Musings about food addiction

"We think fast food is equivalent to pornography,
nutritionally speaking."

~ Steve Elbert

Fast food is addicting.

My opinion is that one of the ingredients that the food producers call a flavouring, or call a preservative, or a crop pesticide, is in actuality an addictive substance they have discovered in the last 20 years, that is without any specific flavour of its own.
The perfect drug...since everyone has to eat...and you can add it to anything you sell, because its a drug, not a spice and people can't taste it in their food. Oh, well, unless it happens to have a sweet taste, which all humans seem to like anyway.

Then you invest in various weight-loss products, and invest in fashions that require thinness to look right on someone, and you advertise them like crazy, and you have created a mass dysfunction/hypnotism that you can profit on.

My theory is, that we are a most ingenious people. And when food producers wanted to increase their sales, they thought like this, (well, they probably hired researchers who thought like this):

Most people need about 2,000 calories per day to live on. How to get people to eat more than they need to be healthy and look good? Most everybody (with money) is already eating enough. So the only growth in your industry is with population growth. That's too slow to make much money, so how to speed up market demand? Hmm, so -- lets make people grow. Then they are the repositories for your increased production. They can buy it and store it in their fat cells.

As long as people didn't die from it right away, any modifications made can't be proved to be a poison. You can blame the individual consumer for any ill-effects. You blame their "lack of will-power." Who can prove that isn't the real problem?

I have another theory about food addiction.

Let's say we are so ingenious as to find a way to make food animals grow really fast until the age we slaughter them. This makes financial sense, because the faster the animals grow, the quicker we can sell them and make a profit, so we don't have to keep feeding them longer than we have to until they feed us. (I.e., this keeps expenses down, since with this method we don't let them find their own food.) It doesn't matter if the long-term effects of these changes are unhealthy (such as cancer, diabetes, hormonal changes, neurological changes) because the animals never live long enough to develop these diseases.

This can be done by genetic alteration, or just breeding for super-fast growth (naturally produced growth hormones, or artificially low satiation hormones) adding artificial growth hormones, or by using animal feed laced with addictive substances. It doesn't matter what happens to the stuff once it is in the animal because nobody tests for these things after the animal is dead. Its supposed to just disappear because the animal's liver metabolises it... however, there will probably be traces of this in all the animal's parts. And so humans get the same effect over time...growth, excessive hunger.

One of the ways genes are inserted into animal cells to alter them, is by using viruses. What if the virus passes from the animal's body into ours? And creates humans who are altered to have abnormal growth and weight gain?

Oh, yeah, there is a published a research study that shows that overweight people seem too often to have a certain virus in them...wonder where that virus came from.***

Sigh.
We are just too smart for our own good. So how do we know that this isn't true? Rely on the ones who profit from this to tell us its all safe and good for us? How can anyone prove this hasn't happened to our food industry? And if its so, how do we undo this mess?

* I switched to buying all organic foods two years ago. Its sad because there is not a guarantee that there won't be GMO contaminants in them, and some farmer's can't afford to follow the strictest guidelines, and so I buy from farmer's who say they don't use a lot of pesticides, but who is going to be checking on them to make sure?

* I started buying more locally produced food, because it needs less alteration to make it easier to transport and store.

* I started growing my own food in my small urban backyard. The freshest vegetables that I could possibly taste, picked and eaten within the hour. If you haven't ever eaten something that you picked yourself, you should try this. Its decadently good. You can taste the sunshine still in it.

* I started cooking from scratch more, to avoid buying things that people can add stuff to that isn't strictly food. I enjoy cooking so this has been fun.

I figure that if it isn't nourishment, I am not eating it or feeding it to my children -- it isn't going to be something our bodies have to try to figure out how to get rid of after we eat it.

I can't rely on my taste buds to tell me if something is toxic or not any more. There are so many things that have no taste or smell that are toxic these days. Like natural gas (they add that funny smell) radon, lead, aluminum, flouride, carbon monoxide, ozone, radiation.

It used to be that our noses could tell us if food was spoiled before we ate it. Now we have food that can last 20 years...but might not sustain life anymore. Back then, the only thing we had to worry about was naturally toxic plants, like certain mushrooms. We have cleaner food preparation, but its only "clean" with respect to bacteria and viruses. It's not "clean" with regard to its production, delivery and storage.

The thing is, that anything that is made by someone else is open to having anything put into it that regulations will allow. And as far as I know, there are about 4,000 chemicals that can be added to our food.

