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It takes two people to make a lie work: the person who tells it, and the one who believes it. Jodi Picoult, Vanishing Acts

‘Healthy whole grains’.

It’s the dietary battle cry of the 21st century, echoed by all official providers of nutritional advice, the dietary community and a trillion-pound food industry. It’s the guiding principle of academic curricula in nutrition, embraced by makers of processed food who produce, along with sugar, mind-boggling quantities of foods from wheat, corn and rice. Is it all based on the purported health benefits of grains – or are there other motivations at work?

Remember family farms, those places idealized or satirized by TV shows such as The Big Valley, The Waltons and Green Acres? It was only 60 years ago that, in the United States, we had more than 6 million of them, mostly near small towns like Walton’s Mountain or Hooterville. These were places where a family typically owned a few dozen acres to grow tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce, along with some chickens, pigs and a cow or two. They grew food for themselves and sold the surplus. Today, small family farms, along with John-Boy and Arnold Ziffel, are largely relics of the past, with the few that remain run by ageing part-time farmers whose primary jobs are off the farm. The food on your table is much more likely to come from a large operation of thousands of acres growing huge tracts of single crops (a farming method called monoculture) like wheat and corn. Parallel transformations from small farm to big business have occurred in the dairy and meat industries.

Farmers, family and otherwise, are stepping up to meet the demands of a worldwide public that has made grains 50 per cent of their calories. That’s direct human consumption of grains. Grains, now favoured in place of forage and grass, are also the preferred feed for livestock. This trend began in the 1960s, and livestock now consume the bulk of the grain produced in the world, outstripping human consumption sevenfold. And we haven’t even discussed how much corn is cultivated for ethanol.¹ Grains are, by anyone’s definition, big business.

Whenever there’s a peculiar situation, we have to ask: Who benefits? Is agribusiness simply responding to consumer demand by providing, for instance, £200 billion in snacks worldwide? Or are there forces at work that quietly cultivate this situation for other reasons? Answering these questions takes us a bit off course from the discussion of why and how forgoing grains gets you closer to total health. But I’m going to ask you to indulge this digression, as understanding this irksome situation will arm you better in the fight against reliance on the seeds of grasses for nutrition.

So let us digress.

The Art of the Commodity

Pretend you are a businessman with ambitions to create a system that will generate millions, or perhaps billions, of pounds. And say you’d like to accomplish it through the world of food, rather than crude oil, iron ore or gold. You’re not all that concerned with environmental issues, long-term sustainability or the health of the consuming public. Your goals are elegantly simple: you’d like to conduct your venture on a worldwide scale for maximum profit.

You certainly cannot achieve such ambitious goals by doing something as pedestrian as growing kale or cultivating an organic farm. You can’t do it by selling fresh foods to a local market: too small, too little room for growth, too much darned hard work. Conquering the world shouldn’t be so hard! Throw me a frickin’ bone here, people. How about manufacturing processed foods on a large scale using low-cost inputs, such as high-fructose corn syrup, cornflour, wheat flour, sucrose and the odd food colouring or two, and then creating the illusion of value-added convenience, health, weight management and sexiness? Well, now we’re talking, Mr Bigglesworth!

But food can be hard work and dirty business. Moreover, most foods, such as eggs, pork, and fruit and vegetables, have finite shelf lives measured in just days – a shipping delay of just a few days could mean that your entire inventory becomes a worthless pile of rot. Lots of foods require refrigeration, adding another layer of cost and risk. Then you have to meet all sorts of regulatory requirements issued by agencies such as – in the US – the FDA, USDA, and federal, state, county and local health departments. What if you are the sort of businessman who doesn’t care to get his hands dirty? You don’t want to actually handle the food; you just want to make large transactions on paper or electronically. Buy low, sell high, bank your profit. No dirty hands, no messy, rotten food.

