Views from the Reading Room

Subtitle: Why the food business is bad for the planet and your health

This is a journalistic exposé, not an academic essay. It has 33 pages of notes and references, most of which don't refer to the author's articles in the Guardian, and no index. It has facts and figures, snippets of science (e.g. what "trans fatty acids" actually means), and anecdata. I'd actually prefer more anecdata; I won't remember the numbers.

It's all about how eeeevil corporations have taken over the food chain. Whenever a familiar eeeevil corporation appears in a new context, she points at it: "Yes, them again". (At least she doesn't feign surprise.)

The last chapter is about signs of hope and what we can do about it, and I wish there was more of that in the rest of the book. By the time I got to the chapter on fish, the book's message seemed to be "We're all doooomed". Not everybody can afford, or even find supplies for, a mostly-vegetarian organic diet with a soupçon of sustainably-fished seafood; one of the anecdotes is about how hard it is to find the sustainably-fished seafood, and how European fisheries policy is even more badly designed than I knew.

I'm with her on the "bad for the planet" part, and also (not making it into the subtitle) the economy, especially the economies of poor countries whose resources are being stolen, and food producers (as opposed to packagers) in this country such as dairy farmers. On health ... there's a lot of interesting things here, but something started to bug me: because it took me a week to read the book and there's no index, I can't check how often she says it, but she uses phrases like "obesity crisis" without defining her terms.

I wouldn't have noticed this before I started hanging out at The F Word, but government campaigns equate "obesity" and ill-health in a simplistic way. When my asthma specialist advised me to lose weight, it wasn't so I could fit into fashionable clothes that I wouldn't wear anyway, but any general talk about "obesity" as a health problem runs the risk of playing into the hands of the size police (and confusing correlation with causation, and otherwise annoying some people who know more about the subject than I do).

Felicity Lawrence definitely isn't saying "people are greedy and lazy"; she's saying that eeeevil corporations have perverted our diet, making it unhealthy in ways that include empty calories and things our bodies don't process properly. I doubt she's signed up to the size police definition "casts a shadow when looked at sideways", but I wish she'd disassociate herself from them more clearly.

Another interesting thing on the health front is omega-3. The proportion of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids in our diet has changed because of industrial food processing, and we're not getting enough omega-3 (found in fish and green leafy vegetables; more easily absorbed from fish). [I'm relying on the book here; I am not a biochemist.] Apparently, omega-3 deficiency leads to a rise in cardiovascular disease (a well-documented feature of modern Western lifestyles, see pun in book title), and also a range of mental health or developmental problems: "depression, dyslexia, dyspraxia and ADHD"; "psychotic, impulse control, and mood disorders"; and treating it can reform violent drunks. "In Christianity fish is a sacred food" (it also has valuable properties in several other religions), and this is why monks ate it on Fridays.

Is fish oil sounding like snake oil yet? I think Ms. Lawrence's pattern-matching algorithm, trained in many years of investigative journalism, might be getting away from her. I'm sure there's something in "This is how our brains are supposed to work; look, there's a component missing right here!", but there may be some noise in this signal.

It could be a useful book, but taking a break or skipping to the last chapter occasionally might be a good idea.