300 THE CHINA STUDYINDUSTRY'S LOVE OF TINKERING
Much of The Airport Club and the CLA story is a story about the "dark
side" of science, which I detailed in chapter thirteen. But the CLA story
is also about the dangers of reductionism, of taking details out of con-
text and making claims about diet and health, which I discussed in the
previous chapter. Like academia, industry is also an essential player in
the system of scientific reductionism that undermines the knowledge
we have about dietary patterns and disease. Industry, you see, loves to
tinker. Securing patents based on details leads to marketing claims and,
ultimately, to greater revenues.
In a recent paper20 by several CLA researchers (including Professor
Dale Bauman, a long-time friend of the animal foods industry), the fol-
lowing sentence appeared, revealing much about how some industry
enthusiasts feel as we "tinker" our way to health:The concept of CLA-enriched foods could be particularly appeal-
ing to people who desire a diet-based approach to cancer preven-
tion without making radical changes in their eating habits.^20
I know that, for Bauman and others, "making radical changes
in ... eating habits" means consuming a diet rich in plant-based foods.
Rather than avoiding bad foods altogether, these researchers are sug-
gesting that we tinker with the existing, but problematic, foods to cor-
rect the problem. Instead of working with nature to maintain health,
they want us to rely on technology-their technology.
This faith in technological tinkering, in man over nature, is ever-
present. It is not limited to the dairy industry, or the meat industry, or
the processed foods industry. It has become part of every single food
and health industry in the country; from oranges to tomatoes, from cere-
als to vitamin supplements.
The plant food industry got carried away recently when another ca-
rotenoid was "discovered." You've probably heard ofit. It is called lyco-
pene, and it provides the red color in tomatoes. In 1995, it was reported
that people who ate more tomatoes, including whole tomatoes and
tomato-containing foods like pasta sauces, had a lower risk for prostate
cancer,24 supporting an earlier report.^25
For those companies that make foods with tomato products, this was
a gift from above. Marketing people in the corporate world quickly got
the message. But what they zeroed in on was lycopene, not tomatoes.