Broken?

 

I've been hearing a lot about our broken food system lately and haven't responded because I've been a little confused over the panic.   

It seems at the very least to be hyperbolic, and at most, a counterproductive and misinformed characterization of something somebody never actually understood in the first place.  Here is every article on 'Our Broken Food System': 

This one issue is happening.  This other person had this horrible or unfortunate thing happen. Our food system is clearly broken...

Major supermarket chains moved out of Detroit(gee, I can't imagine why...).  You can't get fresh tomatoes in this one place.  People still get food poisoning and people still die from it. We have fat people!  Did you hear me?? They're faaaaat!  Our food system is clearly broken.

I've had quite a bit of car trouble in the past year, but I don't flatly declare that automobiles are inherently designed wrong.  The thing is that people have their pet cause and that cause must compete with someone else's wacky theory, so they all must hitch their wagons to the 'Our Food System Is Clearly Broken' meme in order to make their pet cause seem relevant.

Our food system is not broken, but there is certainly room for improvement. Let's start with the issues I named; lack of access(food deserts), food safety, and obesity.

Yes, Grocery stores have left Detroit, but do you blame them?  It's a business and not a charitable organization, despite what you would be led to believe after watching Extreme Couponers.  There is a ton of overhead in running a grocery and you need a diverse group of customers to sell through the stock on the shelves while minimizing what they call 'shrink', which is waste from spoiled unsold, or out of date items.  This is a community problem, though, and not a sign of some foodocalypse.  What you should be seeing there are community gardens and farmer's markets popping up to fill the demand, if there is a demand.  Of course, they may have to deeply discount their overpriced food, but you'll never hear the foodies complain about that... it's always the big ominous corporations that gauge the common man.

Consumers also tend to get what they demand.  It's not unheard of for convenience stores to carry ripe fruits, some ripe veggies, and fresh frozen veggies or canned veggies.  That probably isn't good enough for modern Food Hysterics that believe organic food has greater nutritional value, but these are poor people, and they can't afford your snooty, over-priced food anyway.  It may be a challenge, but it is technically possible to get complete nutrition from 'C' stores and quick service restaurants.  As the city recovers and businesses start to return, so will grocery stores.  

 As far as food safety goes, it's been increasing steadily since the mid to late 90's.  We have the safest food supply in the world.  What we are outraged about and base a claim that 'Our Food System Is Clearly Broken' on, is the 1% to 2% that still has issues.  I agree that we should never stop improving in this area, but you are beyond delusional if you think that we will ever be 100% safe.  That is impossible under any system.  Even if you could theoretically guarantee 100% safety of all food that leaves food producers and processors, you still have ourselves to blame for poisoning each other.  We routinely paw at lunch meat in our refrigerators with hands we didn't wash, and the cold environment selects for things like listeria, which causes miscarriages in pregnant women.  We have manly men that insist on eating medium rare hamburgers.  We have raw foodists... and well, I really don't need to say anything more about them.

But hey, Sam, what about the fatness!?!  Look how fat everyone else is.  Hey, here's a fat picture of you I found in a Google image search, enjoy your shame, fatty!  Well, there are quite a bit of fat people in this country and I'm certainly no exception.  This is due to eating too many calories and not exercising enough, creating a caloric imbalance that resulted in steady weight gain over the years.  What it wasn't, was a some vast conspiracy to fatten America by the food industry.  How can I be so sure?   Well, the food industry makes Hot Pockets, but they also make Oatmeal, and veggies.  We have thin people that eat hot pockets and we have fat vegetarians.  You can lose weight eating potatoes, or snack cakes, or even McDonald's.  It's our choices, actions, and genetics that determine our waistline, not some evil cabal among major players within the food industry.

I've heard other arguments claiming that 'Our Food System Is Clearly Broken', like the fact that we don't have a regional food system and the unsustainable number of food miles that our groceries travel.

  Those assertions are either untrue or misleading, depending on the argument.  Take a look at breweries, bakeries, and dairies for example.  Anheuser-Busch has 12 breweries spread across the U.S.  Kroger has more than a dozen creameries and dairies in the U.S. as well as several bakeries.  McKee and Bimbo also have many bakery facilities.  In the meat industry, you find poultry, beef, and pork processors in every part of the U.S.  Regional food?  Yeah, we've got that.