The methods our great-grandparents used to preserve foods was generally safe, but each has their own problems. Salt is safe, but too much hurts our blood pressure. Canning is safe if done right (if not, there is the risk of botulism,) but years ago cans added lead to our food through the solder. Jar canning is safer than using metal cans, because the metal can corrode, and the plastic lining of some cans can have a toxic chemical embedded in it. Adding sugar stops bacteria, but sugar causes diabetes, dental decay, and other problems. Freezing is great for 6 months or so, but the energy to freeze things is getting more expensive. Fermentation is generally safe if done right, but sometimes the fermentation is supplemented with processing that damages the food enzymes, as in pasteurization.

Extracting parts of food is commonly done, as in getting oil out of olives, but sometimes this is done using solvents which are toxic, like hexane (a type of gasoline) and leave residues in the product.

I remember the time years ago when all that was in the news about food was the mythical "finger found in a can of food" story. Or bugs in stuff. Well, at least the bugs could live on it as much as we could.

But our food doesn't let bugs survive. Pesticides affect a bug's nervous system. I wonder if they die going crazy. I wonder if someone eats too much processed food if they will eventually go crazy from a build-up of these chemicals. I wonder if someone's liver isn't healthy, and they can't remove toxins from the food they eat, does the chemical build up in us?

This sounds paranoid. Oh, oh. I've now come full circle. Maybe its already happened to me...

They say Indian farmers are committing suicide at an alarming rate because of the way farming is practised now. I wonder if it isn't just that they can't make enough money to support their families...I wonder if it is the pesticide exposure. Or exposure to a crop that has had a virus added to it to insert new genes into it.

Its so easy to insert viruses into people these days. Because we have 23 different vaccinations we expect every man, woman and child to insert into their bodies.

These vaccinations are usually not just one virus, they are combinations of several viruses at once. So couldn't they just add one more to change the entire population within one year?

Is anyone looking into this possibility at all? And how to you create enough security to make sure this doesn't happen? A lot of our vaccines are made in other countries...oceans away from us. How closely is anyone watching?

I'm not saying I know any of this is happening. I just see the evidence of it. I know how the economic system in our country works. Its a free market system that is expected to regulate itself, for the most part, and is driven by a so-called "invisible hand" (which is anyone with money to spend.)

To me this just makes sense. Its logical. Its profitable, its possible with our current technology and delivery systems. So if it isn't happening already, then I think its probable.

Its probably mostly legal. All that you need are some really well-paid lawyers and marketers to create a legal smokescreen. And maybe some well-paid lobbyists to make sure it stays legal, and maybe a spin-miester or two. And maybe just to be on the safe side, to fund your own "research" that has a pre-determined outcome or you fire them.

Investments drive invention. But money, the way we invest it, has no soul, no morality, and is so far removed from its ultimate effects that people who invest have no idea what they are truly paying for anymore. It's too easy to hide behind a wall of paper, board members who are investors in what they are deciding on. We mix investments like we mix viruses. Several into one group that people then invest in. Does anyone really follow the money they invest into every combination fund?

Does everyone believe that what is told them on paper is what is really happening with their money? And how would anyone really check for themselves?

* If I was an investor, I would only invest in places I could go visit myself. I would invest in people and businesses I could trust, and not just trust what they say about themselves to get my money.

* If I was a reporter, I would look into this for at least a year, and not let anyone know I was researching it because reporters can get relocated to dangerous war zones.

* I vote, so I can go to my representative and speak about this. I don't stand to loose any money if things go wrong from people investigating things and regulating things.

* I can support people that are speaking up about this...there are those who risk their jobs to talk about it. I would be careful they aren't just other businesspeople who are trying to take pot-shots at their competition.

* I would be careful not to speak of rumours and gossip as if they were truth, with no proof. I would be careful not to spread fear and panic, but to offer practical solutions, and a vision and direction for change, too. And this is why I say here that this is just my opinion, based on what I have seen personally. We are an ingenious people, and if we are smart enough to create a complicated, convoluted, problem, we are smart enough to figure out how to change course, and to find a fix, and to repair some of the damage we have caused to ourselves.

For we are all in this together. Our grocery money and health care money paid for all this, and maybe our grocery and health care budget can be adjusted to pay to find solutions and to implement them.

* I would hope that there is someone in government who still has an interest in public welfare and safety, who could spare some public funds to do independent research by people who are in a safe and well-paid situation to not be susceptible to bribes and corruption.

