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Food Fight

GMOs and the Future of the American Diet

Author Mckay Jenkins
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Penguin Adult HC/TR | Avery
On sale Jan 24, 2017 | 336 Pages | 978-0-698-40983-5
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Are GMOs really that bad?  A prominent environmental journalist takes a fresh look at what they actually mean for our food system and for us.

In the past two decades, GMOs have come to dominate the American diet. Advocates hail them as the future of food, an enhanced method of crop breeding that can help feed an ever-increasing global population and adapt to a rapidly changing environment. Critics, meanwhile, call for their banishment, insisting GMOs were designed by overeager scientists and greedy corporations to bolster an industrial food system that forces us to rely on cheap, unhealthy, processed food so they can turn an easy profit. In response, health-conscious brands such as Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods have started boasting that they are “GMO-free,” and companies like Monsanto have become villains in the eyes of average consumers.

Where can we turn for the truth? Are GMOs an astounding scientific breakthrough destined to end world hunger? Or are they simply a way for giant companies to control a problematic food system?

Environmental writer McKay Jenkins traveled across the country to answer these questions and discovered that the GMO controversy is more complicated than meets the eye. He interviewed dozens of people on all sides of the debate—scientists hoping to engineer new crops that could provide nutrients to people in the developing world, Hawaiian papaya farmers who credit GMOs with saving their livelihoods, and local farmers in Maryland who are redefining what it means to be “sustainable.” The result is a comprehensive, nuanced examination of the state of our food system and a much-needed guide for consumers to help them make more informed choices about what to eat for their next meal. 
The road we have traveled to our current state of eating is actually a very long, interconnected highway. After World War II, American national security strategists decided that protecting the homeland required building a network of broad interstates that mirrored the German Autobahn. This monumental road-building project—now close to 47,000 miles long—was initially conceived as a way to efficiently move troops and military machinery, but it has also had dramatic peacetime consequences for the American landscape, and for the American diet.
 
Suddenly, big, safe interstates—and the millions of miles of ring roads, state roads, and town roads they encouraged—allowed people to live farther and farther from the cities where they worked. People moved out of cities in droves, looking for new places to live. Land prices outside cities skyrocketed, and small farmers occupying that land had a hard time resisting when real estate developers came to call.
 
Suburban development hit small American farms like a virus. In the 1950s alone, some 10 million people left family farms. Chances are, your grandparents (or even your parents) can tell you stories about all those farms in your area that over the last few decades have been turned into subdivisions and shopping malls. In Maryland, where I live, suburban development has replaced 900,000 acres of farmland (and 500,000 acres of forest) in just the last forty years.
 
All these new roads, and the suburbs and industries to which they gave birth, caused a second tectonic shift in American culture: in the way we came to eat. Car-friendly fast-food chains like Mc-Donald’s and Carl’s Jr. and Burger King started popping up along the new highways like weeds. By the early 1960s, Kentucky Fried Chicken was the largest restaurant chain in the United States.
 
These restaurants did not cook, exactly; what they did was heat up highly processed, prepackaged foods that tasted exactly the same, whether you were in Dallas or Des Moines. The ingredients didn’t need to be fresh, they needed to be uniform, and storable, and—most important, given skyrocketing demand—they needed to be provided in vast quantities.
 
Fast-food joints didn’t need local asparagus from New Jersey or collard greens from Georgia or one-of-a-kind apples grown in small orchards in New York. They needed commodity grains to sweeten their sodas, fry their fries, and feed the animals that could be turned into hamburgers and hot dogs and fried chicken. What these restaurants needed was corn, and wheat, and soybeans. And lots of them.
 
As small family farms near population centers went bankrupt or sold their land to developers, and as the American diet started demanding processed meals, food production flowed like beads of mercury to the control of larger and larger industrial farm operations in the Midwest. As food production became centralized, companies that controlled the grains, chemicals, and processing factories became bigger and much more politically powerful. Thanks to intensive lobbying, tens of billions of dollars in federal farm subsidies began flowing to giant agribusinesses that were driving the development of the industrial food system. As early as the 1970s, farmers around the country were being told (in the words of President Nixon’s Agriculture Secretary Rusty Butz) to “get big or get out.”
 
Most farmers got out. A little over a hundred years ago, there were 38 million people living in the United States, and 50 percent of them worked on a farm. Today, we have 300 million people. How many work on farms? Two percent.
 
Today, if you drive across the grain belt—Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas—you will spend many, many hours crossing an ocean of just three crops: corn, wheat, and soybeans. They are being grown by farmers you will likely never meet, processed in factories you will likely never see, into packaged foods containing ingredients that look nothing like the crops from which they were made. You won’t see it, but your soda will be sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, which replaced sugar in the 1980s. Your fries will be dunked in boiling soybean oil. And your burgers and nuggets and sliced turkey breast will all be processed from animals fed corn or soybeans, or both.
 
