Industrial foods, farming methods, and your brain

Forrest Johnson

Long  ago I wrote about efforts by the National Union of Friendly Americans (NUFA) to remove intelligence-draining food products produced by the industrial food complex from our tables. Exacting NUFA studies have since proven that a large segment of the population is consuming bio-engineered and amply processed foods made to keep cows and humans passive and obese while lowering intelligence at the same time.
While NUFA hasn’t yet been able to pinpoint the troubling link between the industrial food complex and the dumbing down of the population, the organization can’t find any other reason for the precipitous decline in the nation’s collective intelligence.
You are what you eat.
Bad foods, bad thoughts.
Chemical-based agriculture is an oxymoron of the first order, and it has been the foundation of most American farming since the invention of DDT and other synthetic measures to support an industrial production model that at its core is unsustainable. Long ago farmers shifted away from practices and crops that regenerate living soil to those practices and crops that have effectively killed off much of our agricultural lands. The soils simply aren’t living organisms anymore. The nutrients have been bled off, the watersheds severed by the subjugation of cattle and grains.
The result of all that chemical-laden and processed food lands with a thud as chronic illnesses such as diabetes and obesity and heart disease ramp up the cost of an already over-priced health care system. The link between what we eat and the overall health of the nation is indisputable. Still, the comedy of fools lives on, as conservatives like Nebraska governor Dave Heineman still bristle at the notion that there’s anything wrong with  the food supply when meat packing plants used ammonia-treated pink slime as a beef filler. Heineman was angered by job losses in the industry and asked, “What’s the problem with a little sinew and tendon product that needs to be treated with a little ammonia?”
Heineman and other job creators failed to mention that the meat packing industry in this day and age rarely provides union labor or wages that allowed prosperity in the middle class to grow from the 1920s into the 1980s. There just isn’t room in the industrial food model for living wages, no matter where the job is between the feedlot and the slaughterhouse.
Instead of doing agriculture the way it has been done since time immemorial, we’ve used our large brains and lack of insight to engineer our food and then add enough calcium proprianate or propyl paraben to preserve our foods from imminent spoilage and cause cancer. Over time we learned to add enough fats, sugars, and salts into the food supply to induce diabetes and high blood pressure. To top it off, we’ve effectively removed most of the natural low-glycemic foods (natural fruits and vegetables) from our food supply and replaced them with refined high-glycemic products (fruit drinks and sweetened cereals) to amplify poor health even further.
I can’t remember who said it, but it was shrewdly put: our foods are grown more in laboratories than cooked in a kitchen.
Something in the food must be making people think in droves that they are eating healthy when exactly the opposite is true. In a recent Consumer Reports survey, fully 90 percent of the 1,234 Americans questioned said they were eating a healthy diet. I’m not sure where that 90 percent fits in with the 60 percent of the population that is overweight or obese, but it must be the chemical residues or additives in so many of the “healthy” foods they eat that make them think that way.
Not only do the way we farm and the foods we produce affect the health of the human body, the entire ecosystem feels the brunt of the shift from sustainable to non-sustainable methodology. It now appears as though the mystery of the massive die-off of honeybees, or colony collapse disorder, is related to a class of widely used pesticides. The pesticides, developed in the 1990s, are intended to disrupt the nervous systems of insects that destroy crops. As in all chemical use, the “drift effect” also takes innocent insect bystanders as well.
Perhaps the pesticides will also be effective on our own nervous systems as well.
NUFA is dedicated to removing, by force if necessary, all such nefarious and thought-robbing foods and farming practices before all of humanity is reduced to the intellectual equivalent of a fried fast food entrée.