* And I hope that the people in the food industry that are working so hard to increase food production use some of their profits to self-regulate, and to do honest research about long-term implications, and to educate their employees about the ethics of food production.

*** Reference:

"Boston (SmartAboutHealth) - According to a new study, a virus may be one of the reasons as to why overweight people can gain weight in shorts periods of time, leading them to obesity.

Researchers were led by Nikhil Dhurandhar from the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana as they carried out a study on overweight people.

They looked at overweight people who gained weight in short periods of time, and compared them to people of normal weight.

What they found was that a virus known as AD-36 was present in over 30% of those who were obese.

In those who were of normal weight, the virus was seen in only around 10% of them.

The virus harms the body by causing fat cells to multiply, sparking massive weight gain in a short period of time.

Researchers believe this could be a reason as to why overweight people gain weight quickly."

Voluntary Poverty and Interdependence

"The importance of detachment from things,
the importance of poverty,
is that we are supposed to be free from things that we might prefer to people.

Wherever things have become more important than people, we are in trouble.
That is the crux of the whole matter."

~ Thomas Merton

Ideoforms Note

And wherever things have become more important than the other living things which we share this Earth with, and with the Earth itself, which sustains our lives.

It isn't the materiality of the Earth that is important as such (in terms of ownership of parts of it) -- it is our inextricable connection to it and that we are its trusted stewards. It is the water in which we swim like fish, we don't know we utterly depend on it until we are flopping gasping on dry land.

And so, we must protect the earth and in so doing we are protecting all the others on the earth.

Instead of competing with them for parts of it, we must protect it in spite of our personal interests which, in the end is our personal interest.

The material world is like a baby that two women brought to the wise man to settle a dispute. Both claimed the child as their own. The wise man, after deliberation, said to have his helpers to cut the child in half and give half to each woman. The real mother gave up the child to save its life.

If we tear this world apart, fighting for it, we might end up with a dead world.

In addition,

When our standing in this world, our ego's position, becomes more important than the principles and people we are standing up for, then the position, whether it is attained or not, will mean nothing. The ego cannot judge what is important. It is impossible for it to both exist as a separate identity from all others, and also truly understand the meaning of, and maintain its position amongst those others.

"Food, Inc." Movie Review

I just got back from seeing "Food, Inc." with my sons at our church.

It's been on PBS all week, but I couldn't watch all of it. Its really hard for me to watch it, because it really speaks to me, and I was so affected by the issues it discusses over 20 years ago that I became a vegetarian for 15 years.

It saddens me to see the warnings of 20 years ago become today's realities. I feel somehow responsible, because it is my generation that created this mess, trying to feed the world, and eradicate hunger, and now we have a whole new mess on our hands because with the power to feed the world, also came corruption on the back of greed.

I now feel that becoming a vegetarian was wimping out. It is too passive of an action and doesn't really address the original problems. Vegetarian eating is healthier and helps with meditation, but it isn't an answer to anything.

In movies and television I saw as a kid, people used to make fun of farmers who moved to the city. They were portrayed as gullible and clueless, and became targets of scams. I think that they had the most honorable work -- feeding the rest of us. They should be our heroes.

The way farming is done now is very different and it has lost all its honor. It has become a black box that no one looks inside of.

I had already read two of Michael Pollen's books. I know what he is saying, but watching it on the screen was difficult. This is how black boxes work. We put things that are hard to look at inside the box. Out of sight, out of mind.

The end of the movie lists things anyone can do to make a different world for the future. I have been doing some of them:

The first thing was to have my sons watch Food, Inc. and discuss it with them. I explained that the movie was what guided how I have been shopping for the last few years, so they know why I do what I am doing.

This week I doubled the size of my small urban vegetable garden. I follow organic gardening practices I learned many years ago, but never had any place to garden. I have the tiniest urban lot, but I find that to be no excuse anymore.

A few years back, we were at the Milwaukee Zoo at the farming exhibit. The master gardeners had a very small plot of land next to the barn which was filled with every kind of vegetable possible. It was such an efficient use of the small amount of space that I could see that it was probably going to produce enough to feed an entire family. I don't have much of a green thumb. It's more Chartruse, but if they can do it, I can learn.

Two years ago I began to purchase all of my food organic, and as much of it locally grown as possible. Its more expensive, but if I cook from scratch, the food is much better and the expense is less.

I cook my own food, and we have meals together as a family. I love this part. I started out in college thinking I would never learn to cook because it wasn't that important of a skill. Now I have watched a few thousand cooking shows and I love cooking. Its a very sensual and purposeful thing to do. Cooking for people you care about is a great way to love them.

