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CHICAGO — Junk food elicits addictive behavior in rats similar to the behaviors of rats addicted to heroin, a new study finds. Pleasure centers in the brains of rats addicted to high-fat, high-calorie diets became less responsive as the binging wore on, making the rats consume more and more food. The results, presented October 20 at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting, may help explain the changes in the brain that lead people to overeat.
“This is the most complete evidence to date that suggests obesity and drug addiction have common neurobiological underpinnings,” says study coauthor Paul Johnson of the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Fla.
To see how junk food affects the brain’s natural reward system — the network of nerve cells that release feel-good chemicals — Johnson started at the grocery store. He loaded up on typical Western fare, including Ho Hos, sausage, pound cake, bacon and cheesecake. Johnson fed rats either a standard diet of high-nutrient, low-calorie chow, or unlimited amounts of the palatable junk food. Rats that ate the junk food soon developed compulsive eating habits and became obese. “They’re taking in twice the amount of calories as the control rats,” says Johnson’s coauthor Paul Kenny, also of Scripps.
Johnson and Kenny wanted to know if this overeating affected the pleasure centers of the rats’ brains, the regions responsible for drug addiction. The researchers used electrical stimulations to activate these reward centers and induce pleasure. Rats could control the amount of feel-good stimulation by running on a wheel — the more they ran, the more stimulation they got. The rats fed junk food ran more, indicating that they needed more brain stimulation to feel good.
After just five days on the junk food diet, rats showed “profound reductions” in the sensitivity of their brains’ pleasure centers, suggesting that the animals quickly became habituated to the food. As a result, the rats ate more food to get the same amount of pleasure. Just as heroin addicts require more and more of the drug to feel good, rats needed more and more of the junk food. “They lose control,” Kenny says. “This is the hallmark of addiction.”
To see how strong the drive to eat junk food was, the researchers exposed the rats to a foot shock when they ate the high-fat food. Rats that had not been constantly exposed to the junk food quickly stopped eating. But the foot shock didn’t faze rats accustomed to the junk food — they continued to eat, even though they knew the shock was coming.
“What we have are these core features of addiction, and these animals are hitting each one of these features,” Kenny says.
These reward pathway deficits persisted for weeks after the rats stopped eating the junk food, the researchers found. “It’s almost as if you break these things, it’s very, very hard to go back to the way things were before,” Kenny says. When the junk food was taken away and the rats had access only to nutritious chow (what Kenny calls the “salad option”), the obese rats refused to eat. “They starve themselves for two weeks afterward,” Kenny says. “Their dietary preferences are dramatically shifted.”
Scientists are interested in determining the long-term effect of altering the reward system. “We might not see it when we look at the animal,” says obesity expert Ralph DiLeone of Yale University School of Medicine. “They might be a normal weight, but how they respond to food in the future may be permanently altered.”
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/48605/title/Junk_food_turns_rats_into_addicts
Dans un rapport[2] rendu public le 14 octobre 2009, la FAO estimait à 1,02 milliard le nombre de personnes sous-alimentées dans le monde, avec la répartition géographique ci-contre.
La malnutrition affecte un enfant sur trois dans les pays en développement. Elle réduit la résistance des enfants aux maladies, provoque des handicaps mentaux et physiques et accroît leur mortalité[3].
En novembre 1996, le sommet mondial pour l’alimentation tenu à Rome sous l’égide de la FAO[4] proclamait la volonté des chefs d’Etat et de gouvernement rassemblés à cette occasion de réduire de moitié le nombre de personnes sous-alimentées à l’horizon 2015.
Aujourd’hui, on ne peut qu’être pessimiste sur les chances de voir cet objectif atteint puisque, loin de régresser, la sous-alimentation frappe des populations de plus en plus nombreuses.
En 1995-97, 825 millions de personnes souffraient de la faim. En 2000-2002, elles étaient 857 millions[5], et aujourd’hui plus d’un milliard.
Cette situation relève de causes multiples. L’emprise de l’élevage sur des ressources naturelles limitées constitue sans nul doute l’une d’entre elles.
33% des terres cultivables de la planète sont utilisées à produire l’alimentation des animaux d’élevage ; 26% de la surface des terres émergées non couvertes par les glaces est employée pour le pâturage[6].
Au total, ce sont 70% des terres à usage agricole qui, directement ou indirectement, sont consacrées à l’élevage[7].
35,5% du volume des céréales produites dans le monde sert à nourrir les animaux d’élevage[8].
