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Food Relationships and Practices Recorded Lecture Transcripts © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved.  Food Relationships and Practices Week 1, Video 1 Title Slide 1 Why do we eat? The most obvious answer is that we eat...

Food Relationships and Practices Recorded Lecture Transcripts © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved.  Food Relationships and Practices Week 1, Video 1 Title Slide 1 Why do we eat? The most obvious answer is that we eat to survive. Our bodies require a certain amount of fuel and specific nutrients to exist and to function. But if eating was merely about staying alive, why is there such a tremendous diversity of foods available? Why are there herbs and spices for infinite combinations of flavor? Why are there dozens of different cooking methods and preparation techniques? Indeed, if food is only fuel, why are family recipes guarded and passed down through the generations? Why can the smell of a certain food conjure up memories? Why does nearly every occasion in life seem to have specific foods dedicated to those moments? Why are towns bursting with restaurants with every cuisine type imaginable? Clearly food is much more than the sum of its calories and reaches beyond the nutrients it provides. In this module, we will discuss what food means to us individually and collectively. We will explore factors and events that have changed our relationship with food over the years, for better and for worse, and examine how those shifts have had rippling impacts on our health. We will also learn about common food practices that cultures around the world have observed for centuries--how did they grow, harvest, prepare, and consume certain foods and why? Slide 2 For many, food is connected to our memories, it influences our emotions, and is even integral to how we experience community. What we choose to put in our bodies can be as profound as our belief systems or as fundamental as what we have access to. Cultures can be celebrated and histories retold through its recipes. It can connect us to realities long past or transport us into the future. Even the distance across countries can seemingly dissolve with a single dish. Food can bring both joy and stress, connection and isolation, or tradition and creativity. Wars have been fought over it, victories have been won because of it, and love has been spread through its offerings. Even our expression of health and disease can be influenced by food’s provisions. FRP W1 V1 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved. Every living creature on the planet requires it and in the end we become part of the soil that sustains it. Food is a powerful piece of our identities and it begins to shape who we are, even before we are born. Slide 3 This is true on a cellular level, as the foods your parents ate prior to conception and the foods your mother ate during pregnancy contributed to the nutrients your body had to grow and develop. The same is true for the foods their parents ate, their grandparents, their great-great grandparents, and so on. Often times, people believe that the health status we are born with, and the genetics we inherit, are unwavering determinants of the wellness we will enjoy throughout our lives. Think of how many times you’ve heard the quip “it’s genetics” or “I got bad genes” when someone is discussing a health challenge they face. While genetics are part of who you are—they are not the whole story, nor do they have to define your destiny. None of us have any control over or ability to change the reality of what our ancestors ate or the genetics we inherited. But where we find our power of influence over our wellbeing is in the relationship we cultivate with food now. The lifestyle of your ancestors impacted your genetics—but the foods you eat and the lifestyle choices you make now shape your epigenetic potential. Epigenetics, also referred to as epigenomics, is a field of study that looks at how our environment and behaviors can influence how, where, and when a gene is turned off or switched on. The genes you have may be fixed, but how they are expressed can be influenced by your choices. Regardless of the genetic hand you’ve been dealt, your food and lifestyle choices today offer hope and opportunity for improved health. Those positive epigenetic changes also have the potential to be transferred on from parent to child, so the choices we make today may also influence the health of the next generation. Slide 4 What should we eat, then, to maximize this power of influence we have over our health? Every food offers a unique array of nutrients, flavors, textures, and aromas to both nourish the body and delight the senses. With all the different dietary approaches in the world, it is logical to think we must have arrived at the answer to the question of what foods are best by now. However, as with all problems involving biological beings—the solution is not so straightforward. At the NTA, our exploration of this question begins with the concept of bio-individuality, which respects that every person is unique and has specific nutritional needs to function at their best. FRP W1 V1 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved. We do not believe there is one perfect diet, nor are we in favor of excluding entire categories of food, unless allergies, access, preferences, or medical needs require it. When you take into consideration the number of items that influence a person’s nutritional needs, it becomes easy to see the wisdom in a bio-individual approach. From where your ancestors grew up and the foods they ate to how you were born, where you grew up, what activities you enjoy, what industries dominated your town, where you work, how well you sleep, and how you manage stress are just a handful of the factors that can shape the nutrient profile your body needs. And that didn’t even count the tremendous diversity in need generated by what you ate growing up and what you eat now. Your nutrient needs are as unique as your fingerprints! Slide 5 Before any overwhelm sets in with that thought—remember you are here specifically to learn how to navigate such a puzzle with nutritional therapy! Simply put, nutritional therapy is an approach to wellness that focuses on using nutrition and lifestyle choices to optimize health. While the detailed nutrient needs of each person are unique, there are some general principles, approaches, and tools we can leverage to help each person connect with their own bodies and find what works for them. We call this general framework for nutritional therapy “The Foundations of Health,” which include: - Nutrient Dense Diet - Sleep - Stress - Digestion - Blood Sugar Regulation This framework is a solid guideline you can use to have a positive impact on anyone’s health goals or situation. We refer to these areas as “Foundations” because they are often at the root of both health and disease. When these areas of a person’s life are balanced and nourished to function optimally, health can flow naturally. When these areas are imbalanced or deficient, the door for disease opens wider. You will have the opportunity to dive deep into each of these Foundations as you progress through the program. Slide 6 Nutritional therapy is both a science and an art. Scientifically speaking, we must understand the physiology of cells, organs, and systems as well as their nutrient requirements to be able to support someone’s shift from dysfunction to function on their path to health. We also need a scientific understanding of the nutrients food provides, how our bodies can best utilize those nutrients, and the signs and symptoms we will see when those nutrients are sufficient or deficient. FRP W1 V1 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved. Yet there is an art to the implementation of nutritional therapy that is essential for success. Whether you are using nutritional therapy for yourself, a loved one, or a client—human nature and societal realities are at play, both of which bring different strengths and different challenges that science alone cannot address. While we will spend a great deal of time focusing on the scientific component, we will continually be contextualizing it through the lens of the human and social experience because knowing something, and being able to do something, are significantly distinct. Slide 7 Let’s unpack that distinction for a moment. Let’s say a person is struggling with low energy and fatigue. They learn about the importance of getting adequate protein and fats for sustained energy levels and realize that their typical diet is more carbohydrate rich. They have knowledge that would help them achieve their desired health outcome. However, what if this person is on a limited budget? Quality proteins and fats tend to cost more than carbohydrates. What if this person lives in an area that has limited access to fresh foods? Convenience stores often have more packaged foods to offer, and those foods also tend to be more carbohydrate-based. Maybe this person has strong food preferences, or sensory processing issues and they don’t care for many different types of food. Or perhaps they have a very busy schedule and feel like the time and energy needed to cook a protein-rich meal is overwhelming. There are many reasons that someone may not choose or be able to act on the knowledge they have, ranging from the resources they have, the environment they live in, or personal preferences. If, as a practitioner, you approach nutritional therapy purely from the scientific standpoint, you’ll be missing these tangible realities that make or break a person’s success with making positive nutrition and lifestyle changes. It is your role to both provide education and equip people with practical strategies that work for their lives and their needs. Slide 8 It is also your role as a nutritional therapy practitioner to help people connect with and find confidence in their body’s innate wisdom. We don’t want to spend our careers telling people what to do. Our goal is to truly empower people to first transform their health and then understand their bodies well enough to maintain that wellbeing for a lifetime. When you strip away all of the forces in our lives that shape our choices—social pressures, financial hardships, work stress, family obligations, media influences, personal experiences, and so on—there is an internal force that drives us to survive and thrive. This force is what we refer to as innate wisdom. Your body was designed to function—and it does everything in its power to prioritize your wellbeing. Your body knows when it needs FRP W1 V1 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved. nutrients or when it has excess. It knows when it needs energy or when it has too much. It knows which foods will promote health and vitality, and which foods will result in dysfunction or disease. The incredible reality is that our bodies not only have this innate wisdom—but they can also communicate with us so we can make the choices that will best serve our wellness! Our bodies are constantly giving us messages about what they need or don’t need. The issue is, we’ve become disconnected from that innate wisdom and often don’t recognize the messages our bodies are giving, nor do we have clarity on how to respond when we do. Slide 9 Connecting with our innate wisdom begins by cultivating a more intentional relationship with our food. Unfortunately, in today’s modern world, many people face a relationship with food that deviates from how we were designed. Instead of consuming a wide array of foods that grow in the ground, graze on the grass, munch on grubs, or swim in the sea—the staple foods in the modern diet are either on a shelf with refined, ultra processed ingredients, or, are a derivative of wheat, corn, or soy, which doesn’t offer much in the way of variety in nutrients. People in centuries past consumed an incredible diversity of foods. Even within the same food, there was a tremendous amount of biodiversity. For example, the self-proclaimed “apple detective” David Benscoter estimates that in North America alone there were 17,000 different varieties of apples. While it is startling to know that only about 4,500 varieties survive today, think about how many varieties you see at the store. 