What you most likely won’t see, out along on the great American road system, are regional food specialties, or the mom-and-pop diners and restaurants that used to serve them. New England clam chowder, New Orleans gumbo, Maryland crab bisque: all these foods require local ingredients, which (by definition) giant farms in Iowa or Kansas are unable to provide. Replacing them has been the food that these farms can provide: Fast food. Processed food. Soda. Pizza. Chicken nuggets. Cheap hamburgers. A vast culinary sameness, all essentially built out of two or three crops, controlled by a small handful of companies. All available twenty-four hours a day in any restaurant, dining hall, or gas station in the country.
Copyright © 2017 by Mckay Jenkins. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
McKay Jenkins holds degrees from Amherst, Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, and Princeton, where he received a PhD in English. A former staff writer for the Atlanta Constitution, he has also written for Outside, Orion, and many other publications. He is the author of What’s Gotten Into Us: Staying Healthy in a Toxic World;  Bloody Falls of the Coppermine: Madness, Murder and the Collision of Cultures in the Arctic, 1913 (Random House, 2005); The Last Ridge: The Epic Story of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division and the Assault on Hitler's Europe (Random House, 2003); The White Death: Tragedy and Heroism in an Avalanche Zone (Random House, 2000); and The South in Black and White: Race, Sex, and Literature in the 1940s (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1999). He is also the editor of The Peter Matthiessen Reader (Vintage, 2000). A winner of the University of Delaware's Excellence in Teaching Award, Jenkins is currently Tilghman Professor of English and a member of the Program in Journalism. He lives in Baltimore with his family. View titles by Mckay Jenkins

About

Are GMOs really that bad?  A prominent environmental journalist takes a fresh look at what they actually mean for our food system and for us.

In the past two decades, GMOs have come to dominate the American diet. Advocates hail them as the future of food, an enhanced method of crop breeding that can help feed an ever-increasing global population and adapt to a rapidly changing environment. Critics, meanwhile, call for their banishment, insisting GMOs were designed by overeager scientists and greedy corporations to bolster an industrial food system that forces us to rely on cheap, unhealthy, processed food so they can turn an easy profit. In response, health-conscious brands such as Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods have started boasting that they are “GMO-free,” and companies like Monsanto have become villains in the eyes of average consumers.

Where can we turn for the truth? Are GMOs an astounding scientific breakthrough destined to end world hunger? Or are they simply a way for giant companies to control a problematic food system?

Environmental writer McKay Jenkins traveled across the country to answer these questions and discovered that the GMO controversy is more complicated than meets the eye. He interviewed dozens of people on all sides of the debate—scientists hoping to engineer new crops that could provide nutrients to people in the developing world, Hawaiian papaya farmers who credit GMOs with saving their livelihoods, and local farmers in Maryland who are redefining what it means to be “sustainable.” The result is a comprehensive, nuanced examination of the state of our food system and a much-needed guide for consumers to help them make more informed choices about what to eat for their next meal. 

Excerpt

The road we have traveled to our current state of eating is actually a very long, interconnected highway. After World War II, American national security strategists decided that protecting the homeland required building a network of broad interstates that mirrored the German Autobahn. This monumental road-building project—now close to 47,000 miles long—was initially conceived as a way to efficiently move troops and military machinery, but it has also had dramatic peacetime consequences for the American landscape, and for the American diet.
 
Suddenly, big, safe interstates—and the millions of miles of ring roads, state roads, and town roads they encouraged—allowed people to live farther and farther from the cities where they worked. People moved out of cities in droves, looking for new places to live. Land prices outside cities skyrocketed, and small farmers occupying that land had a hard time resisting when real estate developers came to call.
 
Suburban development hit small American farms like a virus. In the 1950s alone, some 10 million people left family farms. Chances are, your grandparents (or even your parents) can tell you stories about all those farms in your area that over the last few decades have been turned into subdivisions and shopping malls. In Maryland, where I live, suburban development has replaced 900,000 acres of farmland (and 500,000 acres of forest) in just the last forty years.
 
All these new roads, and the suburbs and industries to which they gave birth, caused a second tectonic shift in American culture: in the way we came to eat. Car-friendly fast-food chains like Mc-Donald’s and Carl’s Jr. and Burger King started popping up along the new highways like weeds. By the early 1960s, Kentucky Fried Chicken was the largest restaurant chain in the United States.
 
These restaurants did not cook, exactly; what they did was heat up highly processed, prepackaged foods that tasted exactly the same, whether you were in Dallas or Des Moines. The ingredients didn’t need to be fresh, they needed to be uniform, and storable, and—most important, given skyrocketing demand—they needed to be provided in vast quantities.
 
Fast-food joints didn’t need local asparagus from New Jersey or collard greens from Georgia or one-of-a-kind apples grown in small orchards in New York. They needed commodity grains to sweeten their sodas, fry their fries, and feed the animals that could be turned into hamburgers and hot dogs and fried chicken. What these restaurants needed was corn, and wheat, and soybeans. And lots of them.
 
