Modernity is Making you Sick – Part 1

What does modernity represent to you?

If, like me, you’ve been educated in some kind of Euro-American scholastic tradition, you probably believe that to be modern is to be good. The belief is so ubiquitous that it’s also unnoticeable. Just as a fish isn’t aware of the water in which it lives, we’re not aware of the extent to which be believe that modern = good. We study history as though this is always the case. Someone – Aristotle, Newton or Einstein – discovered something which made everything afterwards amazingly and irreversibly better. The idea of societal progress towards some idyllic utopia is never something that has to be proven, it’s an underlying assumption located in our collective consciousness.

In a lot of areas, this idea also has the benefit of being true. To give one example, over the past 200,000 years, humans have gone from walking everywhere to riding horses or donkeys to get anywhere to now driving cars or riding bikes. I can travel much further in a car and with much less inconvenience than I could if I traveled by foot, and I’d say that’s a good thing.

But there is at least one category where, I would argue, progress has led to decline: food.

Not everyone agrees with me of course. The defenders of the value of modern food systems have a pretty good story to tell. The past 150 years, they claim, have seen the invention of whole new categories of food, many of these serving particular societal functions. Canned food and preserved food was necessary during times of war to ensure adequate food supplies. Freeze drying, which is now a pretty common form of food preservation, was first invented to help people eat while orbiting the earth in space. Fortification of cheap foods like processed white flour with essential nutrients and vitamins might have played a role in eliminating childhood malnutrition in many countries, and is still being explored in terms of its potential for ending malnutrition globally.

The myth of progress in nutrition is a good story. There is a problem – war, famine or the need to conquer outer space – and along comes Science with the Solution. Crops are hybridized, flours are fortified, problems are solved. Everybody applauds.

But this isn’t the only way in which the story can be told.

To see the other side, consider the story of cottonseed oil. 150 years ago, no one ate cottonseed oil. It’s fine to make clothes out of cotton, but even today no one thinks of eating their shirt. Why then do we eat cottonseed oil?

To understand why we eat cottonseed oil, we need to remind ourselves that 150 years ago, the US economy was built around cotton plantations. (For the moment let’s put aside the fact that the cotton economy was built on slave labor and that the descendants of those enslaved people have never been compensated for the work their ancestors did; reparations and racial justice are another discussion.)

Now when you plant cotton you really get two products – the fiber, which is used to make clothing, and the seeds. The seeds are actually more in terms of volume (but not in terms of value). For every kilogram of cotton harvested, the farmer gets 1.6 kilos of seed. Not more than 5% of that would be needed to plant the next year’s crop. The manufacturers of cotton, being good capitalists, wanted to sell the seed if it was at all possible. Fortunately for them, cottonseeds could be pressed and oil extracted from them. That oil is highly flammable and could be used to replace the increasingly expensive whale oil in street lamps. (Whale oil was becoming expensive due to over hunting of whales, and again environmental devastation and over-hunting are for another discussion.)

But when Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb in 1879, the cottonseed oil industry was threatened with collapse. Instead of accepting their fate, cottonseed venders started mixing their products with butter and lard. There was no way to know if it was safe for human consumption. If they put too much cottonseed oil in, no one would buy it – it becomes rancid and smelly. In 1883, Italy found so much illicit cottonseed oil in exports of what was meant to be pure olive oil that they banned US oils altogether.

Which brings us to the next part of the story. Procter and Gamble, a big US company that’s still very much around, found a way to de-odorize and partially hydrogenate the cottonseed oil it was already using to make things like soaps and candles. The process had the advantage of making the cottonseed oil look a lot like lard, which was the fat most people cooked with and was eventually sold under the brand name Crisco, a name that’s still around today. The process turns the cottonseed oil into what we refer to as a “trans fat”. We’ve known that trans fats are toxic for some years, but they were only removed from the U.S. food supply in 2015. So for more than 100 years, people in the US were happily consuming a processed food that we now know to be toxic. Worse yet, these fats were often marketed as being healthy alternatives to more traditional fats humans have used for centuries, like butter and lard.

Many steps in the process of making cottonseed oil are still used in the production of seed oils such as canola oil, peanut oil, sunflower oil, soy oil and corn oil. Scientists are only now beginning to understand the negative impacts that these fats are having in human physiology. Studies show that excess consumption of these fats – known in technical terms as Omega 6 PUFAs or Poly Unsaturated Fatty Acids – may be linked to poor metabolic health in mice, and potentially other problems that haven’t been well enough studied as yet. The science is still out on some of this and I don’t want to overstate the case, but it seems entirely likely that the modern alternatives to traditional fats may be linked to the epidemic of chronic diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity that we see in nearly all countries.

This is only one example of how the process of creating modern foods – modern processed foods in particular – really has nothing to do with the linear idea of progress and modernity as being improvements on what came before. The invention and use of cottonseed oil made humans worse off than they were before. That’s not a controversial opinion; nearly every country has removed trans fats from the supermarket shelves. Instead of making things better, the process of modernizing food was designed to make money out of an industrial waste product and without even thinking through the health implications of introducing a completely new category of food into the population.

And this is just one aspect – arguably not even the worst – of what modernity has done to our health. In the next blog we’ll take a closer look at the role pleasure (particularly one food linked to pleasure) plays in how modernity makes us sick.

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