The Politics of Food

The Politics of Food

A look into the politics of food makes it clear how and why Americans no longer have the right to grow and eat whatever they want.

By Nicole Faires 
March 2014

When corn became subsidized, farmers began overproducing it in the same way they had wheat and cotton. To find a market for all that extra corn, the United States began producing massive amounts of inexpensive high fructose corn syrup.

Photo by Fotolia/Jeno

Consumers should be concerned about where their food comes from. InFood Tyrants (Skyhorse Publishing, 2013), homesteader and writer Nicole Faires opens our eyes to a wide-scale problem that isn’t going away. With hands-on knowledge and a new view of the American farmer, Faires suggests the answer lays in the soil and provides the information necessary to make informed, healthy food choices. The following selection, from Chapter 1, offers a glimpse into the politics of food that run America.

“I saw all the people hustling early in the morning to go into the factories and stores and the office buildings, to do their job, to get their check. But ultimately it’s not office buildings or jobs that give us our checks. It’s the soil. The soil is what gives us the real income that supports us all.”

—Ed Begley, Jr.

The Abridgement of Freedom

“I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”
—James Madison

You may not realize it yet, but you do not have the legal right to grow and eat anything that you want, and food has become a very complex issue. However, this right was not lost overnight, because originally food was not political. Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution would have included agriculture if any of the founding members or later leaders believed that the government had any say in the matter. Our relatively young food “industry” was still safe in the 1920s, when President Coolidge vetoed a complex price-fixing bill for various crops. He said, “I do not believe that upon serious consideration the farmers of America would tolerate the precedent of a body of men chosen solely by one industry who, acting in the name of the Government, shall arrange for contracts which determine prices...Such action would establish bureaucracy on such a scale as to dominate not only the economic life but the moral, social, and political future of our people.”

These politics of food he meant to avoid, however, is now a staple of most of the food industry legislation in America today. Only ten years after Coolidge, Hoover introduced the Farm Board, which fixed the price of wheat and cotton. The Farm Board had good intentions, but its policies had far-reaching consequences. If the price of wheat or cotton dropped too low, the government would step in and buy it at the fixed price. This relative financial security convinced many farmers to start producing wheat and cotton, and pretty soon they had too much of it. Supply far outstripped demand. That’s when President Roosevelt created the Agricultural Adjustment Act. Rather than paying farmers too much for a worthless crop, the government now paid them not to grow wheat or cotton. By that logic, any business that got into trouble by poorly estimating the market should be “bailed out” and paid to prevent stupidity. But this only applied to farmers.

These subsidies had a completely unexpected result many years later. When corn became subsidized, farmers began overproducing it in the same way they had wheat and cotton. So, to find a market for all that extra corn, the United States began producing massive amounts of inexpensive high fructose corn syrup, which became a major ingredient in many, many manufactured foods. We’re now very aware how bad high fructose corn syrup is for us, and yet the USDA, which is responsible for publishing healthy food guides for millions of children, has no problem handing out money for it.

However, to truly find a solution for our nation’s food problems, it is necessary to go all the way back to the foundation of food: the soil. When we talk about the loss of our right to healthy food, what we are really talking about is losing our freedom to access soil to grow it. When we talk about the toxic state of the factory farms supplying the majority of our food supply, what we are really discussing is the gross mismanagement of our land. We are so quickly destroying our ability to feed ourselves that in a short while we will be completely dependent on others. This all comes down to dirt.

It is no longer possible to allow others to retain responsibility for our food supply without severely endangering a healthy future for the next generation. This means that the current rhetoric of Know Your Farmer will need to become much more personal. It should be Everyone Is a Farmer. I am hopeful that someday we will live in a culture where growing food is a matter of course, something almost everyone will do on balconies and backyards, and farms will dot urban landscapes on every corner, employing vast numbers of willing unemployed workers. This is the path to the restoration of our full freedoms, but it will not come without a cost. The deeply entrenched corporate agenda of the USDA, the millions of dollars corporations pour into legislation, and our own voracious appetites stand in the way.

The Loss of Farmland

“Quit thinking about decent land use as solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
—Aldo Leopold

According to the American Farmland Trust, America lost farmland at a rate of one acre per minute between 2002 and 2007, totaling 4 million acres, and that rate has only increased. Urban development, suburban sprawl, and commercial building all find farmland appealing for the same reasons it is good for farming: It has been cleared and leveled and has good drainage. Unfortunately, not all soil can grow plants. Decent farmland is actually relatively rare in comparison to the rest of the terrain. Rocky places, forests, floodplains, mountains, rivers, lakes, and canyons don’t make good farmland and are more than likely not worth transforming.

Why don’t farmers just stop selling their land? The number one reason is that farmers are getting old. USDA farm census numbers show that in 1997 the average farmer was fifty-four years old, and by 2007 the average had become fifty-seven. This would not be a terrible problem if more than1 percent (as opposed to 38 percent in 1900) of the population actually farmed the land and those farmers were not aging. Most of the next generation doesn’t seem interested in taking over these farms, and so the farmers sell land to finance their retirement or even medical bills. As the demand for land increases, the next generation of farmers finds itself priced out of the market by wealthy developers.