La production mondiale de soja, en expansion très rapide[9], est principalement destinée à l’alimentation animale[10]. Tant les céréales que le soja sont des denrées hautement nutritives, directement consommables par les humains. Les affecter à la l’alimentation animale constitue un détour de production particulièrement inefficace.
Le tableau ci-dessous[11], établi par WWF, compare les surfaces nécessaires pour produire un kilo de différents types d’aliments :
Un rapport de la FAO[12] de 1992 indiquait que les animaux sont de piètres convertisseurs d’énergie en alimentation humaine : si on les nourrit avec des céréales, ils ingèrent en moyenne 7 kcal pour en restituer une sous forme de viande (3 kcal pour les poulets, 16 kcal pour les bovins)
Le président du GIEC, Rajendra Pachaury, illustre d’une autre façon cette inefficacité : il faut 7 à 10 kg de végétaux pour faire 1 kg de viande boeuf, 4 à 5,5 kg pour 1 kg de viande de porc[13].
Consommer des produits animaux tue des animaux, et impose à la plupart d’entre eux une vie misérable, tant les conditions d’élevage sont effroyables.
Une forte consommation de produits animaux tue aussi des humains, ou les maintient dans l’extrême misère. René Dumont qualifiait déjà en son temps l’occidental, avec sa surconsommation de viande, de « cannibale indirect ». La croissance accélérée des productions animales dans le monde au cours des dernières décennies a dramatiquement accentué ce « cannibalisme ». S’il n’est pas exclusivement le fait des occidentaux, il est assurément une des formes que prend l’accaparement des ressources par les riches au détriment des pauvres.
Lire aussi:Manger moins de viande pour sauver la planète par Fabrice Nicolino, auteur de Bidoche
WASHINGTON — The number of Americans who lived in households that lacked consistent access to adequate food soared last year, to 49 million, the highest since the government began tracking what it calls “food insecurity” 14 years ago, the Department of Agriculture reported Monday.
The increase, of 13 million Americans, was much larger than even the most pessimistic observers of hunger trends had expected and cast an alarming light on the daily hardships caused by the recession’s punishing effect on jobs and wages.
About a third of these struggling households had what the researchers called “very low food security,” meaning lack of money forced members to skip meals, cut portions or otherwise forgo food at some point in the year.
The other two-thirds typically had enough to eat, but only by eating cheaper or less varied foods, relying on government aid like food stamps, or visiting food pantries and soup kitchens.
“These numbers are a wake-up call for the country,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.
One figure that drew officials’ attention was the number of households, 506,000, in which children faced “very low food security”: up from 323,000 the previous year. President Obama, who has pledged to end childhood hunger by 2015, released a statement while traveling in Asia that called the finding “particularly troubling.”
The ungainly phrase “food insecurity” stems from years of political and academic wrangling over how to measure adequate access to food. In the 1980s, when officials of the Reagan administration denied there was hunger in the United States, the Food Research and Action Center, a Washington advocacy group, began a survey that concluded otherwise. Over time, Congress had the Agriculture Department oversee a similar survey, which the Census Bureau administers.
Though researchers at the Agriculture Department do not use the word “hunger,” Mr. Obama did. “Hunger rose significantly last year,” he said.
Analysts said the main reason for the growth was the rise in the unemployment rate, to 7.2 percent at the end of 2008 from 4.9 percent a year earlier. And since it now stands at 10.2 percent, the survey might in fact understate the number of Americans struggling to get adequate food.
Rising food prices, too, might have played a role.
The food stamp rolls have expanded to record levels, with 36 million Americans now collecting aid, an increase of nearly 40 percent from two years ago. And the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed last winter, raised the average monthly food stamp benefit per person by about 17 percent, to $133. Many states have made it easier for those eligible to apply, but rising applications and staffing cuts have also brought long delays.
Problems gaining access to food were highest in households with children headed by single mothers. About 37 percent of them reported some form of food insecurity compared with 14 percent of married households with children. About 29 percent of Hispanic households reported food insecurity, compared with 27 percent of black households and 12 percent of white households. Serious problems were most prevalent in the South, followed equally by the West and Midwest.
Some conservatives have attacked the survey’s methodology, saying it is hard to define what it measures. The 18-item questionnaire asks about skipped meals and hunger pangs, but also whether people had worries about getting food. It ranks the severity of their condition by the number of answers that indicate a problem.
“Very few of these people are hungry,” said Robert Rector, an analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “When they lose jobs, they constrain the kind of food they buy. That is regrettable, but it’s a far cry from a hunger crisis.”
The report measures the number of households that experienced problems at any point in the year. Only a “small fraction” were facing the problem at a given moment. Among those with “very low food security,” for instance, most experienced the condition for several days in each of seven or eight months.