3 to 5 if you’re lucky! Each one of those varieties offers different micronutrients, polyphenols, antioxidants, and other beneficial compounds. If you multiply this concept across all the different types of produce, you can see how the relationship with food in the past offered people a much richer opportunity to get the nutrients they needed. Instead of growing their own gardens, tending livestock, or gathering food from local farmers and community markets, we have created a society where living conditions are too crowded for gardens and livestock, land is too abused to bear fruit, and small community farms struggle to subsist. Crops are bred and hybridized to improve yields, reduce pests, and to appeal to the modern palate, which usually translates to varieties that are packed with sweetness and relatively identical in nutrient profiles. Not to mention the fact that our jobs, economies, and social structures have evolved in ways that make homegrown food less attainable for most. Slide 10 Both the ability and the desire to get familiar with how our food is raised or grown, to bring it into the kitchen and prepare it with our own hands, and to savor its bounty at a table with loved ones is waning in our society. Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost our connection with food. We’ve created a transactional relationship that prioritizes gratification and efficiency over nourishment and intention. FRP W1 V1 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved. In doing so, we’ve lost our epigenetic advantage and find ourselves overrun by an epidemic of preventable poor health. This is why the world needs nutritional therapy. Through a bio-individualized approach to nutrition and lifestyle choices, rooted in a passion for whole, nutrient-dense foods, YOU can be part of the revolution that will spark the rekindling of a nourishing relationship with food and a reclamation of the abundant health we have an innate right to enjoy. References 1. Hurle B. Epigenetics. Genome.gov. Published August 7, 2023. Accessed 2023. https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Epigenetics. 2. Jakobek L, Ištuk J, Buljeta I, Voća S, Žlabur JŠ, Babojelić MS. Traditional, Indigenous Apple Varieties, a Fruit with Potential for Beneficial Effects: Their Quality Traits and Bioactive Polyphenol Contents. Foods. 2020;9(1):52. doi:10.3390/foods9010052. PMID:31948050. 3. Karakochuk CD, Whitfield KC, Green TJ, Kraemer K, eds. The Biology of the First 1,000 Days. 1st ed. CRC Press; 2017. doi:10.1201/9781315152950. 4. Stover PJ, Caudill MA. Genetic and epigenetic contributions to human nutrition and health: managing genome-diet interactions. J Am Diet Assoc. 2008;108(9):1480- 1487. doi:10.1016/j.jada.2008.06.430. PMID:18755320. 5. Whitman County Historical Society. Projects. Accessed 2023. https://www.whitmancountyhistoricalsociety.org/projects. 6. Xavier MJ, Roman SD, Aitken RJ, Nixon B. Transgenerational inheritance: how impacts to the epigenetic and genetic information of parents affect offspring health. Hum Reprod Update. 2019;25(5):518-540. doi:10.1093/humupd/dmz017. PMID:31374565. FRP W1 V1 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved.  Food Relationships and Practices Week 1, Video 2 Title Slide 1 As we have discussed, food can be an incredible source of joy, nourishment, and health, but for many it has become a source of fear, confusion, discomfort, and frustration. People may find themselves unsure about what dietary advice to follow as the trends change faster than the seasons. Others may be working multiple jobs and drowning in stress just to put the bare minimum on the table. Some people are sick, exhausted, and overwhelmed trying to figure out why their bodies aren’t working and why the foods they eat seem to make it worse. There are those who are in a constant struggle with their body, trying to eat certain foods and avoid others for a certain outcome, yet getting no results. There are those who eat whatever is convenient and fast because they have no time to make it a priority. There are those who rely on packaged foods because there are no farms or grocery stores nearby. Just how did our relationship with food, both individually and systemically, become so broken? While this question could be approached from many broad-reaching lenses, ranging from social and political to economic and environmental, there are also countless individual experiences that have impacted each person’s food relationship; and, across the globe, each country has its own local events that made their mark. For the purposes of our discussion, we are going to explore some of the events and trends that have shaped the relationship with food we now experience in the United States as it presents one of the most intense case studies of the power our food has on every aspect of our wellbeing. Slide 2 A natural place to begin this conversation is with an acknowledgement that the human species started as scavengers that evolved into small hunter-gatherer communities, which sourced all their food from what grew, roamed, or swam in the wild on the earth and in the sea. Often, this deeply interconnected relationship with nature is idealized as the superior food system and agriculture is painted as the villainous force of destruction that set humanity on the path of ruin. While there were undoubtably some benefits to this way of life, it was not without its limitations. Food was not always easy to find, the size of the community groups had to remain limited, and they were constantly on the move as they had to cover vast expanses of land and adapt to the changing seasons in order to find enough food to survive. The cultivation of plants that spawned the slow move toward a food production system we have labelled as “agriculture,” allowed for more permanent communities to be established, created new jobs FRP W1 V2 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved. and economic opportunity, and the more stable supply of food allowed populations to grow exponentially. Rather than get bogged down in the debate of the pros and cons of this shift—let’s consider how the beginnings of agriculture in the United States began to impact our relationship with food. Although they are commonly classified as part of the “new world,” historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz positions the Americas as a prominent location in the ancient rise of agriculture. Along with “old world” regions in China, the Middle East, western Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa, the South, Central, and eastern North Americas were three of the seven birthplaces of agriculture around 8500 BC (Ortiz, 15). Other archeological findings place the evidence of domesticated plants in Central and South America about 10,000 years before present, and evidence in North America around 5,000 years before present (Balter, 1833). While the exact dating is still being investigated, most agree that this domestication of plants was likely not a “revolution,” or instantaneous change of how people sourced their food. Instead, archeologists theorize that many different factors including changes in weather and environment as well as adoption of religious and social practices encouraged people to start experimenting with the cultivation of wild plants while sustaining many of their hunting and gathering practices. For perhaps thousands of years, these founding human societies enjoyed a blend of cultivated plants in addition to foraged and hunted foods, slowly becoming more and more dependent on the cultivated crops over the centuries. By as early as 1000-1500 AD, Native Americans in the northeast of what is now the United States were practicing incredibly effective horticulture and land management techniques, including forest management, controlled burning, fertilization, intercropping, water management, and permaculture. Combined with fishing and hunting practices, the Native American food system provided a wealth of nutrients and robust health to support a large population. By the time European colonists began to arrive in North America, the Indigenous people had formed what Ortiz describes as a “large network of small and large nations whose governments, commerce, arts and sciences, agriculture, technologies, theologies, philosophies, and institutions were intricately developed, nations that maintained sophisticated relations with one another and with the environments that supported them.” (Ortiz, 46) Slide 3 The Indigenous people of the United States had a beautiful, intimate relationship with their food and the land from which it sprang. They developed horticulture-style agricultural practices which would yield abundant, nutritious food, including their staple crops known as “The Three Sisters,” which include corn, beans, and squash. They fished and hunted with sustainable practices that benefited the environment in addition to ensuring they enjoyed a long-term food supply in the areas they settled. While we will explore some of their key practices later in this module, it is important to emphasize that they had laid a successful foundation of health with a FRP W1 V2 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved. food system that kept them personally connected and hands-on with the foods that nourished them. Yet, in 1606 when King James established the Virginia Company of London and aggressively pursued the initiative of establishing British colonies in “the New World,” the Indigenous people were not only displaced from their communities, but little by little they were disconnected from their traditional food systems. Despite arriving this to this lush region with a diverse array of plants and wildlife, the first colonists in Jamestown nearly starved to death. Initially, the goal was to establish trade, find gold, and generate wealth for investors—so it was merchants, artisans, and soldiers that first arrived, not skilled farmers and hunters. They did not prioritize planting their own crops as they had expected to be able to trade for most of their food, which was not a consistently successful endeavor. Couple that with an extended drought in the region and the group found themselves weathering a famine that has been dubbed “The Starving Time.” It was only after enduring this hardship that the colonists recognized the importance of balancing the pursuit of profit with the production of food. After attempts to