There are some who downplay the loss of farms by rationalizing that 4 million acres isn’t really that much in relation to America’s total landmass, which is about 2.4 billion acres. But this farmland is the most valuable acreage in America because of its soil quality. Good farmland usually has a couple of feet of precious topsoil, but the quality is not simply measured by the quantity of nutrients it has. The structure of the soil is just as important because it can take decades or even hundreds of years to build up a mixture that is perfect. Besides humus (decayed organic matter), there are minerals, clay, and sand that come together to retain water, but still let it drain at the right rate and insulate roots at just the right temperature. This kind of rare and valuable soil is called loam.

Many farms in the United States have been cultivated since they were first cleared during the Colonial period. When the settlers arrived, they found much of North America fully forested, and so they had to clear the land by hand, removing trees and rocks. The forest floor made a rich base for plant life. Some of the land lay in fertile valleys that had been flooded by rising lakes and rivers and fertilized by fish. The early farmers worked the land carefully and sustainably and never pushed the soil beyond its limits. This practice continued until the 1920s, when war and mechanization changed how farming was done. Young men came home from the front only to leave again for city jobs. They were soon replaced by tractors. Farms began to focus on monoculture, or growing one type of food only, rather than producing meat, vegetables, and grain together in the aesthetic form we still picture in our minds today. The size of these farms increased as investors bought up generational farmland and conglomerated it.

Underutilized chemical factories left idle after the war were put to work creating chemical fertilizer, herbicides, and fungicides. On a large scale, the historical and fertile farmland of the past became contaminated by toxic materials and depleted of any nutrients, as farmers became completely dependent on chemicals. Farmers were stunned when they began experiencing mass crop failure and tremendous soil problems on farmland that had faithfully provided for generations, but it wasn’t until the catastrophic drought of the 1930s that people realized how bad the situation was. America’s heartland dried up, and the overgrazed and overplowed soil simply blew away for the next eight years. According to Cary Nelson, by 1934, the drought affected 75 percent of the United States, and the billowing soil carried by the wind created horrific dust storms that killed thousands of people. Sunday, April 14, 1935, became known to history as Black Sunday, as a mountain of dust rolling across the Plains turned day into night. People were stranded for hours as the tsunami of topsoil made its way across the Midwest and travelled all the way to Washington, DC. It was because of this storm that the region became known as the Dust Bowl.

Just a few weeks before Black Sunday, President Roosevelt’s advisor Hugh Hammond Bennett had testified before Congress that the nation desperately needed better soil conservation methods. When the dust obscured the sun, he pointed out the window to his colleagues and said, “This, gentlemen, is what I’ve been talking about.” Obviously there was very little argument, and Congress created the Soil Conservation Service under the USDA before the end of that year. Farmers were taught to use crop rotation, cover crops, better plowing techniques, and basic soil care, all skills their forefathers had been using only forty years before. Nelson found that planting windbreaks and alternative plowing strategies reduced erosion by 65 percent, but by that time there had already been a massive exodus away from the Midwest as crops failed. Skeletons of farms were strewn across the Plains as farmers abandoned farming for good, leaving the land to be repossessed by banks.

In 1942, J. I. Rodale promoted the word organic to describe a method of farming that did not use chemicals and took care of the soil, but it was forty years before that method was embraced and any real change began. The chemical industry was (and still is) a very powerful force, and it wasn’t until the 1990s that more than a few outspoken activists, scientists, and die-hard gardeners took any real notice of it. One hundred years after our departure from sustainable growing methods, farmers and consumers are finally beginning to recognize that some of the soil-conserving methods of the past are better for the soil—and for us. However, despite our awareness of the problem, and the massive drought of the 1930s, there has not been enough change. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 2012 has seen the worst drought since the Dust Bowl, affecting 56 percent of the United States with moderate to extreme drought in June. At the time of this writing, much of the soybean, wheat, and corn crop has been lost, and better soil management practices could have prevented it.

The damage has already been done. Even though the number of sustainable farms has been increasing every year, available farmland has also been shrinking at a steady rate. Considering that the vast majority of farms are not using sustainable soil practices despite the efforts of the Soil Conservation Service (now known as the NRCS), our available fertile soil is decreasing through each mismanaged crop cycle. Add to this our increasing population and dependence on cheap imported food and the rate could be even higher.The USDA census estimates the United States lost 1.7 percent of its farmland within a five-year span, which means that with all factors considered, all of America’s farmland will probably be completely gone within three hundred years. That may seem like a long time, but consider the effect of losing just 20 percent of the farmland. A country so dependent on import for food is a country that will fall victim to rising prices, substandard quality, and even possible political turmoil. Food is so vital for survival that it becomes a mechanism of control. If you don’t see it, your children will within the next sixty years.

This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from Food Tyrants: Reclaiming Our Basic Right to Healthy Food in a Toxic World by Nicole Faires and published by Skyhorse Publishing, 2013.

Out of Sight: The Labor Abuses Behind What We Eat

Out of Sight: The Labor Abuses Behind What We Eat

Erik Loomis  July 29, 2015

Shrimp processing plant, Can Tho province, Vietnam, 2007 (ILO / Flickr)

When you think of the globalized economy, you might not think of food. But capital mobility and the legal framework facilitating it have tremendously shaped the food system. It has transformed where and how our food is produced, who grows it, and how it affects the ecosystem.

