One of the first pieces of news to hit me when I returned from a trip to Germany last week was a report in the Washington Post that the quality of America’s food continues to decline. Nutritional value of various foods in terms of components like protein, iron, and zinc are down 10 per cent and more over the last thirty or forty years.
It’s no surprise to anyone who spends any time in huge American supermarkets or in fast-food type restaurants, and eats the eggs or lettuce or fruit or chicken or bread available in these places.
But what is a surprise is the supposed culprit in sapping nutrients from our food: increased carbon in the atmosphere. What isn’t disclosed is whether the same problem exists in Europe. At least based on appearances, I’d say it doesn’t. I’m just back from ten days in Germany, and the food seems to be as good as always. In even average-quality restaurants, the food appears to be of good quality; you’re less likely to get tough chicken or eggs with pale-yellow yolks. In even smaller convenience-oriented food places, the eggs are unrefrigerated, and the yolks mostly a dark orange. The lettuce is green, and the bread hearty, tasty, and generally fresh. At a huge food outdoor food market in downtown Munich, one stand offered pitchers of maybe 15 different fresh fruit and vegetable drinks for 5 euros or 7 euros a glass, poured from pitchers continually being refreshed on-site. A small casual restaurant nearby offered maybe half a dozen different soups—hearty beef or sausage or vegetable soups. And then there were vegetable stands with huge displays of fresh asparagus—green and white–because the next two months are asparagus season.
So I don’t know if European food has deteriorated as much as American food in nutritional value, but I would guess it hasn’t. There are complaints there that the breads aren’t as diverse as they once were. But overall, there just seems to be much more tradition and pride in production, and less emphasis on churning out ever-more-profitable crops.
But what is a surprise is the supposed culprit in sapping nutrients from our food: increased carbon in the atmosphere. What isn’t disclosed is whether the same problem exists in Europe. At least based on appearances, I’d say it doesn’t. I’m just back from ten days in Germany, and the food seems to be as good as always. In even average-quality restaurants, the food appears to be of good quality; you’re less likely to get tough chicken or eggs with pale-yellow yolks. In even smaller convenience-oriented food places, the eggs are unrefrigerated, and the yolks mostly a dark orange. The lettuce is green, and the bread hearty, tasty, and generally fresh. At a huge food outdoor food market in downtown Munich, one stand offered pitchers of maybe 15 different fresh fruit and vegetable drinks for 5 euros or 7 euros a glass (depending on size), poured from pitchers continually being refreshed on-site. A small casual restaurant nearby offered maybe half a dozen different soups—hearty beef or sausage or vegetable soups. And then there were vegetable stands with huge displays of fresh asparagus—green and white–because the next two months are asparagus season.
So I don’t know if European food has deteriorated as much as American food in nutritional value, but I would guess it hasn’t. There are complaints there that the breads aren’t as diverse as they once were. But overall, there just seems to be much more tradition and pride in production, and less emphasis on churning out ever-more-profitable crops.
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In my travels to Germany over the last few years, I’ve been carrying out family research to hopefully track down at long last what happened to various members of my family during the 1930s and 1940s. One search has involved trying to track a grandmother who was deported to Poland in 1942, and then fell off all radar screens. She was almost certainly taken to one of the many extermination camps Germany set up in Poland. But I wanted to know more about her end. Here is what I finally came up with, from a post on a Medium magazine, Crow’s Feet.
The large sterile conference room could have been anywhere. For my family, however, this location was deeply significant: I was in Bad Arolsen, Germany, an hour or so from the town where, one day in March 1942, my grandmother Clara Joseph was loaded onto a box car headed east to Poland.
Clara was the main subject of discussion in that room four years ago. Three researchers at Arolsen Archives had just completed a 20-minute presentation to report that Clara’s train was bound for Piaski, a small town in eastern Poland, where the trail went ice cold. There seemed to be no evidence of where and for how long she remained in the small town prior to her likely dispatch to one of two nearby concentration camps.
I had no reason to doubt the researchers were trying their best. The Arolsen Archives is the place to go when you are still searching, decades later, for family members the Nazis had deported to concentration camps around Europe. According to the organization’s web site, “We receive around 20,000 tracing inquiries every year — most of them come from relatives wanting to clarify the fate of family members. After conducting detailed research, we are often able to outline the path a person’s life took, but sometimes we search in vain.”
