THE FIGHT BEGINS

THE FIGHT BEGINS

My first experience in the food business was hunting chicken eggs on my father's farm near Verona, Illinois. He was a very conscientious farmer of 320 acres of land, 100 head of cattle, numerous pigs, chickens and other animals that made up our farm. My earliest memories are of farm life and farm chores, and until I moved away to college as a young man, raising food was my life.

Memories of the food we ate are also vivid in my recollection. I remember how my mother would go the kitchen while we were doing chores and whip up a huge "farm breakfast" for us eight children. We'd gobble the pancakes, eggs, fried potatoes, ham and sausage hungrily, and smother it all with butter and a variety of jams and syrups.

We raised most of the food that we ate, but everything was cooked in the usual American way. Peeled potatoes, meat with gravy, and vegetables cooked to limpness were our standard fare. Actually, my mother's cooking was considered quite good at the time. In fact, it was much better than food of 1993—over-processed, overcooked and over-sweetened. Our favorite meal was Saturday noon dinner — lots of great northern bean soup with a pork hock in it. When snack time came we had a little soda pop—three ounces — and a little of the other junk and convenience foods that were typical of the diet of many Americans in the '50s. Our folks rationed them because they were very expensive. There weren't nearly as many junk foods on the market then, so our eating habits weren't too bad, at least by today's standards compared to the diet of the '90s, our family's diet was very good. My family always planted a large garden so that we had lots of fresh vegetables to eat from June to November, and my mother did a lot of freezing and canning of the fresh vegetables, without adding any preservatives. My parents always bought many bushels of apples, which we stored in our well pit, and sometimes they even went to Georgia, to buy fresh tree-ripened peaches.

In October my father always went to the farmers in Central Wisconsin, and bought many bushels of potatoes, which we consumed with the skins on. But some aspects of our diet weren't the best either. My mother sometimes made our bread, but other times she bought bread to fill us up. This bread was always the cheapest white bread in the store. My father complained about the limp, pasty stuff, but there was no other kind of bread available in the stores. Dad would grouch that a 39-cent loaf contained only two cents of grain, and that it was the miller and the baker who were robbing us. In fact, my father complained about the taste and cost of all processed foods. He used to tell us about the time my Grandfather got his first spoonful of a newfangled invention called "corn flakes." Not fooled by the cereal's sweet taste, Grandpa proclaimed, "If you put milk and sugar on sawdust, it'd taste good too!'

Despite Dad's dissatisfaction with processed food, fresh fruits and vegetables were rather scarce during the winter months, and the only vitamin supplements we knew about were the ones we gave our livestock.

Nonetheless, we would always look forward to Mom's return from her weekly shopping trips; she would invariably stop for a dozen glazed doughnuts on the way home — and did we love them! My brothers and sisters and I could finish the whole package in no time, and I remember thinking that nothing in the world could ever taste as good as a glazed doughnut.

The lunches I took to the one-room school I attended were always white-bread sandwiches, and in high school I ate the typical starchy, fatty fare of the cafeteria. About all you could say for our school hot-lunch program was that it was indeed hot. We could go back for seconds, and we were encouraged to gorge ourselves on surplus spaghetti and other leftovers.

Looking back from the vantage of my subsequent learning, I now see some of the effects that our sugary, fatty, high protein diet was having on my family and friends. It was considered natural then, despite our huge breakfasts, that we would be hungry again in an hour or two. By the time we got to school, we were looking for something to eat, and we'd start nibbling on anything we could get from friends or local stores. It was also common that after a Herculean noon dinner we would all lie down for a twenty-minute nap, the weight of the heavy food in our stomachs making our eyelids just as heavy. A well-trained nutritionist would instantly recognize this as the hypoglycemic effect, the disorder that occurs when the blood-sugar level goes on a wild roller-coaster ride after you eat too much sugar and refined starch. We thought it was perfectly normal.

I also recognize that it was our eating habits that tended to make everybody I knew heavy. My father weighed 220 pounds, and my mother always watched her weight. Nearly all of the girls I went to school with had noticeable weight problems, but it just seemed so natural and normal for everybody to be heavy like that. It was a very rare thing for someone to be slim. The only one in my family who escaped chunkiness was my older sister, who always ate like a bird. She would never eat more than a tablespoon of any vegetable, nor more than an ounce of meat at a time. But there was a tendency to think that there was something wrong with a slim person, and we thought it was very strange that my sister did not eat like the rest of us.

One thing that food did not affect at first was my deliberation over what I was going to do with my life. In grade school, we had a workbook called 'Think and Do." My father loved that title and constantly repeated it to us kids — Think and Do. I believe that has helped me all of my life.

Another family saying that has impacted my life is from the tombstone of my Grandfather, who died the same month I was born. Each year on Father's Day, we would visit his grave and celebrate with a picnic under the mulberry tree my grand­father had planted. The epitaph on his tombstone reads, "He who helps others, lives not in vain." When I was trying to decide on a career, I had two good values to build on — "think and do" and "he who helps others, lives not in vain."

The day after I graduated from high school, I decided that I wanted to do something important with my life, and my high school guidance counsellor said I'd probably be pretty good at anything I tried. I decided to become a nuclear scientist. I left for Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin, with that thought in mind, but after my first physics course I decided that perhaps medicine would be a better field for me. When I attempted to get into medical school, however, I found I lacked the necessary money, grades or influential relatives to pull it off, so I began graduate studies in endocrinology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and later changed my focus to biochemistry.

It was my basic "do-good" attitude toward life that made me want to enter medical school in the first place; thinking that, as a doctor, I could help the under-privileged people of the world. With that road closed, I felt that biochemistry would be another field in which I could help solve the problem of world hunger. Unfortunately, I found that biochemistry and nutrition courses were not taught with that in mind at all. They were approached as dry, stuffy disciplines, devoid of enthusiasm or relevance to real life. I sat through the seemingly endless lectures on carbohydrate metabolism and enzyme transfer, hoping that the professor would devote at least the last lecture to explaining how all of this technical information we were jotting in our notebooks and cramming in our heads applied to real life and everyday eating. But when that final lecture did come, the professor would almost brush the subject off by telling us that these things were not to be worried about, and that a person would get all of the nutrients he needed just by eating a variety of foods on a regular basis. I was a bit disappointed, but I believed what he said and accepted it as being as valid as his explanations of molecular metabolic processes.

If I could have made a connection between the things he was telling me and the drowsiness, hunger, crabbiness and overweight of my youth, perhaps I could have seen the fallacy of my professors' nutritional advice. But I didn't make the connection, and neither did my fellow students, nor my professors, nor any of the nutritionists and biochemical academicians of the time. The reason is not difficult to understand: The education I and those who teach nutrition today got was from the men who got their own education in the '30s and '40s. In those days, whole vegetables and fresh fruits were, with little exception, the only kind to be had, and in the early part of this century the professor's admonition to rely on a varied diet would have been sound.

But in the years since World War II, fresh fruits and vegetables and whole grains gradually disappeared from the American diet, and were replaced by a plethora of canned, frozen, processed and refined products, many of them having little nutri­tional resemblance to the foods before processing. In short, Americans had acquired totally different eating habits during the time between my instructor's student days and my own, and the change in the foods in the supermarket had sneaked up on the nutrition establishment, leaving the professors totally unaware of the hazards and tragedies associated with the new American way of eating. The crisis is that their students, the nutritionists of today, are almost as completely in the dark as they were!

In graduate school, before I learned of the real problems involved in American nutrition and the role of the Food Giants in intentionally bringing those problems about, I felt that as a biochemist I would be in the best position to help solve the problem of world starvation, a problem about which I was becoming increasingly concerned. One of the term papers I wrote was on Kwashiorkor. It is the disease of the bloated-belly, tragic-eyed children we have grown sadly accustomed to seeing in articles and documentaries about the world's starvation centers. Affecting perhaps as many as 70 million of the world's people, Kwashiorkor is caused by a protein deficiency that withers muscle and nerve tissues. Children in their formative years are the most heart-rending victims; they are seldom lucky enough to survive infancy, and even if a Kwashiorkor victim has that luck, the degenerative effects of the disease are almost irreversible. Entire populations have been grossly stunted by Kwashiorkor during times of famine and war, and it is this very stunting of the physical and mental resources of a people that makes it so hard for those in the "have-not" nations to achieve peace and plenty.