NAFTA’s agricultural provisions allowed American farmers to dump their products on the Mexican market while raising animals fed on cheap American corn. This transformed Mexico. Mexican pig farmers went out of business because pork prices dropped so low. In 1995 Mexico imported 30,000 tons of pork from the United States, and in 2010 it imported 811,000 tons. Mexican hog farmers had to leave their farms to make a living. Some migrated north, becoming undocumented immigrants in the United States. A group of those people found work in a Smithfield Foods processing plant in North Carolina. Smithfield used these immigrants to bust a union-organizing campaign in the plant. When some of those immigrants in turn joined the union, Smithfield called the Immigration and Naturalization Service to report itself for immigration violations.

One morning, twenty-one workers were individually called to their supervisor’s office, arrested, imprisoned for using false social security cards, and then deported. Hundreds of other workers fled town, fearing they would be deported next. For Smithfield executives, the fines for hiring undocumented workers were the price of a union-free workplace. This actually backfired on Smithfield because the company had to replace those workers with union-supporting African Americans, and the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, the nation’s largest food worker union, won an election there in 2008. But Smithfield’s strategy often does work. An Iowa slaughterhouse turned itself in for immigration violations in 2008 in a similar attempt to disrupt union organizing. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials entered the plant and arrested 389 of its 970 workers. This time, the union drive stalled.

Many of the Mexican workers in North Carolina came from the state of Veracruz, on the Gulf Coast. Those who stayed behind in Veracruz also found themselves fighting Smithfield. NAFTA rules facilitating land privatization allowed American agricultural companies to create U.S.-style agribusiness operations in Mexico. Smithfield built a pork-processing facility in Veracruz, and it treated the people who lived around that facility as poorly as the workers in North Carolina. The company buried dead pigs in unlined pits. When those pigs decomposed, they contaminated the local water supply. Local residents organized to stop Smithfield from expanding the new facility and won.

This Smithfield story tells us much about food’s role in the globalized economy. First, it shows that the food industry outsources production for the same reasons as other industries—to pollute and to exploit workers while minimizing resistance from empowered locals with labor and environmental organizations. The meat industry already locates its facilities in antiunion states such as North Carolina, and even politicians in more progressive states, like Maryland governor and Democratic candidate for president Martin O’Malley, oppose regulations demanded by citizens to keep their water clean because they fear that the meat industry will move to another state. If the regulations in all the states become too strict, NAFTA has opened up Mexico to American agribusiness. States compete with states and nations with nations in a race to the bottom. Ecosystems and workers suffer.

Corporations do not care about national borders so long as they can accomplish their objectives. Whether the slaughterhouse is in North Carolina or Veracruz, most of us never see where our food comes from. When it makes sense to invest in Mexico, agribusinesses do so. But they can also move to the vast Great Plains or the South, where environmental regulations are few and labor unions weak. As Timothy Pachirat writes in his powerful firsthand account of working in a Nebraska slaughterhouse, “Distance and concealment operate as mechanisms of power in modern society.” Hiding food production protects companies by concealing how the industry treats animals, what it dumps into the ecosystem, and how it treats workers. Today’s consumers might eat organic food, but that does not mean the food is produced in a way that contributes to social justice. It does not mean that the people growing the food, butchering the meat, or serving you in the restaurant are treated humanely. Peeling off the food industry’s concealing blindfolds can empower consumers to again fight for labor and nature.

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Public knowledge of working conditions and animal treatment is the food industry’s worst nightmare. This is the motivation behind a series of so-called ag-gag bills to criminalize undercover footage of industrial farming operations. Iowa, Utah, and Missouri have these laws, and Idaho joined them in February 2014. In Idaho, it is now illegal for anyone not employed by the farm—and for anyone who misrepresented themselves to get hired—to make video recordings of what happens on that farm without the express consent of the owner. Violators could receive a year in prison and a $5,000 fine. Agribusiness pushed for the law after an undercover video showed workers beating and sexually abusing cattle at an Idaho dairy operation. Animal rights groups are challenging on constitutional grounds, but it is a dangerous advance in the concealment of industrial activity. If laws protect what happens in meat factories from view, why would they not give all factory owners legal standing for concealment? Why not make the documentation of violations of workers’ rights or the dumping of pollution in any industry a crime? Although court challenges will result, if these laws are held up, they are a very scary legal aid to corporations concealing their operations.

We once knew more about who raised our meat and how it was processed. Until after the Civil War, most Americans lived on farms or in small towns. Food production was largely local, supplemented by larger national and international markets for foods like sugar and coffee. Meat was especially local. People wanted to see the meat they bought, particularly their beef. Given that fresh beef goes bad quickly, consumers did not trust anything that was not butchered locally. Until the late nineteenth century, people raised their own animals, bought meat from nearby farmers, or went to butchers who knew where the animal came from. Even big cities like Boston and New York had slaughterhouses to provide freshly slaughtered beef.

When American cities exploded in size after 1880, local food production became harder. A city of a million people could not easily grow its own food or slaughter its own meat. The advent of refrigerated railcars in the 1880s turned meat into an industrial product and played a major role in separating the production of food from everyday lives. Refrigeration meant that meatpackers could precut beef and send it across the country without concern about spoilage. To overcome people’s concerns about its quality, the companies took a loss in selling their meat, undermining local butchers and creating new markets for cheap meat that would generate profit after the smaller competitors shut down. Millions of cows that grazed on the Great Plains rode trains to Chicago where they went into huge stockyard pens. They were killed in enormous slaughterhouses, processed into a variety of products, and then shipped by train to consumers across the country. By the early twentieth century, beef was not from a cow but from a package you bought at a local market. Once Americans became used to refrigerated or canned beef, they assumed it was good meat. That assumption was often mistaken.

