Corn: Diminishing Returns

Lots of good points in this piece -

May 25, 2013

Breeding the Nutrition Out of Our Food

By JO ROBINSON

WE like the idea that food can be the answer to our ills, that if we eat nutritious foods we won’t need medicine or supplements. We have valued this notion for a long, long time. The Greek physician Hippocrates proclaimed nearly 2,500 years ago: “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” Today, medical experts concur. If we heap our plates with fresh fruits and vegetables, they tell us, we will come closer to optimum health.

This health directive needs to be revised. If we want to get maximum health benefits from fruits and vegetables, we must choose the right varieties. Studies published within the past 15 years show that much of our produce is relatively low in phytonutrients, which are the compounds with the potential to reduce the risk of four of our modern scourges: cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and dementia. The loss of these beneficial nutrients did not begin 50 or 100 years ago, as many assume. Unwittingly, we have been stripping phytonutrients from our diet since we stopped foraging for wild plants some 10,000 years ago and became farmers.

These insights have been made possible by new technology that has allowed researchers to compare the phytonutrient content of wild plants with the produce in our supermarkets. The results are startling.

Wild dandelions, once a springtime treat for Native Americans, have seven times more phytonutrients than spinach, which we consider a “superfood.” A purple potato native to Peru has 28 times more cancer-fighting anthocyanins than common russet potatoes. One species of apple has a staggering 100 times more phytonutrients than the Golden Delicious displayed in our supermarkets.

Were the people who foraged for these wild foods healthier than we are today? They did not live nearly as long as we do, but growing evidence suggests that they were much less likely to die from degenerative diseases, even the minority who lived 70 years and more. The primary cause of death for most adults, according to anthropologists, was injury and infections.

Each fruit and vegetable in our stores has a unique history of nutrient loss, I’ve discovered, but there are two common themes. Throughout the ages, our farming ancestors have chosen the least bitter plants to grow in their gardens. It is now known that many of the most beneficial phytonutrients have a bitter, sour or astringent taste. Second, early farmers favored plants that were relatively low in fiber and high in sugar, starch and oil. These energy-dense plants were pleasurable to eat and provided the calories needed to fuel a strenuous lifestyle. The more palatable our fruits and vegetables became, however, the less advantageous they were for our health.

The sweet corn that we serve at summer dinners illustrates both of these trends. The wild ancestor of our present-day corn is a grassy plant called teosinte. It is hard to see the family resemblance. Teosinte is a bushy plant with short spikes of grain instead of ears, and each spike has only 5 to 12 kernels. The kernels are encased in shells so dense you’d need a hammer to crack them open. Once you extract the kernels, you wonder why you bothered. The dry tidbit of food is a lot of starch and little sugar. Teosinte has 10 times more protein than the corn we eat today, but it was not soft or sweet enough to tempt our ancestors.

Over several thousand years, teosinte underwent several spontaneous mutations. Nature’s rewriting of the genome freed the kernels of their cases and turned a spike of grain into a cob with kernels of many colors. Our ancestors decided that this transformed corn was tasty enough to plant in their gardens. By the 1400s, corn was central to the diet of people living throughout Mexico and the Americas.

When European colonists first arrived in North America, they came upon what they called “Indian corn.” John Winthrop Jr., governor of the colony of Connecticut in the mid-1600s, observed that American Indians grew “corne with great variety of colours,” citing “red, yellow, blew, olive colour, and greenish, and some very black and some of intermediate degrees.” A few centuries later, we would learn that black, red and blue corn is rich in anthocyanins. Anthocyanins have the potential to fight cancer, calm inflammation, lower cholesterol and blood pressure, protect the aging brain, and reduce the risk of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

EUROPEAN settlers were content with this colorful corn until the summer of 1779 when they found something more delectable — a yellow variety with sweeter and more tender kernels. This unusual variety came to light that year after George Washington ordered a scorched-earth campaign against Iroquois tribes. While the militia was destroying the food caches of the Iroquois and burning their crops, soldiers came across a field of extra-sweet yellow corn. According to one account, a lieutenant named Richard Bagnal took home some seeds to share with others. Our old-fashioned sweet corn is a direct descendant of these spoils of war.

