Regular readers know I fancy myself a foodie — part locavore, part organic. And I have been known to be a harsh critic of the industrial food system. (See, for example, here, here, here and here.) So when, over the weekend, I finally got ’round to listening to Part 2 of the Freakonomics podcasts on food, Waiter, There’s a Physicist in My Soup!, I was struck by the simple, obvious, bottom-line fact of the broad benefits of the modern industrial food system:

DUBNER: Go back just a few generations, to America in the 1920s, and you’d be shocked by the state of the average diet.

[Penn State University food scientist John] FLOROS: We did not have all the fruits and the vegetables that we have today. In particular, we did not have those available all year long. There were a lot of preserved foods such as dry material. There were a lot of things that you made and you consumed right away, maybe some cheeses and milks and the like. Uh, some meat, although meat was not as available as it is today, because it was very difficult to grow the animals; and it was fairly expensive. And at the time, not only in this country, but all around the world, there were a lot of diseases that today most people have never even heard of.

DUBNER: Simple food, it turns out, wasn’t always so simple. You might have to check your neck for swelling every morning; make sure you weren’t developing a goiter from iodine deficiency. Thousands of men were rejected from military service in World War I for that reason. And then: we started putting iodine in salt, and the goiters disappeared. Another common affliction was rickets – bowed legs from weak bones. And then: a food scientist in Wisconsin figured out how to get vitamin D into milk.

FLOROS: Lack of vitamins for example — lack of nutrients — were causing a lot of different diseases back then that we have pretty much eliminated today. And the biggest reason that we have eliminated them is the fact that we have plenty of food available, the right kind of food available year — round all over the country — and in most parts of the world actually, not just in this country.

Now, none of this changes my opinion that the food system needs a thorough revamping and, most particularly, our treatment of animals and the land must be radically rethought to be made more humane and sustainable. With the dust bowl in our history you’d think we might have learned.

Still, I found the Freakonomics piece a good reminder of the progress we’ve made.

ALSO worth remembering… I’ve quoted Dubner before. Only to be later appalled by his lazy performance in a radio interview.