GM, Gasses, Irradiation and Big Business: Subversion in the Grocery Store

Cameron Salisbury

see also: Arthritis-Alternatives.com

Wouldn’t you know it. Just when we thought that we had made choices that made the adulterated American food supply manageable, Corporate Agriculture finds new ways to quietly and unobtrusively pollute our lunch. We figured a way around the colors, texturizers, hidden gluten, preservatives and taste enhancers with unpronounceable names, and thought we were home free at dinner time.

That’s the way it used to be. As the twenty-first century arrived the dark clouds that had been gathering for several decades finally turned American food production into a torrent of bad news for consumers and a bonanza for agribusiness.

The new food productions and preservation techniques, like genetically modified seeds, irradiation of everything that doesn’t move, and gasses that create the appearance of freshness no matter how old the meat, were originally introduced for commercial use in the latter years of the 20th century. None of these changes to the food supply were designed to benefit the health of the consumer. In fact, our regulatory watchdogs, the FDA and USDA have allowed their wholesale introduction into our food supply without serious testing or monitoring.

To keep the consumer in the dark, the USDA and FDA deliberately colluded with Corporate Agriculture by allowing them to introduce their spiffy new methods of polluting the food supply and enhancing their bottom line without the labeling that would have allowed the consumers to make their own decisions. The consumer no longer has even the illusion of protection.

We are on our own.

There has never been more than one purpose to the unending adulteration of the food supply in the U.S., and it certainly was not to benefit us. All of the new pollution methods have been to extend shelf life into infinity and beyond, to sell more and cost Monsanto and ArcherDanielsMidland as little as possible to do it. They have the full collusion of the major grocery chains.

Some of the changes to the food supply, like irradiation, indiscriminately kills organisms, the good and the bad alike, and eliminates the need for growers and processor to maintain sanitary conditions on the farm and at the factory. You may be buying and eating filth but at least it has been sterilized.

Treatment with radiation also inhibits sprouting in potatoes and delays fruit ripening. In other words, it allows food to be transported long distances and extends shelf life far into the future with no change in appearance.

Public Citizen, the Center for Food Safety, and Food and Water Watch have declared the use of radiation on the food supply to be an experiment on the American consumer without informed consent.

Radiation-induced changes in human DNA can produce cancer. Do DNA changes to veggies create synthetic eats without the usual life supporting properties? No one knows what food irradiation kills besides pests, or if the food is functionally the same after.

And then there are the production problems with the radiation itself: there has already been radioactive leakage from a processing plant into the water supply in a suburb of Atlanta.

Thus far, despite continuing industry pressure, the FDA has maintained that irradiated food must contain a radiation symbol, which has limited its use since food processors fear that making consumers aware will hurt their profits. Lobbyists for Corporate Agriculture are working relentlessly to get the requirement for disclosure rescinded.

On the flip side of the disclosure issue are the growing and processing methods for which consumers may legally be kept in the dark. Almost all U.S. produced corn, soybean, cotton and beet sugar are now GM. But, have you ever seen a label in the grocery store that would alert you to the presence of something in your veggies, meat, or corn flakes that you might not want to eat or feed your family? No? Unlike European countries where an informed public has ferociously fought the introduction of GM food, it is probable that every pantry and frig in the clueless U.S. contains it.

And then there are the gasses, one of the newest unstudied innovations for contaminating food that is also legally allowed to remain undisclosed to the buyer. Most consumers are not aware that virtually all meat, fish and poultry sold at retail has been treated with a gas to extend the surface appearance of freshness.

In the old days, say, a year or so ago, only packaged ground meats were treated with gas. Since the gas created a tight, balloon-like appearance to the packaging, they were easy to spot and avoid.

These days, processors, with the collusion of large grocery stores, are in the habit of gassing everything possible. Even the fresh fish in the deli has almost always been gassed on its way to you, with the butcher often none the wiser. Packaged fruits and vegetables are also increasingly treated with gas.

Food processors were able to convince the FDA and USDA that the gasses they use, nitrogen, argon, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, occur naturally in the atmosphere and therefore qualify as GRAS – Generally Regarded As Safe – and in no need of labeling disclosure.

Apparently none of the regulators thought to ask if gasses that enter the airways are metabolized the same as the identical gas that enters the digestive system by way of food.

As the millions of people with an impaired immune system already know, they are not.
It will probably take many years, as consumers gradually become aware of the impact of contaminated food on their bodies, to undo these regulations.

Even without counting the endless list of preservatives, artificial colors and texturizing agents, quietly and invisibly the food supply of the United States has become the most legally polluted on earth.

The US Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, federal agencies created to protect the public from polluted food and unsafe medications, have been undermined by the corporate, capitalism-at-any-cost, mindset of one presidential administration after another. As mind-numbing as it seems, the activities of these federal regulators are often subsidized and compromised by their corporate regulatees. Scientists who object to the latest toxin proposed for grocery store aisles often have their careers threatened by the regulated, the ones actually calling the shots.