Beef processing facilities in Chicago, 1900 (Library of Congress)

The gargantuan meatpacking district of Chicago achieved fame and became an international tourist attraction. But, as Upton Sinclair described in his famous 1906 novel The Jungle, these factories created treacherous work conditions and nasty food. Slaughterhouse workers stood on floors soaked in blood and water in very cold temperatures, with flying hooks and knives risking their limbs and lives every second. They began forming unions in the 1890s to improve their lives, but it was not until the creation of the CIO-affiliated Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee (later the United Packinghouse Workers of America or UPWA) in 1937 that they achieved major gains in pay and working conditions. Organized labor increasingly played a big role throughout the nation’s food economy after the 1930s. UPWA members cut beef in Chicago. The milkmen delivering glass jars of fresh milk to doorsteps were Teamsters. By the 1960s, unionized meat cutters made 28 percent more money than average workers made for nondurable manufacturing.

While meatpackers came to terms with the unions, unionization and good wages were bad outcomes for trucking companies, grocery store chains, and the Republican Party. A 1955 union contract won by the meatpacker unions that put a collective $50 million in workers’ pockets begins the recent history of capital mobility in meat production. This contract frustrated Eisenhower administration officials, who faced heat over high beef prices. Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson and his undersecretary Earl Butz, who later created the modern farm subsidy system while Secretary of Agriculture under Richard Nixon, wanted to raise farm profits without increasing consumer costs. Their answer was to undermine unions and squeeze wages by moving meat production out of the cities and into nonunion plants in the countryside, near where the cows and pigs were farmed.

New upstart meatpackers, with the support of trucking and grocery chains who profited from cheaper meat, introduced refrigerated trucks that allowed meat processing in union-free rural areas. This undermined the big Chicago packinghouses and their unions. The new rural corporations had ruthless antiunion mentalities. Iowa Beef Packers (IBP) became a leading meatpacker in the 1960s. Today part of Tyson Foods, IBP rapidly consolidated the rural meatpacking operations in the Midwest, built enormous feedlot operations on the Great Plains, and created nonunion workplaces with low wages. In 1969, IBP workers in Dakota City, Iowa, went on strike. IBP hired scabs to replace them. Violence broke out on both sides and one person was killed. When unionized butchers in New York City refused to sell IBP beef, the company made a deal with the Mafia to break the boycott, undermining the strike. IBP wages were soon 50 percent lower than in the Chicago plants. The big meatpackers could not compete, closed their unionized slaughterhouses, laid off twelve thousand workers, and moved their operations to the Plains as well. Further IBP hard-line antiunion strategies led to the rapid weakening of the UPWA, which became the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) in 1979.

The new geography of meatpacking, with its decentralized production, low wages, and poor working conditions, meant that farm owners earned more money and consumers maintained low beef prices. Workers—never seen by consumers—were caught in the middle. Nonunion factories demanded vastly increased production from their workers. Fatigue, repetitive-motion injuries, serious accidents on the job, and high turnover followed. One IBP manager considered an average annual turnover rate of 96 percent at a plant “low,” showing how little the corporation cared to provide labor dignified enough conditions to keep workers on the job.

The companies might not have wanted unions, but many in the new rural workforce did. Poultry truck drivers joined the Teamsters in North Carolina. The UFCW had major successes organizing southern poultry factories during the 1980s. The largely African American workforce in these plants took major personal risks by unionizing to improve the low wages and unsafe working conditions. Companies responded by closing unionized factories and opening new nonunion plants nearby, intimidating new hires into signing union-decertification petitions, or declaring bankruptcy and reopening the plants without union contracts. They also began replacing African American workers with immigrants, often undocumented, from Mexico and Central America. An Immigration and Naturalization Service investigation in 1991 led to accusations that Tyson Foods paid smugglers to bring employees up to their plants from Mexico and Guatemala. Most unionized plants faded in the face of this determined antiunion effort.

With union-free workplaces and undocumented workers, employers created an exploitative system of labor in the Plains states that looked more like the outsourced maquiladoras of Mexico than the unionized shops of Chicago. In 2005, Human Rights Watch released a report saying the American meat industry violated basic human and worker rights because of the terrible workplace safety, violations of freedom of association, and exploitation of undocumented immigrants. A decade later, little has changed. Meatpacking is a dangerous, nonunion, polluting industry that fights worker organizing through hiring, intimidating, and firing vulnerable workers, and it avoids pollution standards through threats to move operations.

Conditions are arguably even worse in the international fish industry. At Walmart, you can buy inexpensive bags of frozen crawfish and shrimp. As with clothing subcontractors, Walmart signs contracts with suppliers that provide shellfish at low cost. And as in the apparel industry, Walmart’s pressure for low prices means seafood suppliers squeeze every cent out of labor. In 2012, the Worker Rights Consortium issued a report excoriating Walmart for contracting with C.J.’s Seafood, a crawfish processer that brought guest workers from Mexico to its Louisiana processing facility. C.J.’s forced them to work sixteen to twenty-four-hour shifts and locked them in the plant. Workers were threatened with deportation if they complained. Despite these threats, a worker named Ana Rosa Diaz, who had left her four children at home in Tamaulipas, Mexico, to find work, called the National Guestworker Alliance and reported the conditions. This started a series of investigations, including by the U.S. Department of Labor. Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, said, “The extreme lengths of the shifts people were required to work, the employer’s brazenness in violating wage laws, the extent of the psychological abuse the workers faced and the threats of violence against their families—that combination made it one of the most egregious workplaces we’ve examined, whether here or overseas.” This pressure and bad publicity led Walmart to suspend the contract, but not to change its own labor practices or take any responsibility for the manufacturing of its products.

