When many of us baby boomers started to school there were very few kids with allergies or special needs. My cousin was the only person that I knew who had diabetes. There was one kid in school with asthma. There was one family of kids who were neighbours of mine, who always went to their grandmother’s for lunch because of some food allergy, but their grandmother was an excellent cook, too.
In the 1950s there was very little processed food, very few sprays or chemicals used on crops or animals and only one little drugstore in town which sold more horse liniment than human drugs.
My favourite way to start the day was with a bowl of puffed wheat, a little brown sugar and raw cow’s milk which was about four per cent fat. The cardboard cap on the milk bottle said milk from vaccinated and TB-tested cows. In the winter I started the day with a hot bowl of cream of wheat sweetened with corn syrup.
Charlie Joe had a small farm about five miles from town and every day he milked his goats by hand and delivered goat milk to our hospital. Goat milk was known to be easier to digest than cow’s milk and often fed to newborn babies.
Today, 70 years of progress later, most of our population can eat almost anything. Our food comes from all over the world and a lot comes from factories that process and sometimes add preservatives and food colour — that comes from what?
A lot of treats, as we used to call them, can now be classed as junk food and contain lots of added salt and sugar. I recently read in a scientific journal that sugar addictive as cocaine and legal.
An ever increasing amount of our food is eaten outside the home in restaurants and especially fast food restaurants where most food is fried and has lots of preservatives, salt and sugar added.
Even though the majority of people can eat anything an ever increasing number of us are allergic or are sensitive to something.
Some people are lactose intolerant and cannot digest dairy products. A few years after pasteurization became mandatory for milk, several families arrived at our farm with letters from doctors, stating that members from this family could not digest pasteurized milk but could digest raw milk because pasteurization not only kills bacteria but also kills enzymes necessary for some to digest dairy products.
Some people are gluten intolerant or celiac and cannot eat many different products made from grain. To muddy the waters a little more, many of the grain crops are now sprayed with a desiccant to help dry the grain crop before combining. Some people have reported a sensitivity to even small residual amounts of this spray.
Many schools now have outlawed peanuts or peanut butter because some kids are allergic to nuts. Some people have now found out that they can eat peanuts or even peanut butter if it contains 100 per cent peanuts. Most peanut butter contains vegetable oil for added smoothness and liquid corn sweetener for added sweetness as well as peanuts.
Because some people are sensitive to even small amounts of residual sprays used on many crops — they now have a long list of foods that they avoid.
In recent years we have noticed an increase in: diabetes, autism, cancer, Alzheimer’s, perforated bowel and several other diseases. Why?
Is it too much processed food? Do we get too much sugar and salt? Some salt contains more than salt. Read the label. There are different sources of sugar. Which one do you use or not use?
There has been an increase in chemical and pesticide use. Some have been released and in a few years banned. There has been a trend to use more genetically-modified fish, animals and crops. Some countries have restrictions or outright bans on some or all of these products.
We have witnessed the greatest increase in technology in our lifetime that has ever been recorded. Safe food and clean water are the two most necessary things to the survival of man.
Let’s hope that our scientists and politicians are looking farther ahead than their retirement.
Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon
on land that has been in his family
for generations. gladcrest@gmail.com