My research about Kwashiorkor disturbed me deeply. If only we could find the protein source so desperately needed to feed these starvation victims! But there is a greater tragedy to Kwashiorkor, one of which I was ignorant at the time. The real cause of the disease is not a lack of food, nor is it a problem of distribution. The real source of the problem is the way the major protein sources, usually rice and wheat, are processed before they get into the hands of the hungry. Whole, unprocessed brown rice is produced in ample abundance throughout Asia, and whole wheat is available almost around the world; but when the rice or wheat is processed, i.e., when the bran and germ are removed, the grain is essentially stripped of all major nutrient value. These Kwashiorkor victims don't have too little to eat. The tragic truth is that the food they do get has been ruined before it gets to their mouths. But I was as naive about the processing problem as are most nutritionists, and my thinking at the time was that a new source of food had to be found, a fabricated, man-made food if necessary, or the hungry would continue to succumb to Kwashiorkor. I was shocked when my research revealed how widespread the affliction was, and I decided that I had to go and see for myself what conditions were like in some of the countries where starvation was a part of daily life. So, in the midst of my graduate work, my wife and I traveled to Colombia, South America in 1967.

Many of the things we saw there we could have seen in New York or Chicago: the big cities, the crowds, the slums. It wasn't until we went out to the countryside that we began to see the really serious problems, and the underlying causes for them. We would ride on the local buses with the peasants returning to their villages. You can see a great many things from a bus window.

There were people leaning in front of their hovels seemingly with nothing to do; yet the land was teeming with fruit and appeared to be well suited to other types of crops as well. It seemed to us that there was a lot of unused land, and we didn't see people tending gardens or working farms. As I was later to learn, these peasants had been taxed or otherwise forced off their land, so the land could be purchased by rich ranchers who ran cattle on the land. While the evicted peasants starved, much of the land was destroyed by cattle destined for Burger King hamburgers. The animals packed the ground so tight that, when it rained, the water couldn't soak in but instead ran off and caused terrible erosion.

The peasants were being forced to move in ever-increasing numbers to the urban areas, where they would join the throngs of starving beggars in the city streets.

In Colombia there are very rich people and very poor people, and the places where they live are about as different as day and night. But, there is one common denominator, one recurring landmark as common to the shiny new apartment complexes as it is to the tin-hut villages: the Coca-Cola sign. I found soda pop advertisements were amazingly ubiquitous, and I travelled to very few places where the familiar red-and-white sign was out of sight. It cost only a few pennies a bottle in Colombia, and Coke was very popular. Just how popular it was became apparent when I attempted to help an old man who really looked like he needed something to eat. I gave the starved-looking man some money and asked him to buy two cartons of milk, one for me and one for himself. He returned with my milk, but he smilingly showed me that he had purchased a bottle of Coke for himself.

Coca-Cola has extended its growing empire deep into Latin America. For instance, Coke has seized control of 42% of the soft-drink market in Mexico. Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins have written of one small Mexican village, Olinala, whose 6,000 inhabitants put away about 4,000 bottles of Coke a day! 1

My encounter with the old man and many other experiences pointed out to me that the people of all classes in Colombia had made the Western lifestyle their goal and dream. People would beg and plead to buy a tourist's extra shoes, blue jeans and pocket radios, but turned up their noses at the nutritious foods that were growing in their own country.

Many times, nutritional grains and other foods had acquired a stigma as "poor people's food." Quaker Oats, a company for which I was later to work, was distributing a nutritious product in Guatemala at the time, marketing it specifically for a peasant clientele. This product was a mixture of various grains and was sold as a gruel, the kind of stuff you see them dishing out on C.A.R.E. commercials. When I worked for the company, I found out that Quaker was allowed to market its new line of toys in Guatemala if the company would also make a cheap, nutritious food product available. The company wanted to make money on their toys, so they made the product available without really caring if any of it was sold. It was put up in drab, ugly one-pound packages and marketed as poor people's food. Naturally, the poor Guatemalans had too much pride to be seen buying the stuff in stores, but a storekeeper told me that affluent people were his biggest customers for the whole-grain meal. When cooked properly and combined with fruit, the cereal had a delicious flavor that was far superior to oatmeal or rice. Yet it was shunned by the people who needed it most, because it didn't have an image of being some athlete's "favorite cereal."

I also learned at Quaker that the stuff sold so poorly that shop owners had to be bribed into carrying it at all. The shipments of meal came in bulk, packed 35 pounds to the bag. Also enclosed were 40 individual bags. The extras were supposedly provided in case some of the regular bags broke, but the store owners were covertly encouraged by Quaker to short each of the intended one-pound bags and thereby fill the extra five, selling all 40 at full price. This was the only way that many merchants could be convinced to sell the product, and even then, because of the lack of adequate promotion, it would sit on the shelves for months on end.

There was also a big push to get mothers to feed their infants baby foods and formulas instead of breast-feeding them. Billboards depicted smiling mothers who fed their babies with bottles as the perfect mothers, while suggesting that mothers who breast-fed their children were like an "animal." Thus, formula was the overwhelming choice of women seeking the Western lifestyle, but by mixing the formula with impure water, or over-diluting the expensive powder, mothers were subjecting their infants to diarrhea and death on a massive scale.

Despite the depressing scenes I had witnessed in Colombia, I returned to complete my graduate studies with renewed enthusiasm and concern. The trip, along with the studies of Kwashiorkor, convinced me that I should devote my life to helping hungry people by working in the established channels in the food industry. I had been impressed by the efforts Quaker had seemingly made in helping the hungry. I felt that by producing new sources of protein and other nutrients, enough food could be produced to solve the starvation problems of the entire world. At the time it had not dawned on me what the real cause of hunger in the have-not nations was; neither did I realize that, right at home in the United States, malnutrition disguised as "the good life" was claiming and ruining more lives than anywhere in the world. And I never dreamed that both problems were caused by the very corporations I planned to work for.

In my last year of graduate work I learned about a process for actually creating protein from things like natural gas. The process seemed simple enough: Commonly occurring micro organisms were fed on a petroleum product, dairy wastes, and other chemicals under controlled conditions. When enough of the microbes had grown and reproduced, they were removed from their growth medium, dried and used as feed. The process was in its infancy, and it had never been tried on a large laboratory scale, let alone commercially. Yet this seemed to be what I was looking for. My enthusiasm heightened when I attended at Rutgers University a convention of biologists and researchers who were interested in working on world hunger. I was very impressed by what I saw and heard. At the convention I met representatives of the Tenneco Corporation who later offered me a position on a research team which would attempt to make protein out of methane — natural gas — a superabundant material.

It seemed too good to be true that I could so soon happen on just the position I had always wanted. I was caught up, as were most scientists in the 1960s, with the idea that technology, the same technology that had ended smallpox and had landed a man on the moon, could solve all of mankind's problems. "Creating" foods out of otherwise worthless waste materials seemed to be just that kind of impossible dream — so impossible that it almost had to come true. But I, like the rest of the world, was soon to learn that, in too many cases, technology is at the heart of our problems; that it could be used toward devious ends as easily as it could be used to end human suffering. I pictured myself working with a big team to perfect synthetic protein, then building a few big plants in Africa or Asia, where the people would flock to work and to buy the protein. There was no doubt in my mind that if we could just create a cheap, nutritious protein source, the world would hail it as the end of world hunger. The only problem I saw was in perfecting the technology; I assumed that if we built a better mouse trap, the world would beat a path to our door.