You therefore want to transact millions or billions of dollars worth of food, but you don’t want to touch the stuff, deal with logistics, worry about risks or contend with endless regulatory hassles. In other words, you want to arbitrage your way to profits, i.e., take advantage of the different prices paid for a product in wide demand from every level of society and that sells as easily in Spokane as it does in London or Brisbane. And you want to do it with something that passes for food and enjoys extended, perhaps limitless, shelf life and can be transported over long distances to take maximum advantage of worldwide price differentials.

What we’re talking about buying and selling is called a commodity. This is a good or collection of goods – whether iron ore, crude oil, gold, tin or aluminium – that is relatively indistinguishable from source to source and by different consumers. Commodities leave little or no room for variety, for boutique versions, for uniqueness. It’s all the same everywhere, for everyone.

Grains are on the short list of foods consumed by humans that conform perfectly to a commodity market. (Coffee beans, tea, sugar and soyabeans are among the handful of others.) You won’t find heirloom tomatoes, radishes, garlic or grass-fed beef on any commodity exchange. Karl Marx observed that, ‘From the taste of wheat it is not possible to tell who produced it: a Russian serf, a French peasant, or an English capitalist.’ When a loaf of multigrain bread is purchased, how many people are concerned with whether the wheat flour, oats, millet or rye came from Iowa, East Anglia or the Ukraine? There is little difference between corn from Brazil and corn from Kansas, and the consumer can’t tell the difference. Of course, you can pretend that there is some enticing appeal to your San Francisco sourdough bread or ‘authentic’ Mexican tortillas. But it’s all created from the same commodity: grains.

Food: The Ultimate Commodity Exchange

Beginning in the late 19th century and for many years afterward, high-volume grains – wheat, corn and rice – were handled as commodities, all under the control of relatively few individuals and private companies. In the United States, the Kansas City Board of Trade and the Chicago Board of Trade were founded to facilitate the trading of futures contracts for wheat, corn and oats in the 1870s. These were the very first products to trade on a commodities market, preceding even crude oil and iron ore.

This was not about grain farmers labouring to grow their crops, then carting them to the mill and hoping to sell for a favourable price. This was about a financial system with rules written by a select few who were intent on trading and profiting from large transactions that are only possible with foods that can be traded as commodities on a worldwide scale. More recently, large companies that trade in grain contracts have found it even more profitable to extend their businesses outside of just paper transactions and have worked towards vertical integration, getting their hands dirty in the messy business of the grains themselves. Today, companies that trade grains are also likely to own grain storage facilities, milling operations, trucking and railroad companies, and myriad other operations involved in the production, distribution, shipping, milling and sale of grains.

Large-scale demand, long shelf life, long-distance transportability and worldwide price differences: these are the criteria that must be met to allow a grain trader to purchase a million tonnes of hard winter wheat from a grain cooperative in Kansas and ship it by train, and then ocean tanker, to a port in Vladivostok. That wheat will serve a population that desires the product due to a poorer-than-usual yield – a situation that increased the price per bushel to a level the trader finds desirable. That single transaction can net many millions of dollars.

Commodity traders also prefer to deal in markets that are growing, not stagnant or shrinking. Although people enlightened by books like Wheat Belly, as well as those who are jumping on the gluten-free bandwagon, have caused a drop in grain sales for food production, the net effect will likely be increased grain sales, since grains are also used to feed the livestock that will provide calories increasingly obtained from beef, pork, poultry, eggs and farmed seafood. For every tonne of grain consumed by humans in the United States, 7 tonnes are consumed by livestock.² From the perspective of the grain trade, this is called a win-win situation.

Welcome to the world of Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM), Louis Dreyfus, Bunge and Continental Grain Company: multibillion-pound companies that make the grain world go round, trading, arbitraging and cashing in on the millions of tonnes of grains the world’s consumers now demand. In the world of large grain trades, not a lot has changed in the 35 years since journalist Dan Morgan, a 30-year veteran of the Washington Post, wrote his detailed exposé of the grain-trading industry, Merchants of Grain: ‘[T]here they are, in the late 1970s, one of the most remarkable phenomenons in the whole business world: the Hirsches, Borns, Louis-Dreyfuses, Andrés, Fribourgs, Cargills and MacMillans, all survivors and all still in control . . . [I]n no other major industry in the world are all the leading companies private, family-owned, family-operated concerns right down to the last few issues of voting stock.’³

Despite the enormity of their economic sway over world markets, most of these companies were, until recently, private corporations that did not have an obligation to publicly disclose their financial dealings to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. (ADM is an exception, having been publicly traded since the mid-20th century; Bunge became a publicly traded company as recently as 2001, after 183 years of operating privately.) As a result, the billions of dollars of grain trading that occurred during much of the 20th century operated largely in the shadows of business – elusive, mysterious and often represented by large paper trades made before any actual grain was shipped or changed hands.

