Did food used to be more natural, and therefore implicitly better, than the food we eat today, which seems to be over-processed and contain lots of additives? In the past, there was no such thing as “organic”, and yet food was more natural? So should we go back to the past and throw away all the technical frippery that we do with food today?
In a LinkedIn post, biomedical scientist Hannah Samira Schmidt talks about precisely this feeling that today’s food evokes in her.
It’s crazy that today we have to label things that used to be the unspoken norm. 👀
Organic food did not used to be called “organic”.
It was just food.
Free-range eggs and poultry didn’t used to be called free-range.
They were just eggs and poultry.
Our grocery stores are full of extremely processed, food-like substances. You really have to search for real food! I would never buy an item again without checking the ingredients list first. Since I’ve become more involved in marketing, advertising has also left me cold.
The joke:
1️⃣ Marketing claims such as “low-fat” suggest “healthy” to the consumer, but in fact they only distract from the actual additives in the product, which are anything but healthy.
2️⃣ The more unprocessed the product, i.e. the less has been done to it, the more expensive it is.
3️⃣ Greenwashing und Healthwashing
👉 Kan we please let nature do its thing again?
Some diseases – some of which we have probably even created as a result of this – would certainly finally decline.
Food is medicine, in case it is REAL food
She is right: there was no such thing as organic in the past, because almost everything was produced naturally. The fertilizer for the fields, for example, consisted purely of animal and human excrement. Entire occupational groups earned their living by collecting excrement, such as horse apples on the streets of the cities, the Kraxenweiber, women who carried a semi-open basked on their backs and into which you could urinate on the street for a fee, or those who collected the sterile urine for washing clothes.
Artificial fertilizer only came with the invention of the Haber-Bosch process at the beginning of the 20th century, which suddenly increased crop yields sevenfold and saved the growing human population from starvation. Preserving food was a problem for thousands of years. The meat of hunted animals could only be preserved to a limited extent and most of it rotted as soon as hunger was satisfied. Fresh fruit and vegetables had to be foregone in winter or on a long sea voyage, even if cured meat or sauerkraut could help with salt and other substances to provide at least a few vitamins and nutrients even in barren times.
And if people didn’t have to struggle with this, then there were also pests and plant diseases that destroyed harvests or made stored food inedible. We can imagine what this meant for the hygienic conditions and thus for people’s health. Life expectancy in 1900 was 40 to 45 years, today it is almost twice as high at around 80 years. Even if we think that there are too many diseases, there are different diseases today than there were in 1900, which in turn are due to the higher life expectancy. Standard diseases that led to mostly certain death or physical impairment in 1900 are now treatable, curable and even almost forgotten. Technical progress has mainly made us healthier, not sicker.
In other words, nature was and is not humanity’s friend. It is constantly trying to kill us in one way or another.
It was only when mankind learned to influence nature and, over thousands of years, to make plant and animal species more productive and resistant through targeted breeding that the sword of Damocles hanging over humanity – starvation or malnutrition – could slowly be averted. Today, for example, fewer of the 8 billion people live in hunger and poverty in absolute terms than in 1900, when there were 1.5 billion people living on the planet. Fewer than 700 million people are affected by hunger and poverty today, compared to around 900 million in 1900.
The reason for this has to do with technological progress, which has largely created good things, but has also brought us some bad things. Sufficient fertilizers have also brought us the discharge of too much fertilizer into our waters. Growth hormones in animals lead to undesirable side effects in humans. Antibiotics fed to animals – to keep them healthy – have led to antibiotic resistance in germs. Preservatives change the taste of fruit and can have harmful effects on the health of consumers.
Yet food today is better, healthier and cheaper than ever before.
The Quality of the Products
The quality of products and services today is almost always higher than our ancestors could expect and demand. A well-known example is artificial light. We don’t even think about it anymore, we take its use so much for granted. And we certainly don’t think about the price when we flip a light switch or ask Alexa to switch on the light. 200 years ago, people spent up to 20 percent of their income on light just so that they could read or work a little longer than nature allowed.
Today it is fractions of fractions of a cent, and that with a much higher quality of light received, as the American economist William D. Nordhaus calculated in a 1998 paper. Note the logarithmic Y-scale.
The lighting methods used up until the 19th century not only provided poor light, they were time-consuming to produce, required constant monitoring to ensure that they did not go out or accidentally start a fire, polluted the air in the room with their stench and led to soot deposits in the rooms and, worse, to lung diseases.
The quality of food at the time also followed in the footsteps of the lighting methods: it was often poor. Traveling was a hazardous game, because either you were malnourished, as sailors often suffered from scurvy, or a stop at an inn could often be a traveler’s last stop if contaminated food was served. And this happened more often than one would think today, as the example of Typhoid Mary around 1900 shows.
The Amsterdam surgeon Arnold van de Laar talks in his book Under the Knife: A History of Surgery in 28 Remarkable Operation about a very common disease that has plagued people for centuries and is comparatively rare today: stomach cancer.
A tumor at the stomach outlet was one of the most common cancers back then. We don’t know exactly why things are different today. It is probably due to the invention of the refrigerator. An important factor in the development of stomach cancer at the outlet of the stomach is the presence of certain bacteria. Repeated stomach infections caused by food poisoning due to spoiled food can cause stomach cancer even at a very young age. In the 20th century, this form of cancer has most likely been suppressed due to dramatic improvements in food production and preservation. In the 19th century, however, the disease was a widespread problem for which surgeons had no solution – which was particularly frustrating. After all, dying of an ulcer at the outlet of the stomach, starving to death in constant pain, vomiting and thirst, is a degrading end. You virtually die as a living corpse.