Up until this time, nature had been the primary change agent in remaking corn. Farmers began to play a more active role in the 19th century. In 1836, Noyes Darling, a onetime mayor of New Haven, and a gentleman farmer, was the first to use scientific methods to breed a new variety of corn. His goal was to create a sweet, all-white variety that was “fit for boiling” by mid-July.

He succeeded, noting with pride that he had rid sweet corn of “the disadvantage of being yellow.”

The disadvantage of being yellow, we now know, had been an advantage to human health. Corn with deep yellow kernels, including the yellow corn available in our grocery stores, has nearly 60 times more beta-carotene than white corn, valuable because it turns to Vitamin A in the body, which helps vision and the immune system.

SUPERSWEET corn, which now outsells all other kinds of corn, was derived from spontaneous mutations that were selected for their high sugar content. In 1959, a geneticist named John Laughnan was studying a handful of mutant kernels and popped a few into his mouth. He was startled by their intense sweetness. Lab tests showed that they were up to 10 times sweeter than ordinary sweet corn. 

Mr. Laughnan was not a plant breeder, but he realized at once that this mutant corn would revolutionize the sweet corn industry. He became an entrepreneur overnight and spent years developing commercial varieties of supersweet corn. His first hybrids began to be sold in 1961.

Within one generation, the new extra sugary varieties eclipsed old-fashioned sweet corn in the marketplace. Build a sweeter fruit or vegetable — by any means — and we will come. Today, most of the fresh corn in our supermarkets is extra-sweet. The kernels are either white, pale yellow, or a combination of the two. The sweetest varieties approach 40 percent sugar, bringing new meaning to the words “candy corn.” Only a handful of farmers in the United States specialize in multicolored Indian corn, and it is generally sold for seasonal decorations, not food.

We’ve reduced the nutrients and increased the sugar and starch content of hundreds of other fruits and vegetables. How can we begin to recoup the losses?

Here are some suggestions to get you started. Select corn with deep yellow kernels. To recapture the lost anthocyanins and beta-carotene, cook with blue, red or purple cornmeal, which is available in some supermarkets and on the Internet. Make a stack of blue cornmeal pancakes for Sunday breakfast and top with maple syrup.

In the lettuce section, look for arugula. Arugula, also called salad rocket, is very similar to its wild ancestor. Some varieties were domesticated as recently as the 1970s, thousands of years after most fruits and vegetables had come under our sway. The greens are rich in cancer-fighting compounds called glucosinolates and higher in antioxidant activity than many green lettuces.

Scallions, or green onions, are jewels of nutrition hiding in plain sight. They resemble wild onions and are just as good for you. Remarkably, they have more than five times more phytonutrients than many common onions do. The green portions of scallions are more nutritious than the white bulbs, so use the entire plant. Herbs are wild plants incognito. We’ve long valued them for their intense flavors and aroma, which is why they’ve not been given a flavor makeover. Because we’ve left them well enough alone, their phytonutrient content has remained intact.

Experiment with using large quantities of mild-tasting fresh herbs. Add one cup of mixed chopped Italian parsley and basil to a pound of ground grass-fed beef or poultry to make “herb-burgers.” Herbs bring back missing phytonutrients and a touch of wild flavor as well.

The United States Department of Agriculture exerts far more effort developing disease-resistant fruits and vegetables than creating new varieties to enhance the disease resistance of consumers. In fact, I’ve interviewed U.S.D.A. plant breeders who have spent a decade or more developing a new variety of pear or carrot without once measuring its nutritional content.

We can’t increase the health benefits of our produce if we don’t know which nutrients it contains. Ultimately, we need more than an admonition to eat a greater quantity of fruits and vegetables: we need more fruits and vegetables that have the nutrients we require for optimum health.