For many years, the blank slate of my grandmother’s disappearance was a source of such pain that it wasn’t discussed in the family. It wasn’t until 1993, when I was well into my forties, that I first discovered a few details from a partial memoir written by a deceased aunt and uncovered among papers in her home basement.
Here is the rest of the story about what I learned. (Feel free to post reactions on Medium or here.)
I think I have a pretty good idea about what happened to the bioavailability and nutritional density of our American food and the system that produces it. As Americans we are not taught that food is important or that eating is associated with health. We are the land of Freedom and that means Freedom to eat whatever is in front of us at grocery store. Insurance and liability drives the retail availability and liability decision tree. There are entire departments at the big store chains and their sole function is to control liability and assure that they don’t get sued. Full time staff lawyers! This is an American phenomenon. This does not happen in the EU and certainly not in the eastern bloc countries. Fresh on their collective minds is the feeling of starvation that they lived through in two world wars. Having food is a blessing and people don’t sue farmers. This culture of cooking and being thankful for food is also connected to socialized medicine and not having big PHARMA running drugs adds on TV all the time. In the EU food is medicine and the evidence is pretty compelling when measuring the health matrices. Eating well and cooking helps avoid use of the socialized medical care system and controls societal costs. It is a different social-compact between the citizens and their countries leadership. Farmers markets with whole food choices are everywhere!
In America, our cheap food system is the most expensive thing we have. It is the driver of our health degradation and the extreme cost of hospitalization and medications. Pay the farmer or pay the doctor later. Your choice…as you plug your arteries, become obese, get diabetes, asthma, allergies, frequent colds, and autoimmune diseases.
Today, the white house announced plans to fire FDA director Dr. Marty Makery MD. He is a really good guy. We wrote the book “Blind Spots” which did a great job of exposing the macho-doctor “know it all” effect of the “white lab coat plus MD name tag”. He wrote about how money, medical board privilege plus ego and not really reading the studies and looking at the data leads to really bad health outcomes and even death. Love the guy.
Sounds like RFK failed to build a team with Marty and now he will be gone. What a waste!
Meanwhile, raw milk continues to be a thriving market even though the FDA hates raw milk. Influencers continue to say…”whatever the kill-it-all, drug pushing FDA says, run the other way, it’s safer and healthier”.
I really wish the FDA was a trusted source for science and advice. Unfortunately, they have lost that trust.
You will not see this in the news! Right now there is a huge, international recall of dried powdered pasteurized milk produced by CDI in California that is filled with Salmonella. More than 7 recalls (at least) all happening at the same time. If it is pasteurized no one cares….!! It is not news.
We must all remember that pasteurization is an FDA PMO dairy industry promise of 100% perfect safety! What a phony weird reality that we are paying for with our lives.
Bioactive dead highly processed foods equals compromised immune system.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/foodanddrink/foodnews/dry-milk-powder-tied-to-7-recalls-over-salmonella-concerns-so-far/ar-AA22HXEw?ocid=BingNewsSerp
Mark
I do believe Europeans in general have a greater appreciation for real food. But, their governments are worse in many ways to the US. Their nanny state socialism and socialized medicine is a failure. They are all in on the carbon reduction at all costs fraud. Farmers being told to stop raising animals while the EU is making trade deals with S. America for the same meat. Putting restrictions on fertilizer use, fuel use. The EU doesn’t listen to the citizens and makes decrees from Brussels that the people don’t want.
I’ve spoken with a lot of Europeans over the years about health care, and the one thing they focus on, can’t understand, is how Americans put up with a health care system that can put them in debt and even bankrupt them if they don’t have the right insurance. That is totally foreign to Europeans, since their health care system could never do that to them. I’ve heard a bit of grumbling about wait times to see a specialist, but that’s about it. So not sure what your evidence is that “socialized medicine is a failure.” Europeans seem to get good medical care, have lower infant mortality rates, and their overall health appears superior to that of Americans.
As for European farmers, I doubt they’d put up with a dairy system that has American dairy farms shutting down enmasse, farmers committing suicide. No, they’d be out in the streets dumping milk and blocking traffic (which they do on occasion). They definitely have a lot more spirit and political awareness than American farmers….and they get results.