States such as Louisiana promote themselves as “business friendly,” attracting corporations with the unstated promise that companies like C.J.’s can operate with little state interference. Increasingly, though, companies like Walmart want to avoid even the possible threat of a reduction in supply through regulations. Shellfish production has moved decisively overseas over the past two decades. More than 80 percent of shrimp eaten in the United States comes from other nations, with Bangladesh, Vietnam, and China increasingly providing Americans with their inexpensive shellfish. Those governments do not enforce labor laws in fish-processing sites. Immigrant workers in a shrimp factory in Thailand’s Songkhla Province that supplies Walmart went on strike in 2012. They struck over their filthy barracks and a reduced food allowance that left them starving. The Cambodian and Burmese workers cannot read Thai, are in debt to traffickers for their expenses in getting to Thailand, and have little recourse to improve their lives. Walmart originally claimed it had told the Songkhla supplier this behavior violated its labor codes, but it later denied ever having received products from that factory, despite overwhelming physical evidence to the contrary. Thai police fired gunshots in the air to break up the strikers, demonstrating that the government’s interest was in protecting the fish elite and foreign contracts, not ensuring basic human rights. The new government in Thailand, following the 2014 coup, is even worse in its contempt for workers and the poor.

USDA officials inspect a seafood processing operation at Tianbao in China, May 6, 2004 (USDA / Flickr)

On fishing boats, conditions are even worse. Labor brokers sell migrant workers from around Southeast Asia to the mackerel fishing industry until the immigrants pay off their debts. Fifty-nine percent of these workers have witnessed the murder of another worker. One ship owner killed all fourteen of his workers rather than pay them. Meanwhile, fish exports continue to grow in importance to the Thai economy. Thailand is now the third-leading exporter of fish in the world. The United States imported $2.5 billion in seafood from Thailand in 2012, including more than 20 percent of the nation’s mackerel and sardines.

The food products we buy in the middle aisles of the supermarket are even more obscured from their real costs than vegetables and meat. American companies have engaged in the same union busting, outsourcing, and subcontracting in processed food as in apparel or toys. These workers are subjected to the same problems of poisoning, poor conditions, and capital mobility as workers in every other industry. In 2013, Kellogg’s locked out its majority black workforce at a Memphis factory that makes Fruit Loops and Frosted Flakes in order to crush the union, Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union Local 252G. The company recently moved 58 million pounds of cereal production from Memphis to a new factory in Mexico where workers are required to live in company housing. It then hired a union-busting agency in Ohio to bring in scab laborers to Memphis. This one action is part of a larger move by Kellogg’s to eliminate most of its American factories and all of its unions. The company has recently closed union plants in Australia and Canada, shifting production to nonunion sites. In July 2014, a federal judge ordered an end to the lockout and the workers returned to the job, but the long-term outlook for the union members keeping their jobs does not look promising.

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Here’s the thing about food: because it is so important to our lives and our health, it is one set of products where we can effectively resist the concealment of production. Eating is a profound, if everyday, experience that affects our health and our happiness. The explosive growth in farmers’ markets, concerns about genetically modified organisms, and fears of pesticides have challenged the industrial food complex, just not over its treatment of workers. Free-range chickens and cattle have become highly desirable and expensive products, both for taste and for health and safety concerns, but less so because of the workers injured and killed in the meatpacking plants.

We can see the current local food movement as a backlash against corporations’ efforts to hide their operations from us. We cannot control very much about our relationship to the larger economy. But regional food networks, with production ranging from rooftop gardens to large farms on the outskirts of cities, can bring a significant amount of food democracy back into cities while providing enormous environmental benefits compared to the current system. Eschewing monocultures for diversified food crops would cut down on the pesticides and herbicides needed, meaning less fertilizer, less pollution, and healthier rivers, lakes, and oceans as well as small farmers who could afford to live and farm without expensive chemicals.

But food movements also need to be justice movements and connect to bigger issues. If we are serious in thinking about a democratic food system, we have to support good working conditions throughout the food industry. It means we need to support farmworker and meatpacker unions. We have to end the tipped minimum wage and demand greater funding for OSHA and the FDA to inspect our food factories.

Ultimately, our food problems stem from the same lack of democracy that plagues our society. In our food system, animals are abused, workers die, waterways become polluted with animal waste, and wildlife dies. Yet most of us have no idea this is happening. If we can demand ethically produced food that allows consumers insight into food production, we can go far to reshape the world into a more just and sustainable place. Food corporations, from Monsanto to McDonald’s, hope this never happens.

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Erik Loomis is an assistant professor of history at the University of Rhode Island. He blogs at Lawyers, Guns, and Money on labor and environmental issues past and present. Copyright © 2015 by Erik Loomis. This is an edited excerpt from Out of Sight: The Long and Disturbing Story of Corporations Outsourcing Catastrophe, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission.