James Weill, the director of the food center that pioneered the report, called it a careful look at an underappreciated condition.
“Many people are outright hungry, skipping meals,” he said. “Others say they have enough to eat but only because they’re going to food pantries or using food stamps. We describe it as ‘households struggling with hunger.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/us/17hunger.html?_r=1&ref=us&pagewanted=print
Every chef is said to have a secret junk food craving. For Thomas Keller, chef-owner of Per Se and The French Laundry, two of the most acclaimed restaurants in the country, it's Krispy Kreme Donuts and In-N-Out cheeseburgers. For David Bouley, New York's reigning chef in the '90s, it's "high-quality potato chips."
"Father of American cuisine" James Beard "loved McDonald's fries," while Paul Bocuse, an originator of nouvelle cuisine, once declared McDonald's "are the best French fries I have ever eaten." Masaharu Morimoto is partial to "Philly cheese steaks," and Jean-Georges Vongerichten confesses a weakness for Wendy's spicy chicken sandwich. Other accomplished but less-famous chefs admit to craving everything from Peanut M&Ms, Pringles and Combos to Kettle Chips and Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Having attended culinary school and cooked professionally, I can wax rhapsodic about epicurean delights such as squab, Beluga caviar, black truffles, porcini mushrooms, Iberico Ham, langoustines, and acres of exceptional vegetables and fruits. But I also have an unabashed junk food craving: Nacho Cheese Doritos. Sure, there are plenty of other junk foods I enjoy, whether it's Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream or Entenmann's baked goods, but Doritos are the one thing I desire and seek out regularly. (Not that I ever have to look that hard; I've encountered them everywhere from rural villages in Guatemala to tiny towns in the Canadian Arctic.)
For years I wondered why I craved Doritos. I knew the Nacho Cheese powder, which coats your fingers in day-glo orange deliciousness, was one component, as were the fatty, salty chips that crackle and melt into a pleasing mass as you crunch them. I figured there was a dollop of nostalgia in the mix, but an ingredient was still missing in my understanding. Then I read a spate of articles about "umami," designated the fifth taste, along with sweet, sour, salty, and bitter, means "deliciousness" in Japanese and is described as "a meaty, savory, satisfying taste."
I knew some foods -- parmesan cheese, seaweed, shellfish, tomatoes, mushrooms and meats -- were high in umami-rich compounds such as glutamate, inosinate and guanylate. (Most people know umami from the much-maligned MSG, or mono sodium glutamate.) And I knew combining various sources of umami -- such as the bonito-flake and kombu-seaweed broth known as dashi, the foundational stock of Japanese cuisine -- magnified the effect and delivered a uniquely satisfying wallop of flavor.
What I didn't know was that "Nacho-cheese-flavor Doritos, which contain five separate forms of glutamate, may be even richer in umami than the finest kombu dashi (kelp stock) in Japan," according to a New York Times article from last year.
Mystery solved. Now I knew that whenever the Doritos bug bit me, I was jonesing for umami. I had to admit it: I am a junk food junkie and Frito-Lay is my pusher-man.
I am hardly alone. Frito-Lay is the snack-food peddler to the world, with over $43 billion in revenue in 2008. The 43-year-old cheesy chip is a "category killer," dominating the tortilla chip market with a 32 percent share in 2006, and number two in the entire U.S. "sweet and savory snacks category," just behind Lay's potato chips.
$1.7 billion in annual sales in the U.S, is big business. Behind the enigma of Doritos’ dominance, and the lure of junk food to even the most refined palettes in the world, are the wonders of food science. That science, in the service of industrial capitalism, has hooked on us a food system that is destroying our health with obesity-related diseases. And that food system is based on a system of factory farming at one end, which churns out cheap, taxpayer-subsidized commodities like corn, vegetable oil and sweeteners, and the giant food processors at the other, like Frito-Lay, that take these commodities and concoct them into endless forms of addictive junk foods.
Steven Witherly begins his book, Why Humans Like Junk Food, by noting in studying the "psychobiology" of Doritos he consumed the "food intake and chemical senses literature -- over five hundred research reports and four thousand abstracts -- in order to discern the popularity of Doritos." Witherly coined the term "Doritos Effect" to explain its popularity and in his book outlines 14 separate ways in which Doritos appeals to us.
