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Several months 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 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.

Chemically-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 chemically-laden and processed food is a direct link to chronic illnesses such as diabetes and obesity and heart disease which ramp up the costs in 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 industrial farmers and the industrial food system beg for subsidies and crop insurance protection for foods that are killing us.

“We feed the world,” I heard one industry trade spokesman say as the radio discussion turned to the stalled federal farm bill. “We have the best, safest food system in the world.” I think the fellow was from the Minnesota Corn Growers Association. I hope I run into him at their booth at the state fair so I can tell him that our foods prop up the most expensive health care system in the world and the chemical industry too, in addition to providing that “safest” food. You won’t get a bellyache right now, perhaps, but save up your sick days for diabetes or cancer because if you eat the standard American diet in place for the past half century that bellyache will arrive.

The myopia doesn’t end there in farm country. I recall Nebraska governor Dave Heineman going on the defensive during the pink slime revelations last year, touring packing plants to offer support for jobs and the use of ammonia-treated pink slime as a beef filler by asking “what’s the problem with a little sinew and tendon product that needs to be treated with a little ammonia?”
In the meantime, the governor and the rest of the beef, hog and poultry promoters forgot to mention that jobs at the packing plants no longer provide union labor or wages that would allow prosperity in the middle class.

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 and dangerous spoilage and cause cancer instead. 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 makes them think that way.

Not only does the way we farm and the foods we produce impact the health of the human body, the entire ecosystem feels the brunt of the shift from sustainable to non-sustainable methodology. And it now appears as though the mystery of the massive die-off of honeybees, or colony collapse disorder, is likely 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 and our worries about overpopulating the planet will be gone.

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.