Jo Robinson is the author of the forthcoming book “Eating on the Wild Side: The Missing Link to Optimum Health.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: June 2, 2013



http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/opinion/sunday/breeding-the-nutrition-out-of-our-food.html?adxnnl=1&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1383498192-qM7i4Kgt6ylsZKw2dExBpA

Birdseye - The Man Who Created The Brand

How we got to where we are - more details.....

Book review: ‘Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man’ by Mark Kurlansky

By Marie Arana, Published: June 8, 2012

Sometimes a groundbreaking idea is not enough. Sometimes a brilliant notion slouches along until an innovator with a nose for the entrepreneurial realizes its potential, perfects its contours and gives it mass appeal. For cars, it was Henry Ford. For electric light, it was Thomas Edison. For computers, it was Steve Jobs. And for the global food market, it was Clarence Birdseye.
Birdseye, whose name is synonymous with frozen food, revolutionized the way we eat. Generations of Americans have become familiar with the tidy little packages that bear his name in supermarket refrigerators. By perfecting a flash-freeze method — a technique he learned from Inuit of the North Sea — Birdseye single-handedly transformed the American diet and took the food industry from local to global in the course of a decade.
It’s because of Birdseye that Americans expect peach pie in winter, fish fillets in Kansas and TV dinners in a hurry. And it is because of him that whole communities in America left farmlands for urban life.
Birdseye was no scientist or laboratory intellectual. Like Ford, Edison and Jobs, he had no college degree; like them, he depended largely on native intelligence and an irrepressible spirit of can-do. In “Birdseye,” Mark Kurlansky’s brisk account of the man’s galvanic trajectory, we are reminded that American ingenuity has often relied less on a classroom than on insatiable curiosity and a well-lit garage.
Kurlansky is best known for epic portraits of small-scale subjects, among them “Salt,” “Cod” and “The Basque History of the World.” He brings a nimble, no-frills journalism to these tasks, and the result is a series of eye-opening books on worlds we might otherwise never see. “Salt” becomes a history of humankind, complete with explorers and revolutionaries. “Cod” is a rollicking tale of adventure, with a fish as its celebrated star. “The Basque History” ends up being a paean to a highly inventive people: Europe’s earliest explorers, Spain’s first bankers, a race defined by curiosity, ingenuity and grit.
Likewise, “Birdseye” turns out to be less a biography than a glimpse into an exuberantly inventive time in America. Little is known about Birdseye’s personal life, and Kurlansky is quick to admit it. But the impact of the man’s inventions is on full view here: the whaling harpoon, the dipping of livestock to control ticks, the science of crystallization and cryonics, innovations in food packaging, advances in refrigeration, the birth of the sunlamp, the production of dried edibles, the papermaking revolution. We see a tireless tinkerer, a restless mind, a quintessentially American inventor, driven by two questions about the world around him: Why? and Why not?
He was born in the age of the steamboat and died in the age of the satellite. In Kurlansky’s hands, the arc of Birdseye’s life, which spanned from 1886 to 1956, is a history of the American imagination. Birdseye came into the world alongside the telephone, the phonograph and the light bulb, and then rode to manhood on a wave of ingenuity. By the time he was 10, Americans had invented fountain pens, cash registers, Coca-Cola, washing machines, escalators, contact lenses and automobiles. By the time he was 20, factories were churning out a whole host of American products and reaping the riches of the industrial age.
Birdseye was a small, bald, highly energetic man whose enthusiasms were so manifest that he attracted children in every neighborhood he inhabited. He welcomed them into his basement or garage; encouraged them to bring him frogs, insects and rodents; and led them to consider the very questions he was pondering.
I was one of those children. When, at the end of his life, he settled on a sugar plantation in Peru to develop a more efficient way to manufacture paper, his house was a few doors from mine. The Birdseye household was nothing less than an eccentric’s paradise, alive with parrots, deer, guinea pigs and a penguin called Billy. My brother and I brought the great man seeds, flowers and bugs, and every specimen we dropped on his worktable became a ticket to a scintillating lesson, complete with a tour of his marvels and contraptions.
He had been making contraptions since his boyhood in Brooklyn. At 11, he set up a taxidermy practice. He went on to devise clever ways to trap animals, ice their carcasses and convey them to furriers and scientists. At Amherst, he studied biology but dropped out when his family hit hard times. Even as his father was shuttled off to the Pittsburgh penitentiary for massive insurance fraud, Birdseye threw himself into a series of jobs that would lead him to his most prized innovations: A stint at the Department of Agriculture had him gathering data on wildlife; another with the U.S. Biological Survey in Montana led him to document a plague of ticks; a few months on a medical missionary’s ship near Labrador had him pondering the way we eat. In those frigid and desolate waters, where fresh vegetables and fruits were nonexistent, his natural interest in food preservation was piqued to obsession. It was there that he saw the Inuit flash-freeze their catch by holding it up to the Arctic winds.
The rest was history. By tinkering with the process, Birdseye devised a system that froze fish instantly, one by one, thereby preserving freshness. Peas frozen as quickly retained their essential green. In 1926, Birdseye established the General Seafoods Corp. in Gloucester, Mass. He began mass-freezing fish and vegetables, prompting the invention of better systems of refrigeration. He persuaded DuPont to make waterproof cellophane in which to package his wares.
In 1929, Marjorie Merriweather Post, doyenne of the Post food empire, bought Birdseye’s company for $23.5 million — $3.5 million for the operating facilities and $20 million for the patents. Birdseye had transformed American eating habits forever and, in the process, had become a very rich man. He was 43.
Even so, he continued to press on to refine the process. Eventually, in his fully outfitted stainless-steel basement in Gloucester, he devised a system to quick-dry foods: carrots, potatoes, milk, meats and, in time, entire dinners for U.S. soldiers at war in Europe.
“Birdseye always believed in the central concept of agribusiness,” Kurlansky writes. He was convinced that technology could vanquish hunger. He followed new industrial food ideas with high passion. He believed that microwaves were the way of the future. He placed great stock in hydroponic farming.
One wonders what he would have thought of the current campaign to shrink back the global market he created, to urge people to buy only fresh, local food.
Then again, Birdseye could always be counted on to anticipate the next thing in American appetites. He believed fervidly in change and was convinced that we should constantly update and improve our ideas. “Just because something has always been done in a certain way is never a sufficient reason for continuing to do it in that way,” he once wrote. “Change is the very essence of American life.”
Amen to that. May there be many more Birdseyes to keep us changing. There is little as sweet as an American original.