legislate farming requirements were unsuccessful, investors began sending farmers from England over to Virginia as indentured servants. These farmers, however, were not unaccompanied. As one exploration of seventeenth-century Virginia describes it, “Britons were not the only colonizers…English farmers imported seeds and livestock in order to grow food crops and raise animals for milk and meat. The animals themselves were carriers of other aggressive immigrants, species of Old World grasses that over millennia had evolved symbiotically with Old World grazing animals. All four—farmers, food crops, livestock, and weed seeds—soon converted the regional ecology of the Chesapeake into a dynamic open-woodland agricultural system that was part English, part Indian, part raw nature, and part improvisation.” Slide 4 Cattle and pigs were among the first and primary animals imported into Jamestown as well as Maryland and other early colonies. With no fences to keep the animals centralized, the farmers let the animals wander. As these domesticated animals, completely foreign to the landscape, were allowed to roam and graze freely, impacts on the native food systems compounded. From disturbing the habitat of indigenous plants, introducing non-native species to the area, increasing erosion and siltation near streams that in turn impact aquatic food systems, to competing with native wildlife for food, compacting soil, and destroying root systems— domesticated animals not only became part of the food system in Jamestown, but they reshaped the system that already existed. Sheep, chicken, goats, and horses were also brought over and quickly adapted to their new environments. Biomass studies of the region show that by the 1620s, domestic animals had already become the primary source of meat in the diet. The FRP W1 V2 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved. colonists were successful in establishing stable herds and were no longer dependent on England for food. As these animals and grasses pushed their way across the land, they not only pushed Indigenous peoples and their food ways further out of their communities, but they also helped these colonial farmers to more easily clear vegetation from wooded areas that could later be used for tobacco—a major cash crop of both Virginia and Maryland. Let’s take a moment to examine the concept of a cash crop. Despite finally acknowledging the need for subsistence farming, the agricultural mindset of the colonists was largely economic with the primary goal of turning a profit. The colonists quickly discovered that growing tobacco was the key to the wealth they desired—it was a crop that could be grown for its profit rather than its usage, otherwise known as a “cash crop.” But growing tobacco required extensive amounts of land and labor to be successful. In order to work that land and grow the tobacco, the Virginia Company turned to indentured servitude, where people who could not pay their own way to the colony could gain free passage in exchange for working four to seven years, and had the promise of acreage if they completed their service successfully. Slide 5 In 1619, an English privateer ship called the White Lion brought approximately 20 African people, whom they traded for supplies. These enslaved individuals were at first treated as indentured servants, but as the number of indentured servants coming into the colony dwindled the appeal of slavery as a cheaper source for human labor started to grow. By the mid-1670s, Virginians began pursuing enslaved Africans more aggressively. By 1705, the Virginia Slave Codes were established and by 1720, the colonies of Virginia and Maryland were slave societies, with booming plantations. The plantation model stretched into the Carolinas where indigo and rice were the central cash crops, and in the 1790s, the deep south became focused on cotton as the king commodity. In all of these instances, land, labor, energies, and efforts were directed toward single crops that were not primarily food sources for the community but commodities for the market. Soil fertility was diminished, crop diversification and rotation was ignored, and agriculture on these plantations was manipulated into a system of profit for a few at the expense of many rather than a means of providing nourishment. Within the scope and aim of this training program, we cannot begin to unpack all of the impacts and implications of slavery, but it is inextricably linked with the food relationships and systems of the southern region of the United States and beyond. As indentured servants and enslaved peoples were brought to the colonies to grow, harvest, and maintain the plantations, they also brought with them the foods, flavors, and traditions of their homelands. In addition to growing the cash crops, they often maintained their own small gardens, cooked all the food for the FRP W1 V2 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved. plantation owners and their families, and introduced their native foods, spices, and traditions into southern communities. These profound influences are still central to the food experience of these regions today. Slide 6 As land overuse diminished the quality of tobacco, prices began to fluctuate, causing many farmers to abandon the crop in favor of grains, mainly wheat and some corn. As the Revolution approached in 1765 and thereafter, tobacco production had all but been abandoned and wheat was the new focus. By 1850, the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia saw 96% of its farmers growing wheat as its primary crop of the south. As the desire for more fertile land and opportunity grew, so did the push for westward expansion. Beginning with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and the subsequent expeditions of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, there were series of acts, legislation, wars, and movements that led farmers, trappers, traders, and explorers to establish cities across the nation. Of course, the English were not the only people attempting to colonize the “new world” during this time, the Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Swiss, to name a few, were also arriving on both shores of our continent, establishing colonies, taking over Native settlements, and shaping the food system. Colonization was not the only endeavor bringing people to America. There were events like the Irish potato famine in 1845 that brought nearly 500,000 Irish immigrants to America and the Gold Rush of 1849 that brought waves of immigrants from China. There were also government policies like the Homestead Act of 1862 that “allow(ed) for any individual, regardless of gender, ethnicity, or country of origin, over the age of 21 or head of household to claim up to 160 acres of free land if they have lived on it for five years and made the required agricultural improvements.” Industry and technology had their influence too with efforts like the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad that not only brought immigrant laborers in droves but also allowed for the easy transportation of foods from the west and goods from the east and established a framework for international trade. There were countless influences causing people from all over the world to bringing their foods, flavors, and traditions to different pockets of the emerging United States. Indeed, every state has its own evolutionary tale of the food relationships and practices that shaped the regional cuisines we know today that are a blend of the area’s natural resources, Native American legacies, and cultural influences of the communities that settled in America. Slide 7 Despite this wide variety of influence and culture, up until the late 1800s, the way people grew and sourced their food was relatively similar. By the early 1900s, approximately 41% of the population in the United States was employed in the agricultural sector, with most being operators of small, rural farms that grew a diverse array of food crops and raised a variety of FRP W1 V2 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved. animals to provide food for themselves and for their communities that were still largely concentrated in these rural areas. Although farm machinery was advancing, most still relied on animal power and many of the farm chores like milking, forking hay, and chopping wood were still done by hand. In just 100 years, that number fell to just 2% of the U.S. workforce being agricultural in nature. The number of farms has decreased by 63%, and many of the farms that remain have transformed into mechanized, commercialized, and specialized operations focusing on one major commodity. Understanding that the population in those same 100 years more than tripled in size—how could it be that just 2% of labor efforts were direct toward growing and raising our food? How is it possible for 80 to 90 percent of the United States food supply to come from just 10 to 20 percent of the farms? In the next video we will explore just a handful of the contributing factors to this dramatic shift in how we source our food in modern America. Before we do, take a moment to consider what events and influences can you think of that may have had a role? What shifts and changes have you seen in your lifetime. If you have parents, grandparents, or great grandparents around, take time to ask questions and learn about what meals and food practices were like when they were growing up. Every family and individual has their own food relationship history to learn from and grow through. Discovering more about your own personal story alongside these historical, broader experiences can help you better understand the food choices and approaches that will uniquely nourish your wellness on every level. References 1. Atlas WI, Ban NC, Moore JW, et al. Indigenous Systems of Management for Culturally and Ecologically Resilient Pacific Salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.) Fisheries. BioScience. 2020;71(2):186-204. doi:https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biaa144 2. Bowen J, Andrews S. Jamestown Colony: From Food Dependence to Food Independence Faunal Analysis for Second Well (JR2158). Accessed 2023. https://historicjamestowne.org/wp-content/uploads/Faunal-Analysis-for-JR2158- FINAL.pdf 3. Breadbasket of the South (U.S. National Park Service). www.nps.gov. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/the-age-of-grain.htm FRP W1 V2 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved. 4. Bureau UC. Historical Population Change Data (1910-2020). Census.gov. Published April 26, 2021. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time- series/dec/popchange-data-text.html 5. Bureau UC. Changes in Agriculture 1900-1950. Census.gov. Published 1950. Accessed 2023. https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/41667073v5p6ch4.pdf 6. Carson C, Bowen J, Graham W, McCartney M, Walsh L. New World, Real World: Improvising English Culture in Seventeenth-Century Virginia. The Journal of Southern History. 2008;74(1):31-88. Accessed 2023. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27650059 7. Coombs J. The Phases of Conversion: A New Chronology for the Rise of Slavery in Early Virginia. The William and Mary Quarterly. 2011;68(3):332. doi:https://doi.org/10.5309/willmaryquar.68.3.0332 8. Fanto K. How Enslaved Chefs Helped Shape American Cuisine. Smithsonian. Published July 20, 2018. