Looking at the food industry today, and the literal non-food chemical additives, bugs may be a solution (tongue-in-cheek comment). A new look at the food industry horrified me. In our home, we eat food, not stuff coming from a laboratory. Do yourself a favor and check something in your fridge, something in a bottle that you have been buying forever, and see how the ingredients have changed. Try the mayo or the tomato sauce and you will find a different world. Pickles, that is supposed to be a fermented food, are not pickled, rather additives are added to get the correct taste.

I cannot write about food without getting deeply emotionally involved. Food is how we nourish ourselves and it is our offering to others as nourishment. It is joy, there is no celebration without food. Food is also a health protocol and we can heal issues like diabetes completely with a food regime. Conditions such as ADHD respond just marvelously to an appropriate food plan.

Current Food Cost Increases.

No! it is not Russia’s fault. There are certain foods that Russia produces in massive quantities.  One example is sunflower oil and sunflower products. It is not difficult to understand why that price increased tremendously.  Sanctions Yeah.  This applies to animal foods as well.

Because this is an emotional topic for me, I’ll add copious advice which you may follow or not.

Real economists understand that we don’t have a food price crisis per se, or a food supply issue per se (we will leave the issue of money inflation for another place and space). Speculators and large food trading companies are making out like bandits on speculation. Take the sunflower oil example: price increases, so, we can happily speculate on other food oils as well, and up goes the olive oil price. This is a simplistic example but it is relevant.  If the market can bear higher sunflower oil prices, the market will bear higher prices for other oils as well.  The competing product/price matrix must be kept intact, come hell or high water, in the advertised ‘free market’.

My sister who is still in Africa, and I did an experiment. We looked at all the price increases in their area and compared those with products grown and produced in Africa. Given that the food oils are all present, and those countries trade with one another, there is no reason at all for food price increases.

https://theconversation.com/inflation-how-financial-speculation-is-making-the-global-food-price-crisis-worse-191056

The food industry has some of the slickest deceptive marketing methods and techniques in the world. And the scientists are right in there, creating additives that are inedible, but marketed as food.  Between Big Ag and Big Pharma, I cannot pick out the worst.

Meat and fish

Historically people started getting very antsy about the methods used in factory farm animal food production. The producers did not repair their methods of too many animals being force-fed in too small a space, and brutal slaughtering techniques, they reached out to the scientists. And this is what we have. Just check out that slick marketing term for the sno-flakes that cannot understand that animal husbandry and animal food can be produced without anguish. :

slaughter-free animals and fish –

They take some cell cultures and grow them in a food manufacturing facility i.e., a laboratory, cut them neatly into something that resembles the original animal and hey presto, we have a new process. Folks, cells that grow like this are usually called cancer.

Then we have the deception of meat glue. Meat glue is an enzyme that is usually used to stick pieces of meat together in order to make a more attractive product. It is a ‘natural enzyme’ they tell us. It is only that we don’t understand it. Yeah Right!

https://www.psu.edu/news/agricultural-sciences/story/meat-glue-issue-involves-wide-misunderstanding-expert-contends/

https://www.labiotech.eu/in-depth/cellular-agriculture-food-industry/

“When a meat such as filet mignon is reassembled or reformed — when part of the surface becomes the center — microorganisms are trapped inside, so it is really important that you be aware of what you’re cooking and cook it appropriately.” This is code for ‘cook the holy hell out of that filet that we’ve just stuck together, or it will make you sick’.

Fish farms are horrible inventions but they can also be managed very well. The tilapias or shrimp are usually fed some corn or wheat meal, of course engineered.  By mistake, I bought some shrimp that was farmed and did not check the package properly. I tell you those shrimp that should be delicious soft pink morsels of delight, had the consistency of gummy bears left out in the open for too long and they tasted like something that I do not want to eat and I do not want to give it to anyone else to eat. So, out went the expensive shrimp.

Chicken is another story. Buy the organic chicken yes, but take a moment to read what even the free-range chickens are given for food. There are some bugs that humans have eaten for as long as humans have been on this earth, but generally, chickens eat bugs. Even the free-range organic do not get their bugs but get fed corn and such. Did you know that new chicks get their first jab at one day old? That goes for the organic ones as well, as it is required by law.

See .. those factory farms and bad animal practices made all kinds of animal illnesses resurge, and now we are jabbing our eating animals to death. Want a little more fat content? This jab will do.

Vegetables and Fruit

Organic yes? We buy organic vegetables and we think that we’ve just done a good thing.

With vegetables and fruit it is necessary to understand the cycle from seed to plate. For example, if your world imports bananas and they all do, there is only one type of banana – Cavendish. Cavendish is so genetically engineered that the taste is denatured. If you taste a Cavendish banana and you taste a local banana where they grow the fruit, the difference in both taste and texture is immediately evident. So they grow these genetically engineered bananas organically and reap the markup for organic produce. They are picked and I’ll use the Spanish word, when they are lleno. That means they have reached their size but they have not yet ripened. So, they are picked green in order to be exported and transported and eventually ripened in big ripening rooms with gas. And then you buy them, feeling very good because you’ve just bought organic and paid the price for that.