Taurine Grows New Brain Cells and Much More

Life Extension Magazine September 2015

Grow New Brain Cells

By Forrest Ritiker

For years, scientists believed brain shrinkage was inevitable and irreversible.

Cutting-edge research has shown that brain cells can regenerate.

An amino acid called taurine plays an important role in creating new brain cells.

Researchers found that taurine increased the growth of brain cells by activating “sleeping” stem cells. Taurine also increased the survival of new neurons, resulting in an increase in adult brain cell creation.1-3

Recent studies reveal that taurine has unique biochemical properties that promote new brain cell formation.4,5 Animal studies show that taurine triggers new brain cells to grow in the hippocampus, the area of the brain most concerned with memory.1,6 This can lead to dramatic improvements in cognition and recall.7,8 Low levels of taurine have been observed in patients with Parkinson’s disease.9,10

In addition to these impressive brain benefits, taurine also boosts cardiac function and reduces arterial stiffness as well as reducing the negative impacts of metabolic syndrome.11-16 In fact, taurine supplementation added to the drug metforminhas been shown to offer tremendous reductions in tissue damage.17

Taurine levels fall significantly with age, leaving the brain, heart, kidneys, and other tissues deprived of this vital healing compound­—one capable of rescuing dying cells and restoring cellular communication.1,6,18

Experts are beginning to recognize that with age, many can experience a taurine deficiency that is a real and fundamental threat to health.

The great news is that taurine is a super low-cost supplement, meaning everyone can benefit from its potential to slow and reverse degenerative processes.

Taurine Grows New Brain Cells

  

For years, scientists believed that brain shrinkage (atrophy) was an unstoppable degenerative process. New research reveals this loss of brain matter is partially caused byreversible processes.19,20 This knowledge opens the door to a new paradigm—one that aims to restore brain structure and function—as opposed to simply treating the symptoms.

One of the chief requirements for growing fresh brain cells is a little known amino acid:taurine. Taurine has a surprising number of critical actions concerning how cells protect and renew themselves.

Because taurine levels decline with age, older adults are unable to maintain the level of new brain cell formation required to preserve their youthful responses to toxic and metabolic insults.1,21 This taurine deficiency may lie at the heart of some of our most dreaded brain disorders.22

Studies now show that restoring taurine content in brain cells can reverse these trends, and rejuvenate brain structure and function. Animal studies show that taurine triggers new brain cells to grow in the hippocampus, a brain region centrally involved in memory.1,23

A study published in the journal Stem Cell Research found that taurine supplementation in middle-aged mice increased the growth of new cells in regions of the brain associated with learning and memory. It accomplished this by activating“hibernating” stem cells that were then capable of maturing into several different kinds of cells.1

In fact, one study showed that when human neural precursor cells (the early-stage neurons and supporting cells in the brain), were cultured with taurine, it produced significantly more brain cells, demonstrating how taurine stimulates stem-like cells to differentiate into functioning brain cells.2

In animals, taurine deficiency impairs brain growth by delaying normal neuronal development.2 Lab studies show that taurine can reverse this problem. When taurine-deficient brain cells are grown in culture and then taurine is added, it results in a sharp increase in the development of new cells. This is attributed to multiple mechanisms of action, including improved mitochondrial function; activation of genes required for normal proliferation, survival, and energy functioning;2 and blocking chemical signals that inhibit neuronal cell regeneration.3

In addition to promoting the growth of new brain cells, taurine enhances neurites, which are tiny projections that help brain cells to communicate with each other. Neurites maximize connections between those cells, along which electrical impulses flow to support memory, cognition, feeling, and thinking. Over time, chemical stresses and toxins can damage these neurites, contributing to slower cognition in older people.24 A lab study revealed that taurine restores normal neurite growth in nerves exposed to toxic chemicals, largely through its protective effects against chemical stresses.25

The findings that taurine can genuinely rejuvenate damaged brains are truly revolutionary, and are beginning to change the way scientists and neurologists are thinking about age- and trauma-related brain changes.26,27

Taurine’s Benefits For Brain Conditions

Two specific conditions taurine has been shown to help benefit are Parkinson’s disease and depression.22,28

Human studies show that taurine plasma levels are reduced in patients with Parkinson’s disease, suggesting both a potential contribution to the disease—and a possible treatment.28 This problem is compounded by the fact that standard treatment of Parkinson’s symptoms involves the drug levodopa, which may further deplete taurine.28 This makes it particularly important for Parkinson’s patients to supplement with this versatile amino acid.

Supplementing with taurine is also important for those suffering from depression.22 Depression is particularly prevalent in diabetics; indeed, there’s a strong school of thought that chronic blood sugar elevations are involved in depression and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.29-31 Intriguingly, taurine supplementation in diabetic rats has been shown to improve depressive-like behaviors; in addition, supplementation improved the diabetes-damaged neurotransmitter function, which helped lead to improved short-term memory.32

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

Taurine Promotes Brain Cell Regeneration

• Taurine is a free amino acid that is vital in slowing key age-accelerating processes, particularly in the central nervous and cardiovascular systems.
• Laboratory studies show that taurine can achieve what was once thought to be impossible—stimulate new growth and connections of brain cells, which raises the real possibility for restoration of youthful brain function in older adults.
• Taurine levels decrease with age and with metabolic and neurological disease.
• Supplementation with taurine, in both animal and human studies, demonstrates the age-decelerating effects of this amino acid.
• Laboratory studies reveal dramatic improvements in cognition and memory in taurine-supplemented animals, and suggest that human supplementation might slow or reverse changes seen in Parkinson’s disease.
• Taurine supplementation boosts cardiac function and reduces arterial stiffness, both contributors to early death from heart disease and stroke.
• Those with metabolic syndrome also stand to gain from taurine supplements, which substantially reduce that syndrome’s negative impacts on cardiovascular risk.

