20.0: Agriculture—Realities of Leaf and Soil

The interrelationship of plants and animals (including humans) is fascinating. We often take for granted that plants are just “there,” not only filling the yard, shading neighborhood streets, and peeking through cracks in the sidewalk, but providing us with fruit, vegetables, and grain. When we take a closer look, however, we find there’s an awesome continuous flow of essential chemical elements between plant and animal worlds, and words like “worldwide ecology” take on a new meaning.

With an increasing respect for our dependence on plant life, it’s natural to feel added concern, particularly as science provides us with more and more ways of utilizing biotechnology. There’s a perception that we’ve become too eager to mess with things better left alone in their “natural” state—that economic gain drives the machine in ways that can be shortsighted and ultimately harmful. Thus the understandable attraction of movements supporting “natural” and “organic” methods.

Like so many areas of public concern and advocacy, the facts behind the issues are often poorly understood. A thorough understanding will not of course guarantee universal agreement, but arguments tend to become more specific and logical. Science and technology can be viewed as useful tools for the betterment of our health and environment.

As consumers have become more interested in nutrition, they have also become more suspicious of the quality of the food supply. They are encouraged in their fears by charges that our crops are grown on depleted soil, making them nutritionally inferior, and that we are being poisoned by pesticides and food additives.

Is our food supply adequate and safe? This is a concern of such importance that government agencies such as the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture (USDA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) devote considerable amounts of time and money to do the best they can to see that our food supply is, in fact, adequate and safe.

But what our government agencies see as the biggest concerns are quite different from the perceptions of the general public. The public perception is that farm pesticides and food additives top the list of food hazards. In contrast, these experts put these concerns at the bottom, with disease-causing microbes at the top, and environmental contaminants and naturally-occurring food toxins in between (see Fig. 20-1).

So let’s examine the realities of our food supply—from farm to table—starting with a look at some agricultural concerns: basic plant nutrition; uses of fertilizer, pesticides, and biotechnology; natural toxins in food; and how agriculture today relates to world food production and world health.

The next chapter examines various aspects of food processing, in particular those substances that intentionally or unintentionally get into our food as it is commercially processed, and further processed as we store and prepare the food. These substances include food additives and toxins produced by microorganisms.

The last chapter concerns food labeling, and what the label tells us of the food. We should read these labels in selecting our food. For all our concerns about food adequacy and safety, whether or not our food is healthful depends mostly on what—and how much—we choose to eat.