The Elitist Food Movements: Local and Whole Foods

So what gives the elitist food proponents providence over the food we eat? What are their credentials? You know, the people who tell us we should eat whole food, or local food, or whole local food. What does that mean anyway? That whole group of names that mean we are buying food that is better for our bodies? The question today is just that – is that food better for our bodies? As we will see, the answer is – shall we say – complex.

Let me admit, humbly, that I was (maybe still am)  a food elitist. I sang bass in this choir. I still buy from farmers markets and grow my own herbs. But then I realized, local has changed in the world of overnight delivery, and thank goodness for that. Because of that I can purchase lamb from Pennsylvania at Elysian Fields (holistically raised) and I get my salmon that was caught the day before from Alaska.

The various elitist movements are primarily made up of the organic food lobby, some restaurateurs, and a few dedicated adherents. There is no doubt chefs can source food well; they can look at the local farmer’s beets and say, “those look okay.” The market savvy restaurateurs are skilled at convincing people to pay more for their food. People want you to pay a premium for food, and even though they are not doctors, but they are selling you health. Lucky for you we in the world of Culinary Medicine have your back.  

Being local doesn’t mean it’s better. It might be, but if you ask my friend Simon Majumdar (Food Network judge, and someone who has eats food for a living), he would tell you that a mediocre tomato from a local garden is a sin and should not be substituted for a great tasting heirloom tomato just because it is local. Is there more nutrition in one over the other? There is not. What you also don’t know is the pesticide and herbicide levels on the plant raised locally (more on that later).

The restaurants that want to convince you to purchase their food include large chains such as Chipotle, whose “Food with Integrity” program got into trouble when the “local” sourced food had more food-borne illness than the food that was sourced through the conventional means. Chipotle discovered that the more exacting standards used to feed more people resulted in less food borne illness. Or, to put it another way, you are more likely to have a food problem from a poorly sourced, local, “natural” food then you will from the tightly regulated food that those restaurateurs are shunning. 

One of the more ironic twists, most places that claim to be “farm to table” buy products from a wide variety of sources, and perhaps buy a few things locally.  In Season One we had a whole episode of Farm to Fable. Most of Chipotle’s foods were not local. They might extend, like I do the meaning of local? In our podcast Farm-to-Fable we showed a number of restaurants mislead the patrons to think their food is sourced locally. 

Seriously, the lamb from Pennsylvania is amazing, and when it comes to salmon, I get them frozen from Alaska. Since they are vacuum packed they can be placed in sous vide at 130 degrees, and then since they are fully cooked it’s easy to remove the skin and bones. While it is in the sous vide, cook some diced carrots, celery, onion, ginger, and garlic and add that to the salmon with an egg, making a salmon patty and searing it. There really is no better way to fix salmon (unless you catch it).

The “natural” label has no meaning. “All natural” is a meaningless label designed for the “eye” appeal to consumers. For this reason, Consumer Reports has a petition asking that this label be banned from food.

Using Fear and Disgust to Sell Food

What the food elitists sell is not science, but psychology. Disgust is one of the basic emotions of the human brain, and it is rather easy to generate disgust about food, a primitive instinct that resides in us all. No doubt years of evolution taught our brain that food that looks bad, smells bad, or tastes bad is not a good thing. 

Modern food folks want to use that notion of disgust to sell you their food. Imagine being told the food you eat will cause cancer, or heart disease, or is polluting the earth. The food is “unnatural” or is not “organic” or was grown on a “factory farm.” Now imagine someone telling you that if you buy from them, because they have vetted the best sources, the food will be safe and provide longevity. Who wouldn’t want to spend the extra dollars for that?

I love food- I want them to tell me it is delicious.

In an era when books are written about food companies increasing fat, sugar, and salt to sell products, and obesity is increasing, there is plenty of room for people to imply that “their” food is better, that they are looking out for you, and trust them. Who wouldn’t want to support a local farmer, or be in favor of biodiversity, or have food that has lower levels of harmful chemicals? Who doesn’t like a photograph of a beautiful carrot taken from a local farm? In fact, what they are selling you is expensive food with no added nutrient value.

Whole vs Fortified Foods

Whole foods are the best. Right? Everyone agrees about that. It is what nature, or God, intended for us to eat. Read any food or health website, watch any food show; read any food blogger, and they will confirm that you should eat only fresh, whole, and preferably local foods.

We have extended that to now we want fresh, whole food that is locally grown, and organic, and sourced properly without pesticides, and free from GMO. Food is a matter of politics, and politics is policy, and policy and subsidies mean what is cheaper and what is available is important. Or is the orthorexia showing up again? Is there data to back the whole food claim?