A decree immortalized on the wall of the Vetter brewery inn in Heidelberg shows just how dangerous bacteria and germs could be:
The mayor announces that beer will be brewed on Wednesday and that people will therefore no longer be allowed to shit in the river from Tuesday.
Groundwater was often so contaminated with faecal germs that the only safe drinks were beer and wine. Even children were given diluted wine, in France even up until the 1950s at school. In other words, for centuries, people were more or less slightly doped up all the time, and that was because they had to protect themselves from tainted water. It was only with the introduction of tea and coffee, where water was boiled to destroy harmful germs, that mankind came down from centuries of drunkenness and sobered up. It is probably no coincidence that this marked the start of the industrial revolution.
It wasn’t just germs and bacteria that lurked around us, food processing also held many a pitfall. Skeletal remains from past centuries often reveal the poor dental health of those buried during their lifetime. I’m not talking about tooth decay, which in the past mainly afflicted the wealthy because they could afford sugar and over-consume it – a problem that was also caused by a lack of dental care. The manufacturing quality of grain mills was often so poor that millstones slowly disintegrated as the millstone rubbed off sand, which then ended up in the flour. Poorer chewing tools in turn led to toothache and poorer chewing and therefore poorer digestion. The stomach had to work harder.
The Price of Food
In the middle of the 19th century, 60 percent of the income of average earners went on food, today it is only 15 percent. Back then, people worked primarily to earn food. Food prices were therefore very important, as even small price increases could mean death by starvation. The Irish wave of emigration due to the potato blight or the beer wars in Germany due to an increase in the price of beer are just some of the countless cases that had a drastic impact on a society.
Not only did people have to work a lot to be able to afford food back then, the quality of the food was also ridiculously poor. You constantly had to be on your guard to find fresh and healthy food. Food poisoning, diarrhea or worm infestation were constant dangers and required a stomach of steel. The lack of quality often led to death.
You can still experience this today, you just have to travel. In Moscow in the 1990s, I once came across a covered farmers’ market where the stench of rotting meat, swarming with flies, stung my nose. I also visited a large market in Bangalore in 2013 and again a few years later, where shoppers had to wend their way between rotten meat in aisles overflowing with blood and fluids. What I had first perceived as pigeons or crows on the ledges of the two-storey market hall turned out on closer inspection to be a line of birds of prey waiting for the opportunity to pick up a dropped piece of meat from the wet floor.
In between, there were live animals in cages and the free-range specimens rummaging through the garbage on the ground. The olfactory experience of the “natural” cycle was stunning, and that was before any of it had been eaten. The photos I took there speak for themselves.
And up until the time of our grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ generation, this was the situation in the local markets. The hygienic conditions were catastrophic. Don’t forget that it was only in the second half of the 19th century that the theory of bacteria and viruses was developed by researchers such as Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. It was only then that it was understood that it was not miasmas – “bad air” – but these little critters that were responsible for many things, and often not good things. And bacteria were everywhere. It is more likely that nature is trying to kill us than that it is benevolent towards us.
New breeding and cultivation methods, as well as how grain, rice, vegetables and fruit are harvested, how they are protected from pests and preserved, and how more yield can be generated, all have an impact on food prices. In their book Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet, authors Gale L. Pooley and Marian L. Tupy present extensive figures that show the price development of raw materials and food over the centuries.
They use the so-called time price, which calculates how much time people had to work in order to be able to afford a certain amount of a product.
Consider Raj in India and Ray in Indiana. In 1960, Raj spent seven hours a day earning the money he needed to buy rice for his meals. Bu 2018, TP of rice had fallen 86.2 percent. Now Raj’s grandson works only 58 minutes to buy his rice. Raj’s grandson has six hours and two minutes to do something else. In 1960, Ray spent one hour a day earning enough money to buy wheat for his meals. By 2018, TP of wheat had fallen 87.5 percent. Now Ray’s grandson works only seven and a half minutes to buy his wheat. Ray’s grandson has 52.5 minutes now to do something else such as working to buy other goods, going to school or just relaxing.
Rice and wheat were no exception. No matter which commodities, foodstuffs or consumer goods we are talking about, we now need less time to work to be able to afford the same amount. The authors found that the average time price of the 50 basic commodities fell by 75.2 percent.
Why is Organic More Expensive?
If organically grown food uses less pesticides, fertilizers, additives and processing, why is it more expensive? Quite simply, the harvest yield is sometimes drastically lower than conventional cultivation methods, as the trade journal Agrar heute reports:
In fruit growing, this amounts to between 3 and 11 percent, organic rapeseed remains at 55 percent of the conventional yield and organic wheat at only 43 percent. Conversely, this means that much more land would be needed to produce similar quantities to conventional farmers
It may mean more organic and animal and species protection, but not necessarily more climate protection. More agricultural land has to be used, which means increased use of agricultural machinery and therefore energy consumption.
Summary
Today we have more, better and cheaper food than ever before. We have a wider choice of food available to us, which we can buy at any time of the year in high quality and at low prices. We only need to go back a few decades to see how much better off we are today than people 50 or 100 years ago.
The new methods used in cultivation, breeding and processing have also created new problems. These need to be solved, because some of these problems are really serious. But wishing we could turn back the clock and revive the “good old days” is wrong. It was not a good time; our memories tend to ignore the disadvantages that we were too young to understand at the time.
How food was grown, bred and processed 50 years ago differs from what we would call “organic” today. It was the state of agricultural technology at the time that determined the state of people’s health at the time. “Food” back then was definitely less “medicine” – to quote the LinkedIn post – than what we eat today.
However, we can always improve the quality of food, but it would be wrong to weep for the past and wish we were back there. Given the choice, Hannah Samira Schmidt and other nostalgics would probably quickly want to return to the 21st century and local food.