The war on food
We’re seeing first hand, the terrible war events taking place in the world and how important food is for everyone living. It’s the gasoline for your body.
But humans, being who they are, the more food can be provided at the least cost to the masses, the wealthier the food conglomerates get. Money is at the bottom of it all.
Food has changed. So has people’s health as they consume processed non-food.
We have to find our own ways to afford food and prepare it.
But how?
It seems once you jump on the processed food bandwagon, it’s hard to get off again. Those tempting-looking packages show food like you would love to serve yourself and your family.
They’re supposed to be the same thing, you see. After all, how could you go wrong with mac and cheese? Or mashed potatoes? Or shepherd's pie? Turns out it’s easy when you buy them. Take a look at the almost-all reveal of ingredients in bought, frozen offerings.
☙ Mac and cheese
Image via VickiW
☙ Mashed potatoes
Idaho® potatoes, sunflower oil, corn syrup solids, salt, mono and diglycerides, sodium caseinate, maltodextrin, natural flavor, dipotassium phosphate, tricalcium phosphate, soy lecithin, artificial color. Freshness preserved by sodium acid pyrophosphate, sodium bisulfite, citric acid and mixed tocopherols.
Contains: Milk, soy.
☙ Shepherds pie
Topping: potatoes (contain sulphites), cream (milk ingredients, dextrose, microcrystalline cellulose, carob bean gum, cellulose gum, carrageenan, polysorbate 80), butter, salt, spice, water, caramel colour. filling: ground beef, corn, onions, butter. sauce: water, enriched wheat flour, beef base (beef, beef stock, salt, flavour, potato flour, caramel colour, corn oil, spices), salt, flavour (contains salt, canola oil), dextrose, spices, caramel colour, garlic powder, onion powder.
When I make these items I know only my limited kitchen-friendly ingredients go into what I cook.
One of my good friends said she was too embarrassed to cook her own cheesy scalloped potatoes, because next to Betty Crocker’s they just don’t match up in taste, and her family doesn’t enjoy them. So this is why!
☙Potatoes
Enriched Flour (wheat flour, niacin, iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), Corn Starch, Maltodextrin, Salt, Onion*, Potassium Phosphate, Modified Whey, Vegetable Oil (canola, soybean, and/or sunflower oil). Contains 0.5% or less of: Whey, Garlic*, Celery*, Cheddar Cheese* (cultured milk, salt, enzymes), Monoglycerides, Lactic Acid, Nonfat Milk*, Calcium Lactate, Color (annatto & turmeric extract), Sodium Phosphate, Blue Cheese* (cultured milk, salt, enzymes), Chicken Broth*, Natural Flavor, Silicon Dioxide (anticaking agent), Buttermilk, Coconut Oil, Pea Protein Isolate, Rice Flour, Spice. Freshness Preserved By Sodium Bisulfite. *DRIED
Are you rolling your eyes as you read my clumsy attempts at warning here? After all, you know your government and its associations would never allow health-endangering substances to be sold in your local food establishments, or do you?
I care, because I’m seeing the destruction of our civilization through the food that goes into their bellies. There’s solid evidence that all the high-tech additives in “convenience” foods have links to cancer. I now have five younger friends with different types of bowel cancer.
This would have been unheard of before all the present day scientific advances in food ingredients. These foods have become so common in our lives that many who prepare them from packages actually think they are “cooking”.
The same chemicals that are found in our processed food are found in cosmetics, paints and glues, plus other products that we wouldn’t really care to eat. It’s estimated that a minimum number of these is 6000.
It’s hard not to write in terms of gloom and doom on this topic. You read about “tipping points” in climate change. More of the same in the plastic and other pollution in the oceans. Can you imagine being a sea creature, forced to try and survive in this far-from-pristine environment?
Or being a farmed salmon, swimming in waste and antibiotics, then bought by consumers because it’s so much cheaper than wild-caught fish?
Seems like I’ve digressed here. After all, this article is about our food, not the battle that sea animals face. It’s worthwhile remembering though that many humans depend on those creatures for our own food. We’re intertwined, no matter which way you look at it.
Groceries are in the news these days. Prices have increased exponentially. It doesn’t take more than one trip to buy food to realize this. Sure, it would be nice if you had unlimited money to buy only organic food, at four times the price of the regular stuff on offer, but comparatively few of us can do that.
At this time researchers and biologists are warning about microplastics. Those are the tiny, pretty beads found in so many products these days. They serve one important purpose for food manufacturers. They add to the weight of products, therefore increasing the profitability for these gigantic corporations.
It’s worth telling you at this point that it’s actually quite impossible to avoid the global mess food manufacturers have inflicted on all of us. Manufacturers, food scientists, marketers and governments do not have our health in mind. The only thing that matters in their world is profit and money. Nothing else.
What I have written here is just a tiny, skimming look at our modern food situation in 2023. It will not get better. The barn door closed after the horse escaped. We’re beyond the tipping point.
From a personal point of view, there are things you can do for yourself and those you care about. You cannot completely avoid processed food or ultra-processed food. Organophosphates mean that even supposedly organic foods can no longer make that claim.
☙ Read the labels. Know that any items on them you aren’t familiar with should make you pause, and possibly find another.
☙ Try to buy sauces, etcetera, in glass bottles. Plastic disintegrates into microplastic pollution that will be a curse for thousands of years.
☙ Try some simple home recipes, made with familiar ingredients in your kitchen. They taste better, and are always way cheaper.
☙ Find folks who know how to cook, and learn to scratch cook from them. Lots of internet folks for this!
Thanks for reading. This affects us all. I’d love to hear your views on scientifically processed food.
Whorled Tickseed (coreopsis verticillata)
This lovely little rock plant grows just under my window in our new home.
It spreads, and is a lovely cheerful yellow. Seems strange, but it’s actually a tough little relative of the sunflower.
Image via VickiW
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