I now think of my local grocery store as the Chemical and Cholesterol Store. The areas within it (and most stores are designed in a similar way in order to get you to buy more) are these:
1. Simulated Vegetables Section, usually to the right or left as you enter. They call it their Produce Section, but what they sell are items that have the appearance of vegetables and fruit, but are bred to withstand long-distance shipping, have an attractive uniform size, a pretty color, will all reach picking stage (not necessarily ripeness stage) at the same time so they can be picked by machines, and have a long shelf life. Nutrition and taste are not the big considerations.
Imagine that. Food bred without taste and nutrition being primary considerations. Why else do we buy vegetables and fruit? Who would buy products like that?
2. Cholesterol Section (Meat, Poultry, Fish, Milk, Eggs, Butter, Yogurt, etc.), usually at the back and rear sides of the store. All flesh and all animal by-products contain cholesterol, the cause of most heart attacks and strokes (meats are also a leading cause of cancer). They contain no fiber. (Vegetables, fruits, berries and nuts are the opposite; they contain zero cholesterol, but do contain lots of fiber.)
3. The GMO (aka GM) section is my name for the large center area, filled with cans, boxes, and bags which in turn are filled with processed food-like products, 80% of which contain at least one Genetically Modified item, the chemical companies’ varieties of corn, soy, wheat and beet materials (unlabeled as GMO, because chemical companies got Republicans to pass laws to that affect; in Europe GMO foods must be labeled). (The U.S. government has now okayed GMO salmon!) Plus, of course, generous helpings of sugar, salt and fat to feed our corporation-encouraged addictions (“Giving the public what they want!”). Mix and serve diabetes, obesity, internal inflammation and other illnesses.
There are smaller sections tucked in here and there: alcohol, paper, chemical cleaning products and miscellaneous .
When faced with the growing recent public demand for non-chemical, non-GMO, organically grown food, the food giants purchased small organic farms. Some stores carry, often under different brand names, items labeled organic. But for those brands it’s mostly no longer local and small farm organic, it’s corporate farms organic. Recent investigations are beginning to even question how meaningful the labeling “organic” is. (Of course the word "Natural" on a food package has no legal meaning and you should ignore it.)
It’s a pretty repulsive place to me, and certainly not any place that I associate with nutrition or health. Which is not to say we don't shop there for some items (non-GMO soy or almond milk, condensed orange juice, flash frozen out of season berries, organic produce not available at farm stands or our famers’ market, and a few other products.)
A typical grocery store is a branch of a large corporation selling you the products of other large corporations, and the only goal of these corporations is to make more money. Period. The horrors of factory farms (especially poultry and beef) are well known. Some of the same general principles are applied to corporate vegetable and grain farms. Large farmers have little choice but to go along with the system.
Though the phrasing is dramatic, I don’t believe it’s an exaggeration to say that the typical supermarket sells sickness and early death. Further, I don’t believe they think about that, as long as there is short term money to be made.
Their are hundreds of books, thousands of articles, and thousands of scientific studies that support the belief that much of the food sold in most supermarkets makes us sick and leads to early deaths.
One popular source for reliable information is a non-profit web site that covers, almost daily, new scientific studies and puts the data in everyday language. Each year the host, Dr. Michael Greger sums up the findings of that year in a one hour video. It’s fascinating and valuable data that can be used in real life.
The main page: http://nutritionfacts.org/
Two yearly summaries: http://nutritionfacts.org/...
http://nutritionfacts.org/...
Why are these things important to us?
It’s core stuff for you and me: live or die.
And, I was surprised to discover, food choices have large political consequences.
1. Big Ag and huge chemical companies are destroying our land. Many large farmers can no longer grow crops in fertile soil because the soil nutrients have been depleted and the soil isn’t fertile. To get crops to grow they add chemicals. That’s a major contributor to a coming dust bowl, and predictions are it will put the1930s Depression era Dust Bowl to shame. In the 1930s refugees from the Midwest farm belt escaped to California where there was fertile soil and clean water. Where will they go now? Where will be get our food?
Did you know there was a worldwide food shortage crisis seven years ago (2008)? The world’s population doubled from three to six billion people in just forty years (1960-2000) while much of the land for crops, depleted of nutrients, started producing less and less. Food riots are happening more frequently. Governments are being overthrown. Farmers and city folk are becoming refugees, flooding into richer countries, destabilizing economies. But the rich are getting richer, and that’s all that’s important, right? http://www.scientificamerican.com/...
http://www.motherjones.com/...
2. Chemical pesticides have created superbugs that are immune to the existing, strong chemical poisons sprayed on vegetable plants and fruit trees (apples are sprayed 12-24 times a season). The chemical companies responded with “More and Stronger Poisons!” Just what I’m looking for at the family dinner table. Yum-yum.
Part 2-B. Chemical herbicides have created superweeds, which are resistant to the chemical companies’ poisons, and stronger poisons (such as 2,3 D) are now being tried out to see if they kill the weeds. Much of Europe banned Round Up and other herbicides containing Glyphosatge after the World Health Organization classified it as a “probable carcinogen”; American Republican politicians have prevented a ban here. Happy eating!
www.non-gmoreport.org
3. You’ll have to pay far more for your food in the near future – when you can get it – and it will be even less nutritious than it is now. Food prices, not included in the inflation index because they’re so volatile, have gone up significantly (smaller cans and containers, same price) in the last five years. Can you afford for it to get a lot worse? What will it cost? Who’s getting rich (hint: not the middle class)? Ka-ching!
http://grist.org/...
4. Chemical companies control almost all of the commercial seed production of major crops (all GMO seeds) and that means we’re all eating GMO foods. Not much testing has been done on GMO seeds or foods because it’s illegal for anyone but the chemical companies to test them. It’s fine for us to eat them, say the chemical companies, but they’ve worked with the Republicans in Congress to make it illegal to run independent tests. What’s wrong with this picture? Is that right, in any sense of the word?