Celebrity chefs like Tom Colicchio are growing their own food, much like Bern Laxer (of Bern’s Steak House) did years ago. Colicchio will advocate for GMO labeling, local grown, fresh, and for food policy being an open discussion. You may remember Colicchio was called out by one of his contestants on Top Chef for not having 100% grass fed beef (his steaks are finished with genetically modified corn in a feed lot).

The irony of this food movement is that it’s not based in current science; it might be based on some old science. The discoveries about how whole rice and citrus decreased nutrient deficiencies are partially responsible for the current belief that we need “whole foods.” But the data doesn’t support whole foods completely, nor can we rely upon whole foods to feed a hungry planet.

Whole Foods Grown on Amazing Soil

Nowadays we hear about how foods grown in good soil within an ecosystem involving herbivores eating grass and pooping nutrients will provide a sustainable and delicious food source for people. It is on this basis that some farmers work today; and the author Michael Pollen describes this as what our food source should be. He has lovely words to say about Polyface Farm, a family owned, multi-generational, pasture-based, beyond organic, local-market farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.

Of course, American agriculture started out this way. Here is the catch: the most beautiful of environments do not mean the foods grown on them will meet our nutritional needs.

You can imagine the first settlers of Michigan and Minnesota. Farmers, with a chance to get land, homesteaded the land and made a living. The rich, dark soil was covered by a rolling sea of prairie grass as far as the eye could see. 

The early settlers didn’t know the geologic history. How just 25,000 years ago the land was covered with glaciers, frozen and inhospitable to a farm. They would not have guessed that this land was excavated by the glacier retreats. Those glaciers retreating ground those rocks down, making soil and leaving behind water. That it wasn’t an ocean, but a lake, and that left soil..

The soil left from the glacier retreat was perfect fodder for grasses and some small trees. The trees would compete with the grass for sunlight. The Midwest’s summer storms, like today, had lightening that would ignite fires. The fires would eliminate the trees and the shrubs leaving the prairie grass to grow.

Grazing on the grass were the bison, providing a perfect ecosystem for topsoil. You can imagine how nutrient-rich bison poop is. Under that grass was the most fertile land you could imagine—enough to grow the most amazing crops. It wasn’t easy to get to. The grasses were waist high and the root system was thick and rich. But the effort paid off. Underneath those roots was the best soil in the world, from a perfect ecosystem of grass, creatures, and nature.

When we talk about inhabiting other planets, we worry about how to feed people. This must have been on the minds of settlers, as they would head west in the Americas. What they found was the most fertile fields on earth. Quickly they began to plant, and from those plants came not only the food that would sustain their own uses, but crops to sell to others from wheat to corn. From that soil came trees with some of the most amazing apple varieties the world has seen.

What the settlers didn’t know was that despite the bounty of whole foods, in the soil a certain mineral was in poor supply—iodine. This was probably since the original land was a part of a large lake and not an ocean. But they did notice a change in their children. The children growing up eating those delicious crops often developed lumps in their necks, called goiters. As time passed the goiters would grow larger and larger—sometimes so large they would make it difficult to breathe or swallow, and some people would have to undergo surgery to remove them.

The goiters, it turned out, came from a lack of iodine.

In the late 1800s, operations on goiters were dangerous, being so close to the esophagus and the trachea and carotid artery—such large masses that obscured the anatomy of the neck. Even today, with modern surgery and techniques, massive goiters represent a dangerous operation. But there was one group of surgeons who was working hard and perfected “safe thyroid surgery.” Charlie Mayo and his brother, founders of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, removed a massive goiter in 1890, and by 1904 reported their experience with forty patients with large goiters. Before Charlie Mayo died he had performed thousands of thyroidectomies. This was all because the land in Minnesota, like in Michigan, and so many other places in the Middle West, was deficient in that one essential micronutrient—iodine.

Once it was discovered that these goiters were a result of a lack of iodine, the question became how to get the iodine to the people. 

The initial idea was to provide iodine drops for kids in school, and then someone saw how they supplied iodine in salt licks to animals. Looking at the salt licks, a chemist came up with a novel idea. Why not put the iodine in salt, because everybody uses salt in almost every meal? Giving iodine drops for the kids in school wouldn’t solve the goiters of the kids who had dropped out to run the family farm, or the adults who suffered from the goiters. So why not fortify a staple food item, since goiters were a universal problem in the Middle West. I can just see if this were to happen today, someone would raise an alarm and talk about the evils of iodine, how toxic it is.  Iodine is, like all chemicals, including water, toxic at a certain level, but like many chemicals this one is a micronutrient, and essential. With today’s internet I’m sure someone would be posting petitions to stop fortification. Fear of food, a perfect way to get more internet hits.