There’s the "taste-active components," sugar, salt and umami; ingredients like buttermilk solids, lactic acid, and citric acid that stimulate saliva, creating a "mouth-watering" sensation; the "high dynamic contrast" of powder-coated thin, hard chips that melt in the mouth; a complex flavor aroma; a high level of fat that activates "fat recognition receptors in the mouth … increases levels of gut hormones linked to reduction in anxiety … activates brains systems for reward, and enhances ingestion for more fat"; toasted, fried corn that triggers our evolutionary predilection for cooked foods; starches that break down quickly, boosting blood levels of insulin and glucose; and so on.
Witherly explains that some umami sources like MSG don’t have much taste by themselves, but when you add salt,"the hedonic flavors just explode!" And Doritos has plenty of both. The tiny 2-oz. bag of Doritos I'm holding, which in the past would be a warm-up to a Nacho Cheesier dinner, lists MSG near the top, before "buttermilk solids," along with nearly one-sixth of my recommended daily intake of sodium.
One aspect of Doritos that whet my curiosity was, how much does Frito-Lay spend on goods like corn, oil and cheese? Not surprisingly, this data was nowhere to be found in the annual report of Pepsico, Frito-Lay’s parent company. But I gleaned a clue from a 1991 New York Times article. In it, a Wall Street analyst stated that Frito-Lay’s profit margin, around 19 percent in those days (which is close to its margin of late), approached that of Kellogg's. The analyst, an expert on the food industry, said: "Kellogg buys corn for 4 cents a pound and sells it for $2 a box." That's a markup of nearly 5,000 percent over the base ingredient.
I’ll save you the math, but Frito-Lay may do even better than Kellogg's. If it uses two ounces of cornmeal in my 99 cents bag of Doritos, it apparently costs the snack-food giant less than one measly penny. And here’s a critical point about the food industry. The more they can process basic food commodities, the more profits they can gobble up at the expense of farmers. In The End of Food, Paul Roberts writes that in the 1950s, farmers received about half the retail price for the finished food product. By 2000, "this farm share had fallen below 20 percent."
This is the result of the global food system constructed by the U.S. and other Western powers under the World Trade Organization. Countries that once strived for food security by supporting their domestic farmers are now forced -- in the name of free trade -- to open their agricultural sectors to competition from heavily subsidized Western agribusinesses. By the mid-1990s, according to rural sociologist Philip McMichael, 80 percent of farm subsidies in Western countries went to "the largest 20 percent of (corporate) farms, rendering small farmers increasingly vulnerable to the vicissitudes of a deregulated (and increasingly privately managed) global market for agricultural products."
The WTO-enforced system and government subsidies enables food giants -- such as Pepsico, Kraft, Mars, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Burger King and Wal-Mart -- to source their ingredients globally, giving them the power to force down prices, which drives more and more farmers off the land in the global North and South alike. Then the food companies turn around and manufacture high-profit products that seem like an unbelievable bargain to us. In fact, they make this a selling point, and not just with "Dollar Menus."
Last year, in the wake of the economic meltdown, KFC launched the "10 Dollar Challenge," inviting families to try to recreate a meal of seven pieces of fried chicken, four biscuits and a side for less than its asking price of 10 bucks. Of course this is a virtually impossible feat, apart from dumpster diving. But KFC isn’t hawking alfalfa sprouts and a plate of mashed yeast at that price. Witherly, in Why Humans Like Junk Food, writes that "high energy density food is associated with high food pleasure." The corporate food's revenue model is based on designing products oozing with fat, salt, sugar, umami and chemical flavors to turn us into addicts.
While food companies can trot willing doctors, dieticians and nutritionists who claim that eating their brand of poison in moderation can be part of a balanced diet, the companies are like drug dealers who prey on junkies. As Morgan Spurlock explained about McDonald's in Supersize Me, the targets are "heavy users," who visit the Golden Arches at least once a week and "super heavy users,” who visit ten times a month or more. In fact, according to one study, super heavy users "make up approximately 75 percent of McDonald's sales."
Fast-food Addiction
Perhaps no company better exemplifies the intersection of factory farming, fast food and food addiction than McDonald's. It pioneered many of the practices of standardized, industrial food production that made it into a global behemoth. In 1966 McDonald's switched from about 175 different suppliers for fresh potatoes to J.R. Simplot Company’s frozen French fry. A few years later, McDonald's switched from a similar number of beef suppliers to just five. Within a decade, notes Eric Schlosser, McDonald's had gone from 725 outlets nationwide to more than 3,000.
Tyson did the same with chicken, which was seen as a healthy alternative to red meat. It teamed up with McDonald's to launch the Chicken McNugget nationwide in 1983. Within one month McDonald's became the number two chicken buyer in the country, behind KFC. The McNugget also transformed chicken processing. Today, Tyson makes most of its money from processed chicken, selling its products to 90 of the 100 largest restaurant chains. As for the health benefits, Chicken McNuggets have twice as much fat per ounce as a hamburger.
