A Chicken Little in our future?

Much of our food supply is instant, artificial, individualistic, puffed up, disposable, dazzlingly packaged, denatured, and, in several senses, tasteless," says Joan Gussow, professor of nutrition and education at Columbia University's Teachers College in New York. What's more, our food supply is grown, processed, and transported in a way that is not -sustainable over the long term, argues Gussow in her new book, Chicken Little, Tomato Sauce and Agriculture.

"Nature isn't kidding around any more," she warns. "And we shouldn't either."

Q. Doesn't our food supply offer more choices than before?

A: Yes. The number of food items in the supermarket has increased from 800 around 1930 to between 15,000 and 40,000, depending on whom you ask. introducing roughly 1,000 new products a month-many of them in individual-portion packages-is intolerably wasteful.

Q: Isn't demand for healthier foods driving the market?

A: What could be healthier than a fresh potato steamed in its jacket? The Mediterranean diet we are being urged to eat was developed without any processing beyond the simplest sort.

Processing's usual effect is to destroy useful nutrients and add negative ones like sugar, fat, and salt. Is it really better to pay more for a "light" processed food with less of the negatives?

Eating healthfully is neither complicated, nor time-consuming, nor punishing. And we don't need any more new products to do it.

Q: So why are we encouraged to buy them?

A: If we all began to eat as the experts recommend-emphasizing fresh, unprocessed fruits and vegetables, whole grains and legumes in various forms, and using dairy and meat products as condiments-the food industry would go through an economic contraction.

So, for example, we're led to believe that Americans' exposure to other cuisines explains the explosion of add-apart dinners that turn hamburger into French, Chinese, Mexican, or some other exotic mush.

Q: Like Hamburger Helper?

A: Yes. Or the kind of chow mein we eat, which had never been seen in China before it graced our shores. These pastiches of the flavorings whose subtle use other cultures have developed over the centuries have nothing to do with the real cuisine.

The best italian food is often laughably simple: a ripe tomato and fresh mozzarella on a slice of crusty bread, or pasta dressed with an uncooked tomato, basil, and garlic sauce.

Foods like Hamburger Helper are just one more line extension, exploiting the willingness of Americans to believe that a dash of seasoning, a glop of starch and salt, and a package of dehydrated onion and pepper flakes make a sophisticated dish.

Q: Are we getting less sophisticated?

A:Yes, although clever marketing has convinced naive consumers to think otherwise. Real sophistication has been largely lost, as has real variety.

We used to grow more than 200 different apples in New York State, and ordinary people could distinguish the taste of many of them. When was the last time you asked for a specific potato-a Bintje, perhaps, or a yellow Finn-because that particular variety was especially suited to a dish you were preparing?

Q: Don't working women want convenience foods?

A: That's the "no time to cook" myth. But data show that working women now put in exactly the same number of work-related hours-about 40-as they did in 1966.

Those women now spend less time sleeping, eating, and doing housework-including food preparation.

They have almost eight hours more free time a week than in 1966.

But the only thing that's markedly increased since then is TV watching. The hours fully employed women devote to TV in a week has gone from nearly 7 to 13 1/2. So now we know why women don't have time to cook.

Of course, why men don't have time to cook is an even greater mystery. They have over two hours a week more free time than employed women.

Q: Why don't people want to cook?

A: We've been brainwashed into the notion that letting someone else cook dinner is better. Of course it's easier, but you don't feel better because you haven't really done anything creative.

It's unlikely we'll ever develop a food system that is sustainable until we free ourselves of the illusions that bind us to our present helplessness.

Q: What is sustainable agriculture?

A: Agriculture practiced in such a manner that it leaves the soil and the other resources in at least as good shape-and possibly better-than when you began planting, so it can continue for future generations.

Q: Why isn't our system sustainable?

A: Because we're degrading our resource base. For example, if you let topsoil erode, you can throw a lot of fertilizer in for a while and continue to make a crop. But eventually, you've lost so much topsoil that your soil isn't very productive anymore.

We have an addictive agriculture-it's addicted to high-nitrogen fertilizers, to insecticides, to herbicides. We're farming using poisons and those poisons are often cumulative.

And our agriculture is very energy intensive, from the nitrogen fertilizers which are made out of gas to the insecticides and herbicides which are made out of petroleum to our use of gasoline to run irrigation pumps and transport food.

Q: Which resources are in danger?

A: Water is limited, topsoil is limited, good crop land is limited. And we've been using them as if there were no limits. We've covered some of the best crop land with shopping malls and parking lots.

In California, where we've used very high-tech agriculture and all this irrigation, the water's running out. They're growing crops like rice-which needs to be under water-in a desert.

And we're losing people who know how to farm, which is one of most critical resources of all.

Q: Who's replacing these farmers?

A: We're becoming increasingly dependent on the lands, soils, and people of the Third World to produce our food because their land and labor is cheaper. We are major importers of food.

Q: What's wrong with that?

A: It jeopardizes our food security-our ability to provide for ourselves. We've become increasingly dependent on energy from the Middle East and increasingly aware of what it costs to guarantee that energy supply. We're going to become as dependent in food as we are in energy.

The Gulf War is the beginning of the battle over resources, and food is a resource. People are going hungry because we're eating the food that's grown on their land. What's going to happen to us when the Mexicans decide they want to grow their own food?

I don't know whether people want to be in that position or not. I don't. feel very good that my husband and I grow much of our own food.

Q: Should we all do that?

A: I don't expect everyone to grow their own food. But I want people to at least look at where their food comes from. Don't just assume that it comes from the supermarket.

Q: Who controls our food system?

