The Cost of Convenience

As a preface, I am the biggest hypocrite on this. We do a decent job at shopping consciously, our most important stops are the farmers market and the local Kimberton Whole Foods, but I am certainly guilty of eating processed foods and fast foods. Sometimes after a 12 hour day in the field, the best thing for you is a pizza and that’s just life. However, consumption has always been one thing that I have a love hate relationship with. As much as I demonize processed foods and fast food I once read a critique that enlightened me to some of the benefits of these evils. Mainly in poor urban and rural communities there are food desserts, where getting whole food ingredients is much more inconvenient than getting something at the gas station or drive thru. Not only do these foods supply cheap easy calories, these places also tend to offer entry level jobs that can help people further working careers.

However accessible and cheap these foods are, we all know they are in no way nutritious. A suspicious person might find it quite devious the amount of time, money, and resources spent on researching how to make foods more crave-able taking advantage of our own evolution by exploiting our bodies response to sugar, salt, and fat. An even more suspicious person might link the food system to the pharmaceutical and medical system which are all under “regulation”. Where might we find one such suspicious person? Possibly you after reading this…

I’ll try to start at the beginning of processed foods and grocery stores. To clarify, I will be referring to processed foods in the context of large corporations making food on mass scale, not your local pickler or baker. Grocery stores will be considered chain brands after the 1930s when you could find everything in one location complete with a freezer section. People used to shop from many different vendors for raw ingredients to cook meals at home. Finally one could just take one loop around one store and even buy ready made frozen foods. By the ‘50s you have microwaves and tv dinners at your convenience.

I’m sure the main argument against all of what I will be putting together will be that since the 1930s the average life expectancy has risen from 60 to almost 80. The Social Security Administration claims the biggest factor in the low life expectancy of the early 1900s was due to infant mortality. Most of the health impacts I’ll be referring to happen after decades of eating so babies will be of little impact. When one considers that it wasn’t until the end of 1800s people realized the importance of hygiene on health it could be argued washing your hands and having clean medical facilities plays a good role in modern day life expectancy.

If we are mass producing “food” for chains of box stores where everything needs to be consistent in every way, we had better come up with a way to color all these scientifically created stuff the same way. Certainly we could obtain these from the multitudes found in nature, but that would be inconsistent and costly. So, petroleum it is!

https://www.acs.org/education/resources/highschool/chemmatters/past-issues/2015-2016/october-2015/food-colorings.html

Critics argue eating coal and petroleum by products aren’t great, aye? Where would that get such an idea? Ah, here is some great info from Trish Shea at https://www.foodnerdinc.com/blogs/food-for-thought/artificial-food-coloring-no-thank-you

She already did some great research for us below:

Nice, nice. Everything has a good cartoonish color, that is nice and appetizing. Now, if only everything was sweet enough to be considered dessert… but sugar from beets isn’t cheap. Along comes the popularization of high fructose corn syrup in the 1970s. Perfect, another crop we can subsidize for broad scale monoculture to further incentivize small diversified family farms to scale up or sell out. Shouldn’t be too big of a problem to be consuming a lot more processed sugar, certainly not for the bottom line of big food profiting off of peoples sugar addictions.

Now that we have all these box stores and we have them filled with every color of sugary sweet food stuffs, we really needed to vamp up the agricultural output. In 1974 came glyphosate, a convenient spray that worked as a pesticide and herbicide saving farmers tons of labor and increasing yields. If you look, the regulators and salesman will tell you gyphosate is more safe than what is under your kitchen sink, but is it so? Take a look at the abstract for this study:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2021.763917/full

Oh, what’s that about urine? Associated with intestinal and neurological disease?

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/oncology/cancer-causing-herbicide-found-in-80-of-us-urine-samples.html

Things are going great. Farms are growing and putting out more than ever, but farmers are noticing weeds are becoming resistant to the pesticides. The crops can no longer handle the strength of chemicals needed to keep the weeds down. How can we possibly solve this issue? These chemicals are great. Well, science of course. In 1994 GMO foods hit the scene. The first was a tomato modified at its inception to ripen and soften more slowly so large producers could ship all these consistently sized and shaped and colored tomatoes to all of the consistently sized shaped and colored grocery stores. Where would one find a tomato in the summer otherwise? Gosh.

Anyway, now that we can design plants how WE want, not how they evolve in nature we can go ahead and make them resistant to petrol chemicals and we can even splice insecticides to be produced by the plant itself.

https://ejbpc.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41938-018-0051-2

What could be the risk of modifying the genes of the plants we consume? We’ve already been told its relatively benign to be consuming petrol chemicals, so I’m sure when they tell us eating lab designed foods are safe they mean it for real guys. So what is cancer?

See guys, it’s fine. Cancer is just a genetic disease. Based on… changes… in… genes? Wait, what!? Hold on, hold on. How are they doing this gene modification anyway? Well it is very complicated and I am not a scientist but here is what I gathered. They use a bacteria for a culture and what is known as a Ti plasmid to cut and splice DNA. The Ti plasmid comes from the plant tumor causing pathogen Agrobacterium tumefaciens. The Ti plasmid is used to splice the new DNA to the original. The bacteria is just to culture the new genetically engineered DNA only to be killed off by antibiotics. Let me pick my jaw off the floor as I’m just a moronic laymen but are we relying on a plant pathogen that literally causes tumors in plants, to the point they found it useful for “changing genes”? Tumors… changing genes? And we all have heard of antibiotic resistance have we not? So at one point do these bacteria cultures become antibiotic resistant and enter the food chain? Maybe I’m just a highly suspicious person but that sounds sketchy. Is it sketchy?

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271656390_Agrobacterium_a_potent_human_pathogen

So, I guess that is kind of sketchy. But why on earth would they allow something so questionable to be used so widely? Well, a lot of the world doesn’t…

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-that-ban-gmos

So, we got all these stores owned by a small handful of people. All these farms have grown in size, and shrunk in ownership. The pharmaceutical companies and big agriculture now all rely closely to the petrol chemical industry. We have these very unfortunate studies to our bottom line coming out about the dangers of synthetic agriculture and drugs… I guess we better spend some of these boat loads of profits on lobbying the government of the USA since Europe and much of the world has really put the ixne on the old eneticge odificationme.

https://www.sparklinecapital.com/post/investing-in-influence

Well that was easy. Let’s see how that worked out for us.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2022/09/12/executive-order-on-advancing-biotechnology-and-biomanufacturing-innovation-for-a-sustainable-safe-and-secure-american-bioeconomy/

And just like that. We went from getting whole, organic, local ingredients from a variety of vendors supporting a whole heap of farmers and shops along the way to the government by executive order furthering us into a post organic world run by monopolies owned by fewer and fewer. What is a bioeconomy even? Why do we need to manufacture biology? Why do we need to merge biology with technology? What is soylent green!?

“Conspiracy theories” aside. It is not healthy for us to be consuming large amounts of sugary highly processed foods, it is proven. Artificial flavorings and dyes are unsafe for human consumption. Herbicides and insecticides are bad for people and the environment. Genetically modified, genetically engineered, genetically enhanced, whatever name they are calling it currently it is still relatively new to the scene and should be met with the same scrutiny here as most of the world. And maybe these things would be under scrutiny if the regulatory agencies weren’t bought and paid for by corporations.

What is the merger of state and corporate interests? I’ll let you look that one up for yourself.