By cooking more, I can buy what is fresh, looks good and is in season, instead of relying on whatever is "on sale and stale."

The kids and I visit farms.
We go to the Farmer's Markets in the area.
I read labels. We sometimes buy organic meats, free-range, local products.
I am mostly a Pescatarian now, after being an ovo-lacto vegetarian for 12 years, a vegan for one year, and a macrobiotic for one year. I do eat some meat. The word that best describes my eating style is "flexitarian" something I adopted as a label after finding that going back to eating a lot of meat made me feel somewhat sick.

Flexitarian is nice for all those times when people make fun of the various labels that people use to describe how they eat. It isn't about having rigid rules that you follow to somehow save the world or yourself. Eating is mostly a cultural thing. It affects your social life most of all, secondly your health, and then the health and lives of all those who are affected by what you choose to eat.

Green Energy - is there an economical way to get in on it?

The simplest way would be to sign up for a program through your energy company if you have one similar to ours in Wisconsin, called "Energy For Tomorrow." This program allows me to decide any percentage I want of my energy payment to be allocated to Green technology, such as solar, wind turbine and others.

http://apps3.eere.energy.gov/greenpower/markets/pricing.shtml?page=2&companyid=266

This kind of program allows the energy company to do the work of deciding what is the most efficient use of Green dollar investment, and can use the combined money of many energy users to create capacity and build infrastructure that a single energy user could not.

You can advocate for your state to develop a program like this one if you don't already have something like it.

I like to think of Green energy in this way;
you can see your property as a single "unit." Everything coming onto your property is the "inputs" and everything leaving is the "output."

The money you make working determines any variations to the natural inputs and outputs, and you get to decide how to use your dollars to "vote" for what you want to influence in the economy. If you spend your money on an apple grown two states away with lots of agricultural inputs (like pesticides and artificial fertilizers) then you are "promoting" this type of business and trade. If you plant an apple tree, you get apples that 1. don't need to be transported from 2 states away, 2. don't need chemistry to help them to grow in a large scale monoculture (unless you apply it to your own apple tree.)

So, (inputs) your property gets sunlight, rainwater, ground water, wind and can grow things native to that area with little help. If the property was undeveloped and you just lived there under a tree and only ate what grew there, you would have the lowest possible carbon footprint, provided you didn't cut down all the trees for firewood and changed the ecosystem entirely. You could burn a dead tree, cut a few living trees but keep planting others, in other words, manage the ecosystem to keep it somewhat stable while including your presence. (Just like the other animals.)

As output, its everything you leave to others to deal with. Ideally, you minimize this as much as possible. You can produce energy for your neighbors by using your property to generate some kind of energy, and also gain income from this. Here, sustainability is the key. If you simply move in and cut down all the trees, dig up all the coal under the ground, drain the oil, and sell whatever can be sold, like the rocks (a quarry), the topsoil, and capture/kill the animals on it, then this is all non-renewable, because when its gone, its gone. If you generate pollution and waste that needs to be dealt with by your community through a municipal dump (storage), or air or water pollution, you are putting costs onto the community, as well as the environment. This includes if you produce food using toxins that later have health repercussions on others (your farm workers, those consuming your product, yourself and family.)

My local co-op has a zero garbage challenge. The idea is to commit to a certain period of time where you produce zero garbage that goes into a landfill. This is a fun exercise to try. Its very "eye opening."

You first carefully purchase only things that have minimal residual garbage left after its use. You use up the product to the end of its practical "lifespan." Then you re-use whatever you can that isn't used up. Then you recycle everything possible out of that. You compost anything that can be composted. What's left is your "garbage footprint." Some manufacturers will take back their products after its use and apply their resources to recycling or safely disposing of it. (For example, I know of a carpet manufacturer that takes back all of its used carpeting.) I got my output down to 1/5 what it was formerly, just by being conscious of what I was actually throwing away, and not buying things that I then would need to throw away.

Examples of sustainable outputs are energy generated through wind, solar, water and creative power. Food crops are sustainable if you take back the compost from your customers in some fashion (directly or indirectly.) Wind power is mostly sustainable if you re-use or recycle the turbines, minimise the impact on birds, ect. Water power is somewhat sustainable if you are careful to not block the entire waterway and prevent fish migration. As in a water wheel to power carpentry tools or for grinding grain used to be. Crafts you make can bring in cloth from others, that you make into a quilt, for instance, adding value to the materials, and sending the cloth input back out as a useful product, but making sure not to generate toxic waste during the production. Shipping your products very far away would not be as sustainable as selling them locally to your community.