Although the dealings of these companies are generally outside the radar of public scrutiny, federal agencies are indeed aware. In the United States, the federal government relied on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to track the dealings of grain traders, as well as grain production and agricultural policy in places such as the former Soviet Union – issues they viewed as important to the health of US agribusiness and food security. (Due to the recent push for transparency from the federal government in the United States, such redacted reports are available for anyone to read online from the CIA’s files at http://www.foia.cia.gov/collection/princeton-collection.)

While this near monopoly on food commodities prevailed throughout the 20th century, it continues to a substantial degree in our era. The worldwide grain market is still dominated by a handful of commodity traders, all intent on gaining a larger and larger stake in the diet of the world, human or otherwise. Of course, their intent is not to cultivate locally grown vegetables or humanely raised, pasture-fed beef grazing on clover and grass, nor is it to follow sustainable practices that generate the smallest carbon footprint while making their fortunes. It is, as much as possible, to convert the diets of humans and livestock into a commodity-dominated process, with maximum reliance on products with a long shelf-life that are open to price variation worldwide. This creates the perfect situation for profiting from the inequities of an expanding marketplace. Yes: expanding profits on a massive scale underlie much of the push for increased human consumption of grains.

Over the last nearly 20 years, we’ve also witnessed the increasing push towards genetically modified grains, which now provide the added financial advantage of patent protection: seeds must be purchased from the patent holder (Monsanto, Dow AgroSciences or Syngenta) every year, since farmers are prohibited from saving seed, as they have done every year since the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago. While wheat has not yet been converted to genetically modified strains, corn, rice and other crops have. But GM wheat is surely coming, public outcry be damned. The seed market now stands at around $22 billion worldwide. Agribusiness sees this as a great opportunity to cash in on the world’s diet by selling GM seed and then strictly and aggressively enforcing patents. We’ve already seen this in Monsanto’s courtroom tactics in prosecuting the ‘unauthorized’ use of GM seed that inadvertently gets mixed into a field of non-GM crops.⁴

The enemy of large-scale, commoditized grains-as-food is small-scale, locally produced food, since such relatively tiny and disparate operations cannot be controlled by one centralized corporate entity and are beyond the financial reach of the big players. If domination of the world market for food is your goal, then the seeds of grasses are your game.

The Blurred Line Between Government and Agribusiness

The agribusiness multinationals of our time that control the flow of commodity crops around the world wield an astonishing amount of clout in government circles. Staggering sums are spent, year in and year out, by agribusiness companies to influence public policy in their favour. Recent efforts to oppose labelling of GM foods show us just how badly these companies want to keep the public in the dark about which foods contain GM ingredients. Opposition to Proposition 37 in California, which would have required labels on products containing GM foods, drew $45 million in financial support from Monsanto, Syngenta, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, General Mills, Kraft, Nestle, the Corn Refiners Association and the American Bakers Association – a virtual Who’s Who in agribusiness and food processing. Those who opposed the bill outspent proponents (mostly supporters of organic farming) five to one, resulting in defeat of the legislation in 2012.

One typical tactic of agribusiness over the past century has been to employ players who know how to play both sides of the game, as regulators and as the regulated. Consequently, high-level executives and attorneys have seamlessly bounced between, for instance, a post at the USDA, an executive position at Cargill and another post at the USDA. To a surprising degree, the roll call of key personnel in government regulatory agencies and that of key personnel in agribusiness overlap over time. I believe there is a saying about foxes and henhouses that applies to this sort of situation.

