Panic Nation. Stanley FeldmanЧитать онлайн книгу.
Meat
Whenever I carve a leg of lamb I feel saddened that I cannot cut decent slices as I get near the bone. Often this meat goes to waste. How much better it would be if it could be ‘reclaimed’. It is perfectly good meat. Fortunately, when an animal is butchered, the meat that is left on the carcass, too near the bone, or in too small an area for it to be cut off to make good butcher’s meat, can be recovered by high pressure techniques. This meat is termed ‘reclaimed meat’. It is perfectly good, healthy protein and has long been presented and eaten as corned beef, Spam and doner kebabs. However, when the same reclaimed meat is used by the food industry for mass catering it becomes an object of disgust. The same people who today sneer at the use of reclaimed meat tell us that in wartime Britain, when Spam and corned beef formed a major part of our protein intake, the population was at its healthiest.
It is clear that there is no such thing as junk food. It is a product of non-scientific pressure groups that, out of ignorance or prejudice, try to persuade us we are on the brink of a health catastrophe. The problem is not with the food we eat, but with the lifestyle of ‘junk eaters’.
BY STANLEY FELDMAN
THE MYTH: Non-organic foods are covered in harmful pesticides.
THE FACT: One of the pesticides deemed ‘safe’ by organic producers carries a warning that it is harmful to fish.
As I look back to my childhood, it seems that every summer’s day was sunny and filled with joy. I cannot remember it raining so hard that it spoiled a day out in the country. The food tasted better, the tomatoes were juicier, the strawberries tasted sweet and succulent and the peas that came from the pods were so delicious that many were eaten raw before my mother could cook them. I realise that my memory is highly selective – there must have been rainy days, rotten tomatoes, sour strawberries and worm-infested peas, but somehow things today never seem quite as good as they were in our youth.
It is the same rose-tinted nostalgia that is used to promote organic food. The cult of natural ‘organic food’ is based on a belief that, while the sun may not always have shone in days gone by, the food was better and healthier before the advent of modern farming and horticulture, when the crops were liberally fertilised with manure from animal faeces or rotting vegetable waste, in the form of compost.
This belief has been energetically reinforced by the scare stories of the eco-warriors who have blamed every ill – from heart disease and cancer to global warming, pollution, less biodiversity and the rape of the countryside – on the perceived evils of modern farming.
As soon as one spurious claim is disproved another scare is invented. So vociferous and well funded is the propaganda that they have caused many otherwise sensible people, and some government agencies, to embrace the organic bandwagon, although no one has produced any evidence in its favour. By scaring the public, the organic lobby has created a billion-pound market in the UK for food that is up to 40 per cent more expensive than that produced by conventional farming and from which it is indistinguishable.
The term organic food is in itself misleading. The separation into ‘organic’ and ‘nonorganic’ was based on the belief that some substances contained a life-giving property: these were originally called ‘organic’. In recent times it has come to mean chemicals containing molecules based on a carbon atom. So all food is organic (with the technical exception of water). There is no such thing as inorganic food. Whenever a pressure group resorts to a nonsense name, in order to suggest that it has nature on its side, that it has the monopoly on what is good, or that it is the only path that faithful followers of purity and truth can take, one should smell a rat.
The Soil Association, the high priests of this cult, believe that chemicals, whether organic or inorganic, are bad, a danger to the consumer, and will possibly bring death to the planet. Natural substances, by contrast, are apparently good. Yet all infections are caused by natural, organic bacteria; many organic substances produced in plants and berries, such as the belladonna of the deadly nightshade and the prussic acid in almonds, are highly poisonous; the ‘natural’ copper sulphate that is recommended as an organic treatment for fungal infections is so toxic to marine life that copper-based antifouling of boats has been banned in many countries. If a fungicide is not used and the ergot fungus infects cereal crops, then the unsuspecting organic consumer may end up with gangrene of fingers and toes. In all fairness to the Soil Association, it does permit the use of pesticides provided they come from an approved list. Some have reassuringly innocent names such as ‘Soft Soap’, which turns out to be octodecanoic acid and carries a label warning that it is dangerous to fish.
The main thrust of the argument used by adherents of this cult seems to be that organic fertiliser, by which it is implied that it is produced from animal excreta or rotting vegetable waste, is necessary in order to produce food that is both nutritious and safe. This supposition is difficult to support. Manure is teeming with bacteria, many of which are pathogenic, and a few lethal. Compost rots because of the action of these bacteria, and, while they are in the main less harmful than those in manure, most sensible consumers would be reluctant to ingest them in the produce they purchase.
The root systems of plants can absorb only those nutriments that are in solution. They cannot take up particulate matter. Before the plant can use any fertiliser, organic faeces, rotting vegetable waste or chemical additive, it must first be broken down and rendered soluble in water. This necessitates reducing organic matter to its basic chemical form. It is true that in organic fertiliser these are usually more complex chemicals, but they must be rendered into the same simple basic chemicals in the plant before they can be used to encourage its growth.
There is absolutely no rational reason why all the breakdown products of organic fertiliser should not be supplied in a basic chemical form rather than leaving it to the bacteria in the soil to produce them from compost. At the end of the day, the plant uses both chemical and organic fertiliser in the same way in the same chemical processes that are essential for its growth. The main difference is that chemical fertiliser is produced with a standardised value of its content, and does not contain the dangerous bacterial pathogens present in organic waste.
It was reportedly Prince Albert who started the vogue for using natural, organic household waste to fertilise the kitchen garden at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Prince Albert died of typhoid fever, a disease caused by ingesting food contaminated with the faeces from a carrier who may not have exhibited symptoms of the disease.
The other canon of organic law is the avoidance of known effective pesticides and the preference for naturally occurring compounds such as sulphur and copper-based chemicals to control infestations. This again is illogical. It is based on the belief that the organophosphate pesticides are poisonous and naturally occurring chemicals are not. This ignores the fact that sulphur and copper-based ones are also poisonous. Both organophosphate pesticides and naturally occurring chemicals can be poisonous; it is all a matter of dose. The German-Swiss doctor and chemist Paracelsus (1493–1541) pointed out ‘nothing is without poison; it is the dose alone that makes it so’. When one looks at those parts of the world where pesticides are not freely available (usually because of cost), it is found that over a third of all the food produced is eaten by pests, whereas in the Western world, where pesticides are used, the loss is reduced by 41 per cent (figures from the WHO and UN Environment Programme, 1990).
The level of pesticides in our food is carefully monitored and kept below a very conservative safety level. The chemicals have a short half-life and have not been shown to accumulate in the body. Their level in food is way below that at which it is likely to cause symptoms, even in the most sensitive individual. Although pesticides in food have been blamed for a variety of ill-defined syndromes, including cancers, extensive medical studies have failed to implicate them as the cause of any known clinical condition.