Formerly Known as Food, by Kristin Lawless

Kristin Lawless's arguments in Formerly Known as Food: How the Industrial Food System is Changing Our Minds, Bodies, and Culture are alternatively obvious, shocking, and ridiculous.

First, the obvious.  Americans have become over-dependent on processed, packaged foods.  Due to convenience, cost, and economies of scale, our food supply has come to be controlled by a very small number of powerful companies, and we Americans happily eat it up.  Over the course of the last several decades, eating whole foods, close to their geographical origin and close their original form, has become more and more expensive and difficult.

Even packaged products that attest to be more healthy for us are subject to the processing, shipping, and additives that rob them of their nutritional value or make them more dangerous to us.  Lawless's description of the processing of milk made me want to avoid it, or to find a local dairy where I can get milk directly from a cow.

While we obviously ought to try to eat more whole foods and fewer processed, packaged foods, the sections dealing with the chemical effects of food, food additives, herbicides and insecticides, and packaging really rocked me.  In many cases, the chemicals in foods are so common that they are changing the way our bodies respond to food.  These changes are pervasive and are passed on to the next generation.  A couple of examples: certain chemicals actually make fat cells larger, causing obesity.  (So it's not TOTALLY my fault that I'm overweight; it the chemicals in the food I eat!) 

More chillingly,

We have caused one crucially important and protective strain of bacteria normally found in the baby's gut to go extinct in the Western world.  A woman of child-bearing age who was born by C-section, fed formula, or received antibiotics at any point in her life--or if this is true of her mother or grandmother, does not have the important bacterial species B. infantis--it simply no longer exists in her body.

This points to one of her biggest issues: the decline of breastfeeding and the use of formula, the first toehold of industrial food in our lives.  Lawless explains that while our life spans are longer than previous generations due to antibiotics and vaccines, that trend will begin to reverse due to industrial food and the impact it has on our bodies.

Lawless gets into the ridiculous with her sweeping societal solutions.  Guaranteed annual income, pay for one's own domestic work, shorter work weeks and longer leave for parents, and more socialist solutions.  Her answer to the question of how this will be paid for is, "Well, we spend way more on defense than we really need to. . . ." 

I share Lawless's suspicion of "big food," and she certainly convinces me to eat more whole foods and avoid heavily processed food.  But even she has to admit that large-scale industrial agriculture has made it possible to feed our ever-growing global population.  Small-scale urban farming and food co-ops are awesome.  But are they sufficient to food millions of people in a densely populated urban area?  I'm not so sure.  And her utopian, socialist solutions sound compassionate and simple on paper, but let's ask every socialist country in the world how their socialist programs worked out?  Not so well.

The bottom line on Formerly Known as Food: take heed of Lawless's warnings about the food we eat, and make every effort to include whole foods in your diet and avoid processed foods as much as possible.  However, for large-scale solutions, she--and we--have a lot more work to do.


Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!