Dirty Food
As a food scientist by day, I have become increasingly disgusted over the years by how much humankind has manipulated our food supply. We have gone so far away from how primitive man ate. Not that I wish to be a caveman (hell, not having sushi would suck), but humans used to eat things they found around them in nature (fruit, veggies,nuts, etc.) and occasionally kill some buffalo. Now most people don't know what is edible outside in their own neighborhoods. And there still is food existing naturally in nature (if we haven't polluted the land!). All of our fruit and veggies are genetically engineered and eternally pretty looking and shiny (not how they are in nature). Our animals are mass produced in disgusting feed lots, pumped full of hormones and antibiotics, then quickly ground up with "god-only-knows" to become your McDonald's burger. Our food supply is no longer natural people. Unless you support farmers markets (which I plead for you to), you buy food that was never of this earth. Monsanto (amongst other faceless corporations) controls the seeds for most anything any farmer will grow. If as a farmer you do not want to take chances with natural varieties (whick will not look as pretty, go bad quicker, and will be subject to bugs) they will buy these "perfect" seeds. And believe me, I am all for the farmer, but they get shafted day in and day out by politics and the government. Check out the Farm Aid concerts if you know not of what I speak. The people that grow our foods can barely stay above bankrupcy, so why should they risk growing something naturally. So to stay in business most farmers and meat producers buy genetically altered seeds and grow these franken-meats in order to compete. The amount of farmers growing naturally is very small. And this is scary. If a new disease/plague comes about and targets our food supply (bird flu, potato blight) we do not have many of the original varieties of seeds and animals left that came with our planet and we may not have anything to eat. The meat industry is wildly unregulated because of the huge amounts of money they give to politicians. Now we have mad cow disease. This comes from what we feed the animals that we eat. Regular feed is too expensive for these cheap skates. They have been feeding cows other ground up cow's brains, eyes, and spinal chords. Doing this has created mad cow. Now they can't serve brains/eyes/and spinal chords to cows. They realize its bad (only when forced because of mad cow scares). They still can serve cows and chickens and hogs other parts of the same animal legally (blood, bones, etc). We have forced our feed animals to be cannibals. It couldn't get any more disgusting in my mind. This is the modern era. This is what is scary. It these times of high technology and big money you'd think we'd have a utopia. Far from it. The high output and quick timelines that the fast food industry has created has changed our whole food supply. Not many farmers feed their animals really healthy foods, let them roam freely to graze or give them time to develop. I have switched to all organic meat and to organic/farmer's market veggies. It does cost more, but I know what I am getting...something natural. The more you know about what you eat the more it will disgust you. I urge all of you to start buying organic everything because without looking into all the crap that you are eating in your current food, you will at least know there is nothing in your organic food. That gives me a little peace of mind rather than looking into what is in the current food we eat.