or bhandaras during Hindu prayers—through which thousands of people are fed. Additionally, the livelihoods of chaiwalas and dhabawalas, as well as the entire household and cottage industry, are rendered illegal in food processing, leading to criminalising safe foods while legalising the food crimes of disease-producing agribusinesses.
Pseudo safety laws encourage poverty and unemployment by destroying millions of small-scale livelihoods in food production and processing. A just and equitable food law would recognise that decentralised food economies enhance nutrition, safety, culture and livelihoods. The FSSAI, on the other hand, prejudices indigenous food systems in various ways, one of which has to do with the labelling of GMO foods. It states: ‘All food products having total Genetically-Engineered (GE) ingredients [of] 5% or more shall be labelled.’ In other words, up to 5 percent need not be labelled. This is misleading and unfair as well as in defiance of consumer rights. Dominant international standards do not allow the presence of more than 1 percent of GMOs.
There are many examples in the rules for labelling that are unscientific, misleading and in effect a means of imposing unhealthy industrial foods on Indian citizens.
The proposed rules state that all flour will include a label on gluten. This is irrelevant, as in India there are several local wheat varieties that have very low gluten content, so much so that Monsanto tried to take out a patent (No. 0445929B 1) on the naphal variety. (Navdanya challenged this biopiracy patent, along with Greenpeace and Bharat Krishak Samaj, at the European patent office on January 27, 2004, and won.)4
It is the industrial production of wheat, based on uniformity, combined with industrial processing, which damages its structure and has led to an epidemic of gluten allergies.
Industrial flour, called ‘refined’ and ‘enriched’, is stripped of its nutrients and fibre. Synthetic nutrients and fibres are then added to processed flour. The FSSAI rules have a section on fake fibres which is detrimental to the fibre-rich whole flours of diverse grains in our diets.
‘Dietary fibre’ now includes
We need process labelling that clearly describes the process of production and processing, not an unscientific product labelling based on equating unhealthy foods and healthy foods and concealing the health hazards of fake food.
India, the land of rich biodiversity in edible oils—mustard, sesame, coconut, linseed, groundnut, etc.—is now 70 percent dependent on imports of palm oil and GM soyabean oil. Solvent extraction plants use a neurotoxin, hexane, to extract the oil from soyabean or palm.
The FSSAI equates bad fats which are unfit for eating with good fats necessary for health: ‘“Fat” means total lipids including saturated fat, monounsaturated fat, polyunsaturated fat and trans fat.’
Yet, the world over, trans fats are being removed from food.
The FSSAI unscientifically defines sugars in terms of chemical reductionism, equating good and bad sugar instead of assessing the quality and method of processing: ‘“Sugars” means all monosaccharides (glucose, fructose, etc.) and disaccharides (maltose, sucrose, lactose, etc.).’
However, gur, or unrefined sugar, is very different in the way it is processed (and in quality and health impact) from industrial sugar and fake sugars such as high fructose corn syrup.
According to the World Health Organization, overall, the share of ultra-processed foods in the retail sales of total processed food (essential/staple plus ultra-processed) was 43 percent in 2011 and 36 percent in 2021. It is projected to be 39 percent by 2032.5 It is estimated that consuming these foods encourages people to eat more, consuming ~500 additional calories per day and gaining a significant amount of weight, ~900 grams on average in two weeks.6 Studies found that a 10 percent increase in the consumption of ultra-processed foods can increase the risk of diabetes by 15 percent and lead to higher premature mortality due to cardiovascular diseases.
Most of the chronic diseases of our times are foodstyle, rather than lifestyle, diseases; food-related diseases such as neurological problems, metabolic disorders like obesity and diabetes, cancer, infertility and intestinal problems are on the rise. They are called foodstyle diseases because they are associated with changing diets and the foods we are increasingly consuming—chemically grown and highly processed. How we grow our food, how we process it and what we eat are major ecological determinants of health and disease. Industrially-processed food and a homogeneous, uniform diet lacking in diversity is unable to provide the nourishment that the trillions of cells in our bodies need to perform the diversity of functions that make us mentally and physically healthy.
