The Army

I've had a lovely weekend with my dad in Enköping, and today I've had a sunny day off from work.

I have mentioned the writer Mats-Eric Nilsson in my blog before and in one of his books, he explains the concept of real foods. It’s also a guide to the foods that aren’t fake in our shops. Since I had to return 'Äkta Vara' to the library today, where I am now, I’d like to share some of his words. I've translated sections and parts into English for you.

“Mankind has throughout history learnt to eat around 80,000 different types of plants and 3000 of these has widely spread around the world. However today, only four – corn, soy, wheat and rice – stand for two thirds of the calories we consume. The astonishing large number of foods in modern grocery shops makes it difficult to see that the actual number of plants in our diet is constantly becoming fewer. The food industry are growing only a tiny group of plants, mainly corn and soybeans, in order to produce their wide offering of processed foods. They are using chemicals for financial reasons – it’s simply too expensive to use natural foods as ingredients.

Most industrial food ingredients are based on a real product (mainly soybean or corn), however it’s usually been taken through such a rigorous chemical process, it can’t really be recognized after the procedure.

Since soybeans are used to produce a huge number of substances for the food factories, the manufacturers want us to believe that the beans are needed to feed the world’s population – it’s even what the news is telling us. However, nobody tells us that a large portion ends up in our ice cream, cookies, crackers, bread, margarine and ready meals. And since a growing population is starting to eat the same foods we are, the demand of corn and soybeans are becoming bigger.”

Nilsson also talks about the vitamins in our foods: The vitamins are hardly extracted from fruits and vegetables. They are created synthetically in China or India, where the environmental laws are less strict than in the West. To take care of the vitamin process and the remaining chemicals from it, would be extremely complex, inconvenient and expensive in the West. So many food manufacturers has moved to Asia, and started polluting the world from this end instead. Plus, it’s much cheaper. So from the industrial food manufacturers point of view, this is more profitable business.

“By adding food preservations which makes the shelf life longer, today’s grocery chains that can buy enormous bulks of fabricated foods for less and store it in their shops, and then they encourage the consumer to continue storing the volumes in our homes too. There’s hardly a consumer who’s asked for this extreme shelf life, so whose idea is this?” Nilsson asks.

Something I noticed whilst reading the book was that Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream brand pride themselves with being climate neutral and caring about the cows. “Instead of milking natural resources, the cows are milked instead”, it says on the pack. It’s a sweet message to consumers. However – the soylecitin – also in the B&J ice cream – is hardly a climate smart ingredient. I suppose the average consumer doesn’t even know what soylecitin is. And I won't bore you with a page long chemistry class...

Nilsson writes:

“Never before have we spent such little time on buying and cooking food,

We have never before used such a small portion of our salaries on food,

We have never before known so little about the food we buy: how and by who they are made or what they even contain.”

Before reading Nilsson’s book I read that soybeans are grown on fields that are so heavily treated with chemicals that the earth becomes useless after three years. Then new land needs to be found for the soybean. The areas are often rainforests. So the world’s soybean crops are obviously leading to deforestation.

Considering we get our drinking water from the world’s forests, as well as much oxygen production, which lead to clean air - it doesn’t seem like a good idea to grow any crops in an unsustainable way. Without water, oxygen and clean air, we can’t exist. Whether or not we’re aware of it in our day-to-day lives, we come from nature and we live in symbiosis with it. Humans have never been separated from nature – we’re the same living and breathing organism. So, by favouring the industrial food business as consumers, we’re slowly killing ourselves.

Sweden is not at the forefront when it comes to the food debate, and we’re behind the UK as a result, what is mentioned on the ingredient lists are not as strict over here. Some of the foods we buy in our shops contain taste enhancers (yeast extracts or E621 – MSG), colourings, and preservations – that aren’t allowed in dog foods!

When a reporter became aware of this, the Swedish “Jordbruksverket” was contacted for a comment - their food expert explained: “The human has her free choice… But animals can’t read the list of ingredients - that's the difference and that is why the rules for animal foods are a lot stricter.”

It sums it up really:

You and I have a choice as consumers. We obviously have a responsibility towards ourselves – to what we put into our bodies - but also to what we feed our children, and what we feel is acceptable for the world that we all live in.

We can all make a difference, we just need to live by the belief that we can.