in Hayden's blog that meat producers in the US feed arsenic to chickens as an approved additive. Arsenic promotes growth, kills parasites and improves pigmentation, indeed it is the next miracle food. I said it to my broker only the other day, Tarquin I said, the future's in arsenic so buy arsenic futures. My friends say, Dan, much more of this and you'll have no future, but what do they know, the fools ha ha ha, ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha...
I've also discovered that tincture of arsenic taken before breakfast can settle the bowels and calm the innards. Can prepare a person for the day, even if it might be their last.
Of course the food industry in Europe is not beyond reproach in this regard. A recent Food Safety Agency investigation showed 25% of chicken flocks in the EU were infected with salmonella. And doesn't this just demonstrate the yawning gap between the US and Europe? Amerca, bold, brash believes in poisoning its customers directly whereas European food manufacturers prefer more indirect means. Why kill em stone dead when you can make them linger? Linger longer spenda casha. Hmmm, might sell that slogan, make some dosh, buy more futures before what's left of mine runs out.
15 comments:
now and then I foolishly think that any food raised in GB or Europe must be raised more sanely. then I recall mad cow and wonder.
I think, in general, your controls/laws are better.
Today a friend from China cautioned me to never eat food from there - only from Taiwan. She moved here at 10 - but learned to beware of the food from her parents. Even when they go 'home' they try not to eat anything they haven't seen freshly prepared: they are too afraid of contaminants - bleach, rat poison, you name it.
aughhhhhhh!
I have seen the future, and it is vegetarian.
This is the price for having the ability to buy food at a store instead of foraging it for yourself.
Hayden,
Capitalism again you see. The history of food adulteration is long and nasty and certainly not solely a modern phenomenon.
Zinnia,
Great idea except I like eating meat as well as veg. Fruit and veg are not without their problems either, organo-phosphates, pesticides. The food industry also poisons fruit and veg. The problem is not veg versus meat, it seems to me, but the capitalist production process where profit is king and that applies to both meat and flora.
K,
I don't think the adulteration of food is a price we have to pay for not foraging. Already the world exists on a food surplus. Canada and the US grow enough cereals between them to feed the world now. We live in a world of plenty, it's market economics that makes scarcity in the same way as it's market economics that adulterates food.
I see it differently. I see it as a consumption problem - people who don't care what they put in their mouths as long as it's the cheapest thing on the shelf.
want it cheap? the factory farms will oblige. It may poison you, but hey - customers aren't asking for health.
Hayden,
I can't be a great surprise that people with little money eat what they can afford. Here in the UK the organic food industry is too small and expensive for most people. Yet survey after survey show that people are aware of the issues and are particularly sensitive to them. Last year a famous chef, Jamie Oliver did a series of tv programmes about school dinners where he showed that children were being fed factory food, mechanically recovered meat etc. He showed coca cola and pepsi had been stuffing schools with their high sugar drinks. There was an uproar because people don't want their children poisoned. What many people didn't know, because they were children at the time was that Margaret Thatcher practically did away with the rules on food safety and nutritional guidlines in the early 1980's. Now school's have started to cook once again on the premises, there are tighter rules on fat, sugar and salt and mechanically recovered meat is banned from schools. We've had foot and mouth, salmonella in the chicken population, bird flu, factory farming of fish polution etc so the issue is high in people's minds. It was not the consumer who decided to feed rotten chicken to chickens that led to salmonella, it was not the consumer who fed sheep to cows that led to BSE, it was not the consumer who decided that using high pressure hoses to strip the last morsel of meat off bones was a good idea. It was the manufacturers. In Eric Schlossers Fast Food Nation he describes the disgusting working practices in US abbatoirs and the economic rational behind that. The rational is profit, it is not consumer health or consumer wellbeing. The bosses of these companies, if you read what they say privately to each other are very clear, profit is king. Tell me how consumers, who are not a collective and generally have little political or economic confidence are meant to respond?
there are those who chose between scant food and scant heat. These are the truly needy who can't afford decent food. Then there is everyone else.
It seems to me that "everyone else" ie, the majority, prefers to buy designer tennis shoes, subscribe to a billion tv channels and buy electronic gadgets rather than to eat properly.
Before the turn of the 20th century, most people in the "developed world" spent 1/4 of their income on food; today the number is in single digits. That is a choice. Prior to the turn of the 20th century most folks made do with one - possibly two - changes of clothing. There are always trade-offs; deciding that it is more important to take vacation than fund decent food for the school lunch program is one. I don't know how it is in the GB, but here school funding is routinely voted down.
In the US coke and candy bar manufacturers weren't predators looking for innocent, unknowing victims. Here the schools invited them in for - well, not profit, because schools don't make profits. For income. Here the parent teachers association has great power - where were they? Ignoring it, because they too wanted the "free" income to fund programs the community was too cheap to pay for. My guess is that they excused it because they fed their kids the same garbage at home.
