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

history, but this does not automatically make it an acceptable thing to do. The whole point is that plants have been changed for a variety of reasons, but none of them has to do with nutritiousness. We just do not know what has been lost or gained in the process. However, with plant breeding, at least scientists were working with combinations of genes that could have occurred in nature.
    Since the 1970s, scientists have been artificially manipulating plant genes to achieve desired characteristics. Sometimes genes from a quite different species, or even an animal, are introduced to modify the plant genes. Their goals have been to make farming easier and cheaper by improving yields, and by producing crops resistant to pests, drought, salt, and weed killers. A second objective is to make foods that transport well, are easily packaged, and have a long shelf life. It is an incredibly powerful technique that has few boundaries. A Supreme Court decision in 1980 made genetically modified organisms (GMOs) patentable, so there is a strong incentive for agri-business to focus on GMO plants and to ignore conventional breeds. The momentum is so great that it is like a runaway train hurtling into the darkness. No one knows what will come of it, but one thing is clear—the train is rushing us on an enforced journey away from our human origins.
     
    FOOD PROCESSING, TRANSPORT, AND STORAGE
    With the Industrial Revolution going full-swing during the 19th century, cities grew to sizes never before seen in history. Chicago’s population increased 17-fold from 30,000 in 1850 to 500,000 in 1870. New York City grew 25 times bigger, from 60,000 in 1800 to 1.5 million in 1870. In contrast, Babylon at the time of the Biblical exodus (1447 b.c. ) was only about 60,000 total. 39 Feeding populations in these enormous agglomerations required novel methods. It was quite impossible to get most fresh foods to them in the normal way. Food had to be “preserved,”—that is, processed in a way that stopped it from going bad. Meat and fish were a particular problem but there were tried-and-true methods to conserve it: salting and smoking. Salt beef, bacon, cured ham, kippered herring, and bologna were just a few examples that took over the diet of city dwellers, replacing their fresh equivalent.
    Wheat quickly goes rancid when made into flour. For this reason, since time immemorial, bakers only milled their flour when they were ready to use it. However, ingenious industrialists found that the problem lay in the wheat germ. By the simple expedient of removing the wheat germ as the grain was milled, flour would keep almost indefinitely. Mechanization was brought to traditional processes of grinding cereal grains into flour. For 10,000 years, this had been achieved by grinding the grains between two stones. In the 19th century, that process changed. Steel had arrived and the quirky millstones were replaced by banks of steel cylinders rotating at high speed. These progressively ground the grain down to ever finer particle sizes. 40 At every stage, there were sieves to separate the bits of outer husk (bran) from the flour itself. The whole lot was driven by steam-powered machinery—it was a tremendous advance in productivity. This procedure has been continued right to the present day.
    The industrialization of milling and baking also changed the nature of bread. The bakers like the new “refined” flour. It was uniform in size and free of bran and wheat germ, so bread-making became much more predictable. It did not need human skill to ensure that the bread baked properly every time, so this meant that bread could be made on a production line too. But both the bran and the wheat germ had been stripped out of the bread. It was not until much later when scientists discovered that wheat germ is a powerhouse of important nutrients, including omega-3 oil, vitamin E, and choline (a B vitamin). It was the precious and fragile omega-3 oil that went rancid so quickly.