The entire food industry, perhaps best described as "eatertainment," has refined the science of taking the cheap commodities pumped out by agribusiness and processing them into foodstuffs that are downright addictive. But food is far more than mere fuel. It is marketed as a salve for our emotional and psychological ills, as a social activity, a cultural outlet and entertainment.
Faced with little time to cook, bland industrial meat and drawn to exciting and addictive processed foods, most Americans gorge on convenience food. In 1900, the typical American woman spent six hours a day in food prep and cleanup. By last year, Americans on average took 31 minutes a day. For many, "cooking time" consists of opening up takeout containers, dumping the contents on a plate and throwing away the trash.
To get us in the door (or to pick up their product at the supermarket), food companies stoke our gustatory senses. The food has to be visually appealing, have the right feel, texture and smell. And most of all, it has to taste good. To that end, writes David Kessler in The End of Overeating, the food industry has honed in on the "three points of the compass" -- fat, salt and sugar.
One anonymous food-industry executive told Kessler, "Higher sugar, fat and salt make you want to eat more." The executive admitted food is designed to be "highly hedonic," and that the food industry is "the manipulator of the consumers' minds and desires."
This food is even designed to be pre-digested. Factory-farmed meats are ground up, injected with salt, water, a multitude of flavorings and chemicals, reconstituted and often processed with extra fat (like the McNugget). Speaking to an expert in "sensory stimulation and food," Kessler explains how food is engineered to deliver pleasing flavors, aromatic and textural sensations and dissolve easily in the mouth. He writes: "in the past Americans typically chewed a mouthful of food 25 times before it was ready to be swallowed; now the average American chews only ten times." Even the bolus -- the wad of chewed food -- is designed to be smooth and even. It's "adult baby food."
Referencing studies with either humans or lab animals, Kessler shows how varying concentrations and combinations of fat and sugar intensify neurochemicals, much the same way cocaine does. One professor of psychiatry explains that people self-administer food in search of "different stimulating and sedating effects," just as is done with a "speedball" -- which combines cocaine and heroin.
Kessler deconstructs numerous restaurant chain foods to show they are nothing more than layers of fat, salt and sugar. A reoccurring item is "bacon-cheese fries," a coronary event on a plate that displays dazzling engineering precision. One food consultant calls it "cheap filler" in which "20 cents' worth of product gets me $5 worth of wow." The expert in sensory stimulation explains, "Adding more fat gives me more flavor. It gives me more salt. And that bacon gives me a lot more lubricity." A food scientist for Frito-Lay describes the textural appeal: "You've got some pieces that are crispy on the outside, soft on the inside. It's warm. It's probably gooey, stringy, so you have to use your fingers a lot to eat it, and you have to lick your fingers. It's all multisensory."
Or take the McGriddle, which can be deconstructed along the "three points of the compass." It starts with a "cake" made of refined wheat flour, essentially a sugar, pumped with vegetable shortening, three kinds of sugar and salt. This cradles an egg, cheese and bacon topped by another cake. Thus, the McGriddle, from the bottom up, is fat, salt, sugar, fat, then fat and salt in the cheese, fat and salt in the bacon, finished off with fat, salt and sugar. And this doesn't indicate how highly processed the sandwich is. McDonald's bacon, a presumably simple product, lists 18 separate ingredients, including what appears to be six separate sources of umami.
The success of the McGriddle and sandwiches like Wendy's Baconator, which mounds six strips of bacon atop a half-pound cheeseburger and sold 25 million in its first eight weeks, has inspired an arms-race-like escalation among chain restaurants. Burger King has a near-identical imitation with the French Toast Sandwich. In 2004 Hardee's went thermonuclear with its 1,420-calorie, 107-grams-of-fat-laden "Monster Thickburger." And people are gobbling them up.
Perhaps you feel smug (and nauseated) by all this because you are a vegetarian, a vegan or a locavore, or you only eat organic and artisanal foods. Don't. Americans are under the thrall of the food industry. More than half the population eats fast food at least once a week; 92 percent eat fast food every month; and "Every month about 90 percent of American children between the ages of three and nine visit a McDonald's," states Schlosser.
We know this food is killing us slowly with diabetes, heart disease and cancer. But we can't stop because we are addicts, and the food industry is the pusher. Even if can completely opt out (which is almost impossible), it's still our land that is being ravaged, our water and air that is being poisoned, our dollars that are subsidizing the destruction, our public health that is at risk from bacterial and viral plagues.