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-enslaved- chefs-helped-shape-american-cuisine-180969697/ 9. Heim T. The Indigenous Origins of Regenerative Agriculture. National Farmers Union. Published October 12, 2020. https://nfu.org/2020/10/12/the-indigenous- origins-of-regenerative-agriculture/ 10. Kiger PJ. 10 Ways the Transcontinental Railroad Changed America. HISTORY. Published September 4, 2019. https://www.history.com/news/transcontinental- railroad-changed-america 11. Library of Congress. Global Timeline | Immigration and Relocation in U.S. History | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA. https://www.loc.gov/classroom- materials/immigration/global-timeline/ 12. National Geographic Society. Hunter-Gatherer Culture | National Geographic Society. education.nationalgeographic.org. Published January 10, 2023. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/hunter-gatherer-culture/ 13. Nesheim MC, Oria M, Yih PT, et al. Overview of the U.S. Food System. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Published June 17, 2015. Accessed 2023. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK305173/# 14. Park S, Hongu N, Daily JW. Native American foods: History, culture, and influence on modern diets. Journal of Ethnic Foods. 2016;3(3):171-177. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jef.2016.08.001 15. Ponti C. America’s History of Slavery Began Long Before Jamestown. HISTORY. Published August 26, 2019. https://www.history.com/news/american-slavery- before-jamestown-1619 16. Rise of the Colonial Plantation System (U.S. National Park Service). Nps.gov. Published 2017. https://www.nps.gov/articles/plantationsystem.htm FRP W1 V2 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved. 17. Roberts J. Race and the Origins of Plantation Slavery. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. Published online March 3, 2016. doi:https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.268 18. Seventeenth-Century, Maryland. Northeast Historical Archaeology Northeast Historical Archaeology. Northeast Historical Archaeology. 47:47. Accessed 2023. https://orb.binghamton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1517&context=neha 19. Smith KN. Native Americans managed the prairie for better bison hunts. Ars Technica. Published July 25, 2018. https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/native- americans-managed-the-prairie-for-better-bison-hunts/ 20. The Project Gutenberg eBook of Tobacco in Colonial Virginia, by Melvin Herndon. www.gutenberg.org. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27117/27117-h/27117- h.htm FRP W1 V2 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved.  Food Relationships and Practices Week 1, Video 3 Title Slide 1 From the time the colonists established independence from Britain in 1776 to the early 1900s, the United States experienced a rapid expansion of industrialization and urbanization that not only redefined the way people worked, traveled, and spent their time, but it also transformed their relationships with food on the deepest levels. Some of these transformations have endured and continue to be part of the food system we experience today, while others continued to evolve under the influence of war, technology, and various social movements across the next century. Although there are many additional contributing factors to consider, let’s discuss some of the major events that have shaped the modern food landscape America contends with today, beginning with industrialization and urbanization. Slide 2 Although the Industrial Revolution got an early start in Great Britain, it did not take long for its influence to spread to America, and once it got hold, its radical progressiveness quickly changed the way of life for the growing nation. As early as 1793, Samuel Slater and Moses Brown teamed up to open the first textile mill in the U.S. Encouraged by the success of the Slater Mill and driven by political events like the embargo on British goods and the War of 1812, many merchants began to turn their interest to this idea of manufacturing since their participation in Atlantic trade was stifled. One such merchant, Francis Cabot Lowell, formed the Boston Manufacturing Company with other wealthy merchants and began establishing mill towns along the rivers of the northeast. By the 1860s, there were over 800 textile factories in New England alone that employed more than 100,000 people. Textiles were not the only goods to move from being artisan crafted by hand to being factory produced with machinery. During this period of industrialization, nearly every kind of consumer goods you can imagine from shoes and hats to books and toys went from being produced in homes by craftsman to being mass produced by machines in factories. As new economic pursuits emerged from steel production and oil refining to the automotive industry, urban cities began to form around these factories as they provided different employment opportunities for young people who did not see a future in farming, immigrants looking to start a new life in FRP W1 V3 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved. America, and women seeking opportunities outside of what the subsistence of farming life could provide. Slide 3 As advances in the electric grid and the development of the lightbulb allowed factories to adopt new sources of power and lighting, hours of operation could be greatly extended and productivity increased significantly, which in turn created more job opportunities as well as longer work hours for employees. To reduce travel time and pursue these opportunities, many people began to leave the rural life behind and started to concentrate in cities. By 1900, one estimate says that 37.9% of the US population lived in cities and by 1920, for the first time, more Americans lived in cities than in rural areas. This mechanization didn’t only impact how goods were produced, but life on the farm was evolving to utilize machinery as well. Steam engines began to replace horses and man-power for tools like plows and tractors, mechanized reapers and threshers were developed that could reduce the number of labor hours it took to produce 100 bushels of wheat by 90%, and barbed wire was introduced to the system, putting an end to the open-range grazing practices of the past. While this was only the beginning of mechanization of farm work, it was the start of a trend in increased product yield with less labor-effort required, creating both incentive and opportunity for folks on the farm to seek additional or alternative employment in the emerging markets. The introduction of steam and rolling mills brought about refined flour production, reliable industrial canning processes were developed, pasteurization was discovered, a new deodorization process for cottonseed oil made it a fast favorite, and the establishment of national grocery store chains also laid the foundation for America’s movement away from foods fresh off the farm and towards food that had a longer shelf life and that required less preparation at home to enjoy a meal. It is easy to draw some basic conclusions about how these technological advances and the rise of industry would impact people’s relationships with food. The more people moved to urban areas and gave up the farming lifestyle, the further removed they were from the growth and production of their own food. The more farmers pursed the economies of scale mechanization provided, the larger farms became, paving the way for the massive consolidation of farming that we see today. The more convenient the foods became, the more people abandoned laborious at-home food production and preparation. Slide 4 But the impacts of industrialization and urbanization were far deeper than those surface changes. On the farm, families had more control over their time and what they prioritized. The sun governed their waking and sleeping hours. They could decide when to nourish themselves, FRP W1 V3 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved. when to hydrate, when to take a break, and when to enjoy time with their families. Factory work changed that dynamic entirely. Work started early in the morning and lasted well into the evening, with little to no breaks. In 1830, one survey reported the average number of hours worked per week for manufacturers was 69.1 hours. Even in 1929, well after workers attempted to organize and legislation was passed regulating work hours, that average was 50.6 hours per week. Working this volume of hours in the factory with limited to no breaks, away from home drastically changed the eating habits of working Americans. Instead of fueling up for a day of farm work or replenishing their energy with a homecooked meal in the afternoon, factory workers needed something quick in the morning and something they could pack or buy near their place of work for a short lunch or snack if they had a chance to take a break. Cereal became a convenient, easy breakfast that was championed with health food advertising claims such as Post’s Grape-Nuts declaring right on the box that “the system will absorb a greater amount of nourishment from 1 pound of Grape-Nuts than from 10 pounds of meat, wheat, oats, or bread.” Lunch might consist of a sandwich, cold leftovers, canned food, or take-out from a street cart, automat, or restaurant. While lunch used to be the largest meal of the day when work was done on the farm, in the factory people had to wait until the end of a long work day to come home and enjoy a warm, hearty meal. As women began to enter the workforce, the domestic duties that used to occupy a fair share of their time at home also needed to be outsourced in many homes, which further fueled the desire for more convenient foods and kitchen appliances to reduce the amount of work required to put that evening meal on the table. As life and work moved into cities and factories, people lost their personal connection with food and autonomy over their bodies. People no longer had time to grow and prepare their own food. Younger generations were less and less likely to learn farming or cooking skills as even children were part of the factory workforce. Schedules no longer synced to the sun and artificial light extended active hours, changing circadian rhythms, shifting appetite, and redefining work and rest times. Workers could no longer eat when they were hungry or choose the foods their bodies desired, but instead had to eat when their work schedule allowed and select foods that would be quick and long-lasting. Slide 5 As these new food manufacturing technologies evolved and factories sprung up to meet the growing demand for convenience foods, major food corporations also began to take over the food production system in America. Brands like Campbells, Pillsbury, Jello, Quaker Oats, Post, Kelloggs, Coca Cola, the National Biscuit Company (now known as Nabisco), and Nestle just to name a few, were all in full swing by 1910. Even meat was being butchered and processed in massive factories such as Armour, Swift, Morris, and National Packing in the early 1900s. In addition to taking food preparation and processing out of the home, the public soon realized that the food manufacturing process also introduced undesirable elements into the food FRP W1 V3 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved. system. Whether