ISIS Press Release 31/12/03
Food Quality? What’s That?
As the global war over genetically modified food intensifies, so has
the urgency to assess food quality. Dr.
Mae-Wan Ho reports on some promising approaches.
The global war over genetically modified (GM) food has been fought over
many fronts. Safety, environmental impacts, and the farmers’ right to save
and improve seeds on their own farms are the most visible. For ordinary people
all over the world, however, the battle line is drawn around the good,
wholesome foods that they and their parents have enjoyed for centuries. In
protecting their right to good food, consumers in rich countries buying produce
from their supermarkets are in complete solidarity with the small, sustainable
farmers in Africa, Asia and Latin America, who grow and consume diverse
pickings fresh from their farm: they have no use for GM food.
But the battle doesn’t stop there. People are increasingly
demanding food produced with minimum input and negative impacts on the
environment, and most of all, food that is nutritious and healthy. Processed
food and junk foods are notorious for their high salt and sugar content, and
has been blamed by many for the epidemic of obesity and obesity-linked diseases
worldwide.
As governments campaign to ban junk food adverts in the hope of slimming
down the nation, interest in healthy foods has erupted in Europe and the United
States.
The pro-GM scientific establishment may still be dismissing the organic
‘food fetish’, and denying there could be any health benefits from
consuming organic foods, but a new sub-discipline of food science has risen to
the task of assessing ‘food quality’. It is attempting to
characterize that elusive ‘vitality’ and ‘wholesomeness’
that makes food ‘good’, possibly in all senses of the word: good to
grow, good to look at, good to eat, and good for health and the
environment.
As the word ‘wholesomeness’ implies, that quality belongs to
the whole organism, and cannot be found by measuring chemical composition,
however detailed, or vitamin and mineral content. It must be done by methods
that assess the health of the organism serving as food that somehow confers
health benefits to the consumer. And that’s where conventional
reductionist science breaks down, as it has no concept of the whole, or of
vitality.
‘Vitality’ is the quality of being alive. A vital being is
full of life, full of the kind of positive energy that sustains life, the life
of the whole. In that sense, wholesomeness and vitality are intimately linked,
as our intuition tells us.
There is currently a profusion of methods that claim to assess food
quality, ranging from simple tests such as whether animals like it, to more
esoteric methods based on the form of crystals obtained from extracts of the
plants. While many of the tests may satisfy the criteria of statistical
significance applied to ‘scientific’ tests accepted by the
establishment, they lack the conceptual basis that could provide a
‘rational’ explanation. And so the general tendency is to dismiss
those findings.
There is a wide credibility gap between food quality research and the
conventional wisdom. But some recent research could begin to bridge that gap.
Do Animals Like Good Food?
Laboratory and farm animals could help assess food quality.
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho reports
The sources and diagram for this article is posted on ISIS
Members’ website. Details here.
In an earlier issue of
SiS (13/14,
2002) we reported how a young high school student in The Netherlands
carried out an experiment to show that mice did prefer non-GM food. This
confirmed a farmer’s observation that mice in his barn ate up a pile of
non-GM maize but left a similar pile of GM maize untouched. There are many
other anecdotes on the lengths to which domestic and wild animals will go to
avoid eating GM food, and when forced to eat them, fail to thrive (see "Animals
avoid GM food, for good reasons".)
Actually, animal food preference has been adopted by scientists in
Austria as one of the ways to assess food quality for some years.
Dr. Alberta Velimirov in the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Biological
Agriculture and Applied Ecology in Vienna is a member of an interdisciplinary
group of scientists using a combination of methods in an attempt to assess the
quality of food produced under a variety of conditions, from industrial to
organic farming. The tests consists of (1) sensory evaluation by human
subjects, (2) controlled food preference experiments with laboratory animals,
(3) rate of decomposition determined by loss of dried matter, and (4)
electrochemical measurements of pH, redox potential and electrical
conductivity, which together give a ‘P-value’.
The results are plotted in a composite graph where the scores of the
four variables, sensory evaluation, food preference, dried matter loss and P
values are represented along the four axes in the form of a cross (see Fig. 1).
Joining up the four values give a diamond-shaped area.
In three comparisons of organically grown carrots, beetroot and Golden
delicious apples with their conventionally grown counterparts, both humans and
animals tend to prefer the organic produce. Similarly, DM-loss and P-values
tend to be higher in the conventional.
Figure 1 Comparing organic and conventionally produced
food.
But these are only general trends. Velimirov readily admits that
neither people nor animals always prefer organic; even though some biologists
believe that animals tend to eat food that’s good or healthy for them,
that increases their biological ‘fitness’. (If that were true, there
would have been no alcoholics or drug addicts.) In the same way, DMloss and P
values are sometimes higher in the organic than in the conventionally grown
produce.
One way of combining the information from the four tests is to
calculate the ratio of (sensory evaluation + food preference) to (P value +
DMloss), which gives a "quality count". Organic produce consistently scores
higher than convention in "quality count". The tests used are purely empirical
and appear capable of distinguishing organic from conventional produce, and
they do have the virtue of being simple and relatively inexpensive to carry
out.
This recent work confirms and extends an earlier comprehensive review
of 150 studies, carried out by researchers in the Federal Institute for Health
Protection of Consumers and Veterinary Medicine in Berlin, Germany, which
showed that animals do prefer organic produce.
Why not see if your pets and farm animals prefer organic, and if it is
better for their health.
The quest for food quality continues (see "Assessing food quality from
its afterglow", this series).
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