My wife and I and our three children made the move to Piscataway, New Jersey, the site of Tenneco's research laboratories, in the fall of 1968. When I arrived, I found that our research director, Dr. Ira Hill, had gathered a small but excellent staff with whom to carry out the project. We had a diligent bacteriologist who searched the whole country looking for the heat-loving microorganisms we needed for the process. We had an analytical chemist to analyze our end product for nutritional value. We had a talented biochemical engineer to design our equipment and to do theoretical production studies. He also was experienced in methods of removing the protein-rich cells from the water medium. My job was to design and build the small-scale equipment for doing this job. I would get the various strains of bacteria from our bacteriologist, who looked at hundreds of strains to find the best, and grow them in a mixture of water, air and controlled nutrients. I would produce the bacteria on a small scale, then turn them over to the analytical chemist, who checked them for purity, safety and nutritional value. An outside consulting firm did the animal testing of our product, feeding the most nutritious samples to animals to check the product's palatability and effect on animal health. Each of the departments on the research team had several technicians.

When I joined the team in January, we were set to go. The company representatives stressed the time element, and seemed impatient that the process be developed in as short a time as possible. They didn't even take time to build an addition to their factory, but hurriedly cleaned out a storeroom for us to work in. There was a rumor that Tenneco's enthusiasm for the project was due in part to the prodding of a socially-concerned wife of one of the vice presidents. The rumor held weight because there seemed to be no one in the company who knew anything about biological processes. It probably seemed like a good idea to the corporate brass; such altruistic programs were good public relations at the time, and Tenneco was producing more methanol than they could sell. I don't think anyone in the company outside the research team expected us to succeed. It probably seemed outlandish to them that you could take natural gas, the stuff you burn in streetlights and kitchen ranges, and make food out of it. However, they did see the public-relations possibili­ties, and used the project in newspaper ads as one justification for their recent increase in gas prices.

Incidentally, this kind of thing goes on all the time. In the early '70s, Northern Illinois Gas ran large full-color ads in national magazines to inform the public that they were trying to make food out of methane to feed the world's hungry. When I tried to get a job with the project I found out that NIG was spending five times more money on the advertisements than they were on the research itself. They gave one or two researchers an annual $25,000 budget — hardly enough to keep a desk and a secretary. It was all window dress ing, but I would never have known about it if I hadn't tried to get a job there. When, in the late '60s and early '70s, it became evident to many people that we could not go on abusing our natural resources and destroying the environment in the obscene way to which we had become accustomed, it was ironic that "environment" and "natural" became the advertising catch phrases of the very giant corporations that had brought about the disintegration of the biosphere in the first place. Petroleum and food companies were the first to take up the hypocritical call for cleaner air and more healthful food. Since I was working for a company which specialized in both, it was perhaps inevitable that I would be caught up in a public-relations scheme.

But this did not concern us at the time, and we set enthusiastically to work, all of the staff frequently putting in 14—or 16 — hour workdays to keep the project moving ahead rapidly. It was one of the best-directed research projects I have ever seen, devoid of the interoffice politics and backstabbing that are so common in corporate endeavors. Every day brought us closer to our goal. By the summer of 1969 we had made excellent progress in isolating the strains of bacteria appropriate to our purposes and I began producing the small-scale batches. By the following autumn we had made enough of a quality product to begin animal-feed testing, and by the end of the year we were getting highly encouraging results from our test­ing.

The tests showed that test animals—mice — thrived on the protein, and our biochemical engineer had produced studies to show that our process was economically feasible. In short, we had done what few believed possible: We'd shown that protein could be made from natural gas, that it could be done successfully on a large scale, and that it could be done cheaply (a pound would cost about 11 cents to produce, and would provide eight people with 100 % of their protein needs for a day). And we had done it in one year — half the time we'd been allotted for completion! Naturally, we were very pleased. We felt that we had done a great deal of good for the world. As the end of December approached, we planned a jubi­lant New Year's Eve party to celebrate our success.

When we were called into the vice president's office on the afternoon of New Year's Eve, we expected a raise and a pat on the back. None of us could recall a research project that had accomplished so much with so little time, money and per­sonnel. After all, with our process, a plant covering one square mile could produce enough protein to feed ten million people! We gathered expectantly into the office, where the vice president of Corporate Research sat behind his desk with an expressionless face.

"Gentlemen," he said nonchalantly, "the Board of Directors has decided to terminate your project, effective immediately."

Our jaws dropped. We sat in stunned silence as he assured us that the company would help find new jobs for us, that our families would be taken care of, that we didn't have to worry about the future. They were actually firing us!

The party that evening was one of the saddest I've ever been to. Gone was the enthusiasm and idealism; my co-workers assumed a defeatist attitude, and none seemed interested in continuing the project. Another job had just played out, and now we would have to look for new ones. Several discussed going into detergent enzyme production, which was at that time a very lucrative fad for biochemists. It seemed to me that I was the only one left who still believed in the project. The starving people I had seen and read about were still out there, still hungry, still dying by the thousands. And here in our very grasp was the means to end their suffering, to rid the world of hunger and its resultant diseases and to bring new hope to millions of people. With this heart-quickening prospect right in front of them, how could Tenneco possibly "terminate" the project? No matter what angle I viewed it from, it seemed unbelievable.

The thoughts tormented me for days.

Finally, when I could stand it no longer, I marshalled my courage and called the president of Tenneco. How could they do this senseless thing?

"Friend," he told me, "if I had a whole mountain of protein, I wouldn't have the slightest idea what to do with it. Who's gonna buy something like that?"

I was dumb struck. What about the starving millions? Was the profit motive all that counted for anything? I told myself that it could not be so, that somewhere there must be a company which would embrace the project and develop it to full potential. But I was still naive, and I still believed that the best way to make money was to make things people really needed.

My next job, for the powerful and pervasive Quaker Oats Company, would rid me of that illusion.

NOTES

1. Prances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins with Gary Fowler, Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity

(NewYork: Ballantine Books, 1978), pp. 330-1.

Inside The Food Giants

INSIDE A FOOD GIANT

  We began the work of shutting down the Tenneco project, putting the equipment in mothballs, turning our little research lab back into the storeroom it had once been. Although I was still disappointed about the outcome of my first employment, I was eager to carry on and continue my work with another company. After all, I knew that this was an exciting and important area of research in bio­chemistry, and that several corporations were working on similar projects. Moreover, I still believed in the value of what I was doing and had faith in the goal of finding a simple solution to world hunger. So, with the help of Dr. Hill, I began looking for another job.

We contacted several corporations, and I was given expense-paid trips to visit their facilities and talk to the people in­volved in the various projects. The first invitation I got was to tour the American Oil Company research facilities in Whiting, Indiana. The people involved in the company's attempts to produce yeast from paraffin seemed knowledgeable enough, and I noticed that they were using some very sophisticated instruments and equipment. But much of the inaction taking place led me to believe that I was looking at another example of corporate window-dressing for public-relations purposes. They were also highly secretive, and didn't want to let on too much about what they were doing — or not doing. I turned them down; I didn't want to get stuck in another situation where a lot of hard work would go to waste. Ironically, AMOCO eventually did build a commercial-scale plant to produce yeast. The product was sold as a flavoring for processed foods, rather than as a nutritional supplement.

I found a similarly disappointing situation when I visited the Gulf research laboratories in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Their process was similar to AMOCO's, but was on an even smaller scale. They had only two or three researchers actually working on the project, but it seemed that they were spending most of their time justifying their budget to stay in existence. I didn't observe any active research going on at all. The researchers had published reports on their findings in scientific journals, but these again seemed to be self-preservation techniques. The reports, like most coming out of industry pursuits, didn't contain much important information and dwelt on areas already well known by workers in the field. This kept the company's name before the public while not blowing the company's shroud of secrecy, and it gave the researchers something concrete to show their bosses. So I kept looking.