According to the National Institute of Health,
Heart disease is now the world’s leading cause of death, claiming 17.3 million lives each year.… Latest statistics suggest that in India, there are roughly 30 million heart patients…[of which] 14 million reside in urban areas and 16 million in rural areas… and two lakh surgeries are being performed every year.… India has seen a rapid transition in its heart disease burden over the past couple of decades… [and] atherothrombotic cardiovascular diseases in India will surpass any other country in the world.7
Diabetes is fast gaining the status of a potential epidemic in India with more than 62 million diabetic individuals currently diagnosed with the disease. In 2000, India topped the world with the highest number of people with diabetes mellitus (31.7 million), followed by China (20.8 million) and the United States (17.7 million) in second and third place, respectively. The prevalence of diabetes is predicted to double globally from 171 million in 2000 to 366 million in 2030, with a maximum increase in India. It is estimated that by 2030, diabetes mellitus may afflict up to 79.4 million individuals in India, while China (42.3 million) and the United States (30.3 million) will also see significant increases in those affected.8
Cancer, also a major disease in the country, is affecting rural and urban India alike. The government-run National Cancer Control Programme estimates that there are between 2 and 2.5 million cancer patients in the country at any given point of time. Recent reports suggest that India is seeing one million new cases of cancer every year, and about 1,300 people die each day because of it. Doctors fear that South Asia (India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) could account for nearly 50 percent of the world’s cancer cases by 2040.9 In 2010, 556,400 people across the country died of various types of cancer, according to one study, and the 30–69 cohort, the productive age group, accounted for 71 percent or 395,400 of the deaths.10
Food grown with chemicals affects our health in three ways. First, since it is focussed on a handful of commodities, most of which go towards biofuel and animal feed, it contributes to hunger and malnutrition. Ninety percent of the corn and soyabean produced in the world is used as biofuel and animal feed, not for feeding humans. Only 30 percent of the food we eat comes from large industrial farms; 70 percent is derived from small farms, which use only 20 percent of available agricultural land. Second, since industrial agriculture produces uniform, homogeneous monocultures, it contributes to diseases linked to deficiencies of vital, diverse nutrients. Third, toxics used in agriculture make their way into our food and are a factor in diseases such as cancer.
Herbicides like glyphosate, sold under the brand name Roundup, have been recognised by the WHO as a probable carcinogen; the US state of California is demanding that it be labelled as such. Monsanto’s attempt to block the labelling order was legally defeated. Many regions in Europe are banning its use. Scientists have found Roundup implicated in kidney failure and liver diseases. Sri Lanka has banned Roundup because it was linked to kidney failure.
Only two applications of GMOs have been commercialised—Roundup Ready crops which are supposed to control weeds, and Bt toxin crops which are supposed to control pests. GMOs are associated with major food safety and biosafety issues; for example, the proposed GMO mustard uses genes for terminating fertility, genes for herbicide resistance and viral genes as promoters. No animal feeding studies have been conducted yet; the partial tests that have been done are with surrogate proteins. The unscientific assessment of the safety of GMOs is based on a false premise: ‘substantial equivalence’, which assumes that non-GMO food is equivalent to GMO food, thus creating a fallacy for asserting safety. However, as mad cow disease (BSE, bovine spongiform encephalopathy) showed, while food may be substantially equivalent on the basis of ‘nutritionism’, if it is structurally inequivalent, the consequences can be serious. Mad cow disease was identified as having been caused by ‘prions’—deformed proteins—which became self-infecting agents that spread BSE.11
High fructose corn syrup (HFSC), increasingly being used as a sweetener in industrial soft drinks and by Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, has been identified as being responsible for the rise of Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease. A study in the journal Metabolism12 found that in the 35 years following the introduction of HFCS, the rise in obesity has paralleled an increase in the use of HFCS. It has led to skyrocketing insulin production, while suppressing the response to leptin, which regulates appetite. With the disruption of its regulatory mechanisms, the body begins to store fat and obesity is the result.
