Eat It

You voted for your senator. You voted for your house member. You gave them the most important gift you can – your vote.

They show their appreciation. They screw you.

Food is fairly important to most people. I try to use some of it every day – perhaps even a bit more frequently than that. Okay. Too frequently.

What we are facing here is a government that is giving your money to the ones they really care about. It costs you not only your money but your health.

Look at the cute little graphic. It seems that half of the plate is taken up by fruits and vegetables. That’s nice. What’s wrong with that? Not a thing.

What don’t you see there? While one government agency is stressing the importance of fruits and veggies, another is giving your money to the producers of 99% of the other things.

The meat producers have now stopped complaining. They didn’t like the old pyramid. But, you say, the graphic doesn’t show meat at all. They hid it behind the word protein. That makes the meat producers happy. They hope you are less likely to associate meat with the demonized saturated fats.

Meats are foods. Proteins are not food; they are nutrients. With everyone scrambling to get away from fats and carbohydrates, every product with a single cell of protein will be advertising that they need to be a part of what you put on that protein section. My money is on meat to dominate that section, however.

Just an aside here. Saturated fats are not the problem. Our bodies have, over the millennia, adapted to saturated fats. What confuses our bodies are the unsaturated kind; particularly Polly’s.

Whatever, the meat producers don’t need my money to tell me to eat more meat.

The dairy industry’s complaints have been answered. They get their own special place. Why? I’m sure they paid for it – with our money.

Perhaps the biggest bad boy falls under that grain section. Brazil makes ethanol out of sugar cane. We make it out of corn. Sugar ethanol puts out more energy than it takes to produce. Corn ethanol requires more energy to produce than it puts out. Also, corn ethanol requires your money both at the pump and in the form of a government subsidy.

That isn’t where the story ends with corn. Food manufacturers have fallen in love with high fructose corn syrup. It’s cheaper than sugar. You are supposed to ignore what the scientists and physicians are screaming and watch those commercials that show an average consumer unable to remember all of the bad things about it, while the commercial prostitute assures you that everything is fine. Bottom line: avoid high fructose corn syrup.

Think about it. Ethanol and corn syrup take up a great deal of our corn production. That pushes up the price of corn, both for those purposes and any other. There needs to be a little corn on the buffet table. Some people actually eat corn. Guilty. I also eat cornbread, hush puppies and other things I shouldn’t,

Then there is the heinous crime of substituting corn meal for batter on such sacred things as onion rings, fried fish, even catfish. The courts should show no mercy.

Again the pressure on the price of corn goes up. Remember, you’re paying. Then comes another massive hit. Corn just happens to be the major foodstuff of our domesticated animals. Up goes the price of beef, chicken and the rest. Our entire agricultural commodity pricing system has been distorted. And, of course that requires subsidies. Buddy, can you spare a few billion?

What else can go wrong? How long have you got?

It seems that there’s a little problem or two with the world’s most popular herbicide. Roundup has been known since at least 1980 to cause birth defects. Despite the tons of uncontested evidence, the German equivalent of our FDA assured their people last year that there were no known problems with Round Up. Our FDA simply ignores the question.

We can all be proud of the fact that we will be safe from foreign malefactors while the domestic ones are killing us. Who is going to provide the monies for those subsidies if they don’t slow down a bit. Mmmmmmm. I’m hungry. I wish I could afford some glyphosate.