I was next in contact with General Electric, which also was involved in a similar protein project in Arizona. The basic raw materials they were working with were cow manure and offal waste, along with wastes from packing plants and other industries. But, once again, the project had its shortcomings; the real emphasis GE was giving to the project was not to find a cheap protein source, but to find good uses for electric motors in the process. They had found a lot of uses for electric motors, but that seemed to be all they had accomplished.

Finally I got in contact with Dr. Wayne Graham, head of exploratory research at , Quaker Oats Company, who impressed me as being a very sincere and devoted person who wanted to help bring better nutrition to the people of the Third World. He was behind Quaker's whole-grain cereal production in South America, and had done a tremendous amount of work in the area. Now he was about to retire, but he still wanted to see Quaker's protein research projects carried forward.  He had hired a protégé, Dr. Walter Clark, to supervise the projects in this area. Quaker had the money and the facilities necessary for this work, and they had very capable people in their various departments to lend support.   Since I had the background and specific information from the Tenneco project, they thought that I would fit in very well. I was hired, and went to work at the company's research facilities in Barrington, Illinois in March of 1970.

The Quaker Oats research laboratory is a large, awe-inspiring brick building, and I was immediately impressed by its elegance. It was built in stages during the 1950s and 1960s, and from the stylish landscaping on the outside, through the marble-lined foyer and hallways, to the shining ultramodern equipment in the laboratories themselves, the place breathed class.  Quaker never spared any expense in getting the best people or the most up-to-date equipment, and the opulence of their facilities was impressive. An example of this is the separate facilities they had for testing pet foods in the 1970s. The building is a huge southern-style mansion, complete with columns.   The air-conditioned kennels and laboratories cost millions, and I'm sure no ghetto child ever enjoyed accommodations as plush as the ones the dogs at Quaker have. I couldn't imagine spending that kind of money to test dog food, but of course a lot of it was for public relations effect, to show animal lovers that, far from abusing the test animals, the dogs and cats were being luxuriously pampered.

As impressive as Quaker's research laboratory is, it is hardly unusual in the food industry. General Foods spends more than $100 million on new-product research every year. According to Robert Carbonnell, vice-president of Standard Brands, "Re­search has become responsible for corporate growth." 1  I was soon to learn the questionable nature of all that research.

The first part of my job at Quaker was to draw up specifications for the equipment I would need to continue the work I had started at Tenneco. With the orders for the equipment placed, there would be a lapse of time before the materials arrived and could be set up, so the company put me to work at various odd jobs to fill the gap.

The first of these tasks was inspecting pizza. Quaker had just acquired the Celeste Rzza Company in Chicago, and they put me to work checking for salmonella in the pizzas. I began to find salmonella infestations in about one out of every two pizzas I checked. So I went with the inspection team into the shiny new plant where the pizzas were being made and gave the facilities a complete check. We tested the doorknobs, the sewer drains, the refrigeration units, the conveyors, the shredders, the meat grinders, and every other surface and piece of equipment. After going through everything, we could not find the source of the contaminant. To our surprise, the source of the salmonella was the pork — USDA inspected, Grade A pork.

We checked our supplier, and found that many samples of pork we checked had some degree of salmonella. We went to a supermarket, and discovered that about 30% of the samples there were infected. By this time I was beginning to have serious doubts about our salmonella detection program. If all of this pork had salmonella in it, why wasn't there an enormous epidemic of food poisoning? The USDA was claiming that this was the most serious health risk in the food industry, yet salmonella seemed to be ubiquitous and almost harmless. The fact is that salmonella is virtually inherent to meats like pork, lamb and chicken, and there's just no effective way to remove it.

Due to the ways we cook these meats, salmonella presents no real danger to a healthy person. But the USDA has decided that our food must be nearly sterile, so they put out a barrage of hype about the dangers of salmonella infection. In order to solve its problem, Quaker ended up having to buy whole fresh hams, wash them in a chemical preservative solution and then grind them up into sausage, adding substantially to both the cost of production and to the price of a Celeste Pizza. The USDA salmonella scare is basically a game; it keeps a lot of people employed running tests and publishing reports, but it doesn't make much difference.

But there are instances of gross contamination that do matter, and often they go completely unnoticed.

While I was at Quaker in the 1970s, they decided to come out with a new breakfast cereal they were going to call King Vitamin (despite the healthy-sounding name, the stuff was mostly sugar and fat.) They had encouraging results from their test marketing in the Midwest, so they tooled up three of their plants to begin production on a national scale. They pro­duced King Vitamin at an incredible rate, and shipped the cereal by rail from the three factories to one major warehouse.

It happened that one of the railroads sent a freshly-painted boxcar to one of the cereal factories. When the workers at the plant opened the boxcar, the fumes were so strong that they brought in blower fans for ventilation and went right ahead and loaded the King Vitamin into the boxcar. The cereal went to the warehouse and was mixed with all the rest of the stockpiled cereal that had been produced over the last three months. When the time for the big roll-out came, and Quaker had spent two million dollars in advertising, promotions and shelf-space pay-off, a trickle of complaints came in from customers who wondered how Quaker could call this stinking, inedible stuff 'food'!

The company checked its supply and, sure enough, that wasn't the way it was supposed to taste at all! Quaker's analytical laboratory, perhaps the most sophisticated privately owned lab in the world, began the huge task of tracing every supplier of every ingredient and every process that went into making King Vitamin and shipping it to the warehouse. After a massive search, somebody found the shipping receipt that stated that one boxcar had been freshly painted. Because there was no way of telling which boxes of cereal were contaminated and which weren't, Quaker had to recall them all from the shelves and dispose of them. All in all, the company lost around $5 million on this one little mistake. But regardless of the magnitude of the problem, the news of the contamination never made the papers; if I didn't have a friend working in the analytical laboratory, I would never have found out about it myself, even though I worked just one floor below the analytical departmerit.

Quaker did take action to make sure this kind of food would not be made again; they added one line to their voluminous rule book for employees, admonishing them not to load cereal into freshly painted boxcars.

When I thought about this affair, a question began to bother me. How in the world could a company afford to lose $5 million in one year on one product without blinking an eye? It seemed to me that a company making that kind of mistake even sporadically would suffer a big crimp in its ability to stay in business. But later I found two reasons why a multimillion-dollar loss was no big problem to the Quaker people. First, the loss could be made up by raising the prices on the myriad other products they market, a few cents increase on every one; the cereals cost so little to make because the boxes contain so little grain; and their competition was making mistakes equal or worse in magnitude. It is a sad example of how entrenched the major Food Giants are in our economy that they can afford to make this kind of costly mistake and still rake in enormous profits. But the really sad thing is that if the contamination had been less noticeable than the smell of paint, nobody, from Quaker to the consumer to the mighty USDA itself, would ever have discovered it.

Even if Quaker had known about the contaminants beforehand, one would have good reason to question whether they would have done anything about it. Quaker has information that some of their breakfast cereals are harmful even without adulteration; their own studies prove it!

While I was doing research on my project in Quaker's library, I came across a little flyer that the company had published in 1942. It contained a report on a study in which four sets of rats were given special diets. One group received plain whole-wheat kernels, water, vitamins and minerals. Another group received Puffed Wheat, water, and the same nutrient solu­tion. A third set was given water and white sugar, and a fourth given nothing but water and the chemical nutrients. The rats which received the whole wheat lived more than a year on the diet. The rats who got nothing but water and vitamins lived for about eight weeks, and the animals on a white sugar and water diet lived for a month. But Quaker's own laboratory study showed that rats given vitamins, water and all the Puffed Wheat they wanted died in two weeks. It wasn't a matter of the rats dying of malnutrition; results like these suggested that there was something actu­ally toxic about the Puffed Wheat itself. Proteins are very similar to certain toxins in molecular structure, and the puffing process of putting the grain under 1500 pounds-per-square-inch of pressure, and then releasing it, may produce chemical changes which turn a nutritious grain into a poisonous substance. And Quaker has known about this toxicity since 1942.