Here there are enough people demanding organic food - originally at high prices, but still coming down - that the big box stores and even WalMart are providing it. And thereby driving the price down further. It takes time, but just as folks got together in GB to decide what their kids should eat in school, folks can get together to decide what they will eat at home. Companies, needing to sell product or die, will follow the lead of the consumer.
I'm not a victim. It's the job of the electorate in a democracy to be informed, and to clamor for something better when they find it important to do so. Thatcher was elected, Reagan - who famously declared catsup was a vegetable when in a school lunch and got blasted nationwide for saying so - was elected, Bush was elected. You and I might think they are all crap, but then we do what we do: we talk to our friends, we post. We try to sway opinion.
I'd like to be sufficiently in the majority to influence public opinion to demand better regulations. I suspect that whatever is approved, I'll have found more problems and be clamoring for improvement. And complaining.
But that is being an active member of a democracy. this is the way democracies behave.
I'm baffled by your positioning of consumers as victims.
Hayden,
Haven't forgotten this, just not had a moment to reply...
xx
{with a nod to Kurt Vonnegut}
Q: What are you up to these days?
A: Oh, not much. Just slowly committing suicide by sandwich.
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I actually think both Hayden and Dan have good points. It is possible to be very poor and eat both well and healthily. But it is very, very hard work and time consuming.
Cheap food is one of the scourges of the modern world. It's not just the health issues, it's the food miles; the financial pressures on farmers/producers; the exploitation of the developing world; the exponential concentration of wealth to TNCs etc etc etc.
Meh. Modern life is rubbish.
Hayden,
Finally got a moment to do your post some justice. Where to begin? I think that the world views that you and I possess are diametrically opposed. Your starting point is the individual (or consumer) and it seems to me that from here you look outwards to see the individual as having more influence than they really have. The problem of understanding the world from an individual perspective is it tells us nothing about the circumstances within which individuals exist, it tells us nothing about the context within which people make choices. It tells us nothing about the wider world, its tells us nothing about the stage upon which (to use a Shakespearean metaphor) the individual acts, all we see is the player. Everything therefore is down to individual choice and if some are poor and make poor choices surely therefore it must be their fault for they are actors, they make choices. Indeed once we've ascertained the individuals opinion (through their action) there really isn't anything more to know. However this view leaves so much out, like a spotlight it ignores everything else, indeed so poor is this view it can't even acknowledge that we're in a theatre that we exist in a context, a social context.
I think the world is more complicated than that. I think the world, a capitalist world is structured in such a way that the vast majority, and we are talking biliions here, lose out whilst a tiny minority profit in obscene ways.
Even when you make reference to a majority it is not the real one. Add up all the people who live in the 'wealthy' west, say Europe and the US and they still make up a minority of the world's population. The majority of the world's population get by on a couple of dollars a day, and that's whole families. The majority of the world's population live with the most extremes of poverty, a manufactured poverty. It is not natural. It is a consequence of an economic system where production is not geared to meet human need but is geared to meet a minority's greed. We live in a world of abundance, in energy, in food, in transport. The productive agricultural power of the US and Canada alone could feed the whole world and still leave a surplus. The industrial power of Europe and the US could provide all the world's technologcal needs on their own. The capacity of 5 billion people to transform the world for the betterment of all is not beyond those 5 billion people. So what stops them? Not individual greed for the majority are so poor they haven't even reached a level where they might experience such a thing as greed. These people don't so much live as survive.
I think it's important to name this economic system that exploits so many and really benefits so few and it's called Capitalism. And in capitalism there is no future without profit. No profit, no future and to hell with the rest of us. And so it is for the billions who starve in this world of abundance just so the rich can get richer. Not only is this unjust but it's undemocratic.
You mention Reagan and Thatcher and how the majority voted for them when in fact the majority did not vote for them. In the US the majority didn't vote at all. As I understand it the majority of the US franchise has not voted since the 1940's and the turnout gets lower at each election. The last figures I saw, which were for Bush's last election, showed a total turnout of close to 30%. I'm sure it was around that figure. That is to say approx two thirds of all voters stayed away. Hardly suprising when both the Republicans and Democrats represent the rich.
We have a similar situation here in the UK. Turnouts are diminishing and I think less than 40% of the franchise turned out to vote at the last general election. Now you might say, well that's democracy for you and I say, well that's a type of democracy for you. But it's not the only type of democracy. In the UK we had to fight for the vote (as did you in the US, indeed you had a revolution in the 1770's as I recall). Winning the vote was such a tremendously progressive step as it represented the end of Royal power, of power by diktat. However the current system only allows us a vote once every five or four years, plus we only get to vote on a whole government and nothing else. So although like you I think voting is important I can understand why many no longer vote when what's on offer are representatives and a voting system that does not deliver. Increasingly the majority of the franchise in the US and the UK are disenfranchised.