Food miles and our carbon footprint is a legitimate concern, but the issue is distorted by people who barely understand it.  Let's take an honest look at the buy local movement and economics.  Advocates say that by supporting small, local farms, we can better impact the community.  Instead of going to the hypermarket to buy your peppers and tomatoes, you decide to go to your local farmer's market.  You feel the food is better, the economy is better served, and you are doing your part to reduce the carbon footprint.  The farmer you buy your tomatoes and peppers from brings about 30 lbs of each in his pick-up truck, along with his table, tent, and a chair.  He lives nearby, only 12 miles away and gets 12 mpg out of his truck.  You buy $6 worth of veggies and drive home.  Ok, he spends 2 gallons of gas to transport 60lbs of vegetables.  The semi that delivers the produce order to the hypermarket traveled several hundred miles to make the delivery and probably got 6mpg.  

So at first glance, it seems that the semi has made a much bigger impact on the environment, but did it really?  Let's assume the semi brings 1,000lbs of produce for a total round trip of 600 miles and gets 6mpg.  That means that each pound of produce at the hypermarket is responsible for .01 gallons of fuel.  The farmer's produce is responsible for .03 gallons of fuel per pound, or 3 times the amount of fuel per pound.

Now let's take a look at the economic impact.  In the community, the local market pays more because the money goes directly to the farmer, but is that really a greater economic benefit? Stay with me here... ok?  When you buy your produce at the farmer's market, you support the local gas station, shops where the farmer buys his stuff, and the help he may or may not pay.  When you buy from the hypermarket you support, the store employees, waste management services, utilities that the grocery uses, the driver that delivered the produce, the truck stop he fueled up at, the distribution center he picked the goods up from, the distribution center employees, the growers that sell to the produce buyer, the grower's local grocer, gas station, staff, places he/she shops, etc.  While the farmer's market certainly concentrates the funds from your purchase, the broader system supports many more jobs much more efficiently.

We have challenges every day when dealing with food.  We need solid regulations as well as a well staffed regulatory agency to ensure safety and to make sure all the major/minor players are playing by the rules.  We have problems that occur that we must deal with from time to time and long term goals we must work towards.  That in no way means 'Our Food System Is Clearly Broken'.  Don't buy into that doomsday speak, because it simply isn't true.

Volume

I thought I would share an analogy I've crafted in regards to eating and weight gain. It's one of the last things I haven't already written about so I can bring you people a new blog without repeating myself.

Imagine you have a day off and you decided to listen to some music while you do something else, like clean the house or rearrange your bedroom.

So you turn on the stereo/music choice channel/iTunes to a song you like, perhaps as part of a playlist.  You're really feeling the tunes so you turn it up a bit as you head bang and sweep or move your bed from one side of the room to another.

Next track is even better than the first so you turn it up a little more.  You're loving the tunes and getting things done.  It's a great day for you.  From here, you get a little more excited after every 3 or 4 songs and kick the volume up a notch.  

Later in the afternoon, your girlfriend/wife/boyfriend/husband/partner comes home and they are covering their ears.  'It's too loud!', they yell as they turn down the sound.  The problem now is that you can't hear it, so you turn it back up.  Eventually, the volume finds it's way back to where it was before.  Once again, the significant other turns the volume way down, but you complain that you can't even hear the music now and he/she just sort of gives you a raised eyebrow, 'Really??'.

Turning the volume up slowly is really how many of us increase our caloric intake.  You don't wake up one day and consume twice the calories.  If you do, you feel way too full and sluggish, and you don't overdo it the same amount the next day.  Imagine that you have a big lunch, but a normal dinner, and you follow this up with a little more food.  Then every few days or every other week, you reach a new peak for eating, slowly turning up the volume.

OK, so now is when the partner walks in and turns down the volume.  Instead of not hearing the music, with food, and you're still really hungry.  You can put it off for a couple days, but when you give in to hunger, you give in big, cranking the volume up to where it had been.  Imagine what would happen in my volume analogy if the partner walked in and turned the volume down by just a notch barely noticeable to the person listening to the music?  Then a few minutes later, he/she turns it down just a little bit more.  This is far more effective and works in the opposite way that turning the volume up slowly works.  Eventually, you'll be comfortable with a volume so low that the partner walks in and says he/she can't hear it and turns it up.