it be more natural contaminants like bugs, rodents, and bacteria, or various chemicals designed to cut product to save on costs or produce a certain visual appearance, or misleading labeling to deceive consumers, less than savory ingredients were finding there way into these manufactured foods all too often. In the span of about 25 years, over 100 bills were created attempting to regulate the safety of foods produced in these factories. The mounting issues came to a tipping point when Upton Sinclair’s fictional expose about the Chicago meat packing industry called The Jungle was released in 1905. Although he was aiming to stir a movement to advocate for the health and wellbeing of the workers in these meat packing plants, the public reaction was aimed squarely at the quality and safety of the meat produced in these gruesome conditions. Letters poured in demanding that the government reform the meat packing industry. When the investigation confirmed the horrors Sinclair described in his story were true, the Food and Drug Administration began its role as a consumer protection agency with the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act. This act was largely penned by Dr. Harvey Wiley, a chemist who led a brave group of young men dubbed The Poison Squad as they voluntarily tested chemicals and adulterated foods on themselves. Prior to this law being established, companies did not have to disclose ingredients, even narcotics like morphine, heroine, and opium were being included in “soothing syrups” given to babies! Not only was this act the beginning of formal government oversight and growing control of our food system, but it is also a profound marker of a shift in the American food relationship as people could no longer trust the safety of their food. Where they once either grew or raised the food themselves, or knew the people who did, they now needed a third party, government agency to legislate the quality and basic safety of the foods they were consuming. Slide 6 Dr. Wiley continued his crusade for food safety by taking a role as Director of the Bureau of Foods, Sanitation, and Health for Good Housekeeping Magazine. Under his direction, the magazine’s “Tested and Approved” seal became a gold standard for safe, high-quality food and goods. This seal was in many ways the forerunner of the sanctions people often use to guide their food choices today. Whether it is an official USDA Organic label or the approval moniker of the latest diet, many people rely on seals of this nature to confirm that their food choices align with their values and contain ingredients that will meet their standards. When a food is mechanically processed, packaged, and preserved, containing multiple ingredients and extra components for flavor, texture, and longevity—each of those steps takes us further away from our ability to identify what it is, to feel safe consuming it, and to trust our own judgement about what will nourish us. The further away our relationship is from the people producing the food, the stronger our need for these regulatory agencies to boost our confidence and support our safety. FRP W1 V3 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved. While some of these government programs and initiatives do maintain a certain level of sanitation and transparency that help protect our modern food landscape, safety and sustainability are not always at the center of the decisions that govern our agricultural practices. This truth is perhaps best illustrated with the introduction and wide-spread use of pesticides and agricultural inputs. Slide 7 The story of agricultural inputs begins quite unglamorously with the world’s first intensive fertilizer, Peruvian Guano, which is the dried excrement of seabirds that inhabited the Chincha Islands and is a very rich source of nitrogen. When an organic chemist named Justus von Liebig published a treatise on the importance of nitrogen for plants and highlighted guano as an excellent way to source it, farmers that could afford it were quick to try it. When their yields increased significantly, the demand for the fertilizer was frenzied. The public demand for it was so great that the U.S. Congress passed the Guano Islands Act in 1856, authorizing people to seize any unclaimed or unoccupied guano islands to mine an affordable supply of guano for the U.S. and its citizens. As one article puts it, “For the sake of seabird droppings, a powerful fertilizer, the U.S. Congress authorized our nation’s earliest significant expansion beyond the continent.” Just why were the American people so hungry for seabird excrement that their demand sparked the seizure of foreign lands and the beginning of US imperialism in the Pacific? The answer to that question may reside in a powerful observation about the relationship people were developing with food and the practices they were using to produce it—Justus von Liebig’s focus on soil chemistry ushered in the mindset of science over nature, encouraging the notion that the land was not a living organism we had to work with, but rather it was a resource we could manipulate and bend to our purposes. By this time, commercial farmers were practicing monocropping with cash crops, planting large quantities of single crops year after year in the same fields, which continuously depleted the soil of critical nutrients. As one farmer in Georgia expressed in the Southern Cultivator in 1844 “The lands have been, by a succession of hard cropping, shallow up-hill and down-hill plowing, and other imprudences, denuded of a large portion of the richest soil…we are now reduced to one of three alternatives, either to be content with scant crops…and, in the end, with poverty; abandon our homes…or, to commence, in right good earnest, the work of improving our lands”43. Farmers with smaller fields could use manure from cattle to help put nutrients back into the soil, but as farms grew larger in this era, there just wasn’t enough manure to cover them and it was not as effective as guano at increasing crop yield. Rather than utilizing time intensive processes like crop rotation and allowing the land to remain fallow for a season, the attitude and outlook was to find ways to amend the soil—to intervene in the processes of nature and speed up production to increase quantity and profit. FRP W1 V3 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved. Others, like former slaves and sharecroppers who had been confined to overused, worn out fields, found the introduction of soil amendments like guano to be critical for any chance of a successful harvest. In many instances, these farmers would cosign on special liens known as “guano notes,” in which they would promise a share of their crops and even put their homestead up as collateral in exchange for landlords and merchants supplying them with guano. Slide 8 In both cases, whether by choice or out of necessity, farmers were participating in the commercialization of soil fertility and the demise of farming practices that once sought to support and encourage the natural soil ecosystem. As history professor Dan Allosso describes, “generations of American farmers who had been taught to depend on plentiful commercial fertilizers, had forgotten the value of humus. Since Justus von Liebig had focused their attention on soil chemistry in the 1840s, most soil scientists had promoted the idea that chemical nutrients were the important thing, and that soil itself was just an inert medium.” Faith in the agricultural inputs and government land acts encouraged people to look toward marginal lands that were not naturally suited to agriculture, such as grazing lands in the high plains of western Kansas and Nebraska, Oklahoma and northwestern Texas. When put to the plow, the root systems of the perennial grasses that used to keep the soil bound together and kept moisture in the ground were destroyed and the soil was exposed to the elements. This coupled with a lengthy drought left the area extremely vulnerable and led to years of severe dust storms. The era is known as The Dust Bowl and it was the “greatest man-made ecological disaster in the history of the United States.” Some 2.5 million people had to leave the great plains and their farms behind, largely because we lost our connection with the land and tried to manipulate food production for profit. Slide 9 Peruvian Guano is not the only agricultural input to be introduced to our agricultural system during this time. The first successful use of insecticides in agriculture is reported to trace back to the 1860s when an orange and black beetle native to south-central Mexico found its way to America when its traditional food source, buffalo bur, came over with horses and cows via the Spaniards engaging in the Columbian Exchange. Once the beetles discovered the potato, a relative to the buffalo bur, they feasted and multiplied across the land and earned a new name, the Colorado Potato beetle. In a desperate effort to combat the beetles, an inorganic compound of copper, acetate, and arsenic that was traditionally used as a green paint pigment called Paris Green was applied as an insecticide. Although initially classified as a success, the beetles that survived grew resistant. Many different iterations and insecticides have been tried, but even up to today the beetle has FRP W1 V3 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved. become resistant to all major classes of insecticides. Many different types of sprayers were developed in pursuit of eradicating this pest and potatoes were one of the first crops to be sprayed by airplane. While other pesticides were developed over the course of time, the issue escalated with the development of the first synthetic insecticide, DDT, and its use in World War 2. Capable of killing hundreds of species of insects compared to one or two like other insecticides, this powerful product was able to kill insects carrying diseases like malaria and typhoid, greatly aiding the U.S. troops in the Pacific Islands. After the war, the U.S. Department of Agriculture sought to make use of the miracle chemical by encouraging its use to increase agricultural productivity and combat insect-borne illness. Since DDT’s effectiveness continued long after its application, it was a seemingly simple, long- term solution for many pest-based issues. Slide 10 But as Rachel Carson discussed in her 1962 book, Silent Spring, this long-lasting characteristic and its ability to bioaccumulate and biomagnify in many ecological and biological substances was threatening to wipe out many species, not just the mosquitoes. DDT was being indiscriminately and unreservedly applied everywhere, including on private lands without consent. It was getting into the soil and onto food crops. It was finding its way into water systems and the creatures who live in those systems. As fish ate contaminated plankton, birds ate contaminated fish, and larger predators ate the birds, the concentration of chemicals increased with each level up the food chain. Some studies report that mosquitoes were even growing resistant to DDT as early as 1947, meaning the primary problem for which it was being employed was already losing its effectiveness as side effects were mounting in the rest of the ecological system. While Carson’s work was a landmark achievement in creating awareness that sparked decades of environmental