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From Visible Food

Welcome to VisibleFood!

1 About Visible Food
2 Site Categories
3 Truthful, but not Objective
4 A Word about Information
5 Who We Are
6 Getting started

[edit] About Visible Food

The VisibleFood project is an open content wiki dedicated to exposing the hidden costs of the globalized system that produces, processes and distributes our food. These costs are not accounted for in corporate balance sheets or in reports on national economies, but are deferred--either to the future or to people somewhere further down on the food chain . The damages are everywhere: in the water we drink, the air we breathe, the soil that has become depleted and poisoned, in the economies of less powerful and affluent countries, in our health and even more by children's health, and in the conditions of workers paid less than a living wage to make our food appear in supermarkets and restaurants as if by magic.

Think of it as a "Whole Truth in Labeling Act" initiated and performed by citizens in the absence of government and corporate responsibility.

This wiki is made with mediawiki, the same software that creates wikipedia so it is easy to use. However within that basic architecture we have a few organizing conventions specific to the aims of this project.

[edit] Site Categories

Every page in this wiki should indicate at its end at least one category through which it can be indexed. The site is only just forming, so the list of categories is glaringly incomplete. That said, please review the logic of the existing categories before you create a new one.

[edit] Truthful, but not Objective

"Truth" comes in many forms; "Objectivity" is but one of them, communicated through a set of conventions meant to minimize human bias.

There is a lot of information out there trying to be objective and that is great. We want to do something different: we want to create a site of knowledge with an unhidden agenda: making very clear what is wrong with out current food system and what might constitute a better food system. Better for whom? For every living being that has nothing to gain from profiting off selling unnaturally cheap, toxic food that compromises the health and dignity of humans and our many living counterparts in the ecosphere that keeps us all alive.

As we begin this project, we are open to entries that reflect opinion, personality, anecdotes. humor and anger. As the wiki evolves we will continue to evaluate this experiment and may introduce new guidelines to make it a widely relevant resource. Much of the information we absorb daily is actually very biased, sometimes in very subtle ways, often when it presents itself as objective. An alternative idea is to compensate for hidden and persuasive bias by creating sources that are transparent, open to revision and contestation, created by a wide variety of people.

As always we welcome comments! admin (at) visiblefood.org

[edit] A Word about Information

"We have only scratched the surface. These data are exploratory, but suggest the type of information needed to understand the concentration of the global food system."

Dr. William Heffernan, Rural Sociology, Professor Emeritus, University of Missouri

Some of the information we want is not easy to get. The reasons why are part of the problem.

Corporations can keep a lot of information secret on the grounds that disclosing it would harm their competitiveness in the marketplace. Because food is somewhat regulated in the interest of public health there are things that they do have to disclose, like certain ingredient and nutritional information. But they do not have to disclose their data on market share, where they source their products or many details of processing methods which are considered [[trade secrets]]. Cargill, one of the world's top five producers and traders of grain, meat, vegetable oils, salt, animal feed and more, is a privately held company. They are under obligation to disclose almost nothing.

The modus operandi in global product sourcing is the search for the cheapest goods and labor, and escape from environmental and fair labor regulations. Corporations have streamlined so that they can move quickly to take advantage of the most desperate economies. While some things may remain fairly constant, e.g., which geographical regions are best suited to produce a given commodity like coffee, if labor costs or crop quality shifts, a corporation is usually prepared to move their export operation overnight.

The biggest companies with the most influence have operations all over the world. They are accountable to no one government or public. Relationships between corporations are dynamic and evolving; the trend in the industry is consolidation through mergers, acquisitions and spin-offs of large and small companies, as well as a complex web of joint ventures, side agreements, deals and alliances brokered between different suppliers and producers. The upshot is a few vertically integrated systems controlling access to seeds and germlines, agricultural inputs, commodity buying, shipping and selling, and food processing. As rural sociologist William Heffernan explains, "Within this emerging system, there will be no markets and thus no 'price discovery' from the gene, fertilizer, processing and chemical production to the supermarket shelf. The only time the public will ever know the 'price' of animal protein is when it arrives in the meat case." Same goes for grain, or vegetables, or oils.

Consequently, the chains of accountability are dizzying and often impossible to try to track. People who spend all their time studying this industry will tell you that consistent information is difficult and sometimes impossible to get. Something is wrong with that much secrecy around our food.

Other aspects of food information pose different problems. Some have to do with how scientific research is managed. For instance, if you are looking for independent tests on the effects on humans from eating transgenic food, you aren't going to find any. The one well-designed long-term study done on rats, by Dr. Arnaud Pustai formerly of the Rowett Institute in Scotland cost him his job a few days after he told the press that he had found problems in the organs of the rats. His data was seized. Since then scientists can't get permission from the companies who own the patents on these genetically modified products to do experiments with them. Since research at universities is increasingly dependent on partnerships with industry, it is not likely to happen there. The government has approved and even promoted the rapid integration of these products into the food system so they have little incentive to find out they may have acted too hastily. When the FDA approves new [[genetically modified]] agricultural products, their approval is carefully worded to say that they have approved its safety based on the petitioning company's research. They do not do research themselves.

There are other kinds of problems with pesticide and herbicide toxicity information. History reveals that often we don't really know what to test for until the substance is widely distributed in the environment. This is the case for endocrine disruptors, chemicals that mimic hormones in living organisms including humans. When they get in the organism's system they send messages to the body that create chaos. We only discovered this ability of some chemicals a decade ago when frogs began turning up with deformed and hermaphroditic arrangements of sex organs. Many scientists believe this is a factor in the increasingly early onset of puberty in humans and the dramatic rise of cancers in our reproductive organs. These chemicals had already been registered and commercially released. We don't have an adequate test for the problem. In addition, toxicity tests are executed for a given chemical in isolation, not in combination with other toxic substances. We know next to nothing about the interactions of accumulating chemicals. Toxins are approved with regulations as to their use, but can we trust that application is adequately supervised? Especially in offshore production performed by untrained, temporary workers paid some of the lowest wages in the global economy?

At the same time more and more people and groups are shining light into this rat's nest. And more people are creating and supporting a different agriculture, a better way to treat workers and other living things, and a better way to eat.

[edit] Who We Are

Soylent Green is people!

VisibleFood is people too. Just a few people who started asking questions about food and couldn't stop. We spent so much time researching the food system we wanted to start sharing this information and ways to understand it. We began to realize that the food system is connected to just about any other issue you can think of. And we were so disturbed by what we were finding out and by how hard it is to get this information that we began to see that we need all the help we can get, not just to reveal the system but to create a new one.