What too many people do is reach a breaking point where they just blame everything, and therefore, banishes everything.  They say no more meat, no more sugar, no more fruit, no more white foods because some journalism professor told them it was the problem.  So they turn the volume all the way down.  But none of us gained all the weight/fat in a day and our appetites are much stronger than our long term goals for body size.  So we fail and the yo-yo pattern begins.

A couple months back, I made the leap and cut regular pop, switching to diet in the home.  It's just a small step.  I didn't do this because hfcs is the devil or any weird conspiracy theorists explanation... and I didn't banish regular pop entirely.  When out to eat, I'll get a regular pop if I want, but I only buy the diet version for home.  I singled this out as a starting point because calories from pop are the most empty and easiest to replace.  I was drinking at least 3 cases a week which is 36 cans X 170 calories for Mtn Dew or 36 cans X 150 calories for Pepsi.  That works out to 6,120 - 5,400 calories a week... or 1.54 - 1.74 lbs a week.  It's a start and I'm not suddenly trying to run 10 miles a week and drastically cut portions, it's small steps, turning the volume down a little at a time. Next level will be adding some exercise or making a rule about only getting small sized combos when I get takeout.  Again, small steps.  Let me also say that this doesn't mean that you can't ever go to a buffet or have a big meal again.  You just take it easy the day of the meal and the day after, and in the context of that week, you are still ok.

So that's my analogy as well as where I am.  What you can do if you are what Kevin Smith calls normies - normal sized people - is not turn the volume down very far on someone else.  If you doubt me, try the volume experiment yourself.  Turn the volume all the way up and see how well you like it vs. turning the volume up slowly.  Also, don't snicker or mock fat people in public.  This one is huge... pardon the pun.  Ever wonder why you don't see fat people out running or at least walking?  Well, for one, they don't make tasteful athletic wear for big people(that's a whole 'nother blog) and second, they get laughed at and develop social phobias as a result.  So don't drastically adjust the volume, and be supportive.  See a fat person at the gym... give a high five... smile... spot them on the bench... give pointers on proper lifting technique... make a friend and stop shunning them because they are becoming us.

Creating Evil.

When you hear advocates for sustainable ag and organic production talk about what they do, you are left with the impression that conventional farmers do not do those things.

If you click the title to this post, you'll be directed to a WaPo article by Eric Schlosser, Author of Fast Food Nation and co-producer of Food Inc.  In the article, Schlosser writes a rebuttal to foodies being called elitist.  Within that rebuttal, Mr. Schlosser makes several broad statements about food and ag.  He says that modern ag is, 'overly reliant on monocultures, pesticides, chemical fertilizers, chemical additives, genetically modified organisms, factory farms, government subsidies and fossil fuels'.

Eric Schlosser wants the public to believe that modern agriculture doesn't use crop rotation, no-till, cover crops, wind breaks, grass waterways, etc.  He paints the picture of 1 big, monolithic building run by an evil villain whose only goal is to poison children.

I knew about crop rotation, no-till, grass waterways, etc, before I ever knew what organic was.  His charge against conventional ag is incredibly misleading, considering that organic farms also use pesticides, fertilizers, fossil fuels, and government subsidies.

I spent many years of my youth on a farm and my college education is specifically designed to give me the training to run a food manufacturing facility.  Given that, I have never seen a 'Factory Farm'.  This is meant as an expletive that is all too often said by people who aren't educated enough to recognize what they are looking at in a large operation.  Of course, ignorance leads to fear, and ultimately, name calling.

Large operations have insanely huge input costs.  To control those costs, farmers have invested in precision agriculture in the past 15 years.  Many tractors now have in cab computers, gps systems, and auto-steer.  Soil samples are taken all over the field and plotted with gps so variable rate spreaders can be used so the farmers don't waste a drop of the increasingly expensive fertilizer.  GM crop varieties reduce the amount of pesticides needed, which also means that farm equipment is run for less hours.  This means reduced consumption of fuel lowered maintenance costs over the life of the equipment.

The farm isn't the only place Eric Schlosser has fostered the view point that everyone else is evil.  He also takes several shots at the food industry.  He makes reference to consolidation among meat packers and then likens it to the climate that existed when The Jungle was written.  It's as if having more owners would magically improve the safety of the world's safest food supply.