Changing our perilous food system means making choices -- not to shop for a greener planet, but to collectively dismantle the nexus of factory farming, food corporations and the political system that enables them. It's a tall order, but it's the only option left on the menu.
Posted August 5, 2009.
Arun Gupta is a founding editor of The Indypendent newspaper. He is writing a book on the decline of American Empire for Haymarket Books.
Fabrice Nicolino : C'est une question complexe, mais on dispose d'un document officiel, institutionnel, un gros rapport de la FAO (Organisation des Nations unies pour l'alimentation et l'agriculture) qui date de 2006. En fait, il s'agit d'une analyse globale de tout le cycle de production de l'élevage au niveau planétaire. Pas seulement les animaux, mais leur alimentation, les moyens de transport utilisés [pour les mener aux abattoirs]. Ce rapport estime que l'élevage planétaire émet 18 % des gaz à effet de serre d'origine humaine, et ce total est supérieur à celui concernant les transports utilisés par les êtres humains (voiture, bateau...).
Pharrell_Arot : Bonjour. Etant moi-même un amateur de viande, je m'interroge sur les conduites à adopter pour conjuguer plaisirs alimentaires et développement durable. Quelles sont, selon vous, les précautions qu'un consommateur lambda peut prendre immédiatement ?
Fabrice Nicolino : La première chose, c'est de rappeler que la consommation de viande en France a été multipliée par 4 environ depuis l'entre-deux-guerres. On mange beaucoup trop de viande, pour des raisons économiques et politiques.
Je n'ai pas vraiment de conseil à donner. Mon avis est qu'on peut manger beaucoup moins de viande, manger du coup une viande de meilleure qualité. Personnellement, je mange de la viande, de moins en moins, et c'est de la viande biologique, car dans cette façon de produire, on s'interdit quantité de produits médicamenteux et chimiques.
Pharrell_Arot : Y a-t-il des consommations d'espèces moins dangereuses que d'autres pour la planète ? Quid du porc par exemple ?
Fabrice Nicolino : Le plus mauvais transformateur d'énergie, ce serait le bovin. Moins un animal consomme de végétaux, moins sa consommation nuit aux équilibres de la planète. Et de ce point de vue, il y a une certaine hiérarchie qui va du poulet au bovin en passant par le porc. Le moins mauvais, c'est le poulet.
Herve_Naturopathe : Y a-t-il un lobby français des bouchers/éleveurs aussi important qu'aux Etats-Unis ?
Fabrice Nicolino : Je crois vraiment que non. Il existe un lobby de la viande industrielle en France, puissant, mais qui n'a rien à voir avec l'extraordinaire importance qu'a pu prendre la "bidoche" aux Etats-Unis. Dans ce pays, il y a une histoire passionnante derrière le lobby de la viande. Cela fait un siècle qu'on dénonce les méfaits de ce formidable lobby américain de la viande. Un livre remarquable, La Jungle, est paru en 1906, d'Upton Sinclair, qui décrit l'univers des abattoirs de Chicago. C'est une très belle œuvre.
Aux Etats-Unis, le lobby est vraiment surpuissant ; des secrétaires d'Etat à l'agriculture, notamment sous Reagan, étaient eux-mêmes d'anciens industriels de la viande. Sous les administrations républicaines, mais pas seulement, il y a une espèce de consanguinité entre politiciens et lobby de la viande.
Pour en revenir à la France, oui, il existe un lobby de la viande, qui est représenté par le Comité d'information des viandes, qui a des liens étroits avec l'industrie de la viande, bien sûr, mais aussi avec l'appareil d'Etat, le ministère de l'agriculture et le syndicat ultramajoritaire dans la paysannerie française, la FNSEA.
Romain : Quels substituts peut-on utiliser pour la viande rouge en matière d'apports nutritionnels et de saveurs ?
Fabrice Nicolino : Il n'y a pas de réponse à une telle question... La saveur de la viande rouge est la saveur de la viande rouge. Je ne vois pas quel substitut on pourrait imaginer sur le plan de la saveur. Sur le plan nutritionnel, aussi curieux que cela paraisse, un grand nombre d'études montrent que les régimes végétariens ou les régimes extrêmement peu carnés sont les meilleurs pour la santé humaine. Je cite rapidement un nom, très connu dans les milieux de la nutrition : c'est un Américain qui s'appelle Colin Campbell. Il a réussi à mener une étude comparée de l'alimentation dans des cantons chinois d'un côté, et d'autre part dans des comtés américains. Une étude énorme qui a duré vingt ans. Il note que le régime chinois, très largement basé sur les végétaux, est infiniment meilleur pour la santé.
cocoparis : Pensez-vous qu'il faille aussi réduire notre consommation de lait ?