There is some logical justification for such ‘golden revolving doors’, as they are known, between government and industry. After all, these are experts in specific fields that often require deep knowledge that’s held by relatively few people. But with virtually no checks and balances over the process, it also means that such appointments can potentially be used to manipulate policy.

The list of questionable appointments is too long to recount in full, but among the many agribusiness executives who’ve held high-level positions in government was Charles Conner, appointed by President George W. Bush. Conner, former head of the Corn Refiners Association, was appointed Special Assistant to the President for Agriculture, Trade, and Food Assistance and then, in 2005, became Deputy Secretary of Agriculture. In an especially notorious instance of these ‘henhouse’ appointments, Michael R. Taylor, an attorney for agribusiness giant Monsanto and the firm’s vice president for public policy, became the FDA’s Deputy Commissioner for Policy and helped draft the FDA’s policy for bovine growth hormone, the Monsanto product given to cows to stimulate milk production. This policy not only paved the way for unrestricted use of the drug, but also prohibited any producer from labelling dairy products as not containing bovine growth hormone. And in one of the most recent golden revolving door exchanges, Carol Browner, who led the EPA under President Bill Clinton and then served as director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy under President Barack Obama, left her post for a high-level position at Bunge, a company whose history has been marred over the years by allegations of environmental crimes.

Lobbyists on the agribusiness payroll working at the federal and state government levels supplement the golden revolving door of agribusiness-friendly key executives. The agribusiness lobby is among the most powerful and well-funded of all lobbying groups, making the motor and education industries look like mom-and-pop businesses. Agribusiness rivals the spending of lobbying giants that include oil, gas, defence and communications. The Center for Responsive Politics reports that in 2012, agribusiness spent $139,726,313 on its lobbying efforts – nearly double the amount spent a decade earlier. Similar sums are spent year in, year out, to wine, dine and curry favour with politicians and policymakers to make sure that government policy remains friendly to agribusiness. One hundred million dollars can buy an awful lot of favourable treatment. Similar vigorous lobbying efforts are focused on the USDA, which is among the most lobbied of government agencies. The USDA receives more than three times the lobbying aimed at the US Securities and Exchange Commission and more than 20 times that aimed at the Social Security Administration.

Political contributions are another way agribusiness influences policy, donating millions of dollars every year to congressmen, senators and other elected politicians friendly to the agribusiness agenda. In 2011, agribusiness contributed nearly $92 million.⁵ In 2012, more than $60 million was donated to the 435 members of Congress alone. Perhaps all of this should come as no surprise, given the impressive size of these companies: Syngenta’s 2012 revenue was $14.2 billion, Monsanto’s was $13.5 billion and General Mills’s was $17.8 billion. Other operations of similar magnitude populate the agribusiness and processed food landscape, as well, commanding considerable financial power that can be used to muscle public opinion, legislation and marketing in their favour.

Grains are therefore the darlings of agribusiness, as they are the favourites of government agencies that provide dietary advice, such as the USDA, which emphasizes grains in its MyPlate and (previously) MyPyramid recommendations. ‘Eat more healthy whole grains’ is therefore not just advice purported to increase health, but advice that increases the commoditization of the human diet. Combine this with the growing worldwide appetite for inexpensive meat that is increasingly a grain-derived product, and you understand how the human diet has become a virtual grainfest.

Your Ass is Grass

When viewed from the perspective of governments and big agribusiness, the current dietary status quo makes perfect sense: this is how to make a lot of money on a gargantuan scale by shifting the worldwide diet towards high-yield, commoditized grain products, while ensuring that the government will offer advice and policies favourable to this system.

So what’s wrong with a situation that allows more people to eat, reduces starvation and happens to allow some enterprising companies to profit, all while allowing congressmen to have an occasional nice dinner or all-expenses-paid weekend in Barbados? Well, what’s wrong is that it ruins your health.

Let’s shift our discussion towards that line of thinking. In Chapter 4, we’ll talk about what happens to humans who have been encouraged to obtain 50 per cent or more of their calories from the seeds of grasses.