Marie Arana is a former editor of The Washington Post’s Book World. She wrote about meeting Clarence Birdseye in her memoir of her childhood in Peru, “American Chica.”

BIRDSEYE The Adventures of a Curious Man By Mark Kurlansky Doubleday. 251 pp. $25.95

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/book-review-birdseye-the-adventures-of-a-curious-man-by-mark-kurlansky/2012/06/08/gJQAbf3DOV_story.html

Medical Marijuana Does Not Create Problems In California

From The New York Times - encouraging report that medical marijuana in California, although a far less than perfect system from many points of view, has not resulted in the negative results predicted by the fear mongers.

October 26, 2013

Few Problems With Cannabis for California

By ADAM NAGOURNEY and RICK LYMAN

LOS ANGELES — In the heart of Northern California’s marijuana growing region, the sheriff’s office is inundated each fall with complaints about the stench of marijuana plots or the latest expropriation of public land by growers. Its tranquil communities have been altered by the emergence of a wealthy class of marijuana entrepreneurs, while nearly 500 miles away in Los Angeles, officials have struggled to regulate an explosion of medical marijuana shops.

But at a time when polls show widening public support for legalization — recreational marijuana is about to become legal in Colorado and Washington, and voter initiatives are in the pipeline in at least three other states — California’s 17-year experience as the first state to legalize medical marijuana offers surprising lessons, experts say.

Warnings voiced against partial legalization — of civic disorder, increased lawlessness and a drastic rise in other drug use — have proved unfounded.

Instead, research suggests both that marijuana has become an alcohol substitute for younger people here and in other states that have legalized medical marijuana, and that while driving under the influence of any intoxicant is dangerous, driving after smoking marijuana is less dangerous than after drinking alcohol.