He talks about the food and ag system being centralized.  While some companies only have one plant, most food companies set up plants in different areas of the country... you know... in regions.  Of course, this must be a lie if Mr. Schlosser insists that our system is centralized and if foodies all call for a regional food system.  Kroger is one of the nations largest grocer's and has it's own manufacturing, named Kroger Manufacturing.  Kroger Manufacturing has bakeries, dairies, and various other facilities spread all over the country.  In all, Kroger Manufacturing has over 40 facilities where food is produced.  That doesn't seem very central to me.

Mr. Schlosser mentions how sick everyone is getting due to our very unsafe food supply... actually, he only mentions children, which is kind of cowardly if you ask me.  He fails to mention that you can't go anywhere else in the world and find safer food.  He makes a mention of pesticide residues and how bad that is for kids, but leaves out the part where residue limits are set so far below the amount that can make people sick, that it's virtually impossible to get sick from the residues. For instance, a child would need to eat 154 servings of apples in one day to get sick from the highest amount of residue allowed in apples by the USDA.  To calculate your own limits, go here.

Foodies get called elitist because they advocate an antiquated method of farming that, if implemented, would leave a large portion of the planet without food(hunger is already a huge problem throughout much of the world).  Any volunteers to never eat again?  No?  Hmm.  They also scoff at how little we pay for food as a percentage of our income, which is an indicator of economic health, not personal health.  Ethiopians pay a huge amount of their income(for those fortunate to have incomes) for food and they are starving.  Many foodies brag about how much more they spend for food.  Sound elitist?  Yes.  The cost of food didn't make us fat, our abundance of calories did.  We're still wired to eat and screw as much as possible, so it takes a fair amount of education to get people to willfully waste calories by exercising and not eating so much.  The elitist solution is to make food even more expensive for the poorest people in this country.

Agroecology: Welcome To The 1800's.

Paula Crossfield from Civil Eater posted a story in the Huffington Post which references a UN study that claims to solve the challenges of hunger in an organic manner.

I suggest you all read the HuffPo article, then read the study.  What follows is an analysis of that study.

Allow me to decode this report for everyone:

*Eliminate animal feed and use those inputs to make more human food. - This is entirely unrealistic, especially since it advocates feeding animals the scraps of food we don't want.  Basically, there won't be enough food for the animals, so there will be less of them.  Meat will be a delicacy reserved for the wealthy.

*Revert back to farm labor of the 1800's when people had to work all day to barely produce enough food for their families and caloric intakes were between 1,000 and 1,500 kcal/day.

*Sell all the food locally... meaning that everyone has to be a farmer.   -  The few that aren't farmers will pay huge premiums for the labor intense, niche market food.  This also means you have to eat the food that is grown where you live.  That could be rice or that could be cassava.  Don't like either?  Move... I guess.

*Spend more money and research on plant breeding, but singles out 'industrial ag'.  -  This is a thinly veiled knock on fertilizers, pesticides, and biotech.  Replacing all that will be the way we used to breed crop varieties... when we were all starving.  Breeding desired traits into crops using conventional methods does yield the same results as biotech... except it takes much longer.  Years longer.

*In place of fertilizers, which add nitrogen to the soil, they advocate natural means... of adding nitrogen to the soil.  -  Of course, the natural methods will work(it's nitrogen too) but not as efficiently.

This whole report reads like a fantasy wish list written by a few activists without any regard for reality.

To sum up the plan...
Everyone grow organic since organic costs more money and farmers will make more.
More people will then be needed to farm this way and we'll need much more farms.
Unfortunately, we'll still be short of food so the only animal production that can be tolerated is animals fed the scraps of food we don't eat.
The rest depends on magic, apparently.

This couldn't have been written by agronomists and crop science experts.

There are some good things in here.  For instance, they advocate the use of ponds and nitrogen fixing trees.  They do allow for some fertilizer use where organic methods are unavailable.

The worst of what this plan does, however, is tie poor countries to subsistence level farming so that they may never develop and grow wealth.

An Example Of How Food Hysterics Reason.

Mark Bittman wrote an NYT piece about McDonald's new fruit and maple oatmeal that was easily one of the dumbest attempted take-downs of a food item I have ever seen.

It was very Fox News-ish in how it conveyed facts without context.  By the time people figured out the whole truth? Damage done.

And damage was undoubtedly the intent here.  Sometimes it's foodists crapping all over whatever seems to be popular at the moment, but lately attacks are usually nothing more than thinly veiled anti-corporate vitriol.