I question if your opinions are based on years of residency in Europe and thorough research about the EU and national governance, as your remark seems to indicate lack of knowledge. I can assure you that EU is not like you describe it. I live and work in Europe with farmers…
Mark,
Dr. Marty Makary chose to criticize the medical bureaucracies and pharmaceutical industry with these words, “Young healthy people have essentially no risk of dying of COVID and nobody was honest enough to admit that. We hear stories of long-term complications that were attributed to long COVID and they were not, they were vaccine injuries.” Perhaps this was unfortunately the reason why he was dismissed. The above institutions when they flex their muscles have an enormous amount of clout, heaven forbid if someone like Dr. David Makary should challenge their integrity by pointing out their dishonesty and corruption… Robert F Kennedy junior has been given the difficult and uphill task of dealing with these cesspools of corruption.
I worked with a group called the Bionutrient Food Institute during the covid pandemic, they are doing some very interesting science in this very field. They are looking a variation in the food supply and also did a lot of work with Dr Elaine Ingham to address the soil quality questions that many have. Lots of good research here: https://www.bionutrient.org/
Thanks for the link, Cynthia. I suspect a lot of the American problem has to do with soil health.
I think the nutritional depletion seen in USA is to a large extent driven by monoculture and nutritional depletion of the soils. The monoculture will deplete the soils of nutrients combined with artificial fertilizer. In Europe most smaller farms are rotating through crops annually on the fields, are using the animal slurry and manure to a much larger extent, and less weed killers.
The UK (not exactly Europe) started monitoring trace mineral levels in food in the 1930’s due to human malnutrition, and the soil in the early 70’s due in part to William Albrects work at the University of Missouri in the 40’s to understand the role in the lack of soils trace minerals with livestock mortality. The studies at the NSI in the UK found that by the early 70’s trace minerals in food had dropped by as much as 50%, some by 75%. Growing food and feed for livestock is a slow-motion mining operation, slower if your organic (sustainable-blah-blah blah) but mining just the same. There are only 2 known fertilizer and consulting companies in the US that concentrate on trace mineral applications and its relationship to soil and animal optimization through soil biology which depends on trace minerals to breakdown macro (NPK) and turn organic matter into humus and make nutrients available to the plant.
Large Agricultural firms are just figuring out plant disease is related to trace mineral deficiencies, though most money is spent on genetics to grow tolerant to disease at the cost of lower quality product. Big seed companies have pumped more CO2 into seed development greenhouses and learned early on (late 80’s) that more CO2 lead to lower quality(less trace mineral uptake). A big tell in planning for a future understood to be a reality. Once the Big Ag companies learn that Glyphosate ties up trace minerals in the soil, they will have to learn the biological aspect of weed control and maximizing applications of fertilizer at lessor amounts while sequestering carbon in the soil while growing crops to mitigate higher atmospheric CO2.
AND, before everyone tells the tale of Regenerative Ag in the comments, true regenerative as its currently known only works on Rangeland, not pasture, not commodity crops, not veggie gardens. Lettuce and small greens maybe, for a time if you overloaded the ground decades prior, but those are about as least demanding in nutrients, so you do the math.
link to NSI study https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09637486.2021.1981831#abstract
Tim Wightman
I agree with you, I simply do not think it is logical to think that you can just take and take and take from any natural system without giving back. And having livestock on the farm is critical to this as well as minerals and abundant organic matter.
One more huge reason that Americans have such a hard time connecting soil minerals and Whole Foods to health and health benefits.
The FDA strongly enforces any medical claim of any sort of benefits for consumption of food related to health benefits. According to the FDA NO health benefits can be associated with consumption of foods. The only claims that can be made must be FDA approved and are considered a “new drug”. Because only FDA approved drugs are associated with healing health or benefits to health. Very few health claims for food exist. It takes millions of dollars and years to get a claim approved and most are patented! You can not patent a food !
That is why all the research investments in food and health are a waste in the USA. When a discovery is made, consumer education of that discovery is blocked. Sick dysfunctional systems produce sick dysfunctional outcomes, and sell lots of drugs to lots of sick people. How do I know this ?? The FDA dragged me into federal court 15 years ago and claimed I was pushing an unapproved new drug called Raw Milk!
The claim I was making ? Simply putting FDA NIH CDC Pubmed links to the long list of peer reviewed published studies on raw milk and breast milk on
my website. 25 years later thousands of raw milk consumers report huge benefits just like the blocked research found. That is sick. Really sick policy. Profits over public health. That’s pathological immoral policy.
We created the very sick country we live in. The masses are ignorant unhealthy addicted lazy voters. Pharma runs the show and we are not clear minded enough to take back our country from this sickness slavery.
Farmers over Pharmacies
The gut micro biome matters. Soil to Soul.