Fabricated Food
Every so often, something comes across my desk that seems relevant to the upcoming transits. Today I received an article about food policy in the US.
I have been thinking about food lately and it affects on our children. Health problems have become so common that we have almost forgotten that it's natural to be healthy. How many children do you know who don’t have allergies, crooked teeth, bad skin, weight problems, constant colds or flu, or something more difficult?
In the past, the fear was shortage of food and starvation. Now it is too much food, (or so called food), and starvation. Lack of nutrients brings longer, slower, more insidious, health problems. Maybe we will evolve to be able to consume plastic food, but I doubt we will see it even in the next generation. I wonder how many of our children will live to old age without the aid of drugs and machines?
Today there was news about Emma Faust Tillman, the oldest living woman, who passed away at 114. She was the daughter of a slave. Even to the day she died, she didn't need glasses. Until recently poor people or the "less privileged" didn't have the option to eat unhealthy food, they were given the stuff people didn't want. They didn't get the fancy pastries, sugar, and alcohol. They had to eat the food off the land.
With the Full Moon in Leo, the sign of children, we are receiving the energy to rid ourselves of those things that don't work and fabricated food is one of them. Send out the desire for wonderful, nutritious, fresh food. Support your local farmer. It’s much more pleasant to take a drive to the farm than to drag your screaming child through the super duper grocery with artificial lights and long lines, with or without candy.
As one of my teachers always told me, don't buy anything in a box, and shop the outside aisles for real food. What's even worse, in the US, we have deceptive labeling. Manufactures are allowed to use the word "natural" even though it has nothing to do with real food. Natural vanilla flavor does not always mean a real vanilla bean.
Here is the article. It's scary to think what people believe about food. I wonder if the people who have the authority to regulate food allow their families to eat all these synthetic foods.
A Review of the 29th Annual National Food Policy Conference
By Matthew Rales
In October, 2006, I attended the 29th Annual National Food Policy Conference on behalf of the Weston A. Price Foundation. The conference provided an eye-opening and sobering look at the current state of commodity food and agriculture in America. The Washington D.C. pressroom, where the conference was held, was filled with academic nutritionists, FDA officials and corporate food public relations representatives from all over the country.
These leaders in industry presented diverse views on the topic of food policy, yet their general understanding of food as it relates to human health was startlingly poor. Among the common suggestions were to limit caloric intake and follow the guidelines presented by the USDA. The culminating message was that virtually no food is safe unless it is inspected by a standardized government program, based on the assumption that the only food available is corporate imitation food. According to the majority of the speakers, alternatives do not exist, are unsafe or are not widely available enough to make a difference.
The lesson of the two-day gathering: how to pick “sensible” imitation food in the grocery store aisle. The “sensible solution,” as these food officials like to euphemistically call their recommendations to consumers, was indeed varied. For a Kraft public relations representative, the “sensible solution” was a block of imitation cheese with a gram less trans fat than the original block of imitation cheese and a gram of added fiber in the form of dextrose. For a political representative from Alaska working on school lunch programs it is a granola bar instead of a coke. And for an NYU professor of nutrition, food studies and public health it is fruits and vegetables, regardless of their origin or the growing practices used to produce them.
Consider the sponsors of the conference: Cargill, General Mills, Kraft Foods and Pioneer Hi-Bred International. It comes as no surprise, then, that breakfast cereals, granola bars, fake cheese and genetic engineering were all espoused as the saviors of the dietary and agricultural problems in America. Even nanotechnology, genomics and biomarkers were suggested by one FDA official as the pending solution to outbreaks like the recent E. coli menace in bagged spinach (this was breaking news on the second day of the conference). There was no mention of simple solutions like buying your spinach from a nearby farmer you can trust.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest seemed to have a representative on nearly every panel discussion. They called for lawsuits against breakfast cereal marketing firms that target children and complained that we in America do not have the “luxury” of a National Animal Identification System. Of course, no mention of nutrients in food by these folks either.
As for real foods like butter, eggs and whole milk, these are not part of the food policy vocabulary. They are no longer the topic of debate because it is simply assumed that these foods are unhealthy. Raw milk of course is just dangerous – no further discussion permitted. If the broad-spectrum, standardized food policy that these folks want is to be effective in improving the health of America’s children, shouldn’t it focus on counting nutrients instead of calories? The advantages of real food become apparent with real science. But as long as the system continues to operate under a regime of fabricated science, we will continue to be indoctrinated with fabricated food.
Matthew Rales is a recent graduate of Middlebury College in Vermont with a BA in Environmental Studies and Literature. He recently completed an internship with the Weston A. Price Foundation and is currently working as an intern at Joel Salatin’s grass-based Polyface Farm.