The way Food Hysterics bring about a story can be understood in two recent examples; one example being Mr. Bittman's critique of McDonald's fruit & maple oatmeal... or rather, fruit & maple oatmeal's creator - McDonald's, and the other being Michael Jacobson's HuffPo piece on caramel coloring.

Food Hysterics start with their worldview and work backwards, shaping the story to meet their predetermined outcome.  Bittman's beef isn't really with the oatmeal, it's with McDonald's. He says, 'The leading fast-food multinational, with sales over $16.5 billion a year (just under the GDP of Afghanistan), represents a great deal of what is wrong with American food today.'  So right off the bat, you should know that everything you are about to read is a negative against McDonald's.

Food Hysterics then steal one of Fox News' more devious tricks by leaving out all context in the numbers they report.  Those numbers are reported in a way to reinforce the negative image they just established.  The reader leaves the article disappointed and outraged... but they really aren't too sure why.  Bittman starts naming the number of ingredients and calls them chemicals without explaining what they're used for.  Yes, I do realize he's being honest, but not totally.  See, everything is a chemical.  You're a sack of chemicals, your filtered water is chemicals(H2O), but he knows that people squirm when they hear that so it just fortifies his point.  He recalls facts that are out of context, saying that this oatmeal has only 10 fewer calories than a McDonald's cheeseburger.  

Correct, but let's do a quick experiment.  Without looking up the nutritional facts... tell me how many calories you think are in a McDonald's cheeseburger.  You have your guess ready?  It's 300 calories.  That means that McDonald's Fruit & Maple Oatmeal contains a gut busting 290 calories.  Oh my!!  That's a whopping 14.5% of your daily recommended amount of calories(based on a 2,000 calorie diet)!  Not very much, considering breakfast should be the biggest meal of the day.  But never mind the context... too late for that, he already has you running for the hills in fear of those massive cheeseburger calories.  If you order the oatmeal sans the brown sugar, you can get down to an ethereal 260 calories and only 18 grams of sugar(32 grams with).

Mark then makes a point that oatmeal should just be the oatmeal + water and we should have the options of whether we wanted our wholesome goodness ruined with things like fruit and 30 calories worth of brown sugar.  He even goes so far as emailing McDonald's to pose them this question directly.  Two incredible things followed: first was that he actually reported what they wrote back and second... he glosses right over it.

Incredible thing number one: “Customers can order FMO with or without the light cream, brown sugar and the fruit. Our menu is entirely customizable by request with our ‘Made for You’ platform that has been in place since the late 90s.”

Incredible thing number two... his response: 'Oh please.'

Oh please?  This must be the Food Hysteric's equivalent to, 'Yeah, but still'

'Did you hear that the moon landing was faked?'

No.  We really did land on the moon.

'No, it was faked.  They have multiple light sources and shadows where they shouldn't be.'

Actually, they recreated the lighting conditions and surface areas on the moon to scale and proved it was right.

'Yeah...but still'

It basically means you have no argument.

Yes the oatmeal is 10 less calories than McDonald's cheeseburger or the Egg McMuffin, but those sandwich's are only 300 calories, which means the oatmeal is only 290 calories.  Not only that but the Egg McMuffin is only 7.1oz while the fully loaded oatmeal is 9.2oz.  So for less calories you get a more filling meal.  If your lunch and dinner had twice those calories, you would have only consumed 1,450 calories for the entire day and would most likely be running a caloric deficit.

I know this is a long post but bear with me... on to Michael Jacobson and the Center for Science in the Public Interest( CSPI ).

Jacobson's story warns of the dangers hidden in cola(which they already have a huge problem with).  He starts by talking about food marketers as if there is some building in Minnesota where they all live labeled, 'Food Marketers' and they're in constant cahoots with one another.  He mentions how caramel coloring is made and is all too happy with telling us there is a reaction with ammonia involved, but doesn't go so far as explaining the science.  Funny, I thought science was in his organization's name?

