The mad rush towards fake food, such as artificial meat created with GM soya, ignores the importance of the diversity of our foods and food cultures. It is a recipe for accelerating the destruction of the Earth and our health.
Food is not a commodity, not "stuff" assembled mechanically and artificially in laboratories and factories. Food is life. Food is the contribution of all the beings that make up the food web, and it is what sustains and regenerates the web of life. Food can transform into health or disease, depending on how it has been grown and processed. Food, therefore, is the living currency of life as a whole.
As an ancient Upanishad reminds us: "All is food, all is food of something else." Good food and real food are the foundation of health. Poor food, industrial food, fake food are the foundation of disease. Hippocrates indeed stated: "Let food be thy medicine." In Ayurveda, the ancient Indian science of life, food is called "sarvausadha", the medicine that heals all diseases. Industrial food systems, on the other hand, have reduced food to a mere commodity, something that can even be assembled in a laboratory. In this process, both the planet's health and our own have been all but destroyed.
75 per cent of the planet's destruction of soil, water and biodiversity, and 50 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, come from industrial agriculture, which also contributes 75 per cent of chronic diet-related diseases. It contributes 50 per cent of greenhouse gases, which cause global warming.
Chemical agriculture does not return the organic matter and natural fertility to the soil. On the contrary, it contributes to desertification and soil degradation. It also requires more water, as it destroys the soil's natural water-retention capacity. Industrial food systems have destroyed the planet's biodiversity both through the spread of monocultures and through the use of toxins and poisons that are killing bees, butterflies, insects and birds, driving the sixth mass extinction.
Biodiversity-based, poison-free agriculture, on the other hand, produces more nutrition per acre while simultaneously revitalising the planet, and charts the path towards the goal of zero hunger in times of ongoing climate change. Industrial agriculture and the toxic food model have been promoted as the only answer to economic and food security. Yet globally, more than 1 billion people suffer from hunger and over 3 billion people suffer from chronic diet-related diseases.
Industrial agriculture based on fossil-fuel-intensive monocultures uses 75 per cent of the land but produces only 30 per cent of the food we eat. In fact, it is small, biodiversity-based farms using 25 per cent of the land that provide 70 per cent of the food. At this rate, if the share of industrial farming and industrial food in our diet reaches 45 per cent, we will have a dead planet. It will no longer have life, nor food.
And the mad rush towards fake food (such as fake meat made with GM soya), heedless of the diversity of our foods and food cultures and of the role of biodiversity in maintaining our health, is a recipe for accelerating the destruction of the planet and our health. Pat Brown, founder and chief executive of Impossible Foods, has stated that he "looked for the safest, most environmentally responsible option that would allow us to scale production and deliver the Impossible burger, at a reasonable cost, to consumers."
Given that 90 per cent of monarch butterflies have disappeared due to Roundup Ready crops, and that we are living through what scientists have called "Insectageddon", the use of GM soya can hardly be considered "an environmentally responsible option." In stating this, Pat Brown reveals his complete ignorance of the fact that weeds have developed resistance to Roundup and have become "super weeds" that now require ever more lethal herbicides.
At a time when a movement to ban GMOs and Roundup is growing around the world, promoting GM soya as "meat" is misleading for those who eat it, both in terms of the ontology of the burger and in terms of safety.
The Impossible burger made from GM soya, sprayed with Roundup, is not a safe option, as denounced by Zen Honeycutt of Moms Across America: "the Impossible burger tested positive for glyphosate. The levels of glyphosate detected in the Impossible burger by the laboratories of the Health Research Institute were 11 times higher than in the Beyond Meat burger: 11.3 parts per billion of glyphosate and its breakdown product AMPA (aminomethylphosphonic acid), compared to 1 part per billion.
"We are shocked to find that the Impossible Burger can have glyphosate residue levels up to 11 times higher than the Beyond Meat burger, according to these tested samples. This new product is being marketed as a solution for healthy eating, while in reality the consumption of 11 parts per billion of glyphosate herbicide can be extremely dangerous. It has been shown that just 0.1 parts per billion of glyphosate destroys gut bacteria, which is where the cornerstone of the immune system resides. I am seriously concerned that consumers are being misled into believing that the Impossible Burger is healthy."
Some recent lawsuits have shown the connections between Roundup crops and cancers. In this sense, investments in Roundup Ready GM soya represent a blindness to the market. There is another ontological misconception linked to fake food. While it claims to move away from meat, "fake meat" is about selling products like meat. Pat Brown declares he uses "genetically modified yeast to produce haem, the 'magic' molecule that makes meat taste like meat, thus making the Impossible Burger the only plant-based product to offer the delicious explosion of flavour and aroma that meat lovers crave."
I thought a plant-based diet was for vegans and vegetarians, not for meat lovers.
Indeed, the promotion of fake foods seems to have more to do with giving new life to the failing GM agriculture and junk food industry, and the threat to it posed by the growing awareness and consciousness everywhere that organic, local and fresh food is real food that regenerates the planet and our health. As a result, investment in "plant-based food companies" rose from nearly zero in 2009 to 600 million dollars by 2018. And these companies are looking for more.
It is about profit and control. Anyone taking part in the fake food gold rush has no discernible knowledge, or conscience or compassion for living beings, for the web of life, nor for the role of living food in composing that web.
The sudden embrace of "plant-based diets", including GM soya, is an ontological violation of food as a living system that connects us to the ecosystem and to other beings, and signals ignorance of the diversity of cultures that have used a variety of plants in their diet.
Ecological sciences have been grounded in the recognition of interconnections and interrelations between human beings and nature, between different organisms and within all living systems, including the human body. This has thus evolved as an ecological and systemic science, not a fragmented and reductionist one. Diets have evolved according to local climates and biodiversity, enabled by the climate. The biodiversity of the soil, of plants and of our gut microbiome is a continuum. In Indian civilisation, technologies are tools. Tools must be evaluated according to ethical, social and ecological criteria. Technologies have never been regarded as self-referential, but evaluated in the context of their contribution to the wellbeing of all.
Through fake food, evolution, biodiversity and the web of life are being redefined as an "ancient technology that cannot be improved upon", ignoring the sophisticated knowledge that has evolved across various agricultural and food cultures in various climates and ecosystems to sustain and renew biodiversity, ecosystems, and the health of people and the planet.
The industrialised West has always been arrogant and ignorant of the cultures it colonised. Fake food is merely the latest step in the history of food imperialism, a century and a half of colonisation of our food knowledge and cultures. Soya is a gift from East Asia, where it has been a food for millennia. It was eaten only as fermented food, to remove its anti-nutritional factors. But recently, GM soya has created a soya imperialism, annihilating plant diversity. This continues the destruction of the diversity of India's rich edible oils and plant proteins found in "dal", the Indian legumes.
While Indian farmers knew that legumes fix nitrogen, the West was industrialising agriculture based on synthetic nitrogen, which contributes to greenhouse gases, ocean dead zones and dead soils. While we ate a variety of "dal" in our everyday "dal roti", the British colonisers, who had no idea of the nutritional richness of legumes, reduced them to animal feed. Chana became chickpea, gahat became horse gram, tur became pigeon pea.
We stand on the brink of a planetary emergency, a health emergency, a crisis in farmers' livelihoods. Fake food accelerates the race to collapse. Real food gives us the opportunity to reinvigorate the land, our food economies, food sovereignty and food cultures. Through real food we can decolonise our food cultures and our consciousness. We can remember that food is alive and gives us life.