Solving Your Heart’s Energy Crisis

Heart disease remains the leading cause of death in US adults.33

A recent study in mice has, for the first time, suggested that taurine might prolong life span by improving heart muscle function.34 The study used mice genetically engineered to be profoundly taurine deficient, a state that causes premature aging and severe heart problems, eventually resulting in early death.34 Painstaking work in other animal models revealed why taurine deficiency leads to these severe effects. Taurine deficiency disrupts the “electron transport chain,” which reduces the amount of energy-rich adenosine triphosphate (ATP) available for heart cells to support their contractions, leading to decreased pumping ability of the heart.

That fundamental finding—that low taurine levels contribute to or exacerbate poor heart muscle function—is now being corroborated by lab and animal studies demonstrating improvements in heart or blood vessel performance.

Poor or unregulated control of arterial smooth muscle is a major contributor to high blood pressure and resulting cardiovascular disease.35 Fortunately, taurine is known to have blood pressure-reducing and heart muscle-protecting effects.11 In a lab study, human artery segments were immersed in a chemical bath that induced contractions similar to those that occur during an angina episode or heart attack. The addition of taurine to the bath resulted in relaxation of the artery.

Animal and lab studies also show that taurine supplementation can mitigate ischemia-reperfusion injury,36,37 a major cause of long-term heart failure and further dysfunction. This type of injury occurs when there is a loss of blood flow to the heart muscle (ischemia) followed by the restoration of blood flow (reperfusion).38,39 Both processes can lead to an energy crisis and high amounts of reactive chemicals.

Ischemia-reperfusion injury is severely exacerbated by high sugar intake and diabetes because of negative effects on nervous system signals.40,41 Taurine supplementation can abolish those aberrant signals and improve arterial blood pressure following such an injury.42

HOW TAURINE ENHANCES BRAIN FUNCTION

Taurine has the unique ability to help promote new brain cell formation—but its benefits don’t end there. Taurine has several other important properties that preserve and enhance brain function:

• Taurine restores to aging brain cells the ability to prevent and clean up after chemical stresses from reactive molecules, to fight brain inflammation, and to generate brain cell relaxing and stimulating signals at appropriate times.1,6,73-76
• Taurine increases the electrical activity (signaling ability) in nerve cells through effects on calcium, a key element required for proper electrical function of neurons.77
• Taurine can favorably mimic the actions of certain neurotransmitters, the chemical signals that brain cells use to communicate. From a chemical structural standpoint, taurine closely resembles the neurotransmitter gamma-amino-butyric acid (GABA).78,79 GABA is involved in learning, and studies in lower animals demonstrate improvements on simple learning tasks following GABA supplementation.79
• Taurine supplementation supports learning in higher animals as well. Supplementation in a mouse model of inheritable intellectual disability (fragile X syndrome), which is associated with reduced GABA signaling, stabilized and recovered some cognitive functions to an extent that brought some measures of the animals’ performance close to that of normal mice.78

Human Studies Of Taurine’s Cardiovascular Effects

Human studies are demonstrating the impact of taurine’s cardiovascular effects. Large epidemiological studies show that deficiencies in taurine are associated with an increase in cardiovascular risk factors. For example, when compared to people with the highest taurine levels, those with the lowest levels had a 184% increase in the risk of obesity, a 22% increase in the risk of hypertension, and a 120% increase in the risk of elevated cholesterol.12

While the risk of taurine deficiency is great, encouraging studies show that supplementation with taurine can reduce risk factors for heart disease. And in fact, intervention studies are now showing that supplementation can rectify heart muscle energy deficiency to the point of improving clinical outcomes.43

One of the best examples of this is a Russian study on patients undergoing heart valve replacement and coronary bypass surgery—both of which are huge thieves of cardiac muscle energy. This study showed that supplementation with taurine resulted in improved heart pumping action, reduced the size of the enlarged pumping chambers, lowered triglyceride levels, and significantly improved quality of life.44 These benefits may help to reduce the rates of sudden death after cardiac surgery, which remain unacceptably high.45-48 As is typical with many mainstream doctors, if something costs virtually nothing, as taurine does, they overlook its critical lifesaving properties.

Congestive Heart Failure

  

Taurine has been shown to have protective effects against congestive heart failure, a common, energy-related complication in heart attack survivors, cardiac surgery patients, and people with hypertension or severe lung disease; it results from an inability of the heart to pump sufficient blood to meet the demands of the body.49

In a study published in the journal Clinical Cardiology, patients with congestive heart failure took either a placebo or 2,000 mg of taurine three times a day.50 Compared to placebo recipients, supplemented patients experienced significant improvements in the severity of their heart failure, and significant increases in measurements of the heart’s ability to pump blood. In addition, none of the taurine-supplemented patients worsened during treatment, while 29% of placebo subjects did.