Although marijuana is legal here only for medical use, it is widely available. There is no evidence that its use by teenagers has risen since the 1996 legalization, though it is an open question whether outright legalization would make the drug that much easier for young people to get, and thus contribute to increased use.

And though Los Angeles has struggled to regulate marijuana dispensaries, with neighborhoods upset at their sheer number, the threat of unsavory street traffic and the stigma of marijuana shops on the corner, communities that imposed early and strict regulations on their operations have not experienced such disruption.

Imposing a local tax on medical marijuana, as Oakland, San Jose and other communities have done, has not pushed consumers to drug dealers as some analysts expected. Presumably that is because it is so easy to get reliable and high-quality marijuana legally.

Finally, for consumers, the era of legalized medical marijuana has meant an expanded market and often cheaper prices. Buyers here gaze over showcases offering a rich assortment of marijuana, promising different potencies and different kinds of highs. Cannabis sativa produces a pronounced psychological high, a “head buzz,” while cannabis indica delivers a more relaxed, lethargic effect, a “body buzz.”

Advocates for marijuana legalization see the moves in Colorado and Washington as the start of a wave. A Gallup poll released last week found that 58 percent of Americans think the drug should be made legal.

“There is definitely going to be a legalization here at some point, one way or another, like in Colorado and Washington,” said Tom Ammiano, a Democratic state assemblyman from San Francisco who has pushed the Legislature to legalize recreational marijuana use.

Still, even as public opinion in support of legalizing marijuana has grown, opposition remains strong among many, including some law enforcement organizations, which warn that the use of the drug leads to marijuana dependence, endangers the health of users and encourages the use of other drugs.

“Unfortunately, many have been convinced that marijuana is harmless, and many in policing do not believe that is the case,” Darrel W. Stephens, the executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, wrote in an e-mail.

Craig T. Steckler, a former chief of the Police Department in Fremont, Calif., who is now the president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, said the problems in Los Angeles and robberies of cash-rich marijuana farms in Northern California were just two of the reasons states should hesitate before legalizing the drug.

“If it’s more readily accessible, if the parents and the siblings are doing it, then it becomes available to the younger kids — it’s going to be in the house, it’s going to be in the car,” he said.

“Where does it stop?” Mr. Steckler asked. “You make all drugs legal? Or just marijuana for now and suffer for that? What happens when you find out this wasn’t such a good idea?”

After California, medical marijuana was legalized in 19 states and the District of Columbia, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Although the law in California applies only to people who have a medical need for marijuana, like glaucoma or cancer, the requirements for getting the card to buy the drug are notoriously lax. Doctors can recommend its use for ailments as common as sleeplessness and headaches. And marijuana in California has become almost as culturally accepted, and in some parts of the state nearly as widely used, as alcohol.

“Marijuana users are much more representative of the overall adult population in California than medical marijuana populations in other states,” said Amanda Reiman, the state policy director for the Drug Policy Alliance, an organization working toward the decriminalization of marijuana.

The percentage of California drivers with traces of marijuana in their systems, 7.4 percent, was slightly higher than the 7 percent of drivers found to have alcohol in their system during a spot check last year, according to a report from the California Office of Traffic Safety. The report found that 14 percent of those checked tested positive for some kind of drug that might impair driving.

In a broad study on the ramifications of legalizing recreational marijuana about to be published in The Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, two economics professors said a survey of evidence showed a correlation between increased marijuana use and less alcohol use for people ages 18 to 29.

The researchers, D. Mark Anderson of Montana State University and Daniel I. Rees of the University of Colorado, said that based on their study, they expected younger people in Colorado and Washington to use marijuana more and alcohol less.

“These states will experience a reduction in the social harms resulting from alcohol use: Reducing traffic injuries and fatalities is potentially one of the most important,” the professors said.

Mark A. R. Kleiman, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an expert on marijuana policy who was the chief adviser to Washington on its marijuana law, said the connection between alcohol and marijuana use, if borne out, would be a powerful argument in favor of decriminalization.