A: Much of what happens to food between farmers and consumers is in the hands of multinational companies.

We've created a machine which looks around the world and says: Where can I find land and labor the cheapest? You have Thailand, which was a non-chicken producer, brought in six years to being the sixth largest exporter of chickens in the world.

Agriculture has become so much like a factory that you can simply move it to Thailand. What does it do to the Thai farmers who were displaced from the land? Are they better off plucking chickens in the factory?

In the Philippines they took over land that was used for subsistence crops and planted bananas. Then there was an oversupply of bananas so they chopped them down and planted oil seed palms. And the farmers don't have any food.

Q: Don't poor countries need our business?

A: Only because they're in debt to us. We should cancel the debt and urge those countries to become self-reliant before they start exporting food.

If you turn the world into a global market, then companies shop around for a place where they can evade paying decent wages, where they can escape restrictions on pesticides and other environmental constraints. The California food-packing plants closed down and moved to Mexico to cut costs, but the conditions in the Mexican plants are appalling.

Q: Explain the title of your new book, "Chicken Little, Tomato Sauce and Agriculture. "

A: In Frederik Pohl's 1952 science fiction classic The Space Merchants, one of the products that has kept civilization "a step ahead of the failure of natural resources" is "Chicken Little."

It's a legless, wingless, headless, featherless technological triumph, a giant mass of flesh "fed by dozens of pipes" from which daily slices are cut to feed a populace otherwise reduced to soyburgers.

My book raises the very real possibility that there is a Chicken Little in our future-that someday, all our tomato sauce will be "grown" in a vat in Rahway, New Jersey. I intend to work for a different sort of food system.

Q: What's driving us towards Chicken Little?

A: Profit, obviously The less these multinational companies have to depend on variability in prices caused by poor weather in Ghana-or the less they have to depend on Ghana-the more they can optimize their profits. They're now talking about using biotechnology to make extracts like coffee and chocolate so we don't have to depend on the Third World.

But there's another motive. We've all lived so much within unnatural systems that we believe nature has to be controlled. And some have suggested that we struggle to control nature because we are unable to control ourselves. Only by controlling everything else will we get enough to meet our insatiable needs.

Q: What kinds of needs?

A: In nutrition it is best characterized by our desire for fat and sugar substitutes, and now phytochemicals.

Why do we think a fake fat will solve anything? if I have a fake fat I can eat a whole pint of Simple Pleasures, whereas before I would have eaten only a half pint of ice cream?

We hope that the food industry will find a product that requires no self-restraint, takes no time to prepare, protects us from disease, is cheap, and is absolutely delicious in terms of what we presently like.

We'll then be able to watch seven hours of Tv a day because we will have saved so much time.

Q: What's wrong with health-conscious eaters having fat-free cake?

A: If you ate mostly fruits, vegetables, and grains, would it be so terrible to eat a piece of cake for dessert? Why would I want to eat a highly sweetened, synthetic, fat-free cake instead of a small piece of really delicious cake?

I don't object to yogurt, milk, and other things that are low-fat. But many of the low-fat cheeses don't have any cheese taste. I'd rather have a little real parmesan than a parmesan substitute.

It's like margarine. My husband and I go through a quarter pound of butter in a month. Why not eat butter when we use so little? These substitute foods are substitutes for self-control.

Q: What diet do you recommend?

A: If we talk only about health, we're lost. If a company sold a diet soda fortified with protein, vitamins, and minerals, we would be hard pressed to say that it wasn't a good food. I used to argue that fortification is bad because you only add certain nutrients. I said Tang isn't as good as orange juice because the juice has folic acid. So they'll put folic acid in Tang. If you think of food as a formula, they can always make the formula better than the food. I'm not willing to give up whole food. And I don't see anything keeping whole food from disappearing unless we fight this.

Q: What do you eat?

A: My diet is based on what we grow. I don't count anything, even calories, though sometimes I probably should. I try hard to keep my fat level down just by not eating greasy foods.

We eat pasta. We eat meals that consist of nothing but vegetables. I drink skim milk and I eat good bread from a local bakery. And that's about it. I love to cook, love to eat.

Q: No meat, poultry, or fish?

A: We don't eat much flesh. It's just fallen out of our diets. I make lentil burgers which I'm trying to convert my husband to. He often has a Genoa salami around, which we use as a condiment. We'll have fish maybe once a week-it's very expensive.

We eat a lot of vegetarian Indian food. In summer we'll have potato salad math eggplant bhurta with some kind of vegetable curry. In winter we have more root vegetables.

Q: Is protecting our health your goal?

A: No, but that will happen incidentally. We are awfully navel-watching. I'm so bloody sick of everybody worrying about the micrometer of fat they're carrying on their butt-I don't really care about it. The idea isn't to live forever but to live for some purpose.

The kinds of foods that would be produced by a sustainable food supply would be healthy. They would be whole, fresh foods, not overprocessed, with many fewer chemicals added either on the farm or in processing.

Q: But too many unprcessed animal foods are also unhealthy.

A:I don't eat that many animal products because it's very wasteful. Only a fraction of the crops grown in the U.S. for domestic use is eaten by people. The vast bulk is fed to cattle, hogs, and chickens. So each calorie of animal based food requires about 5 to 10 calories of crops to produce.

Q: What do you recommend to consumers?

A: Eat foods that are as fresh and minimally processed as possible. That doesn't eliminate freezing or canning.

Try to eat further down on the food chain. That is, limit animal products to low-fat ones and lesser amounts. And pay attention to where your food comes from. Use farmers markets and pressure your supermarket to buy from local producers. El