I want to say something about education, about diet, and a little more about consumers in response to the points you raise but I'll save it for another day as I think I've gone on long enough. However, I will give my view on those things over the next seven days. What I'm also going to do is look back on how we handled this discussion previously on our blogs, just to see what we said.
xx
Hayden,
Just reading the above and I refer to the greed of a minority. I mean a minority class, the capitalist class. I don't mean you (unless of course you are a millionaire of have independent means to survive if you lose your job etc) However I'll also say a little about class as a definition in the next posts.
And what the big countries don't want get dumped here. It makes me so angry, that we here have bought into the idea that everything overseas is better for us. For example...pesticides. Our farmers today think using pesticide is better, whereas in the past, they didn't use it. Now, our old practise of farming fish in rice lands is not good because of the pesticides.
Hayden,
To continue. Re the consumers as victims thing, I don't find it useful to categorise people as consumers because the term doesn't really tell us anything useful except we are dealing with a person who consumes. The term cannot say anything other than that. I find social class, an economic and political definition much more useful as it situates people in their economic and political context. For me as a Marxist, inequality, poverty, the division between rich and poor are not accidental but arise directly from Capitalism as an economic process. The capitalist process therefore is one the majority are subject to, and given the majority live in poverty are also victims of. Even though I earn a decent wage if I fall ill, or become disabled and cannot work I too will fall into poverty. In that sense I feel victimised by an economic system that is only interested in me whilst I can work, that is only interested in me as a worker and not as a rounded human being with potential to do lots more than labour.
Rapacious Capitalism brings us war, famine, want, it is poisoning the planet, destroying the ground from under us. Look at what Bush and his cronies are doing to Alaska. However, for me the whole shebang is about more than one individual President or Prime Minister. Capitalism is an economic system based on exploitation, it exists only to make profits.
I live in hope for a better world, a more equal and democratic world where meeting need is the driving force not making profit. In this world there'd be unlimited budgets for education and health, in this world we will be healthier because food will be healthier and the democracy that I envisage will be the product of a confident majority. It will be a living democracy, a day to day democracy, a participative rather than representational democracy. In the old Feudal world Kings where God's representative on earth, there was no vote. The vote had to be fought for, indeed the vote was initially won only via revolutionary means in your country and mine. Capitalism, like Feudalism before it is not the pinnacle of human endeavour, it is not the end of history. History will end when war and famine end, when profit ends and a world without poverty, war, famine and inequality is surely a world worth fighing for?
G,
Monsanto the Agri business is flogging genetically modified rice and soy to poor nations. Rice and soy modified so it cannot reproduce, ie it provides no seeds for next years crop so farmers have to buy from Monsanto. They argue that these crops require no pesticides and are free from blight. What is the poor farmer to do? And you're right about dumping on poorer countries the agri businesses, oil conglomerates, chemical and pharmaceutical industries dump all the time. So old ways of living are lost, old methods of production are driven away. Old skills are devalued. Meanwhile the rich continue to get richer. Christmas bonuses to bankers in the City of London amounted to £8 billion pound whereas the latest poverty index should the number of children living in poverty in the UK is rising not falling. Millions of workers this year are being forced to take a below inflation pay rise, (in effect a pay cut) to pay for those bonuses. Fortunately there's a growing anger here in the UK and the number of strike days per year is rising. Me? I will vote to strike when the Union ballots us and not just for a higher wage, I'll also be voting to strike because I remain angry at injustice wherever it is, even in Guyana.
ah well, Dan, we see things differently, and indeed I'm sure we always will.
part of the problem is that we talk about different people. you talk about an amorphous mass of deprived, and I talk about the folks I see around me. I don't live in a wealthy place, in western terms, but I see few who couldn't choose to eat better if they could be troubled to bother to prioritize it over television. Yep, it's gonna cut into tv time to do it, but that's a matter of priorities, isn't it?
So what would happen if all of these people got their s*it together and tossed Monsanto out on its ear?
For one thing, places like Guyana wouldn't be tempted by the "progressiveness" of pesticides. And they would have fish growing in their rice fields again, which would be a win win.
Seems to me that a good part of the problem does start in the west and our corporations - so if the folks in the west paid a little more attention and rejected the crap solutions offered, we'd be causing everyone else a lot less heartache.
I do believe in individuals. I believe that individuals shape societies. I'm guessing that you do too, or you wouldn't be ready to fight 'the system.'
But it seems to me that this abyss in attitudes between us is a pretty standard gap between folks in the US and those in GB and Europe. We have different histories.
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