You start to see the familiar pattern emerge of facts without context after giving away his true bias.  He goes on to mention how lab rats and mice were given the coloring and formed tumors.  What he doesn't mention and, more importantly, what he doesn't address in any of the comments was the toxicity.  One study put the minimum amount of 4-Methylimidazole that causes cancer in lab rats to be 40 milligrams per kilogram of body weight.  The most 4-Methylimidazole they found per 20oz cola was 213 micrograms or .213milligrams.  Let's say someone weighs 100 Kg, they would need to ingest 4,000 mg/kg of bodyweight to get cancer.  That works out to over 18,000 20oz bottle of cola in the same 2 year period as the rats.  Can you drink 9,000 bottle of cola a year?  If I really try, I can get down 48 12oz servings in a week.  So even though I am a heavy pop drinker, I would fall far short.

But it's not about the science, is it?  It's about scaring people into taking a specific action.  These food hysterics are using you and your misguided outrage to shape the world the way they see fit.

A Brief Discussion Of Food And Income.

Fair Food Fight, a food activist blog has recently caught my attention.  They mean well, I'm sure, but the premise of many of their arguments is flawed.

The reason for their flaws seems to be that they need their ideas to always prevail while making sure certain people are always seen , not just as in the wrong, but part of a concerted effort do some harm.

So the food companies(corporations), ag companies(corporations), the products they sell, and even the government are all part of the problem in their eyes.  This leaves little room for facts, which they didn't consider when they formed their ideology.

What follows is a comment I left on their blog, The Devaluation of Food, Farms and Our Future.  The blog touched on other things, but I took plenty of room just responding to their call to make food a higher percentage of our income.  Enjoy.

If you look at the history of agricultural and economic development, the percentage spent on food is a fairly accurate indicator of wealth in a country.

It starts at 100% or very close to it, where nearly everyone is subsistence level farmers.  People were very poor because all of their money went to buying food.  They were the ultimate locavores... except they were perpetually starving.  The food they grew was barely enough to keep them going and that was before they had to sell some for money to buy other things. 

So that extreme doesn't work.  People can't go pursue other interest, because their labor is needed on the farm.  Speaking of which, we needed to have a lot of kids because we needed the labor.

Saying that we need to spend more on food, doesn't necessarily mean that we'll go backwards as a nation, but it also doesn't mean we'll all weigh less.  It's a flawed premise, assuming it's the cheap cost of food that makes people heavy.  Over-consumption of calories is what makes people obese.  We over-consume because food is much easier to find, ready to eat, and because we are too poor to be secure in our food choices. 

As humans, we have ALWAYS eaten whatever we could find.  Until recently, we couldn't eat enough, because we could never find enough food.  So the real problem is discipline and restraint, a concept which humans are relatively new to.

You can craft a caloric budget that allows for the foods you want along with exercise to help keep the balance.  You can do this with the prices of food now and especially if food is even cheaper.

I think the proper way to look at this is to say that people don't make enough money.  When we live paycheck to paycheck, you are never completely sure you'll have enough to eat in the future or have the money to buy the food(as cheap as it is).  So what we do is search for the best values for our money to stretch our dollars.

So if your theory is correct then paying more for that food will make people buy less of it, but that ignores thousands of years of human instincts.  More likely, we'd just spend the extra money and seek out more calorically dense foods, rather than more nutritionally dense foods.  When I have lot's of money, I am not so concerned with getting enough to eat.  I can eat a light meal, knowing that more is available later.  But as a poor person, which I most certainly am, I am much more likely to go to a buffet and consume larger meals. 

So that's it.  I was searching for specific ag econ graphs showing caloric consumption over the years as well as Engel Curves showing income vs food expenditures, but I got bored.  Link this blog, and follow me on twitter @samvance  If you already follow me, get someone else to.

Zero Tolerance Extremism.

Once again, my blog title is a clickable link that goes to a food science resource.  Today's resource is the faculty list of UMass' Food Science Department.  I chose UMass because they were ranked as the top food science department for PhD students in the country.

Today I'd like to address the problems concerning zero tolerance in  the conversation about food.  It's a pretty common practice when people argue about anything, that they take the arguments to the extreme boundaries to try to make a point.  So any discussion of guns leads to a world where jack-booted thugs are raping your  mother while you're watching and powerless because you have no gun... or it's like a John Woo film and everyone is diving sideways in slow motion shooting everybody until we are all dead.

Get the idea?

By taking arguments about food out to the extremes, Food Hysterics hope to make their point while making you defend the most ridiculous scenarios.  Just think of the movie, Super Size Me.  In that movie, Morgan Spurlock wanted to prove that our(Western, mostly American) fast food diets are making us very sick/unhealthy/giving us feline AIDS/etc.  