protection acts, the impacts of this widespread use of DDT still remain. Even the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledges that “After the use of DDT was discontinued in the United States, its concentration in the environment and animals has decreased, but because of its persistence, residues of concern from historical use still remain.” Slide 11 Beyond DDT, over 1 billion pounds of pesticides are used every year in the United States. While these chemical inputs may indeed protect crops from pests or disease for a time, the complex issues surrounding their usage remain an important consideration. Over 500 species of insects and mites are resistant to one or more insecticides. Pesticides are repeatedly found in our water sources and the aquatic life that inhabits them. One comprehensive report published in 2004 found at least one pesticide in 94% of the water samples, 60% of the shallow well FRP W1 V3 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved. samples, and 90% of the fish samples from streams across the US. As these pesticides are being sprayed directly on to our food and altering the microbiology of the soil, nearby lands and waters also become contaminated through indirect exposure from pesticides that drift in the air when sprayed, spread to other waters and regions through soil erosion and runoff, or that enter the water system during the process of washing the machinery. While the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) does attempt to monitor exposure levels and assess risk to both humans and the environment, the system itself has its limitations. As a central component of the monitoring system, the EPA sets a tolerance level for each pesticide, which is defined as the “maximum residue level of a specific pesticide chemical that is permitted in or on a specific human or animal food in the United States.” Since 1996 when landmark legislation was passed with the Food Quality Protection Act, the process for setting that tolerance level evolved to require the EPA to establish with “reasonable certainty that no harm will result to infants and children from aggregate exposure to the pesticide chemical residue.” The risk resulting from pesticide residue exposure is calculated using computer software, data from USDA food consumption surveys, and data submitted by the manufacturer seeking to have a pesticide registered. Computer models can be helpful, but are not actual measurements and any survey results will be heavily shaped by the people who participated, where they live, what resources they have, where they work, and what kinds of food are available in their area. Additionally, many of the tests the EPA requires that manufacturers pay for to assess aspects like dermatological toxicity or the potential to be endocrine disruptors are conducted on animals, which should not be directly extrapolated to human results. Slide 12 There also seems to be a lack of exploration of how the overall load of exposure to a wide variety of different pesticides might impact the environment or human health. In 2022, farms in the US applied 1,845,000 pounds of four different pesticides just to potatoes! Understanding the impacts of the residue left by one of those pesticides is important, but if we think about each crop having the potential to be sprayed with several different pesticides—the combined exposure to these chemical additives should be considered. Further limitations of this system can be readily seen in two specific pesticide examples, Chlorpyrifos and Aldicarb. Chlorpyrifos is an insecticide that has been in use since 1965 on crops like broccoli, cauliflower, soybeans, fruit, and nut trees. Despite evidence of the potential to cause neurodevelopmental issues in children, it took until August of 2021 for the EPA to decide to revoke its tolerances and until February of 2022 for that revocation to go into effect. Perhaps even more alarming than the duration of usage before the ruling was made is the fact that tolerances only apply to food commodities, so chlorpyrifos can still be used in non-food FRP W1 V3 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved. applications. This means that if a farm is growing corn for ethanol production, that field can still be sprayed with chlorpyrifos, meaning it can still get into the soil, water systems, aquatic life, and wildlife that eats fish. The EPA guidelines even state that “applications of chlorpyrifos to or around fruit/nut trees may be considered a non-food use provided applications are made to non-bearing trees (i.e., trees without fruit present at the time of application and that will not bear fruit within one year.”15 So while some exposure may be reduced by the regulation to restrict application on food, continued exposure will occur from its application on these “non- food” commodities and its travels through the ecosystem. With Aldicarb, the regulations and the EPA’s collaboration with manufacturers seemed to have a positive impact at first. In 2010, the manufacturer, Bayer Crop Science, submitted additional data showing the pesticide was more potent than originally believed. With the EPA’s revised safety factor for infants and children in place, the EPA conducted a new risk assessment and found the aggregated exposure could exceed the tolerance level for children ages 1 through 5, with citrus fruit and potatoes being the primary sources of exposure. As a result, Bayer agreed to suspend use of Aldicarb on citrus and potatoes within the year and take additional measures to protect groundwater resources. Yet in September of 2010—the same year that the EPA received the additional toxicity data about Aldicarb, a manufacturer named AgLogic submitted registration for a pesticide product called Meymik 15G, which contains Aldicarb. This pesticide was approved for use on peanuts, cotton, sugar beets, dry beans, soybeans, and sweet potatoes. In January of 2021, Meymik was conditionally approved for use on oranges and grapefruit, as the EPA is permitted to grant registration “even if the data concerning the pesticide may be insufficient to support an unconditional registration." Slide 13 Moreover, despite having these standards in place, the United States continues to use pesticides that have been banned in other major agricultural countries. In 2019, one analysis found that of the pesticides approved for agricultural use in the US, 72 in the EU, 17 in Brazil, and 11 in China are banned or in the process of a complete phase-out. In pursuit of higher crop yields and more efficient agricultural practices, we are putting our entire ecosystem at risk in ways that other countries have taken a stand against. Our soil, water systems, air quality, non-target plants, beneficial insects, fish, birds, and members of the food chain all the way up to humans face challenges and risks associated with exposure to these chemical inputs. This intervention in how our food is grown also creates resistant pests, weeds, and diseases that will inevitably require stronger products to yield the desired effect over time. As you will FRP W1 V3 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved. learn in your studies, buying organic products does not necessarily mitigate exposure to agricultural chemicals either. The National List of Allowed and Prohibited Substances currently shows dozens of additives approved for use with organic foods and products. While an argument can be made that these chemicals pose less risk to human and environmental health, there is still much to be learned about the use of these inputs over time and they still underscore the significant change in our food system as it has become perhaps more science and technology based than it is farm-centered. References 1. A Man-Made Ecological Disaster | The Dust Bowl. PBS LearningMedia. https://tpt.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/ecological-disaster-ken-burns-dust- bowl/ken-burns-the-dust-bowl/ 2. Agricultural Contaminants | U.S. Geological Survey. www.usgs.gov. https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/agricultural- contaminants#:~:text=Pesticides%20are%20widespread%20in%20surface 3. Allosso D. Green Revolution. Pressbooks.pub. Published 2010. https://mlpp.pressbooks.pub/americanenvironmentalhistory/chapter/chapter-8- green-revolution/ 4. Amorim A, Laurindo JB, Sobral PJ do A. 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Powder spray for Paris Green, France, 1925-1935 | Science Museum Group Collection. collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk. Accessed 2023. https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co131288/powder-spray- for-paris-green-france-1925-1935-pest-sprayer 36. Radcliffe EB, Lagnaoui A. Chapter 25 - Insect Pests in Potato. ScienceDirect. Published January 1, 2007. Accessed 2023. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B9780444510181500671 37. Rajmohan KS, Chandrasekaran R, Varjani S. A Review on Occurrence of Pesticides in Environment and Current Technologies for Their Remediation and Management. Indian Journal of Microbiology. 2020;60(2):125-138. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s12088-019-00841-x 38. Rees J. Industrialization and Urbanization in the United States, 1880–1929. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. Published online July 7, 2016. doi:https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.327 39. Regulations.gov. www.regulations.gov. 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The Role of Women in the Industrial Revolution | UMass Lowell. www.uml.edu. Published 2019. https://www.uml.edu/tsongas/barilla- taylor/women-industrial-revolution.aspx 45. Ten Agricultural Inventions that Changed the Face of Farming in America. Farm Collector. https://www.farmcollector.com/equipment/ten-agricultural-inventions- in-farming-history/ 46. The Guano Islands Act. National Museum of American History. Published February 8, 2016. https://americanhistory.si.edu/norie-atlas/guano-islands-act FRP W1 V3 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved. 47. Tudi M, Daniel Ruan H, Wang L, et al. Agriculture Development, Pesticide Application and Its Impact on the Environment. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. 2021;18(3). doi:https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18031112 48. US Department of Agriculture. A Condensed History of American Agriculture 1776–1999. Page 10. https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/history- american-agriculture.pdf 49. US Department of Agriculture. The 2022 Agricultural Chemical Use Survey of potato producers. Accessed2023. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Surveys/Guide_to_NASS_Surveys/Chemical_Use/2022_ Potatoes_Wheat/ChemHighlights-Potato%20FINAL.pdf 50. Veit HZ. Eating Cotton: Cottonseed, Crisco, and Consumer Ignorance. The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. 2019;18(4):397-421. doi:https://doi.org/10.1017/s1537781419000276 51. Whaples R. Hours of Work in U.S. History. Eh.net. Published 2019. https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/ FRP W1 V3 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved.  