Apis88 : A ce jour, il est clairement démontré que les pays qui s'enrichissent voient la consommation de viande augmenter par habitant. Ce constat peut-il s'inverser ?
Fabrice Nicolino : C'est une question décisive, une question-clé. Il existe un modèle de consommation de la viande, le modèle occidental, basé sur une consommation très forte de viande. Or produire de la viande nécessite des quantités industrielles de céréales. Et les surfaces agricoles dans le monde ne sont pas extensibles à l'infini. Beaucoup d'agronomes de premier plan se demandent comment on pourra, dans les années qui viennent, satisfaire cette étonnante augmentation de la demande de viande dans des pays dits émergents, au premier rang desquels l'Inde, mais surtout la Chine, où 200 à 300 millions de Chinois réclament de la viande, car ils ont pour la première fois de l'argent pour en consommer et veulent rejoindre le modèle occidental.
Le problème, c'est que les terres agricoles qui permettraient de nourrir ce bétail manquent actuellement, et il paraît extrêmement difficile d'en trouver de nouvelles sur la Terre telle qu'elle est. Ce que je veux dire, c'est qu'à mon sens, le modèle de consommation de la viande qu'on connaît chez nous n'est absolument pas généralisable à la planète. Autrement dit, il me paraît hautement probable qu'il va falloir rapidement se poser la question centrale, essentielle, de notre modèle alimentaire. Faute de quoi, on pourrait sans doute passer de 1 milliard d'affamés chroniques actuellement à peut-être 2 ou 3 milliards à l'horizon 2050.
br : Pensez-vous que les politiques, dans leur réponse à la crise agricole actuelle, vont prendre en considération ce phénomène ?
Fabrice Nicolino : Clairement, non, non, non et non. Je vais faire un parallèle avec la situation en France en 1965.
Le ministre de l'agriculture du général de Gaulle s'appelle Edgard Pisani. En 1965, celui-ci fait une tournée triomphale en Bretagne, et il déclare, sous les acclamations : la Bretagne doit devenir l'usine à lait et à viande de la France. C'est très important, parce qu'on voit bien là que les politiques suivent bien entendu des objectifs, mais que par définition, ce sont des objectifs politiques. Or nous sommes en train de parler de questions d'une autre nature, qui appellent des décisions beaucoup plus réfléchies, beaucoup plus pensées, sur un terme beaucoup plus long que le temps des politiques. J'ajouterai que l'écologie, la crise écologique et tout ce qui y est associé imposeraient des visions, des points de vue, des décisions dont la classe politique, toutes tendances confondues, de l'extrême droite à l'extrême gauche, est incapable.
GrandGousier : D'accord, il faut stopper cette orgie de viande, pour toutes les raisons recensées dans votre livre. Mais par quoi commence-t-on ? En France, quelles seraient les premières actions à mener, les premiers objectifs à se fixer ?
Fabrice Nicolino : Je ne suis pas là pour donner des leçons à qui que ce soit. Mais en tant que personne, je pense qu'il serait bon de s'atteler à la construction d'un mouvement de consommateurs tel qu'on n'en a encore jamais vu. Je pense, dans le droit fil de ce que je viens de dire sur la classe politique, que malgré leur intérêt et leur vaillance, les mouvements de consommateurs qui existent en France, par exemple l'UFC-Que choisir ou 60 millions de consommateurs, expriment en grande partie des préoccupations d'un autre temps. Je pense qu'il serait utile, nécessaire pour tous qu'un mouvement de consommateurs naisse, qui intègre les nouvelles données de base sur la crise écologique, qui est fondamentalement une crise des limites physiques. Et ce mouvement, s'il apparaissait, très certainement, lancerait des actions collectives contre la viande industrielle. Selon moi, un tel mouvement passerait nécessairement par des formes de boycott.
Herve_Naturopathe : Etre "consommacteur", n'est-ce pas la réponse ? Consommer avec réflexion et respect...
Fabrice Nicolino : Sûrement. Mais la question est quand et comment, car des mouvements, il y en a déjà eu. Je rappelle le boycott du veau aux hormones en 1980, mouvement lancé par UFC-Que choisir. La consommation de la viande de veau a été divisée par 6 ou 8, c'était très impressionnant. Et le système s'est adapté, puis s'est renforcé. Donc la question est vraiment de savoir comment trouver une efficacité en face d'une industrie qui est reliée par quantité de fils à tous les pouvoirs en place. Qu'ils soient administratif, politique, industriel, syndical. C'est une question que je m'adresse à moi-même : comment devenir "consommacteur" réellement, et plus seulement dans les propos.
hadadada : Devra-t-on dans le futur arrêter totalement de consommer de la viande ?