I was shocked, so I showed the report to Dr. Clark, who shared my concern. His predecessor, Dr. Graham, had published the report, and begged the company not to continue producing Puffed Wheat because of its poisonous effect on animals.

Dr. Clark was so upset about finding a report like this in the company's own literature that he went right to the president of the company, Robert D. Stuart III. "I know people should throw it on brides and grooms at weddings," Stuart cracked, "but if they insist on sticking it in their mouth, can I help it? Besides, we made $9 million on the stuff last year." That's a direct quote! I could hardly believe my ears when Dr. Clark told me the president's word, but I was soon informed that the situation was not important, and that I had better keep my nose in my own business and not worry about what was going on in the rest of the company.

Since the publication of the first edition of this book, the Quaker Oats Company hotly denied that this study existed. I have little doubt that the study no longer exists, but I still maintain that I saw it then with my own eyes. Furthermore, published studies confirm that the process of puffing any grain gives the product a negative nutritional value. I have repeated similar tests with white rats, and have found that rats on a diet Puffed Wheat do worse that animals eating nothing at all. Yet despite the fact that Quaker has done its best to discredit me and intimidate members of the media interested in my message, it has yet to demonstrate that its puffed cereals can support life of any kind. To me, making food for another is a sacred duty. Whether you are helping to feed one person or a million, feeding another is a calling. It shouldn't be reduced to the normal parameters of running a business — how can I make an extra buck off this customer. Food companies should treat their customers as if they were their own children and as if they were their god— never offend or do them harm else they will destroy you.

Food companies should treat their customers as if they were their parents. You would never want to do anything that would ever harm your parents in any way—  after all, they gave you life — the greatest gift of all.

Quaker doesn't do animal feeding studies on most of its human products anymore, because too often these tests show their "foods" are incapable of sustaining life. This is also why, despite Quaker's lavish facilities for testing pet food, not a single dollar is spent to find out if Quaker products are really good for human beings. Why, they figure, should they waste money on tests that are just going to tell them things they don't want to know? In reality, most of Quaker's research efforts are aimed not at finding new products or improving the old ones, but in cutting the cost of production. In corporate lingo, it's called "product differentiation" and in advertisements they call the product "new and improved." The result is a cheaper, less nutritious product that costs the consumer more.

Every employee in the building was expected to participate in this differentiation process by taking part in taste tests that would take place several times a day. Each employee would be called by name to the testing laboratory several times a week and asked to sample product "A" and compare it to product "B." The first product would be, for instance, a bowl of Cap'n Crunch cereal; the second would be Cap'n Crunch made by a new process that would cut the cost of production by a tenth of a cent per pound. The object was to tell if we could notice any difference between the old product and the cheaper version. If the researchers, executives, secretaries couldn't tell the difference, as was usually the case, the company assumed the public would be fooled as well, and Cap'n Crunch would henceforth be made the cheaper way. In several months, when the researchers had found an even cheaper way to make the cereal, another taste test would be performed, and if the results showed "no discernible difference," a few tenths of a cent more were cut from production costs. This went on and on, with almost every product being altered once or several times a year. Of course, even though the harried testers couldn't notice the difference between "A" and "B," there was always a slight difference; and after the end of several years and many changes, the taste and nutritional value of the new product bore little resemblance to the taste of the original stuff.

This taste-panel activity takes up a lot of the researcher's time and attention. Sometimes I would be called away from my work three or four times a day to taste new foods. But the company absolutely insisted that the employees participate, so one often felt the tests were the only constructive thing one could get accomplished all day! We would even test out the dog food to see if its color and texture were attractive to humans. Computers and analysts would endeavor to make sure that all the tests were objective and accurate, even going as far as making sure a test was not biased by which product was called "A" and which was labeled "B." Yet, for all this concern over taste, not a single study was done to determine how the foods affected the health of humans or even whether they were safe to eat.

An example of this product differentiation and cost cutting in action is the process used for making cereals which are shaped like little O's, crowns, moons and the like. The machine used for making shaped cereals, called an extruder, is huge pump with a die at one end.  The ingredients are mixed together into a thikc soup called a slurry. The slurry goes into the extruder, is heated to a very high temperature and pushed through the die at high pressure. A spinning blade slice off each little crown or elephant, which carried on a stream of hot air past nozzle which spray a coating of oil and sugar on each piece, to seal off the cereal from the ravages of milk and give it crunch. This extrusion process, besides creating a sweet crunchy cereal, destroys much of the nutrient content of the ingredients. Even the chemical vitamins, added before the extrusion process, are damaged by it. The amino acid lysine, a crucial amino acid, is especially ravaged by extrusion. Yet the only changes made in the dozens of variables in the extrusion process are those which will cut costs or increase sale regardless of how these changes will alt the nutritive value of the product.

As James Hightower puts it in his book, "Eat Your Heart Out," "It is not that food firms are trying to produce bad food. Rather, they are not trying to produce good food."2   What they are trying to produce is profits, and they have learned that in order to expand their markets, in order to keep growing and commanding a bigger share of the market, they must process and sweeten, process and add salt, process and add color dyes and flavor chemicals. Processed foods are more profitable for a variety of reasons; with much of the food value removed and dozens of preservatives added, processed foods last practically forever. When flavors, colors, texture, indeed when the food itself is synthesized, the corporations are freed from dealing with the cost and bother of real foods like vegetables and fruit. Most importantly, the foods can be designed to hit "consumer hot buttons," industry lingo for the real or imagined needs of the public.

The priority of shelf-life is clearly one of the industry's most vital. It is not at all unusual for the freshness codes on food packages to brag that the product inside will still be in "best" condition almost a year after it arrives in the store. A recent Progressive article reported that food "engineers" at the Campbell Soup Company are working on a process to keep their foods "fresh" for two or three years!3   On the surface this may seem quite an achievement, but on reflection it is clear that these long-lived foods are not really fresh. They have merely been doctored in one or two ways: Either they have been loaded with preservatives, more accurately poisons that ward off the growth of microorganisms, or the nutritive content of the food has been depleted to the point where no microbes could live on it. This would be a shining scientific accomplishment, as the Food Giants insist it is, if it were not for the fact that the microbes are after the same things in the food that your body utilizes when you eat. In fact, many of these microbes resemble those in your digestive tract. If these "bugs" can't live on the stuff, it is a good indication that you will not be getting the proper nutrition from it either. This, of course, does not enter the minds of the executives who order such research and effect such changes in the production of our daily bread.

What matters to them is that they will be able to stockpile when commodity prices are cheap and have their stock last long enough to get them through times of higher prices; that the company can centralize its location and ship processed foods from one spot to all parts of the nation and every corner of the world; and that grocers love a product that lasts a year and turn down foods that have to be disposed of in a couple of days or weeks. It is particularly ironic that so many Food Giants love to brag about their "freshness" in advertisements. They have assumed that, if they can make a bread that stays soft and white for a week on the shelf, that entitles them to proclaim the bread's everlasting freshness. If the Food Giants can put out canned corn that is firm and brightly colored, they may name the brand "Freshlike." The FDA under David Kessler put a stop to many of the abuses of the word fresh and made spaghetti and orange juice companies take the word "fresh" off their products in 1992.

The truth is that 80% of the food in a supermarket is stale. Thank goodness for the fresh foods that they do contain. Sadly, food companies have duped the consumer into believing that if a food has the same color or texture it had when it came out of the oven or off the tree, then it is indeed fresh. But common sense tells us that a food's real freshness depends on how much of its original food value and quality have dete­riorated since the time of harvest or bak­ing. Of course, the Food Giants have sidestepped this issue entirely. They remove any food value present.