In the meantime, U.S. life expectancy and average height, major indicators of the health of a population, today fall far behind other nations.

Food allergies and asthma are an increasingly prominent causes of illness, death and disability.

When you get a chance, tune in to this video:

 

Indestructible Food: With Love from America, Inc.

There can be no doubt that the United States has one of the most legally polluted food supplies in the Western world. Antibiotics and hormones have long been allowed in chicken and cattle feed, a practice forbidden in Europe. Plastics, which release compounds that interfere with normal cell division, are present in baby bottles, soda cans, and milk and water bottles We have more additives of all kinds: preservatives, dyes, color enhancers, taste enhancers, texture enhancers, sugar substitutes, emulsifiers, thickeners, all labeled ‘GRAS’, generally regarded as safe, by the porous safety net charged with protecting our food supply: the Food and Drug Administration.

Especially since about 1970, as more chemicals and other ‘enhancements,’ like genetically modified ingredients, have inundated the grocery store, other things have also been happening. Consider that, with no known cause: A girl entering puberty at age eight is no longer considered an anomaly; the U.S. no longer grows the tallest people on earth- in fact, we aren’t even in the top 5; our life expectancy has fallen behind many other nations; we are among the heaviest people on earth; the rate of the devastating condition known as autism is mushrooming.

There is no research linking these facts to our food supply because there seems to be no research whatever on the impact of a degraded food supply on human health. But the incidental evidence is causing plenty of unease. The legal contamination of the food supply has now reached levels where no one can predict the outcome, and the adulteration just keeps on coming.

Like genetic modification. GM tampering can produce plants with ingrown pesticides, herbicides, color enhancers, preservatives or other. The possible results of manipulating a plant’s (or an animal’s) DNA are limited only by the creativity of the scientist, the money and motivation of Big Agra, and the unwitting compliance of the uninformed consumer. The United States produces more genetically engineered crops than the rest of the world combined, and, unlike 35 other nations, requires no labeling.

Since virtually all corn and soybeans grown in the U.S. is now genetically manipulated, frankenfood is a staple in all but the most obsessively organic kitchens. It is now estimated that approximately 70% of everything in the grocery store contains genetically modified ingredients. That includes a clear, sweet, inexpensive sludge with an infinite shelf life that has almost replaced sugar in processed foods made in the U.S.: High Fructose Corn Syrup.

HCFS is insidious not just because it contains genetically engineered ingredients of unproven safety, and not because of the unnerving list of health consequences seen in animal research, but because it bypasses the satiety center in the brain. We can eat almost all the pastries, pies, cakes, soda and candy we like without getting that full feeling that shuts down our compulsion to eat. We and our kids get rounder and sicker.

We are consuming literally tons of other concoctions from the chemistry labs run by agribusiness that they would prefer we know nothing about.

For example, have you noticed the other worldly quality of ground meat these days? It can now last for months without losing that fresh pink glow.

That’s because of yet another hushed innovation of the food processing industry. The use of gases like carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide to preserve meats poultry and fish is rapidly gaining ground and may soon replace safe and effective, and preservative-free, vacuum packing. The healthy pink patina these gases give meat lasts far into the future, like Styrofoam. This poses a question about the safety of the meat at the end of, say, three months. Does that deathless fresh color cover up organisms we’d rather not eat? The European Union has banned this method of preservation also.

Irradiation, another method of creating indestructible meats, fruits and vegetables, may soon be coming to a store near you, after agribusiness finishes pressuring the FDA into sanitizing the name of the process into something that consumers are more likely to buy. They prefer ‘pasteurization.’

Since zapping edibles with radiation kills germs and any other malfeasants that may be lurking about, food items become ‘sterilized’ quickly and cheaply. And by the way, it relieves Big Agra of the responsibility for producing clean food. The filth they leave in the food will be germ free filth.

Possibly best of all for Big Agra, radiation increases the life expectancy of a food to what seems like eternity, another bonanza to the corporate bottom line and something the FDA lists as a benefit.

The statement in the FDA’s 2004 report that radiation induces “chemical changes [that] can ultimately have biological consequences” is neither explained nor integrated into their contention that irradiation “causes little change in the composition of food beyond that which would occur from cooking.”

Although research has been done on the impact of GM, gas and irradiation on the vitamin content, taste and texture of foods, I could find no evidence that the impact of changes to the architecture of food on the people who will consume it has even been seriously considered, despite clear evidence from laboratory testing that all may not be well in the land of falsified edibles.

Genetic engineering, irradiation and gas all work their magic by changing the molecular structure of food. The low-profile adoption of new, unadvertised, untested and often unlisted, potential toxins in the food supply, lobbied hard by corporations and decreed harmless by the FDA, is a walk into the unknown.

by Cameron Salisbury