Soft drink companies also use colour additives. The artificial caramel colouring in colas is made by heating ammonia and sulphites under high temperatures which produces a cancerous substance called 4 methylimidazole (4-MEI). In 2007, a US government study concluded that 4-MEI caused cancer in mice; and in 2011, a study by the International Agency for Research on Cancer determined that the chemical is a probable carcinogen.
Artisanal coconut and mustard oils are now being recognised as healthy, despite all the pseudo-scientific propaganda against them for decades by the industrial food processing lobby; it has been promoting trans fats by influencing food policy, trade policy and scientific research, and by spending enormous amounts of money on misleading advertisements. Trans fats help increase the shelf life of processed food, allowing it to remain solid at room temperature. According to a 2012 study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, a mere 40 calorie per day increase in trans fats in your diet increases the risks of heart disease by 23 percent. The Centers for Disease Control has also attributed heart attacks to trans fats. It is worth noting that trans fats were originally invented to make candles; Procter & Gamble took out a patent on them and used them to produce cheap food.
The artisanal versus industrialised processing of wheat, salt and lentils, to name a few, offer similar examples of the takeover of small enterprises and localised production by agribusinesses and multinational corporations. The same handful of corporations sell both toxic agrichemicals as inputs in industrial agriculture and pharmaceutical products as inputs in industrial medicine. Disease is a market opportunity for this agro-medical-industrial complex. It is not in their interest to promote internal-input agriculture or health systems based on the science of the body as a living, self-regulating system; nor is it in their interest to understand the links between agriculture and health. Profits are ensured by selling new ‘magic bullets’ which will not cure and may, instead, create new complications.
Ultra-processed food contributes to emissions that destabilise the climate and disrupt the earth’s metabolism. Industrially-produced food is at the root of both the climate crisis and the health crisis. Going further and faster down the resource intensive, energy intensive and disease-inducing path will aggravate both the climate and health catastrophes.
There is an intimate connection between the biodiversity in the soil, the biodiversity of our plants and the biodiversity in our gut, between ecological sustainability and health.
My quantum worldview and ecological perspective have taught me that the principles of non-separability and potential are central to both the quantum and the ecological paradigms. Over the years I have seen the health of ecosystems and organisms as a non-localised symphony in quantum coherence. In this perspective, ecological degradation and disease impair the self-organisation, self-regulation, self-healing and renewal capacity of living systems. In an ecological paradigm, agriculture, food production and health are internal-inputs systems, which have the capacity and potential to produce what they need. The earth, food and our bodies are interconnected living systems; the health of the planet and our health are a continuum.
We are one humanity on one planet, united through biological and cultural diversity. Issues of sustainability and justice are interconnected. Processes that harm the earth harm humans. A healthy planet, healthy ecosystems, healthy organisms and healthy people are all based on diversity, balance, symbiosis. When we respect the integrity and limits of the earth, her ecosystems and species, we are connected through health; when we violate the integrity of living beings and the ecological limits of the earth, we are connected through disease. And when we destroy the biosphere and substitute living processes with fossil energy and fossil industrialisation, we destabilise the earth’s self-regulating mechanism that stabilises climate systems.
Food is the currency of life. It is the connection between us, the earth and other species. We are part of the web of life, which is a food web. The food web weaves the web of life in cooperation and mutuality. Food is the metabolism that connects humans with the earth, with biodiversity and cultural diversity.
When we destroy biodiversity within us, we create chronic diseases. When we destroy the biodiversity of our gut microbiome with industrial food and ultra-processed food, chronic diseases like diabetes and cancer take on epidemic proportions. The biodiversity outside and the biodiversity within us in our gut microbiome are interrelated; destroying one, we destroy the other.