Naturally, the next logical step from such radical adulteration of the bounty of the earth is to fix things so that you can bypass Mother Nature (and the farmers trying to make a living tending her) entirely. According to the United States General Accounting Office, almost 80% of the additives in foods are cosmetic. 4 Instead of the bright yellow color and tangy-sour taste of lemonade, we get sugar and artificial flavoring; instead of the deep ebony color and rich dark flavor of real chocolate pudding, we get cotton-based synthetics; instead of creamy milk and smooth ice cream in our shakes, we get sodium caseinate and fat solids. An ever-increasing proportion of the food we eat is no longer even food but is now a conglomerate of high-priced chemistry experiments designed to simulate food. There are even chemicals like International Multifood's Merlinex, described by Hightower as "the silly putty of the food world," which takes the place of the real thing in everything from cheese to brownies.5 In the words of Albert Clausi, vice-president at General Foods, "In my business, commodity is sort of a bad word," — commodity meaning fresh, real food! 6

With the twin bugbears of raw materials and product longevity out of the way, the Food Giants are in the position to design their foods, to make exactly what the consumer wants, exactly the way she wants it. The food companies spend millions in surveys and laboratory research to divine the "consumer hot buttons" and millions more in development research to exploit what they perceive to be the needs of the people. Boil-in-bag glop, gravy that comes in a stick, cheese-flavored tort in a hermetically sealed plastic cup, vegetable oil in a spray can, and dozens of other such freakish fares are the end result of the company's concern for your eating habits. Margarine, the ultimate in created foods, is composed of diacetyl, isopropyl and stearyl citrates, sodium benzoate, benzoic or citric acid, diglycerides and monoglycerides, and loaded with trans fats. Trans fats are created during the hydrogenation process. Harvard School of Public Health recently published in a prestigious British medical journal that four servings of white bread, cake or cookies that contain "partially hydrogenated fats" can increase the chances of heart trouble by 67% or, 21/2 pats of margarine can increase the chance of heart trouble by 100%.7 Margarine has been on the market for 81 years. For the first time, it has finally been tested on human beings. People that have heart trouble should sue the margarine companies. The taste may say butter, but the ingredients say junk.

The ability to invent, mass produce and advertise these food monsters allows the Food Giants to obliterate their competition. As they become more able to preserve their products and ship them to every supermarket in the country, and as they continue to diversify their product lines, they are in a position to put smaller farmers and food producers out of business. What local potato chip concern could hope to match Procter and Gamble's huge advertising budget for Pringles? Very few, so the consumer may be more aware of a product shipped from across the country than he is of the same product that's been produced across town for decades. As if the disparity in resources were not enough of a blow to small producers, the Food Giants make it a standard procedure to underprice products they wish to bring into a new area in an attempt to drive the local boys out of business. Of course the price doesn't stay down very long after the competition is out of the way, but the ol' one-two punch of mass promotion and price fixing has won another round for the Food Giant involved. The result? Despite the plethora of brand names that are still on the grocer's shelves, a mere 50 companies control 64% of the nation's $800 billion-a-year food market. The executives of a Food Giant may brag to their stock­holders that their ultimate sales goal is to be number one, but their real competition worries have been eliminated. Naturally they can blow $5 million on a lousy tainted cereal; when your sales are in the billions, who cares?

Of course, even a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign is insufficient to convince the consumer that some of the chemical-and sugar-filled glop the Food Giants produce actually tastes like real food! The Food Giants realize this, but they have found an interesting ploy to distract the consumer from the horrible taste and worse nutritional value of their products. When was the last time you saw a cake mix advertised on the basis of its natural taste or wholesome ingredients?

Instead, we are assured that the cake is "super-moist," as though water and fat content were the real hallmark of a good cake. Catsup producers have long given up the hope of convincing you that their brand tastes more like tomatoes than brand "X," but they go all out to sell you on the fact that their catsup takes more time to drip down an inclined plane than the competitor's. Fast-food chains have nearly abandoned using descriptions of their food in advertisements. Now chains like McDonald's and Burger King fill their ads with clowns, puppets, NinjaTurtles, jingles and magic. What they are trying to market is fun, not food.

All of the above are examples of how the Food Giants, having discovered that they can no longer sell the quality of their products, are trying to change the criteria upon which people base their food choices. One would hope that consumers could see right through such ploys. Unfortunately, the Food Giants have discovered to their glee that people can be made to care more about Ronald McDonald than about eating a good meal. Is it any wonder, then, that the consumers have been trained to happily stuff themselves with billions of dollars worth of poison each year?

If the food engineers were ignorant of what they were doing, uneducated in the effects of vitamin-destroying heat and pressure on food or the physical damage caused by megadoses of sugar and chemicals, they might be forgiven, if not excused. But the majority are like Dr. Nesheim, who was then director of new research and vice-president for scientific development at Quaker. He is a robust and healthy individual, and you can tell by looking at him that he puts the principles of good diet to practice in his own life. But I once asked Dr. Nesheim what he thought of the nutritional content of some of the foods Quaker produced. He laughed nervously and asked, "How do you define nutrition?" It is just as hard to make waves in the food industry as anywhere else, and the junk-food mongers are not the only people giving out good jobs and promotions to bio­chemists. So the people who should know better play along.

One of the more bizarre projects that went on during my term of employment at Quaker will illustrate what the corporation's true priorities are, as well as the great lengths to which the company will go to keep what it considers its really important work "top secret."

This project was going on in the packaging department, and the Pentagon would have been impressed by the security measures that veiled it. No outside employees were allowed in any of the rooms in which the project was taking place, and if you happen to bungle into one of the secret chambers, even by mistake, you could be fired on the spot. When the packaging people went on coffee breaks they were not allowed to fraternize with anyone else in the building. This went on for months, and it wasn't until almost a year after I left Quaker that I found out what the all-important, top secret project actually was. They were trying to put a flip top on cereal boxes! The researchers ran the box through a battery of tests: They jostled the boxes in mechanical jostlers to see how the box would survive shipping; they put the boxes in coolers and ovens to judge the effects of temperature variation; they opened, resealed, opened, resealed, opened and resealed them. It was quite obvious to me that they cared an awful lot more about how the box would perform than how the stuff inside was going to perform in people's bodies.

One of the projects I worked on at Quaker was the development of a soy protein snack bar. The idea was to design a product so that two of these bars would provide a person with all the protein he or she would need for breakfast. After very little work we found that it was easy to make a good tasting, nutritional breakfast bar. After I worked on the bars, they were so filling and satisfying, a person couldn't finish more than one at a meal. This meant that a box of breakfast bars might last a family a week. That would be bad for sales. The project was dropped immediately. It was determined that people would not buy enough of the product to generate the large profit margin Quaker wanted. They wanted a cheap product that would have phenomenal sales.

I call this attitude, which pervades the food industry, the Conspiracy of the Sales Curve: What sells the best determines what will be produced and how it will be marketed. That's true for all industries, of course, but making sales increases the top priority is especially dangerous in the food industry. If a product were to taste, smell or look bad, or if it were especially inconvenient to prepare, people would stop buying it and the company would eventually stop making it. Consequently, these products seldom reach the production stage, much less the grocer's shelves. But if any product were changed to provide a good source of nutrition and was satisfying enough to "stick to your ribs," the sales curve might also show decreased consumption of the product; people just wouldn't have to eat as much of the stuff to be full. This would be judged by the company to be a bad change, and if such a healthful change were to make it into production, it would not last long. An example of this is Kellogg's Concentrate (made in the 1970s), one of the best break­fast cereals Kellogg's or anyone else ever produced. It contained an unusually high proportion of protein and other nutrients and was very filling, which was one of the reasons it sold in such a small box. And precisely because people didn't have to buy as much as, say, Sugar Pops, the product was taken out of production.

Unfortunately, the consumer is playing right into this con game. He's like the guy at the carnival who gets pies thrown at him for a living: He just stands there and takes it. Let's assume a person is used to having one bowl of corn flakes for breakfast. One morning he tries a new cereal, perhaps corn flakes coated with sugar. Because this processed sweetener stimulates his appetite (I explain how this works in Chapter 4), he finds himself eating two or three bowls. "Wow," he tells himself, "this stuff is really good — I can't stop eating it!" While he's actually getting more empty calories and fewer healthful proteins and complex carbohydrates, he thinks that he's found a better breakfast cereal. 'You can't eat just one" is, unfortunately, more than just a sales pitch. It is the watchword for how the Conspiracy of the Sales Curve is starving the American people.