In a similarly designed study, heart failure patients who took 500 mg of taurine three times a day experienced increases in exercise time and distance, and increased ability to utilize cardiac energy, compared with placebo. This is a graphic example of how taurine can affect heart muscle energy production, making it more efficient and helping to energize tired heart muscle.51

Another study of heart failure patients showed that taurine supplementation (3 grams per day for six weeks) resulted in significant changes in echocardiogram results, which showed improvements in the pumping action of the left ventricle, the chamber that pumps blood out to the entire body.52

Clearly, ample blood taurine levels are required for proper heart functioning and this data was published by Life Extension®decades ago based on what cardiologists in Japan had discovered when treating congestive heart failure patients with 3 grams of taurine per day.53 Let’s now look at some ways that taurine can reduce the risks for developing cardiovascular disease in the first place.

Taurine Reduces Metabolic Syndrome

Metabolic syndrome is the combination of central obesity, high blood pressure, insulin resistance/borderline high blood sugar, elevated triglyceride levels, and low HDL cholesterol levels.54 It is strongly associated with short- and long-term risks of cardiovascular and kidney disease, diabetes, cancer, and death.55-58

Taurine supplements have been found to be extremely effective in reducing harmful effects of metabolic syndrome—while at the same time inducing changes that reduce the syndrome’s long-term impact on cardiovascular risk.

Studies of diabetic and/or obese mice and rats demonstrate that taurine leads to consistent improvements in multiple components of metabolic syndrome, including insulin secretion and sensitivity and glucose tolerance.13-15

One study also showed that taurine-deficient mice develop kidney changes identical to those in human diabetic nephropathy, the leading cause of end-stage kidney disease.59 This suggests that taurine supplementation in metabolic syndrome patients might lower renal disease risk.16,60

And, in a remarkable pair of studies, taurine was shown to amplify the beneficial effects of metformin, a naturally derived antidiabetic drug with multiple health-promoting effects in metabolic syndrome. In the first study, when rats were treated with both taurine and metformin, they were better protected against chemical and metabolic stresses than when either was used alone.61 For the second study, the combination of taurine supplementation and metformin was found to provide the same pattern of protection as insulin against diabetes-induced metabolic changes, including preservation of renal function.17

Human Studies Of Taurine And Metabolic Syndrome

  

Human studies demonstrated just how important taurine supplementation is for people with metabolic syndrome, which exacerbates the age-related decline in taurine levels. Compared with healthy people, obese people have as much as a 41% reduction in taurine levels compared with healthy controls,62 while diabetics have a 30% reduction in taurine levels.63

The good news is that supplementing with taurine significantly reduces many of the risk factors faced by those with metabolic syndrome. For example, at doses of 3 grams per day for eight weeks, a group of obese adults had significant 29% reductions in plasma markers of inflammation (hs-CRP) and 20% reduction in lipid peroxidation (thiobarbituric acid reducing substances.)62

And when diabetics supplemented with 1.5 grams per day, not only were their taurine levels restored to normal, but their platelet aggregation was reduced to levels seen in healthy controls.63 (Platelet aggregation is elevated in diabetics,64increasing the risk for stroke- or heart attack-inducing blood clots.)65 This study also involved a laboratory test of platelet aggregation, which showed that while taurine reduced aggregation in blood from diabetic patients, it had no effect at all on blood from healthy controls. (This is a safety concern about virtually all prescription antiplatelet drugs).

In addition to the heart disease and stroke risk induced by aggressive platelet aggregation, diabetics (and even nondiabetic people with chronically “high normal” blood sugar levels) are at increased cardiovascular risk from physical stiffening of their arteries.66-68

Again, taurine supplementation is able to reverse this dangerous state of affairs. In a study published in Diabetes & Vascular Disease Research, young adults with type I diabetes and impaired endothelial function supplemented with 500 mg of taurine three times a day. After just two weeks, their abnormal arterial stiffening and reactivity returned to levels found in controls!69

Since type I diabetes (formerly known as “juvenile-onset,” or “insulin-dependent” diabetes) exposes its victims to much greater elevation and fluctuation in glucose levels even than those seen in type II (“adult-onset”) diabetes, seeing this dramatic effect in the more severe form of the disease is especially encouraging for the much larger population of type II diabetics.49,70,71

Summary

Taurine, a little-known amino acid,72 can do the seemingly impossible: stimulate new brain cells to grow in adult brains. This capability creates an entirely new paradigm for the ways we think about age-related cognitive decline, and even major neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

Taurine levels fall as we age, leaving our brains relatively unprotected. Taurine levels are low in people with age-related brain disorders. Animal studies reveal that supplementation can not only restore youthful taurine levels, but also improves deficits in memory and cognition.

Taurine also has a fundamental connection with longevity, particularly related to cardiovascular disorders. Animal studies demonstrate protection against heart disease with taurine supplementation, and human studies show that supplementation produces dramatic improvements in heart and blood vessel function.

People with metabolic syndrome have lower taurine levels than their healthy peers; again, taurine supplementation drives down the detrimental effects of metabolic syndrome while inducing changes that reduce the syndrome’s long-term impact on cardiovascular risk.

A balanced supplement program should aim at restoring youthful levels of nutrients known to counteract the chemical stresses, inflammatory changes, and toxic exposures we experience through life. The evidence for the amino acid taurinesuggests that it be included in such a regimen.

If you have any questions on the scientific content of this article, please call a Life Extension® Health Advisor at1-866-864-3027.

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