The greater the biodiversity in any ecosystem, the greater its resilience and resistance to disease. This also applies to our gut ecosystem. Biodiversity destruction in the gut microbiome is responsible for inflammation and metabolic dysregulation, leading to many chronic diseases. When our gut biodiversity plummets because of the toxics or deficiencies in the food we eat, health pandemics can emerge—gastrointestinal infections, autoimmune diseases like asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, autism spectrum disorders, obesity and metabolic diseases.
When it comes to exposing the damage that an industrial system does to the planet’s biodiversity, it is necessary to understand the extent to which human beings are part of that same biodiversity and how greatly they share the risks. It is no coincidence that more and more researchers are focusing on the relationship between the loss of biodiversity and an increase in inflammatory diseases. The decline in our immune system’s ability to properly function is associated with the state of health of our microbiome, which is the system of bacteria, viruses, fungi, yeasts and protozoa in our intestines. Also called our ‘second brain’ by scientists, it performs a number of important functions that significantly contribute to the health of our immune system. A poor functioning microbiome, or its lack of diversity, also entails greater risks of developing various neuropsychiatric disorders such as depression, schizophrenia, autism and anxiety. Additionally, recent research has confirmed that the composition and diversity of the microbiome are very important in determining anti-tumour immunity. The fact that the human microbiome is in distress is confirmed by a practice that is becoming widespread in medical circles: namely, the transplantation of faeces, aimed at transferring a healthy microbiome into a patient whose microbiome is no longer functional.
As Salvatore Ceccarelli, international expert in agronomy and plant genetics, explains:
How can we have a diet based on diversity, if six percent of our calories come from just three plant species: wheat, rice and corn? And how can we have a diet based on diversity, if almost all the food we eat is produced from seed varieties that, in order to be legally traded, must be registered in a catalogue that is called a register of varieties; and that, in order to be recorded in this register, must be uniform, stable and recognisable? Between the need to eat ‘diverse’ foods discussed so far, and the uniformity in food products required by laws on crops, there is a clear contradiction.13
Industrial agriculture not only limits the varieties of food —it also places large quantities of food with very low nutritional value in the market.
Nadia El-Hage, former FAO scientist, notes,
The food that is being put on the market today is not of the same quality as before the Second World War; compared to more than 60 years ago, most crops have lost, on average, almost 20% of nutrients with peaks of up to 70 or 90%.14
Junk food and ultra-processed food are contributing to an emerging epidemic of non-communicable chronic diseases; these are now being considered as metabolic disorders and are collectively referred to as the metabolic syndrome (MetS). MetS is a collection of diseases related to metabolic abnormalities, including abdominal obesity, hypertriglyceridemia, low high-density lipoprotein-cholesterol (HDL-C) concentrations, hypertension and hyperglycaemia (which have a strong association with the development of type 2 diabetes), and cardiovascular morbidity and mortality in adults. The prevalence and incidence of MetS is increasing rapidly in children and adolescents and becoming a major public health challenge worldwide.15
The industrial agricultural sector can be defined as one of the principal actors in ‘predatory globalisation’, which prefers to be ranked on the efficiency of capital, rather than on people’s well-being. First of all, this is a political issue, considering that industrial food is produced at high cost, because of public subsidies, yet is marketed internationally through so-called ‘free trade treaties’. Local markets, flooded with cheap junk food, lose their suppliers—and farmers, under the pressure of a contrived productive system, are forced to abandon their land.
Food transformation is a process that accounts for about three-fourths of all international food sales. Healthy substances, such as vitamins, are generally removed, and large amounts of sugars and fats, preservatives, organic solvents, hormones, colouring agents, flavour enhancers and other food additives are normally added in the process, especially when the food has to travel thousands of kilometres and must be transformed to increase its shelf-life. The effects of these additives are often unknown, while their interactions with other substances present in food have not yet been identified.