As small family farms near population centers went bankrupt or sold their land to developers, and as the American diet started demanding processed meals, food production flowed like beads of mercury to the control of larger and larger industrial farm operations in the Midwest. As food production became centralized, companies that controlled the grains, chemicals, and processing factories became bigger and much more politically powerful. Thanks to intensive lobbying, tens of billions of dollars in federal farm subsidies began flowing to giant agribusinesses that were driving the development of the industrial food system. As early as the 1970s, farmers around the country were being told (in the words of President Nixon’s Agriculture Secretary Rusty Butz) to “get big or get out.”
 
Most farmers got out. A little over a hundred years ago, there were 38 million people living in the United States, and 50 percent of them worked on a farm. Today, we have 300 million people. How many work on farms? Two percent.
 
Today, if you drive across the grain belt—Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas—you will spend many, many hours crossing an ocean of just three crops: corn, wheat, and soybeans. They are being grown by farmers you will likely never meet, processed in factories you will likely never see, into packaged foods containing ingredients that look nothing like the crops from which they were made. You won’t see it, but your soda will be sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, which replaced sugar in the 1980s. Your fries will be dunked in boiling soybean oil. And your burgers and nuggets and sliced turkey breast will all be processed from animals fed corn or soybeans, or both.
 
What you most likely won’t see, out along on the great American road system, are regional food specialties, or the mom-and-pop diners and restaurants that used to serve them. New England clam chowder, New Orleans gumbo, Maryland crab bisque: all these foods require local ingredients, which (by definition) giant farms in Iowa or Kansas are unable to provide. Replacing them has been the food that these farms can provide: Fast food. Processed food. Soda. Pizza. Chicken nuggets. Cheap hamburgers. A vast culinary sameness, all essentially built out of two or three crops, controlled by a small handful of companies. All available twenty-four hours a day in any restaurant, dining hall, or gas station in the country.
Copyright © 2017 by Mckay Jenkins. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Author

McKay Jenkins holds degrees from Amherst, Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, and Princeton, where he received a PhD in English. A former staff writer for the Atlanta Constitution, he has also written for Outside, Orion, and many other publications. He is the author of What’s Gotten Into Us: Staying Healthy in a Toxic World;  Bloody Falls of the Coppermine: Madness, Murder and the Collision of Cultures in the Arctic, 1913 (Random House, 2005); The Last Ridge: The Epic Story of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division and the Assault on Hitler's Europe (Random House, 2003); The White Death: Tragedy and Heroism in an Avalanche Zone (Random House, 2000); and The South in Black and White: Race, Sex, and Literature in the 1940s (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1999). He is also the editor of The Peter Matthiessen Reader (Vintage, 2000). A winner of the University of Delaware's Excellence in Teaching Award, Jenkins is currently Tilghman Professor of English and a member of the Program in Journalism. He lives in Baltimore with his family. View titles by Mckay Jenkins

Additional formats

  • Food Fight
    Food Fight
    GMOs and the Future of the American Diet
    Mckay Jenkins
    978-1-5247-5156-2
    Audiobook Download
    Penguin Audio
    Jan 24, 2017
  • Food Fight
    Food Fight
    GMOs and the Future of the American Diet
    Mckay Jenkins
    978-1-5247-5156-2
    Audiobook Download
    Penguin Audio
    Jan 24, 2017

Other Books by this Author

  • ContamiNation
    ContamiNation
    My Quest to Survive in a Toxic World
    Mckay Jenkins
    978-0-399-57340-8
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Avery
    Jan 26, 2016
  • Bloody Falls of the Coppermine
    Bloody Falls of the Coppermine
    Madness and Murder in the Arctic Barren Lands
    Mckay Jenkins
    978-0-8129-7537-6
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Random House Trade Paperbacks
    Jan 10, 2006
  • The Last Ridge
    The Last Ridge
    The Epic Story of America's First Mountain Soldiers and the Assault on Hitler's Europe
    Mckay Jenkins
    978-0-375-75951-2
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Random House Trade Paperbacks
    Nov 09, 2004
  • The White Death
    The White Death
    Tragedy and Heroism in an Avalanche Zone
    Mckay Jenkins
    978-0-385-72077-9
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Anchor
    Feb 13, 2001
  • ContamiNation
    ContamiNation
    My Quest to Survive in a Toxic World
    Mckay Jenkins
    978-0-399-57340-8
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Avery
    Jan 26, 2016
  • Bloody Falls of the Coppermine
    Bloody Falls of the Coppermine
    Madness and Murder in the Arctic Barren Lands
    Mckay Jenkins
    978-0-8129-7537-6
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Random House Trade Paperbacks
    Jan 10, 2006
  • The Last Ridge
    The Last Ridge
    The Epic Story of America's First Mountain Soldiers and the Assault on Hitler's Europe
    Mckay Jenkins
    978-0-375-75951-2
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Random House Trade Paperbacks
    Nov 09, 2004
  • The White Death
    The White Death
    Tragedy and Heroism in an Avalanche Zone
    Mckay Jenkins
    978-0-385-72077-9
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Anchor
    Feb 13, 2001

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