The search began to find the right amount of iodine to place in salt so as not to be toxic and not to affect taste. The food scientists in Michigan perfected it, and within ten years after iodine was introduced in salt there had been an eighty percent decline in goiters. Key to the fortification was cooperation between the public health workers and industry. Iodized salt became a marketing standard, and no federal laws were needed to demand iodination of salt. The only current FDA requirement is that salt be labeled as containing or not containing iodine.

The fortification of food by adding micronutrients began because the most beautiful soil in the world could not produce food that would provide all the micronutrients a human requires.

To solve another problem—rickets—vitamin D fortification of milk came quickly on its heels. The clinical manifestation of diseases such as rickets is easy to see in children. It isn’t that adults don’t obviously manifest them; it’s because children grow rapidly, and if they lack the essential micronutrients it’s seen in disease quickly. But even adults were deficient in vitamin D (like they are today), so why not put it into milk? In those days it was fashionable for everyone to drink milk with every meal, and it was delivered daily. It was also more palatable than children taking teaspoons of cod liver oil (try cod liver oil sometime if you wish to punish a child for some misdeed—I promise it will take a child who might end up in a life of crime and straighten them out).

In the 1930s, vitamin B enrichment of flour came after it was noted that the American diet relied upon grain for one-fourth of its calories, and to get enough vitamin B an American would have to eat large amounts of fruits, potatoes, vegetables, and milk.  Sounds a bit like today; many will advocate that if people eat enough whole foods they can stem the tide of nutrient deficiency. The difference is that today Americans rely on more grain-based foods than ever. While eating a diet of those amounts of whole foods might be possible, vitamin B fortification was proposed as a way to provide a “safety margin” for nutrition. What ultimately helped was the effort during World War Two, and the campaign from the baking industry with such sayings as, “The extra vitamins and minerals in enriched white bread help restore energy… to tackle your war job.” Still, laws were required to mandate enrichment of flour. The role of fortification in the US led to elimination of pellagra (niacin deficiency or Vitamin B3) in the United States.

Perhaps as an unintended consequence of the desirability of purposeful enrichment, some companies have used fortification as a marketing campaign while not showing a need for it. Calcium enrichment by industry in the 1980s was done without any requests from the medical community and was done to increase market shares of beverages. It worked. Most orange juices today are pointlessly “enriched” with calcium.

The advantages of processed foods are portability, stability, and a long storage life. Micronutrients were what chemists in the first half of the twentieth century were isolating in order to supplement food. It ushered in the golden age of biochemistry and a slew of Nobel prizes.

Micronutrient chemistry is complex, and how those micronutrients work in biochemistry makes medical student’s heads swim. (There are some of us nerds who love those biochemical pathways.) Sadly, too many experts simplify the treatment of micronutrient deficiencies by saying one needs more “natural” foods. I doubt there is any farmer’s market today that could grow the beautiful vegetables that led to the goiters in the Middle West. Simplification of biochemistry led to the pendulum swinging to the false logic of deficiencies as the source of all disease, and renewed the notion that food could be medicine. This also led to the rise of pseudoscience for people who wouldn’t take the time to understand the complicated biochemistry of vitamins or physiology, but would take the “kernel” from these stories to make fortunes preying on people who sought “natural cures.” Oddly, in addition to leading to the persistent belief in whole foods it spawned a new industry in selling vitamins and supplements by those same individuals.

Vitamins are now put back into processed food, which creates fortified foods. The food industry does this with breads, cereals, juices, and infant formula. Vegans are urged to take advantage of fortified food (especially grains) in order to get the micronutrients that they lack when they refuse to eat meat.

In spite of advancing the science of processed foods to fortify them with known micronutrients, there is the persistent belief that there is an almost magical benefit to eating whole foods that are naturally rich in the essential ingredients, beyond what they can be fortified. This has led to the “slow food” movement, and to the persistent idea that if you are not eating the “local sourced” or “farmer’s market” food that you are doing something evil to your body and to the planet. The “elitists” need only to look at nutrient-poor soil, where you can still grow lovely looking crops that are void in some micronutrients, such as we saw in the Midwest and iodine deficiency. As almost all the available agricultural land is being used, soil nutrient depletion has become a major problem. Still, the thought that whole foods can supply nutrition without fortification persists. Some would propose that whole foods have some magic that science has yet to discover, such as new micronutrients, or it may be that how these various ingredients are presented to our bodies makes a large difference in long-term health. In spite of no evidence, such claims persist and are common. The elitism of food, and an almost religious dogma about how to eat and what to eat, are two centuries behind the times.