Click here to read about Traditional Healthy Foods
I have been thinking about food lately and it affects on our children. Health problems have become so common that we have almost forgotten that it's natural to be healthy. How many children do you know who don’t have allergies, crooked teeth, bad skin, weight problems, constant colds or flu, or something more difficult?
In the past, the fear was shortage of food and starvation. Now it is too much food, (or so called food), and starvation. Lack of nutrients brings longer, slower, more insidious, health problems. Maybe we will evolve to be able to consume plastic food, but I doubt we will see it even in the next generation. I wonder how many of our children will live to old age without the aid of drugs and machines?
Today there was news about Emma Faust Tillman, the oldest living woman, who passed away at 114. She was the daughter of a slave. Even to the day she died, she didn't need glasses. Until recently poor people or the "less privileged" didn't have the option to eat unhealthy food, they were given the stuff people didn't want. They didn't get the fancy pastries, sugar, and alcohol. They had to eat the food off the land.
With the Full Moon in Leo, the sign of children, we are receiving the energy to rid ourselves of those things that don't work and fabricated food is one of them. Send out the desire for wonderful, nutritious, fresh food. Support your local farmer. It’s much more pleasant to take a drive to the farm than to drag your screaming child through the super duper grocery with artificial lights and long lines, with or without candy.
As one of my teachers always told me, don't buy anything in a box, and shop the outside aisles for real food. What's even worse, in the US, we have deceptive labeling. Manufactures are allowed to use the word "natural" even though it has nothing to do with real food. Natural vanilla flavor does not always mean a real vanilla bean.
Here is the article. It's scary to think what people believe about food. I wonder if the people who have the authority to regulate food allow their families to eat all these synthetic foods.
A Review of the 29th Annual National Food Policy Conference
By Matthew Rales
In October, 2006, I attended the 29th Annual National Food Policy Conference on behalf of the Weston A. Price Foundation. The conference provided an eye-opening and sobering look at the current state of commodity food and agriculture in America. The Washington D.C. pressroom, where the conference was held, was filled with academic nutritionists, FDA officials and corporate food public relations representatives from all over the country.
These leaders in industry presented diverse views on the topic of food policy, yet their general understanding of food as it relates to human health was startlingly poor. Among the common suggestions were to limit caloric intake and follow the guidelines presented by the USDA. The culminating message was that virtually no food is safe unless it is inspected by a standardized government program, based on the assumption that the only food available is corporate imitation food. According to the majority of the speakers, alternatives do not exist, are unsafe or are not widely available enough to make a difference.
The lesson of the two-day gathering: how to pick “sensible” imitation food in the grocery store aisle. The “sensible solution,” as these food officials like to euphemistically call their recommendations to consumers, was indeed varied. For a Kraft public relations representative, the “sensible solution” was a block of imitation cheese with a gram less trans fat than the original block of imitation cheese and a gram of added fiber in the form of dextrose. For a political representative from Alaska working on school lunch programs it is a granola bar instead of a coke. And for an NYU professor of nutrition, food studies and public health it is fruits and vegetables, regardless of their origin or the growing practices used to produce them.
Consider the sponsors of the conference: Cargill, General Mills, Kraft Foods and Pioneer Hi-Bred International. It comes as no surprise, then, that breakfast cereals, granola bars, fake cheese and genetic engineering were all espoused as the saviors of the dietary and agricultural problems in America. Even nanotechnology, genomics and biomarkers were suggested by one FDA official as the pending solution to outbreaks like the recent E. coli menace in bagged spinach (this was breaking news on the second day of the conference). There was no mention of simple solutions like buying your spinach from a nearby farmer you can trust.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest seemed to have a representative on nearly every panel discussion. They called for lawsuits against breakfast cereal marketing firms that target children and complained that we in America do not have the “luxury” of a National Animal Identification System. Of course, no mention of nutrients in food by these folks either.
As for real foods like butter, eggs and whole milk, these are not part of the food policy vocabulary. They are no longer the topic of debate because it is simply assumed that these foods are unhealthy. Raw milk of course is just dangerous – no further discussion permitted. If the broad-spectrum, standardized food policy that these folks want is to be effective in improving the health of America’s children, shouldn’t it focus on counting nutrients instead of calories? The advantages of real food become apparent with real science. But as long as the system continues to operate under a regime of fabricated science, we will continue to be indoctrinated with fabricated food.
Matthew Rales is a recent graduate of Middlebury College in Vermont with a BA in Environmental Studies and Literature. He recently completed an internship with the Weston A. Price Foundation and is currently working as an intern at Joel Salatin’s grass-based Polyface Farm.
Click here to read about Traditional Healthy Foods
posted by The Astrology Page at 9:35:00 AM
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