Food Relationships and Practices Week 1, Video 4 Title Slide 1 Let’s continue our exploration of events that have shaped the modern food landscape of America. As we have seen, a push to maximize profit and minimize effort has been central to many of the changes in our food system. We’ve looked at some of the ways this motive impacted our agricultural methods, but this valuation of quantity over quality has also seeped its way into our animal husbandry practices. Slide 2 Instead of lush pastures of grass and grubs on small family farms for cattle, sheep, and chickens to feast on, many animals raised for food in the United States are kept indoors in crowded, unsanitary conditions with limited to no access to their natural food sources. One source reports that as much as 82% of beef sales in the US are earned by just 4 meat packing companies. As with the monocropping system we’ve seen with agriculture, industrial farm animal production aims to raise as many of a given animal species for one purpose as possible. This progression went hand in hand with the “Green Revolution” that took place over two decades from the 1940s to 1960s that was a combination of the use of genetic selection, irrigation technology, and the extensive use of fertilizers and chemicals that we have reviewed. Where a farmer in the 1940s could grow 70-80 bushels of corn per acre, by the 1980s they could achieve as much as 200 bushels per acre. This significant increase in yield, which also impacted other cereal crops like wheat, allowed for prices to drop—making grains an abundant, cheap, and therefore appealing food for livestock. Soon, people began developing grain-based feed blends with synthetic additives designed to hasten the time it takes an animal to reach the desired weight. Where it used to take 84 days to nurture a chicken to a 5-pound size, it now takes as few as 45. As Michael Pollan described in an interview, the situation with cattle is equally accelerated: They spend the first six months out on the pasture with their moms, nursing, nibbling grass.… We take them off grass. We put them in pens… and we teach them how to eat something that they are not evolved to eat, which is grain, and mostly corn. Why do we do this? Well, it's a very good question, because it makes absolutely no sense from an ecological standpoint. From a financial standpoint, it does. It makes them FRP W1 V4 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved.  grow much more quickly. It makes them get fat, and we like our meat really fat and marbled. And it allows us to speed up the lifespan. In capitalism, time is money. We're taking cows that we used to let grow to be four or five years old before we eat them [and] we've got it down to 14 months, and we're heading toward 11 months. What allows us to do this is getting them [on] corn, getting them off this whole evolutionary relationship they've had with grass.... Slide 3 With a large pasture for grazing no longer necessary, the introduction of grain-based food made movement into industrial buildings for maximum production possible. It also allowed for more animals to be raised in a smaller space, which was certainly more economical, but far less sanitary. Confined in small spaces with their waste and susceptible to digestive illnesses induced by the unnatural food source, these concentrated animal feeding operations result in the need for more antibiotics to combat disease, which in turn increases the potential for microbes to become antibiotic resistant. These unsanitary conditions also increase the likelihood of pathogens spreading from the animals to humans and contribute to issues of soil and water contamination. There are even studies that have documented increases of neurobehavioral issues in people living near these facilities because of the gases, vapors, and aerosols these systems emit. As we saw with agricultural advancement, here too the consumer has become increasingly removed from a relationship with the animals that make up a significant portion of their diet. A crop growing farm will sell grain to a feed mill, which will formulate the food, which gets sold to a feedlot that is raising the animals, and the animals are then often passed on to yet another facility for slaughtering and processing—all before it hits a distributor, then the store, and finally ends up in the cart of the customer. Despite being so far removed from the animals themselves, people are becoming increasingly concerned over the conditions animals endure and the subsequent welfare they experience. While there are certainly humane and ethical motives at the center of that concern, there is also evidence that stressors resulting from the way animals are housed, transported, and handled can have numerous impacts on the ultimate health and quality of the meat. From an increase in pro-inflammatory cytokines that disturbs microbial fermentation in the rumen, impairs intestinal barrier function, and reduces feed intake to the depletion of muscle glycogen that increases the pH, resulting in a loss of tenderness, dark coloration, and decreased water- holding capacity,, how an animal is treated can have dramatic impact on its health and the subsequent properties of the meat it provides. Slide 4 From mechanization and chemical inputs in the fields to concentration and food alterations on the feedlots, science, technology, and the twofold desire for production and profit have FRP W1 V4 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved. significantly altered the way our food is grown and raised. But the intervention did not stop there. As food production moved to the factory, these driving forces went as far as manipulating the food itself—not just how it was made, but the nutrients it offered, the flavor and textural experiences it provided, and the psychological influences it generated. From Antoine Lavoisier’s invention of the ice calorimeter that helped him discover that food supplies the body with energy in the 1780s to Wilbur Olin Atwater’s respiration calorimeter that was able to measure the energy equivalents for carbohydrates, fat, and protein, scientists have been trying to break down food and understand its components and functions for centuries. That understanding grew more microscopic with discoveries like Takaki Kanehiro’s demonstration that beriberi was the result of malnutrition and Casimir Funk’s successful isolation of thiamine, the first identified “vital amine,” or as we know it today, vitamin. As links between health and these food components grew, we saw the first instance of food fortification with the addition of iodine to table salt in 1924. By 1954, food fortification had virtually eliminated the known nutrient-deficient based diseases in the United States and the FDA had developed multiple governing standards for food fortification. Although we can acknowledge the beneficial health qualities of receiving adequate nutrients to avoid deficiency-based diseases, this scientific isolation and manipulation of food components reflects an important shift in the deteriorating relationship of Americans and their food. Rather than seeking nutrient-dense, whole food sources of the identified nutrients, which contain a multitude of synergistic compounds that are still being explored, the approach was to isolate, extract, and eventually synthesize versions of the nutrient to add it to foods that didn’t naturally contain significant amounts. This approach may have been reasonable at the time given the Great Depression and World War 2 left a lot of families with limited means and many communities without adequate food supplies, but the prevailing mindset that has continued is that humans can engineer their health and obtain all the nutrients they need from factory- made foods. This mindset coupled with the advances in food processing and packaging technologies developed to supply rations to soldiers during the war created the perfect platform for big food industries to push their ready to eat, fortified, shelf-stable products on to the center stage of American tables. As one examination puts it, “the American provisioning practices during World War II greatly accelerated the transition to a national, highly standardized food system that blurred the line between intense and emergency feeding under military conditions, and ordinary dining practices among civilians.” Slide 5 As the nation stabilized and the economy began to prosper again, the government’s focus shifted from manipulating foods to ensure adequate intake of important nutrients to recommending dietary guidelines to reduce certain food compounds believed to be associated FRP W1 V4 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved. with disease. If the lack of certain nutrients could cause disease, it stood to reason that the excess of others could do the same. Rather than questioning why people were getting more concentrated amounts of certain food components than diets provided in the past, such as the shift from eating whole foods prepared at home to eating manufactured foods composed of more concentrated amounts of certain pieces of foods—the question that dominated scientific focus was which element of food is the villain? Although population growth, advances in medical care, improvements in hygiene, and improved understanding of and ability to diagnose certain conditions are important factors to consider, the increase in the number of deaths attributed to heart disease in 1900 compared to that in 1950 offers an understandable reason that heart disease became a primary target of the initiative to find a controllable dietary cause of disease. Across the US, 27,427 lives were claimed by heart disease in 1900. In 1950, that number was 535,705. With scientific studies like the Framingham Heart Study that launched in 1948 and the Seven Countries Study led by Ancel Keys in 1958 reporting a correlation between saturated fatty acid intake and mortality from coronary heart disease, dietary fats—and particularly saturated fats from foods like red meat and butter—the dietary villain was found. Some studies additionally suggested that replacing saturated fats in the diet with polyunsaturated fat would lower the risk of coronary heart disease, paving the way for vegetable oil-based margarines and spreads to become staples in the American kitchen. Slide 6 There are arguments on both sides of the fence regarding the integrity of these studies, the interpretation of the results, and allegations that the Sugar Research Foundation continued to propagate this narrative by funding studies that continued to point the blame at fat and cholesterol in the 60s and 70s—but our conversation is not focused on the legitimacy of the science, but rather the resulting impacts the belief in that science had on our relationship with food. The government based dietary guidelines that were released following these studies in the 70s and 80s encouraged people to minimize dietary fats. Not only were people motivated to take nutrient-dense animal foods like steak and eggs off their plates, but food manufactures all the way through the 1990s capitalized on the American public’s fear of fat and flooded the market with low-fat and fat-free versions of every product imaginable. Of course, fat is not an inert compound. In addition to supplying the body with energy and materials to build healthy cells, it also is a major contributor of taste and texture in food. How did manufacturers manage to remove fat and still have a product that consumers enjoyed? FRP W1 V4 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved. They had to add more