According to the authors of the Manifesto on Food for Health,16 diets rich in calories but poor in fibres and nutrients, together with high fats, sugar and salt, are associated with high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high blood lipids and body fat. These in turn trigger the pathological processes of inflammation, atherosclerosis of blood vessels and thrombosis, and induce carcinogenesis through epigenetic effects.
When we look at living systems as a whole, disease is treated as a metabolic disorder. The mechanistic medical paradigm sees individual diseases and looks for cures by suppressing and eliminating the distinct disease. Drugs target a response rather than the disease. However, in a systems-health paradigm, different diseases are seen as symptoms of underlying causes: foodstyle/lifestyle-induced metabolic disorders producing mitochondria dysfunction. Metabolic disorders need metabolic strategies. In the context of disease caused by junk food, health can be regenerated by shifting to diverse, chemical-free, fresh or artisanally-processed food.
The ecological health paradigm sees the climate crisis as a disruption of the earth’s self-regulating capacity caused by the destruction of the biosphere. Systems that regenerate biodiversity as well as the biosphere also mitigate climate change and create climate resilience. Diversity is the principle for resilience and immunity. Diversity is also the basis of sustainable, healthy and productive food systems.
1 Annam: Food as Health (New Delhi: Navdanya, 2017), 133.
2 Vandana Shiva, ‘A Law for Food Fascism: Part One’, Slow Food, June 23, 2005, https://
3 Arun Gupta (@Moveribfan), ‘Terrible news…,’ Twitter, November 25, 2023, 3:59 a.m., https://
4 For more, see Vandana Shiva, Origin: The Corporate War on Nature and Culture (Delhi: Natraj Books, 2018).
5 The Growth of Ultra-Processed Foods in India: An Analysis of Trends, Issues and Policy Recommendations (New Delhi: World Health Organization, Country Office for India, 2023), https://
6 Kevin D. Hall et al., ‘Ultra-Processed Diets Cause Excess Calorie Intake and Weight Gain: An Inpatient Randomized Controlled Trial of Ad Libitum Food Intake’, Cell Metabolism 30, no. 1 (July 2019), https://
7 ‘World Heart Day 2015: Heart Disease in India Is a Growing Concern, Ansari’, Press Trust of India, July 13, 2017, https://
8 Seema Abhijeet Kaveeshwar and Jon Cornwall, ‘The Current State of Diabetes Mellitus in India’, Australas Med J 7, no. 1 (January 2014), https://
9 Sumitra Debroy, ‘Cancer Cases in India Estimated to Rise from 14 Lakh Per Year to 20 Lakh by 2040’, The Times of India, November 5, 2023, https://
10 ‘The Cruel Economics of Cancer Care’, Money Control, September 29, 2015, https://
11 Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, https://
12 MyPhuong T. Le et al.,‘Effects of High-Fructose Corn Syrup and Sucrose on the Pharmacokinetics of Fructose and Acute Metabolic and Hemodynamic Responses in Healthy Subjects’, Metabolism: Clinical and Experimental 61, no. 5 (May 2012): 641–51, https://
13 Comment at the meeting of a group of experts in Florence, Italy, in 2018 to draft the Manifesto on Food for Health. International Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture, Manifesto on Food for Health: Cultivating Biodiversity, Cultivating Health (New Delhi: Navdanya /RFSTE, 2019), https://
14 Manlio Masucci, ‘Food for Health: The Right to Health Is to Live Healthy Lives,’ Navdanya International, March 6, 2020, https://
15 Golaleh Asghari et al., ‘Fast Food Intake Increases the Incidence of Metabolic Syndrome in Children and Adolescents: Tehran Lipid and Glucose Study’, PLoS One 10, no. 10 (October 2015): e0139641, https://
16 Manifesto on Food for Health, op. cit.