I don't mean to suggest that this is an overt conspiracy or that there are memos floating around the offices of food company executives that read, "Make the stuff less nutritional so it will sell more." In fact, there are probably not many people in the food industry who realize what is happening. The people in the industry think they have the best intentions in the world: to make what the people want to eat. And if the people buy more of a product they've tinkered with, they're gratified; they think, "We've done the American public a favor." Researchers are praised and promoted when they make changes that improve the sales of the product, and with alarming frequency those changes amount to adding sugar, fat and appetite stimulants and processing out fiber and nutrients. It is the most costly form of "planned obsolescence"— it's taking place in your own bloodstream. It's making your body fat and obsolescent.

I don't want you to get the idea that Quaker Oats is the only food manufacturer that is involved in pushing nutritionally worthless foods. As a matter of fact, despite all the shoddy practices I witnessed while at Quaker, I learned that the other breakfast food companies were even worse! At least Quaker was making some attempt, if only a half-hearted one, to produce some nutritional foods like Oat Bran. But the others—Kellogg's, General Mills and the rest — had long ago given up on making anything but fast-selling junk. Quaker's Oat Bran really does help people lower their serum cholesterol. It just isn't the miracle food their promotion depart­ment made it seem.

The Quaker Oats Company moved me to the small town of Manitowoc, Wisconsin, where a local grain-malting research plant had the right kind of pilot-plant facilities for continuing my work of making a nutritional product from the waste materials resulting from making rolled oats. My distance from the rest of the company allowed me to work where I didn't have to waste my time taste-testing and where I could still nourish the naive hope that my work was leading to better nutrition for the consumer. I continually wrote reports on my work and its possible applications but the company didn't respond. Finally I made an appointment to meet with some of my overseers in Barrington with another one of my detailed reports on making protein concentrate. I walked into the meeting room and handed copies of the report around to the gentlemen gathered there. They didn't even look at my report this time.

"Paul," Dr. Bob Jones began, "we want to get down to brass tacks."

What was he talking about? I thought I always had been down to brass tacks. My research had been innovative and productive, and I had gone out of my way to make my reports informative and free from fluff and hyperbole. But I was refusing to play along, refusing to become another worshipper of the almighty Sales Curve, and as a result the devotees in their executive offices had little use for my research results. I didn't have all of this conceptualized at that point; I just sat there while another man in a pinstriped suit was telling me that my promising project was being cancelled, and that I was out of a job.

'With your attitudes," he said, "I'm sure you'll never work in the food industry again." They blackballed me and I couldn't even get a job interview in the food industry for the next three years.

Although my fellow employees at Quaker felt sorry for me that I had lost my job, they were generally of the opinion that my hopes of getting the industry to produce nutritious foods were "pie in the sky." I was beginning to have some apprehensions also. It was a rather depressing thought that the only way I could make a living in the food business was to develop worthless foods, foods that I couldn't let my children eat. My prospects were appearing gloomier all the time, and, as I drew my last pay in the early autumn of 1972,1 was seriously wondering whether I ought to abandon my dreams of saving the world and join the corporate fold. I had three children at home, and though our house was paid for I didn't have the slightest idea what I would do to earn money to feed and clothe my family.

Yet I still had two things going in my favor. Since both Tenneco and Quaker had abandoned the protein processes I had developed for them, I had the right under patent law to perfect the design and obtain the rights to it for my own use and profit. And I still had my do-good attitudes and a lot of brash confidence in myself and my dreams. So I decided I would give the thing one more try. If Tenneco and Quaker were too impatient and profit-hungry to market a cheap, nutritious foodstuff, I would do it myself, working alone in my basement, while looking for a job. If I couldn't get a job, then I would market the process on my own. Surely some corpora­tion, somewhere, would believe in my work if I could convince them of its worth. So, with nothing but my personal savings accounts to work with, I set out to fine-tune my research into a patentable process.

This presented several problems. Because I wasn't associated with any research outfit or university, I was eligible for none of the usual grants. My wife had to be dismayed that our recent prosperity had been shot down the tubes while I pursued a seemingly impossible dream, but she knew she couldn't talk me out of it, so she understandingly didn't try. The situation was perhaps toughest on my three children, who were then ages 5,7 and 9. Other kids could brag about their daddies being policemen or machinists or store clerks; but it's pretty hard to explain to a 7-year-old that you're synthesizing single-celled protein from industrial waste, so what could my children say? The best they could come up with was, "My daddy works in the basement."

Luckily it didn't take me too long to put the finishing touches on another ver­sion of my protein fermentation process, this time based on whey, the cheese byproduct that is as hard on the lakes and streams it's dumped into as it is on the waste-disposal budgets of the dairy manufacturers . When I had the last bugs worked out and detailed plans for industrial use drawn up, I went to Washington, D.C. and hired a patent attorney to file claims in the United States and Canada patent offices. I knew nothing about the legalese or jargon required in a patent application, so I looked up another patent for a similar process and just made the changes necessary to adapt it to the details of my own work. It worked out well, but it turned out that my process was a little too similar to the other for the liking of the guy who held the patent on it, and my lawyer was drawn into an extended debate with the patent office to prove that my process was significantly different enough to allow a new patent to be issued on it. We won, but not before the legal fees had put a severe drain on my already dwindling resources. When the patent came through in the summer of 1973,1 had doubts as to whether my funds would last long enough to make it pay off.

I continued my laboratory work, though, and when I had produced a large enough sample of the whey protein I sent it to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation in Madison, Wisconsin, for nutritional testing. The institute does testing for many of the major food corporations, but since I was an alumnus they offered to do the complicated task of nutritional analysis for me free of charge. As if this weren't enough luck, I met and got to know Dr. Elizabeth McCoy, an internationally acclaimed bacteriologist at the University of Wisconsin, who had been doing doctoral work in her laboratories. She was also a very wealthy person, due to fortuitous inheritances and wise investments, and she made a practice of helping independent researchers who were doing impor­tant work. Dr. McCoy graciously offered her assistance, and I eagerly accepted.

About this time I was anxious to see my newly patented process put to good use, so I travelled to New York to meet with Edward Juhls, then head of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's protein division. He was also in charge of protein distribution for several other UN organizations, and I was told by the people I contacted at the UN that he was the man to see. I explained my process for making protein out of various waste products, showed him how fundamentally simple and inexpensive it was, and enthusiastically told him that my process would allow people in under-developed areas of the world to make all the protein they needed for themselves. But Juhls explained to me that, as good as my plan sounded, there was really nothing he could do about it; the United Nations has no resources for buying food or building plants, he said, but merely serves as a distribution center for food and tools donated by various nations and organizations. "Now then," he said, "if you could donate a supply of the product, we could surely find some use for it...." Of course, there was no way I could do that. I was unemployed, with a family to support and a dwindling bank account. For all my grand hopes and good intentions, I had accomplished nothing except to spend a few more of my disappearing dollars on train fare.

I had one last hope: to manufacture the stuff myself, on an actual industrial scale, and then either sell the protein or the process. Dr. McCoy agreed to put up the financial backing, and the White Clover Dairy in Hollandtown, Wisconsin agreed to furnish the whey and let me set up my equipment on their premises. In fact, the owners of White Clover Dairy were very enthusiastic, and hoped I could develop the process enough to build a plant; they would rather give the whey to me than pay to have it disposed of. I drew up specifications, ordered the necessary material, had the needed equipment built and in a few months I was in production.