At least we’d like to know whether or not GMOs are in the food, so we have a choice. Remember having a free choice in a free country? Quaint. If you’d like to be among the informed watch https://www.youtube.com/... If you think the Republican presidential candidates are sharp people, don’t bother.
5. Chemical fertilizers, persistent pesticides and mono-cropping (huge fields of one crop) lead to nutrition and chemical run off. They pollute our ground water, our streams, our lakes and even our oceans, making the water unusable. Some have been found to last for fifty years. Can you afford to pay more and more for a rapidly dwindling supply of drinkable water?
http://www.thewire.com/...
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/...
6. Chemicals, mono-cropping, and varietal choices based on ease of mechanical picking, shelf life, shipping durability, uniform appearance, and flashy color – the keys to the profit of Big Ag and Big Chem – have lowered the overall nutritional value of our food 30% in just the last twenty years and some foods have lost 85% of their nutrition (USDA), making people prone to sickness and early death. Do you want your spouse, your children and your grandchildren to be painfully sick more and more often, and die early? You don’t have to do that.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/...
7. The current market situation strengthens huge right wing chemical and agricultural companies, giving them power over the government and over you. I’m tired of being a patsy.
http://www.nationofchange.org/...
8. The system wastes fuel by depending on mid- and long-distance shipping. A bite of food traveled an average of 1,400 miles from field to plate. Why make right wing oil companies and the Koch brothers richer and more powerful, and why pay to pollute the air with poisonous exhaust when there’s an alternative?
http://www.cuesa.org/...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
9. The current food system is a model of right wing economics, redistributing wealth from the 99% to the 1%, substituting a plutocracy (government by the rich, for the rich) for our democracy. Are you okay with that? Are you registered to vote?
http://www.renaissancealliance.org/...
10. Super sized corporations are now planning your meals. Take charge of this vital part of your life. Don’t just take what they give you; they don’t have your interests in mind.
11. The current situation promotes the torture of animals for money, hardening us to cruelty for profit (their profit, not yours). It’s ugly.
https://www.aspca.org/... or better, do a web search on CAFO.
12. The current situation discourages education, entrepreneurship, and creates low paying jobs with little or no future while diminishing a person’s self-respect. Those that feel financially helpless feel politically helpless. Our food system increases economic inequality. http://thinkprogress.org/...
13. We’re not isolated, and what happens to land, water and food in other countries is already changing America. The largest Chinese takeover of an American company was the $4.7 billion dollar buyout of the world’s largest pork producer, Smithfield Farms. Just in China pollution and development take 2.5 million acres out of production every year, and 10 percent of the land is heavily polluted with toxic metals. So they, and Saudi Arabia and South Korea are buying or leasing millions of acres of land per year in Africa, Australia, The Philippine Islands, Ukraine and elsewhere.
The deforestation of the Amazon is being done to satisfy the Chinese need for soybeans (who needs oxygen?). Our food prices will be determined by Chinese demands for food, and that means more chemical farming and an acceleration of all the problems above. (See The End of Plenty by Joel K. Bourne Jr.)
But even that’s a temporary solution because many basic commodities needed for chemical farming are being mined far faster than they’re being discovered (peak phosphorus! peak sulfur!). The easy finds have already been depleted, and now the cost of mining the remaining minerals is skyrocketing. That means less food worldwide, including your grocery store, and at even higher prices. (See Extraction by Ugo Bardi and the Club of Rome.) How stable will our government be then?
The consumer (you, me) is tricked by misleading product appearances. The propaganda called advertising lulls us into both addictions to harmful amounts of substances such as sugar, fats, salt and cholesterol, and cheats us out of disease preventing and disease controlling food. All for the benefit of the 1%.
Money, not surprisingly, is at the root of it all.
Advertising dollars make the media unreliable.
A quick example: You’re a booking agent for a morning TV talk show. Do you book a Liberal who might say something highly critical of your food advertisers, or a Conservative who won’t even mention the problem – or, if the topic does come up, will support the mega-corporations? Which is the safe road to keeping your job and advancing in your corporate structure? Hmmmmm.
Another example: You’re a research scientist or college professor, driving a new Kia. Another person in the same job lives in a McMansion, is a favorite of the CEO or Dean and drives a Mercedes because he gets grants (and generates donations to the school, or contracts for the business) from chemical companies or giant agriculture/food conglomerates or oil companies, while he just happens to produce papers that support their views.
They’ve got it all covered, papered over with money, and the public remains uninformed and misinformed. And, if Conservative, unquestioning.
Thoughtless shopping makes sick serfs and suckers out of all of us.
The answer is to shop for organic vegetables and fruit at your local farmer’s market, in a grocery store that features local organic food, or at an organic produce roadside stand. Try to cut down or wean yourself off of meat and animal by-products – you’ll also be weaning yourself off of giving your money to the Republicans. (We eat grains – bread, for example – and get a certain number of calories. To get the same amount of calories from beef we need to feed the cattle ten times as much grain. Water consumption to raise that grain and water the cattle is over the moon. Eating meat is astoundingly inefficient.)
The next step is to grow your own food, just like the war time backyard Victory Gardens of the 1940s, or the way many of our grandparents did.
You don’t have to go crazy overnight, and you don’t have to live in the country, but you do have to start. Even something on a small scale, such as planting a vegetable in a container on a balcony or patio, will make a difference in your life. In the meantime eat certified organic, locally grown fruits and vegetables. And vote for the good guys.
It’s literally true, you are what you eat.
Here’s some help: http://www.dailykos.com/...
A Southerner in Yankeeland