Let’s take a tomato: The tomato seed patent is most probably owned by one of the Big Ag companies. So, don’t save seeds because they do not belong to you. You can be lucky if that tomato is grown in a field. If it is organic, the rule of thumb these days is that at least 50% of products used in producing that fruit or vegetable, must be organic. So, the other 50% can be toxic.  If that tomato is grown in a production facility or large greenhouse, it will be sprayed with something chemical and toxic.  The tomatoes are also picked green and ripened, and waxed. So, you will be eating a denatured food.

Do this experiment with an apple. Buy some lovely shiny apples in your local market. Hold an apple firmly with one hand and take a paring knife and firmly scrape down the apple skin a few times. This will let you know how much wax you are eating with your fruit. I once wanted to make apple cider vinegar and could not find unwaxed apples. I tried with waxed apples, and my vinegar rotted. Vinegar is the easiest thing in the world to make so to get that to rot, really is outside of the thinking process of a foodie.

I don’t have deep and emotional problems with organic vegetables grown in aquaculture or in water with additives.  I just don’t eat them because they taste exactly like their chemical additives.

That is a real problem with real food. One can taste a product that is not clean of additives, and it becomes a real problem to find real food. In the olden days, everyone had vegetable gardens. Now it is a joy to find someone else with a veggie garden. Make friends with those and immediately start collaborating. One grows tomatoes, the other grows potatoes.  Good clean food production really takes a village.

With vegetables and fruit, know the hand that grows your produce. These products need deep and healthy soils, full of minerals. Let me tell the wheat story in short. So, all of our wheat is now little seeds of carbohydrates and we have so many illnesses that come from various kinds of wheat allergies. A long time ago, wheat was a tall grass, with deep roots, taking its fill of minerals. Those were too tall and difficult to harvest with farm machinery, and too small for high-quantity production. So, they engineered those and came up with short wheat, perfect to harvest with farm machinery, and a bigger kernel. But the root system is now shallow, and the wheat does not grow to the depth where it finds minerals in the soil. Hence our wheat these days are fat little kernels of useless carbohydrates and it makes people sick.

Cheeses

Cheese starts out with fermentation process. If it is not an initial fermented product, it is a product made of wax with taste additives. Please eat good cheese.  Velveeta is not cheese.  I did a quick search for alternatives and this is what they say:  “The best substitute for Velveeta is another processed cheese product, such as American cheese or Cheez Whiz. Since Velveeta isn’t actually cheese, substituting in real cheese will not guarantee the same results — part of Velveeta’s processed charm is its fluid texture and ability to melt easily.”  Nice marketing eh!

Nuts and other goodies

There is a big call now in the foody circles. They say not to eat seed oils – because they are bad for you. This is faulty reasoning. Do not eat bad and rancid seed oils, is what the reasoning is supposed to be. Our species have eaten seed oils since the first person found that they could get the oil out by beating it with a sharp stone in another stone that is hollow. The issue here is to not exceed the smoke point of any oil if you heat it. For example, I never heat olive oil, because of the low smoke point. But we have ghee for preparing something that needs a higher temperature. The moment you exceed the smoke point of an oil, it starts breaking down and becomes rancid. And of course, everyone knows that rape seed oil is not edible oil – use that for your vehicles.

Nuts should be fresh or very well packaged so that they do not become rancid. Nuts and olives properly packaged are probably two products that can easily be transported without loss of nutritive value.

There are new ways of freezing food. Decide for yourself if you would like to eat something frozen with Isochoric Freezing:

A New Technology for Food Preservation – https://www.ift.org/news-and-publications/food-technology-magazine/issues/2019/november/columns/isochoric-freezing

Take it very easy with sugar.  That stuff is a drug.  I bought a kilogram of brown sugar at the beginning of this year and have probably a good quarter left and we can and bottle and bake and cook chutneys and so on.

The end

I have not spoken about the quality of the earth in which we grow our food and the toxic sprays and toxic additives. But 1,700 words off the top of my head feels sufficient for now. The quality of food breaks my heart.

The two most important rules: Know the hands that produce your food and at this stage for me, it is better to eat off the land and not out of the laboratory. Start preparing most of what you use. I make tomato sauce, vinegars, mayo which is a marvelous thing because it can be worked into a herby concoction or into a spicy concoction or into a creamy thing. If you make mayo, understand that it is real food and it cannot sit in the fridge for weeks like the bottle that you bought at the supermarket. There are raw eggs in there, so make only what is needed for no more than 5 days or so. Do not buy anything in beautiful packaging.

We have lost our food culture and given it away to Big Ag, Big Internationals and Big Money in the interests of time savings.

In losing our food culture, we’ve lost our collective knowledge of how to nourish ourselves and one another.

Learn traditional food cultures.  Learn how to dry, preserve and ferment food.  You will find that something like corn cannot be eaten without some kind of fermentation.  (I’m not talking about fresh corn but dried and meal).  If you can preserve food with traditional preservatives, salt, spices and herbs, it keeps you out of Big Food, Big Pharma and Big Chem hands.

Finally, did you know that if you buy .. say .. blueberry muffins from the supermarket, or a package of ready made muffin mix, there are no dried blueberries in there?  The little things that look like berries inside there, are pieces of gum that some food scientist invented, and many many food test tasters sat around a table and tasted, until the taste perfectly mimicked a real muffin.

Know the hands that produce your food and who better to trust, than your own hands.