Fabrice Nicolino : Je ne vois pas ce point-là à l'horizon de ma vie. J'ai découvert en tout cas, en écrivant ce livre, qu'on pouvait se passer de viande. Je l'ignorais vraiment. Je crois qu'en fait, on a moqué trop longtemps les végétariens, on a prétendu parfois contre l'évidence que leur santé était très mauvaise. Certains lobbyistes dont je parle dans mon livre rappellent, pour disqualifier les végétariens, que tant Hitler que Jules Bonnot, l'anarchiste, étaient végétariens tous les deux. Ce que j'ai vu, c'est qu'on peut vivre sans manger du tout de viande. Pour les grands équilibres, pour affronter les grands problèmes qui sont devant nous, à commencer par la faim, il me paraît vital que nous changions à nouveau de régime alimentaire et que nous renoncions à une grosse partie de la viande que nous ingurgitons chaque année. Mais plus de viande du tout, je n'y crois pas trop, je pense que c'est une question anthropologique, qui en amène beaucoup d'autres. Je ne suis pas sûr que l'humanité soit vraiment destinée à ne plus manger de viande.
cocoparis : Et que dit-on aux éleveurs ? changez de métier ? devenez céréaliers ?
Fabrice Nicolino : C'est une question terrible. J'aime les paysans. C'est vrai que je préfère les paysans vivriers du Sud à ceux gorgés de subventions du Nord, mais le monde de l'élevage est un monde où j'ai rencontré des tas de belles personnes, même dans l'élevage intensif. Mais je vais essayer d'être direct : je pense que l'élevage industriel est condamné. Je pense que la France, la société française, a contracté une dette envers ses éleveurs, car on a tout organisé pour que l'élevage devienne industriel, et il serait insupportable de dire brusquement aux éleveurs de changer de métier. Je crois qu'on pourrait imaginer un plan de transition, un peu sur le modèle du plan de transition de sortie du nucléaire en Allemagne. On pourrait imaginer un plan de transition d'une quinzaine d'années pour permettre un atterrissage en douceur, pour permettre à un certain nombre d'éleveurs de prendre dignement leur retraite, et pour inciter les plus jeunes à se lancer dans un élevage plus respectueux des animaux, des équilibres naturels, et des humains qui sont en bout de chaîne.
Scheatt : Les transformations nécessaires vers un mode de vie plus sobre sont-elles compatibles avec l'organisation actuelle de la distribution et de l'élevage ?
Fabrice Nicolino : Non, car il faut comprendre qu'il s'agit d'un système extrêmement efficace dans son registre, très complexe, très rodé, qui exclut par exemple tout droit des animaux à exister. Moi, au risque d'en choquer certains, je suis très sensible au sort des humains, je suis un humaniste, mais j'estime que les animaux ont un droit à l'existence. J'ai dédié mon livre aux animaux morts sans avoir vécu. J'y tiens beaucoup, car dans un passé pas si lointain, pendant huit mille à neuf mille ans, les humains ont vécu un compagnonnage avec les animaux, qui n'était pas sans cruauté, violence, dureté. Les animaux donnaient leur chair, leur peau, leur force de travail, mais ils demeuraient des êtres vivants, sensibles.
Et l'industrie a totalement transformé les bêtes, à qui on doit tant. Je rappelle que sans l'existence des animaux d'élevage, il n'y aurait pas eu de civilisation humaine. On est donc passé à une situation d'industrialisation où l'animal est devenu une chose, une marchandise, un objet d'échange, du matériel. Je crains que cette rupture dans l'histoire de notre relation avec l'animal nous enlève une part considérable de notre humanité. Je crains que cette manière de traiter cet "autre" qu'est l'animal ouvre la voie à un gouffre moral.
link http://www.lemonde.fr/planete/chat/2009/10/15/faut-il-manger-moins-de-viande-pour-sauver-la-planete_1254289_3244.html#ens_id=1254657
Le site du livre: http://bidoche.wordpress.com/
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Par Andrew Wasley
Vast swathes of rainforest are destroyed to make way for soya monocultures
Protein king
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| Indigenous people, such as this elder from the Kaiowa tribe, say that their traditional way of life is being eroded by intensive soya farming |
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| Families have been displaced by the spread of soya farming. There are reports that those who refuse to sell their land to farmers have their land sprayed with herbicides |
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| Those who protest against soya plantations have met with a heavy-handed response, according to campaigners |
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