Free Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Heath and Our Food by Geoff Bond

Antibiotics have routinely been added to animal feed since the 1950s to increase growth rate. All these measures are sanctioned by government authorities, chief among them the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But even this is not enough for some: the competitive pressures to produce cheap meat are so great that unscrupulous cattlemen inject their herds with illegal substances, such as muscle-building steroids.
     
    Mechanization
    Meanwhile, in the 19th century, another major development was taking place—mechanization. Early steam “traction engines” were developed for plowing. These were cumbersome but were a great improvement on the horse-drawn methods. Soon, they were supplanted by the internal combustion engine in the form of tractors. The first successful gasoline tractor was built in the United States in 1892. The number of tractors increased dramatically in America from 600 in 1907 to almost 3,400,000 by 1950. Thus, mechanization was a tremendous force for increasing productivity and reducing the need for farm labor.
    Through all these changes, the nature of the plants was changed by selective breeding. Combine harvesters, tomato reapers, or cotton pickers need plants that grow in specific ways to work efficiently, so the plants were bred to be more suitable for mechanical harvesting. In this way, mechanization drove a trend to change plants for convenient handling. Many plants do not lend themselves to mechanized production, so they were no longer farmed.
    “ A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage”—that was the slogan used by Herbert Hoover in his 1928 presidential campaign. It is hard to imagine that, for the average American in those times, it was as rare to eat chicken as it was to own a car. Mechanization changed all that for both chickens and cars. Animals such as hogs and chickens could be kept in large sheds and reared in much more densely packed conditions. Their products became much cheaper. By the 1930s, farming had become so mechanized that this marked a major change: agriculture flipped from being a labor-intensive industry to one that used few farmhands but invested heavily in machines.
     
    Plant Genetics
    We have seen how ancient farmers selected the best plants for cultivation. This was a continuous process down through the centuries. Indeed, many plants that we know today are unrecognizably different from their wild ancestors. However, the process accelerated as commercial pressures of farming intensified. There have been some major successes. Millions more could be fed after the “green revolution” that occurred during the 1960s in Asian countries, when new, highly productive strains of rice were planted. However, often plants are modified for seemingly trivial reasons. Take, for example, wheat flakes: different varieties of wheat respond differently to milk. One of the major producers of breakfast cereal, General Mills, has a brand called “Wheaties.” They wanted a flake that curled on contact with milk and reduced sogginess in the breakfast bowl. General Mills undertook a development program to breed such a wheat and then contracted with farmers to supply only this variety. 38 What happened to the nutritional quality? Perhaps nothing changed, but no one cared to find out either.
     
    Carrot Color Frivolity
    The ancestral wild carrot came from western Asia (the region of Turkey, Lebanon, and Syria). It was a deep purple color and it was skinnier and had a hard yellow core. As long ago as the 16th century, Dutch farmers thought it amusing to breed a carrot in the Dutch national color: bright orange. For us in the West, this is the “proper” carrot color; however, for the people of western Asia the carrot has remained purple. Now, growers want to jazz up their product and make it more appealing. Plant breeders are experimenting to make carrots with all kinds of hues, from white through primrose and bright red to black.
     
    This kind of plant breeding has a long