I do not want to give the impression that this was a surething proposition. There is a great deal of difference between working with small amounts of relatively pure ingredients in a laboratory and deal­ing with huge quantities of whey in the less-controllable atmosphere of a cheese factory, especially when delicate microorganisms are involved. The whey had to be monitored constantly, because it varied greatly in both quality and in the pollutants it contained. One load might be contaminated with antibiotics, the next with pesticides, the next with fecal matter. But the strain of microbes I was working with proved to be hardier than I suspected, and withstood the fluctuating conditions of the real world as well as they had survived in the laboratory. The real problems were with the machinery; much of it was custom-designed, and several modifications had to be made before it would work evenly and properly. I spent many a long night baby-sitting my contraptions, but before long the equipment was turning out protein by the pound.

I had to come up with a snappy name for my product, one that would have some sales appeal to it — I couldn't call it "dead yeast." I christened the stuff Royal Protein Flour, and in the summer of 19741 began the arduous task of contacting food com­panies to find out if any of them could use the high-protein supplement in their products. The names of the corporations I got in touch with will be familiar to anyone who shops in supermarkets or watches TV commercials: Nabisco Food Company of New York, Procter and Gamble (I wondered if they could use it in Pringles), Pillsbury, Beechnut Baby Foods, Crescent Baking Company, Johnson Food Company in Milwaukee, Adams Snak Food Company in Beloit, Rippin' Good Cookie Company in Ripon, Geyser Potato Chip Company, and many others. I tried almost every major and minor food company I could find, and everywhere I got the same reply: "Well, we'll think about it and get back to you." Whether they ever thought about it or not, they never did get back to me.

By the spring of 1975, it had become obvious to me that there was no way I could continue my work. I had contacted hundreds of people and had gotten no positive responses anywhere. My money was gone, yet I couldn't bring myself to ask Dr. McCoy for financial support for my family. My hopes of doing anything with this protein miracle had been completely dashed. It looked like I wouldn't be able to feed myself, much less the starving millions of the world. By April, I was down to my last $10,000 treasury bond, and I didn't have the slightest idea what to do next.

NOTES

1. Daniel Zwerdling, "The Food Monsters," Progressive. March, 1980, p. 22.
2. Jim Hightower, Eat Your Heart Out: Food Profiteering in America (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc. 1975), p. 74.
3. Zwerdling, op. cit.
4. Zwerdling, op. cit.
5. Hightower, p. 106.
6. Zwerdling, op. cit.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Frequently Asked Questions

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Frequently Asked Questions 

  What is the difference between normal fatigue and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?
Nothing much on the first few days. Normal fatigue is the feeling of exhaustion which is usually caused by physical exertion, mental stress and sickness.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, on the other hand, is a group of symptoms or conditions that result to various other symptoms such as decreased mental acuity and flu-like illness and excessive fatigue. A type that will not afford its sufferers with enough energy to move freely. The difference between the two is demonstrated once full-blown symptoms occur and when they last for at least 6 months, that's when it becomes chronic.

• What are the symptoms of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?

There are various symptoms of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and in order to determine the presence of this condition, a patient must possess at least four of the following: post-exertional malaise which persists for more than 24 hours, muscle pains, joint pain, sleep difficulties or sleep that does not lend energy to the individual, frequent severe headaches, sore throat that is persistent and recurring, decreased mental clarity, poor memory and impaired concentration, and tenderness of the lymph nodes that are located in the neck and armpit.

• What are the causes of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?

While the exact causes of CFS are not yet identified, there are strong indications that cause can be divided into three types: immune system-related, viral and non-viral pathogens and stress-related. There are also indications that CFS is triggered by the combination of these causes. For some people, the onset of the condition begins after contracting an infection; for others it begins after a prolonged period of exposure to stress.

There are also some patients who had weakened immune system which made it easier for the symptoms to develop and progress to worse conditions. Current studies are trying to find out whether genetics, emotional distress and immunological conditions are related with the disorder.

• Is there a cure for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?

As of yet, cures for CFS are still being developed. Thus, treatment for the condition is basically focused on alleviating the symptoms.

• What are the treatment options?

There are several types of treatment options available for patients of CFS which are roughly divided into four categories: medical treatments, alternative treatments, supportive treatments and lifestyle alterations. Under medical treatments are the medications and drugs that are prescribed to alleviate symptoms such as pains, headaches and psychological stress caused by CFS. These include pain relievers, NSAIDs or Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs, Anxiolyticagents, Autonomic nervous system stimulants and antidepressants.

Natural, herbal and hormone supplements are commonly used under alternative medicine. Relaxation techniques and behavioral techniques are used in supportive treatments while lifestyle alterations basically help patients change some aspects of their lives to establish relief from debilitating symptoms.

• How is diagnosis made?

Since there are no laboratory, diagnostic and medical examinations and tests that are used in the diagnosis of CFS, health care providers use the principle of exclusion in determining the presence of the condition. Through this method, all diseases, illnesses and conditions that are known to have symptoms similar with CFS are ruled out. Diagnosis is only made once the symptoms of the patients match with the case definition. 

• Where can I get help?

You can get help from health care providers who are knowledgeable in diagnosing and treating CFS are the best people patients could go to. Support groups for patients of CFS are also available.

Chronic Fatigue Diagnosis

Chronic Fatigue Diagnosis

  Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, more commonly known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is a disorder or groups of disorders that is characterized by the onset of fatigue that persists for more than 6 months. It is characterized by a host of symptoms that range from muscle and joint pains to decreased ability to perform even the least demanding activities.

This syndrome is diagnosed by examining the symptoms of an individual against two groups of symptoms which are commonly demonstrated by CFS patients.

The first sign that healthcare professionals look for is the persisting chronic fatigue that is not related to any other condition that results to exhaustion. Tolerance to fatigue among CFS patients is very low, thus they get severely exhausted after performing even the simplest and least demanding of tasks. In fact, it is not uncommon for CFS patients to move from one place to another without feeling drained.

Most of them also get sick for several days to several weeks after performing minor activities. Most of them also exhibit flu-like symptoms after performing low intensity tasks.

The second criteria for establishing the presence of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is the onset of four of any of the following symptoms: myalgia or muscle pains, arthralgia or joint pains in multiple locations, head aches of more serious severity, persistent soar throat which recurs, tenderness of the cervical and axillary lymph nodes, impaired short-term memory and concentration, malaise which is experienced after physical exertion, and sleep disturbance.

Other symptoms that healthcare professionals look for are abdominal pain, bloating, dizziness, nausea, chronic cough, chest pains, shortness of breath, dryness of the mouth and eyes, weight loss, onset of minor and major psychological problems  such as depression, anxiety, irritability and panic attacks, diarrhea, alcohol intolerance and skin and tingling sensations.

Diagnosis is facilitated only after all conditions that are known to produce the aforementioned symptoms are ruled out. In general, healthcare professionals encounter difficulty in diagnosing chronic fatigue syndromes due to the similarities and generality of symptoms it presents. Apart from the fact that fatigue is a common result of many diseases, it is also a very common sign of most chronic conditions. CFS also presents no symptoms that are visible and obvious enough for easy identification.

On top of these, there are also no diagnostic and laboratory tests that can help in establishing the presence of the disorder. Patients of CFS also display varying symptoms and level of severity which makes most patient experience differences in symptoms and severity. However through exclusion of the following factors, most doctors can arrive at a diagnosis:

1. The presentation of identifiable conditions that result to fatigue and decreased level of activities. Most doctors look for symptoms of hypothyroidism, a condition wherein the thyroid produces lower levels of thyroid hormones. Other notable conditions that may exhibit symptoms similar with CFS are lupus, Lyme disease, multiple sclerosis, bipolar disorder, mononucleosis or kissing disease, depression and diabetes.

2. The usage of medications that result to fatigue. Obviously, there are a number of medications, drugs and substances that can cause physical exhaustion.

3. Recurrence of previous diseases, disorders and illness that can produce extreme exhaustion such as cancer.

4. Substance abuse, more specifically excessive alcohol consumption.

5. Obesity which is defined as having a Body Mass Index (BMI) or more than 45.

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