A review of Thomas F. Pawlick's book, subtitled "How the Food Industry is Destroying Our Food Supply -- And What You Can Do About It"
I made the mistake of picking up Thomas F. Pawlick’s book, “The End of Food” (2006, Greystone Books), with the intention only of leafing through it quickly, because I was already involved in another book. I say “mistake” because, from the moment I began browsing the pages, I could not put Pawlick’s book down. The other book would have to wait.
“The End of Food: How the Food Industry is Destroying Our Food Supply – and What You Can Do About It” presents a thoroughly researched, at-times funny, at-times angry, disturbing, illuminating and wholly engrossing case study of everything that is wrong with what we eat today. From the unnatural, bottom-line-driven ways in which crops and animals are raised, to the overwhelming number of non-food substances – some, like genetically modified organisms or trans-fatty acids, added deliberately; others, like salmonella, listeria and E. coli, the accidental byproducts of the heedless quest for speed, uniformity and cost-efficiency – in our food, Pawlick persuasively paints a picture of a food system gone short-sightedly and unwholesomely awry.
Pawlick’s foray into the dysfunction of modern food begins simply and humorously, with the innocent purchase of four tomatoes at a local supermarket:
“I wanted to make a salad, a simple thing, just lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, some parsley, add a can of tuna, and toss it in vinegar and oil: a quick meal, so I could get to work on the stuff I’d brought home from the office. But when I went to slice the tomato, it was too hard,” Pawlick writes. All three others prove the same. “Oh well. Put them back on the counter. In a day or two they’d be ripe enough. But a day or two later, they weren’t. A week later, they were still hard. So I put them on the windowsill, directly in the sun, to ripen. Two, three days went by, then a week. Still hard.”
So Pawlick sets off on a mission to find out why those tomatoes resembled red tennis balls more than tasty, juicy salad ingredients. He takes his readers along for each progressively more alarming discovery: that the “variety” of produce available in stores is only a tiny fraction of the different types once grown in North America; that the fruits and vegetables we eat have almost all declined in nutritional value over the past 40-plus years; that the wholesome, “farm-fresh” eggs we buy come from debeaked birds packed 50,000 to 125,000 in a single shed, their eyes and lungs burning from the ammonia rising out of their waste, their bodies diseased and depleted of calcium from the abnormally high number of eggs they’re stimulated, with medications, to lay.
Fortunately, though, Pawlick doesn’t tell only horror stories. He offers a message of hope in the form of, as he calls it, “acts of subversion.” Grow your own food, he urges, buy locally grown and sustainably raised foods, avoid participating in the dysfunctional system offered as the system of choice, make food a sacred, socially bonding thing again, not something to be consumed as quickly and as cheaply as possible.
“Food is not just something you jam into your mouth and swallow fast to prevent starvation. It is the basis of social interaction,” Pawlick writes. “Pressed by the demands of work and daily cares, we may not always be able to give this ritual its due attention. But it should be given much more regard than it is in our present culture. To make the neglect of food a habit, its production a mere conveyor-belt, assembly line routine measured in some corporate ledger book, and the eating of it a peripheral event to be gotten through quickly, is to make it a habit to forget what makes us human.”
Wise words indeed, and a wiser guide to living – and eating – better.
(Click here to read a sidebar with suggestions for better food choices from "The End of Food")