Morgan Spurlock could have set up an experiment similar to what comedian Doug Benson did in his stonermentary, 'Super High Me'.  What Doug did was smoke pot several times a day, every day, for 30 days.  He followed that up with 30 days of no pot.  So Doug had two sets of data to compare.

What Spurlock did was not only eat McDonald's every meal, but he also(as the title suggests) Super Sized those meals.  The end.  This is very extreme and is meant to prove a point rather than honestly explore an issue.  For instance, if he wanted to be fair, he could have maintained his normal caloric intake but only ate McDonald's and compared the results afterward.  He could've binged for 30 days and then tried to lose weight for 30 days eating only McDonald's.  He could have brought a registered dietitian the McDonald's tray liner with the nutrition facts on the back and planned out meals that met his needs.  Nope, just Super Size it... all day... every day.  Nobody does that.  Nobody eats out for every meal.  Hell, I'll say that most people don't even eat every meal(like breakfast).

I get flamed* by several Twitter trolls** who are anti-everything except a small garden. I have a theory that most of it traces back to an anti-corporate sentiment(which makes me appear pro-corporate for calling out their extremist views) more than anything, but they have some odd views about food nonetheless.

I was asked what my thoughts were on chemicals in food. ???  I wasn't sure how to respond because I didn't know how much they understood about food.  Do they realize that all food is made of 100% chemicals?  Were they referring to gras food additives and wanted to belittle them by just saying the word chemical?

So I explain that things are added to food to improve the: taste, texture, color, mouth feel, shelf life, safety, or nutritional value.  The troll then wonders how many people, if polled, would say they wanted any chemicals added to their food.  So now we already went to an extreme - 'any'.  Of course, if that's how the poll were conducted, everyone would vote no.  It's a leading question.  If I do a survey where I ask people if they want to be shot through the air at 500mph, I'll bet I get nearly all 'No' responses.  Does that mean that commercial air flight should be outlawed?

When I get pulled into these back and forths, I can usually see where things are heading.  So the interrogation breaks down into profits for the food companies.  So now I'm a shill because I explain why things are added to food.  If I were a food technologist working for a large company that was needlessly adding things to food without merit, I would be pretty happy.  Why?  Because I would get to be the hero after I reformulate the products, ditching the wasted materials and saving that company a shitload of money.  I explain that companies won't spend money on unneeded ingredients.  The conversation later evolves into that person referring to everything he doesn't eat as 'shit' and says, 'people eat shit they get sick. This can be backed by 10's of 100's of studies - but of course you disagree.'

This conversation goes nowhere.  It's a horrible circle that makes him crazier and more paranoid while making me dumber for responding.  What people need to realize is that there is a lot of nuance in food science and food issues.  Can BPA hurt you?  Yup, in high enough amounts.  Last I checked, the highest concentrations were found in a 15oz can of French Style green beans... and you'd need to eat 1,000 cans to get sick from the BPA.

Nuance.

People have died from drinking too much water, but we need water to live.  We actually need fat and salt, just not so much.  So the conversation can't be about banning or eliminating things, it has to be about moderation and educational outreach.  I need the help of food scientists and food science educators out their reading this.  

We have politicians wasting our time talking about the aforementioned BPA, and they have needlessly banned potatoes from the WIC program, even though they are great sources of fiber and potassium.  We have people suing Taco Bell because the filling isn't 100% beef, without considering that 100% beef leaves no room for seasonings.  We have a lot of hysteria out there and people are starting to just believe the negative because they haven't seen food scientists go on Oprah or The Daily Show or The Today Show, but they see plenty of Michael Pollan telling them not to eat foods that their Grandma wouldn't recognize.

We need to get out their and call out the extremists with science.  Call them out when they make silly arguments and explain the science behind what's in food.  If you know a food science professor or food science professional, get them on Twitter.  Have them follow me @SamVance. Be warned though, you'll get bombarded with trolls who seem to have all day to try to tweet you down and then discredit anything you try to say.  Hell, I even have a mock version of myself on Twitter @shitSamVancesez

* Flame - to pick apart someone's comments on the internet, usually resulting in the dreaded 'Flame War', a heated exchange that goes on for quite some time.
** Troll - A person who seeks out someone to flame.  Trolls are usually limited to specific topics and not at all random.  They find someone commenting on their pet subject, then they start internet arguments(Flame Wars)