Fwd: Food Quality? What's That? / Do Animals Like Good Food?

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31 Dec 2003 15:11:05 -0000

 

Food Quality? What's That? / Do Animals Like Good Food?

press-release

 

The Institute of Science in Society

Science Society Sustainability

http://www.i-sis.org.uk

 

General Enquiries sam

Website/Mailing List press-release

ISIS Director m.w.ho

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ISIS Press Release 31/12/03

Food Quality? What’s That?

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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?

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Laboratory and farm animals could help assess food quality. Dr. Mae-Wan Ho

reports

 

The sources and diagram (http://www.i-sis.org.uk/full/FoodQualityFull.php) for

this article is posted on ISIS Members’ website. Details here

(http://www.i-sis.org.uk/membership.php).

 

In an earlier issue of SiS (13/14, 2002)

(http://www.i-sis.org.uk/isisnews/i-sisnews13.php) 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 "

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/AAGMF.php.)

 

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 http://www.i-sis.org.uk/AFQFIA.php).

 

 

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This article can be found on the I-SIS website at

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/FoodQuality.php

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General Enquiries sam

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ISIS Director m.w.ho

 

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