Foods With Benefits

Food has been sleeping around with your stomach and no condoms have ever been involved. It’s like a 60’s love fest in your belly. Groovy, baby.

It turns out that the human stomach isn’t that discriminating. It’s a go-with-the-flow kind of hipster dufus (probably wearing a fedora) who blindly trusts decisions made by the brain and mouth. Ha ha ha! Like they give a shit about downstream organs!

Tom’s Law #42

As one becomes less involved in the production and preparing of one’s own food, the odds of unwanted contaminants, unknown ingredients, lessened nutrition, deception and malice are exponentially increased.

Chew on that!

For example, the average fast food patron eats an average of 12 public hairs per year. And probably in a public place! Some things are meant to be handled in pubic.

By now we all now that the FDA (Fertile Dung Association) legally allows up to X amount of things like “insect fragments” in our processed foods and that ingredients like the exudate from the castor sacs of the mature North American Beaver can be euphemistically hidden behind nomenclature on product labels as “natural flavors.” And we’ve all seen Jamie Oliver’s expose on the composition of “chicken” nuggets and how “all beef” patties are made.

We know this is how the world works yet each time a news story breaks about cockroaches in chicken or human parts in the beef vats we have the audacity to act surprised. I guess you could argue that the ability of the human brain to pretend something doesn’t exist could be a naturally evolved defense mechanism.

That’s when it hit me!

My two presidential campaign promises: Places where food is made have to have glass walls, and 7.5 ounce packages can't say "five servings."

— Tom B. Taker (@shoutabyss) April 21, 2012

They say that no one should see how laws or sausages are made. I say we combine both into an exciting new product called Politician Political Pork Sausage. Delicious and nutritious! The product motto could be: “We kill two birds with one stone!”

The theory goes that transparency in law making is a necessary ingredient of good governance. So, I thought, why can’t the same concept be extended to the food we eat? All food should literally be made in glass houses. Let there be no secrets between the food maker and the people to which he says, “Here, take this, put it in your mouth, masticate and swallow. You can trust me.”

Who would ever in a million years possibly be opposed to this idea? Oh yeah, the people who make food. Apparently they don’t like the idea of not being able to do absolutely anything they want with impunity.

Once upon a time there was a place known as Conklin Dairy Farms where an employee abused the shit out of helpless cows with a crowbar. (I promptly dubbed the place The Crowbar Ranch.) This employee had dreams of one day becoming a police officer. (True story. Even I can’t make up shit like this.)

What happened at Crowbar Ranch? An undercover animal rights team successfully caught the abuse on film. If not, we would never be having this discussion. It would be like it never happened.

You’d think incidents like these would prompt an industry to take a good hard look at itself and change for the better. That would send a strong signal to customers.

But a dozen or so state legislatures have had a different reaction: They proposed or enacted bills that would make it illegal to covertly videotape livestock farms, or apply for a job at one without disclosing ties to animal rights groups. They have also drafted measures to require such videos to be given to the authorities almost immediately, which activists say would thwart any meaningful undercover investigation of large factory farms.

Critics call them “Ag-Gag” bills.

Source: The New York Times – Taping of Farm Cruelty Is Becoming the Crime

There ya have it. Right there, out in the open, on your public plate. This is what the food industry thinks of openness and transparency. An industry led, perhaps, by Monstano and it’s monolithic fight against any and all food labeling laws.

“You buy our products. You make us rich. You eat what we make. You actually put our products in your bodies. We have no obligation to tell you anything. Thank you, come again!”

I hope this is something that your brain will process (probably not best around dinner time) as you eat that processed “cheese.” Why the quotes? Per law, a substance can legally be called “processed cheese” as long as it contains 51% actual cheese. In other words, those slices that you like to melt on your burger can be up to 49% of something else like additives, chemicals and flavorings.

Masticate, bitches.