“If it turns out that cannabis and alcohol are substitutes, then by my scoring system, legalizing cannabis is obviously a good idea,” Mr. Kleiman said. “Alcohol is so much more of a problem than cannabis ever has been.”

Still, he said, it will take time before long-term judgments can be made.

“Does it cause problems?” he said. “Certainly. Is it on balance a good or bad thing? Ask me 10 years from now.”

Mr. Rees also said his study found no evidence of increased drug use among high school students in Los Angeles during the period when medical marijuana shops opened here, probably because dispensaries were vigilant about not risking their thriving ventures by selling to under-age consumers.

“The dispensary numbers went through the roof,” he said. “But nothing happens to marijuana use among teenagers.”

The marijuana cultivation business in Northern California has been an economic boon for many communities, creating tax revenues, an industry of ancillary industries, and local wealth, visible by expensive cars parked along once dusty streets.

“A lot of cottage industries have popped up that service the marijuana industry,” said Scot Candell, a lawyer in San Rafael who specializes in medical marijuana clients. “Labs that do testing, hydroponic stores that provide growing equipment, software developers, insurance companies that specialize in dispensaries.”

Steve DeAngelo, the founder of the Harborside Health Center in Oakland, one of the state’s largest marijuana dispensaries, said his dispensary collected $1.2 million last year in marijuana sales tax for the city.

Medical marijuana, he said, has “created a whole new cast of people who have a vested interest in cannabis.”

“What was inevitable is that the movement, at some point, would go into hyper-speed, and that is what’s happening now,” he said.

This has altered the economy of places like Mendocino County.

“I am not aware of any business in Mendocino County that doesn’t consider marijuana as part of their business plan, and that can be good and bad,” said Sheriff Thomas D. Allman.

Mr. Candell said that while regulation was important, overregulation could be counterproductive. In California, several communities outlawed all marijuana dispensaries, giving rise to delivery services, which are not subject to regulation.

In Mendocino the issue is not dispensaries, but cultivation. There has been a spectacular rise in the amount of marijuana being grown there because, under county law, individuals with medical marijuana cards can have up to 25 plants for personal use.

Sheriff Allman said he spent about 30 percent of his resources on medical marijuana cases, especially between April and October, the growing season. The No. 1 call to 911 in October is complaints about the overwhelming smell of a next-door plot.

In Los Angeles, repeated attempts to regulate the stores have failed, causing an uproar in quiet neighborhoods like Larchmont and Mar Vista. Yet there is a lesson here: San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley, which imposed strict regulations on the shops from the start, have had few problems.

“Those cities really took charge in 1996, saying: ‘We have to figure out how we are going to regulate this. We need to figure out how marijuana could be sold, how it will be regulated, what it will mean for tax revenue,’ ” Ms. Reiman said. “As a result, those three cities have seen little to no issues in terms of crime or public safety issues.”

Consumers of marijuana are also benefiting. Competition among growers has resulted in powerful strains, raising the levels of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, to as high as 25 percent. Previously, levels ranged from 6 percent to 9 percent.

And since cities have competing dispensaries, prices have tended to decrease or at least keep pace with street prices. At Harborside in Oakland, marijuana buds run anywhere from $240 to $360 an ounce, though patients tend to buy smaller amounts like an eighth or a quarter of an ounce.

The array of products has exploded, and now includes not only smokable buds but also hashish, marijuana-rich oils that are drunk or smoked, edible cakes and other food products, and topical ointments intended to ease skin or joint pain without providing a high.

California has learned a lot in its years of dealing with a legal form of marijuana, Mr. Candell said. “But there are a lot of states that are just now going through it, and there are things they need to know.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 3, 2013
An article last Sunday about California’s experience as the first state to legalize medical marijuana misstated the percentage of California drivers found with traces of marijuana in their systems during a spot check last year. According to a report from the California Office of Traffic Safety, it was 7.4 percent — not 14 percent, the total number who tested positive for some kind of drug that might impair driving.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/us/few-problems-with-cannabis-for-california.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0