sugar, stabilizers, and additives to provide the right mouth-feel and palatable flavor. The resulting foods often had the same number of calories as their full-fat counterparts, but were less satiating because fat is one of the key drivers of keeping us full and satisfied after a meal since it is a slower burning fuel. By 1997, The American Heart Association was putting their seal of approval on hundreds of products—including sugar-rich foods like Frosted Flakes and Pop-Tarts. This type of marketing initiative was compounded by low-fat and fat-free rhetoric in magazines, on television, and continued reinforcement of government-based food guidelines that prioritized a cereal-grain based diet. Many Americans were led to believe these manufactured foods were supportive of health and that as long as a product was low-fat, they could eat more. Slide 7 Once again, Americans found themselves looking to external sources to make decisions about what to eat and to discern what their bodies needed. Consuming more calories in search for satiety further separated people from their innate wisdom as hunger cues no longer correlated with the energy being provided by the food. Extra sugar finding its way into regular meals in addition to snacks and treats also set people on a blood sugar roller coaster that exacerbated the disconnect from their own appetite signals as the crash that accompanies sugar in the absence of fat often encourages people to reach for something else to pick their energy back up again. The age of manufactured, engineered low-fat food was an era where energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods became the staple foods in the American diet. Yet by the end of the 90s and into the early 2000s, the popular dietary dogma had flipped with carbohydrates being the star villain that the media blamed for their poor health. Even though the USDA’s dietary guidelines didn’t advocate for this dramatic shift, people knew their health was getting worse and they weren’t living the vibrant, nourished lives the low-fat messaging had promised. We had been so conditioned in the mindset that the answer must lie in the reduction and restriction of a food component that we ran to another extreme—not questioning the principles that mindset was based on, simply believing a different compound was to blame. These dietary trends, media messages, and government guidelines were not the only forces influencing our perception of food and behaviors. Our psychological relationship with food was further damaged by food manufacturer’s drive for profit and their manipulation of food with the development of what Associate Professor Tera Fazzino describes as “hyper-palatable foods.” FRP W1 V4 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved. Slide 8 Fazzino explains these are foods “designed to maximize a food’s rewarding properties during consumption. In contrast to naturally occurring foods that contain one primary palatability inducing nutrient, [hyper-palatable foods] contain combinations of nutrients that are not typically found in nature (like high quantities of both sugar and fat). The combinations of nutrients are present at thresholds that artificially enhance a food’s palatability and provide a highly rewarding eating experience, eliciting strong activation in brain reward regions.” These foods may even delay signals of satiety while encouraging continued consumption. The research team classified hyper-palatable foods into three categories: -Those with greater than 25% of calories from fat and greater than or equal to 0.30% sodium by weight -Those with greater than 20% of calories from fat and greater than 20% of calories from sugar -Those with greater than 40% of calories from carbohydrates and greater than or equal to 0.20% sodium by weight When these definitions were applied to 7,757 food items in the US Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies, 62%, or 4,795 food items met the hyper- palatability criteria. Fazzino’s findings contend that the reinforcing mechanisms of hyper-palatable foods triggering reward centers in the brain are very similar to those seen with substance abuse. One review of existing literature estimates a high prevalence of food addiction is present in as much as 20% of the general population. Considering many of these hyper-palatable foods were specifically marketed to children with tactics brought to the food industry by big tobacco companies like Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds, some people have been contending with these products that are engineered to make us crave more, eat more, and feel worse for the majority of their lives. Our food system has been masterfully designed to keep people in a dueling cycle of consumption and restriction. Physically, mentally, and emotionally we are plagued by this broken relationship that causes us to fear our food, question our bodies, and continuously search for a way out. Slide 9 Despite the trending tone of negativity that can be seen across all of these events, nutritional therapy offers the common thread of hope that none of these setbacks have to be permanent. Even if hyper-palatable foods dominate the market, big food companies continue to control FRP W1 V4 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved. production and influence dietary guidelines, and agricultural experiments from GMO crops to lab raised meat continue to defy nature—power is never further away than your kitchen. None of these societal influences can stop you from rekindling your connection with food or relearning to trust your body’s innate wisdom. The mere decision to cook a meal is a proclamation of victory over the systems of convenience and manipulation that have tainted our relationship with food. With nothing more than a hot plate, a skillet, and a knife, you can take on these monumental opponents and reclaim your health. As much as these events have helped us better understand some of the issues America contends with in our current food system, there are also places and peoples we can look to for inspiration on how to heal and repair that relationship. Next week, we will explore some cultural food practices and traditions that have helped people maintain a positive, nourishing relationship with their food for centuries and discover ways we can enrich our modern lives with these principles. In the meantime, we encourage you to carve out time in your week to make a meal that excites you. Use a seasonal ingredient that you always look forward to. Make something with a variety of colors and herbs. Or choose something that brings back a special memory and warm feelings. Notice the smells and sounds of each ingredient as you prepare them. Take time to sit down and eat the meal in peace, relishing its flavors and textures. Find joy and empowerment in knowing that the meal you’ve prepared is giving you strength and supporting your wellbeing because you honored it with your time and intention. References 1. Carrasco-García AA, Pardío-Sedas VT, León-Banda GG, et al. Effect of stress during slaughter on carcass characteristics and meat quality in tropical beef cattle. Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences. 2020;33(10):1656-1665. doi:https://doi.org/10.5713/ajas.19.0804 2. Fazzino T. The Reinforcing Natures of Hyper-Palatable Foods: Behavioral Evidence for Their Reinforcing Properties and the Role of the US Food Industry in Promoting Their Availability. Current Addiction Reports. 2022; 9. 10.1007/s40429- 022-00417-8. FRP W1 V4 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved. 3. Fitzgerald, Deborah. 2020. "World War II and the Quest for Time-Insensitive Foods." Osiris, 35. https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/146637/709509.pdf?sequence=2 4. Gouvêa VN, Cooke RF, Marques RS. Impacts of stress-induced inflammation on feed intake of beef cattle. Frontiers in animal science. 2022;3. doi:https://doi.org/10.3389/fanim.2022.962748 5. Kearns CE, Schmidt LA, Glantz SA. Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research. JAMA Internal Medicine. 2016;176(11):1680. doi:https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.5394 6. MacDonald JM, McBride WD. The Transformation of U.S. Livestock Agriculture Scale, Efficiency, and Risks. SSRN Electronic Journal. Published online 2009. doi:https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1354028 7. NCHS - Top Five Leading Causes of Death: United States, 1990, 1950, 2000 | Data | Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. data.cdc.gov. Accessed August 8, 2023. https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/NCHS-Top-Five-Leading-Causes-of-Death-United- State/mc4y- cbbv/explore/query/SELECT%20%60year%60%2C%20%60leading_causes%60%2C%2 0%60number_of_deaths%60/page/filter 8. Nguyen KH, Glantz SA, Palmer CN, Schmidt LA. Tobacco industry involvement in children’s sugary drinks market. BMJ. Published online March 14, 2019:l736. doi:https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l736 9. PBS. Interviews - Michael Pollan | Modern Meat | FRONTLINE | PBS. Pbs.org. Published 2014. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/meat/interviews/pollan.html 10. Sánchez-Muniz FJ, Cuesta C. Sunflower Oil - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics. www.sciencedirect.com. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/sunflower-oil 11. Stafford N. History: The changing notion of food. Nature. 2010;468(7327):S16- S17. doi:https://doi.org/10.1038/468s16a 12. Swine. Water-Holding Capacity of Fresh Meat – Hogs, Pigs, and Pork. swine.extension.org. https://swine.extension.org/water-holding-capacity-of-fresh- meat/ 13. Temple N. Fat, Sugar, Whole Grains and Heart Disease: 50 Years of Confusion. Nutrients. 2018;10(1):39. doi:https://doi.org/10.3390/nu10010039 14. Vasiliu O. Current Status of Evidence for a New Diagnosis: Food Addiction-A Literature Review. Frontiers in Psychiatry. 2022;12. doi:https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.824936 FRP W1 V4 © 2023 Nutritional Therapy Association, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved.  Food Relationships and Practices Week 2, Video 1 Title Slide 1 Although we have covered a range of events and circumstances that have disrupted our relationship with food, and altered the way we engage with it on a daily basis, there is an equal abundance of examples from cultures and communities across the globe of methods people embrace to maintain connection to food—even amidst these challenges. From thoughtfully planning a meal in advance or tending to a loaf of sourdough throughout the day to the simple expression of gratitude right before a meal, the way we think, speak, and behave offer an infinite number of ways for us to tap into our innate wisdom and build a nourishing relationship with our food. Indeed, to represent the examples of positive food relationships and practices across all cultures throughout history would require an entire course solely on this subject. While we don’t have the space to explore them all, we do have the opportunity to highlight a few of these traditional practices as we seek to reclaim our health in the kitchen. As we embark on this exploration of traditional food practices, the goal is not to judge anyone’s choices as superior or inferior because of what they have access to or capacity for. Rather, we hope this conversation sheds light