I think there are many green things that people used to do that could be done again easily, but I think they simply went out of fashion.

For instance, my grandmother put all her laundry outside to dry in the sun. The sheets always smelled so good. She had a dryer, but preferred to line dry most of her laundry for this reason. The UV rays also provides some disinfection function. In my suburban neighborhood, you aren't allowed to line dry clothing because of the perception that it looks "tacky." I think it looks homey and sweet.

People used to compost everything. Pigs and chickens got a lot of it, and the rest helped the vegetable garden grow. The pigs and chickens "outputs" also contributed to the vegetable garden. You can buy nightcrawlers very cheap to use to turn kitchen scraps to top grade humus in a very small space -- a bin under the sink, in the garage, or in the basement. If you could have a "gentleman's farm" in your area, you could own a goat, which cut the grass for you, and get the side benefit of goat's milk. There is this cool, moveable chicken shed that houses a few chickens. When the chickens have left enough fertilizer on the ground (through the chicken mesh floor) the chicken coop is moved to another garden spot. The chickens eat the extra bugs.

Most homes had a cistern. They collected rainwater from what fell on the roof to use in doing laundry, housecleaning, watering the garden. You can buy large plastic rain barrels in my village from the township at cost and attach them to your downspouts, which lessens the amount of rainwater that ends up in our over-burdened sewer system. We have a local artist who paints them with interesting designs if you want that.

Almost everybody had a small kitchen garden, right outside the back door, where the cook could grab fresh herbs and salad fixings every evening, (lessening the need for taking vitamins -- most of the vitamins in fresh vegetables evaporate within hours, even refrigerated.) This lessens the need for refrigeration.

Most everyone had a root cellar, which was like a free refrigerator. In my area, the weather is cold enough most of the year to allow us to not need to use a freezer at all, yet everyone in our neighborhood has freezers that they pay to run all winter inside their heated homes. What a waste.

In girl scouts, (well, my church called it "Rangerettes") we learned to cook using the sun with reflectors. Lots of people used the sun to dry foods, which is probably the most natural preservative that exists. Saving a lot of chemical exposure.

Houses used to have very tall windows, with vents at the top. They used sun roofs, to get as much daylight and ventilation as possible, and many workplaces didn't even have artificial lighting. People went to sleep when the sun was down, and woke up when the sun came up, mostly. There is a lot of natural ventilation that is possible just from designing a home with the local breezes and topography in mind.

You can plant deciduous trees on the south side of your house for shade in the summer (trees that drop their leaves in the fall) and evergreens to the north for protection from the wind in the winter. You can change the temperature of your home up to 10 degrees this way. You can use a system of extremely fine mist to cool your patio without any fancy equipment, just using the natural cooling action of evaporation.

People used to travel "up north" in the summer, and go south for the winter, having two smaller homes instead of one large one.

People used to "use things up" instead of replacing them so quickly. They passed clothing from one person to another, some pieces becoming heirlooms. I have my grandmother's apron and wear it proudly. I have another grandparent's cast iron skillets (which will never be used up -- they will outlast me and four more generations...)

I make coffee and tea with a Melior pot. Also called a French Press. You put loose tea or ground coffee in it, pour boiling water in it, and use the press's filter when its ready to serve. No electricity required, and mine is so well made, it looks like new and is 12 years old. No waste, no paper filter is required, although you can add one for more refinement, but the ones that fit the melior are half the size of the other drip kind.

My favorite idea, that I hope someone will do someday, is to make gym equipment generate electricity. I went 3 miles on the eliptical trainer at my gym and I wish I could have converted that chemical energy into electricity to run the radio I was listening to. We all eat way too much (costing us energy in more ways than one) and then run like hamsters to work it off, producing nothing valuable with all that physical energy.

There is someone who invented a speed bump that generates electricity for a street light. Perhaps we can have stairways that move slightly each time we step on them, operating something else (a well water pump, for instance.) We have so much inventiveness, its a shame we have spent so many generations inventing things to use up fossilized energy so we can sell more of it to each other, instead of finding ways to get things done on site without having to sell or transport energy from one place to another. Sometimes the simplest and the low tech/high inventiveness solutions are the best.

A NASA engineer designed a sewage system that takes what comes out of a typical bathroom, runs it through a greenhouse, and produces clean water for a pond behind his house that he stocks with fish.