Chapter 1: Loaves and Fishes ≠ Cheetos and Mountain Dew

For thousands of years, the food that we consumed on a daily basis basically stayed the same. Wheat was wheat. Fish was fish. Our food preservation methods were simple and God-given: cold storage, drying, and fermenting. Then, after World War I and II, “food science” and chemical companies took over and changed the food we eat to be nearly unrecognizable from it’s simpler iterations. In the name of food scarcity and scientific advancement, fillers, additives, preservatives, colorings, and flavorings were added to food in such a way that each generation has slowly become accustomed to more abstracted forms of “nutrition”. Nutrition “gels” and meal replacement shakes are now the norm. Making your own sourdough bread and roasting a chicken are considered hipster and fringe.

Now, I’m not knocking “progress”, but I do think that “progress” should be something that is analyzed and not taken for granted. Oh yes, “progress is always good or they wouldn’t call it progress.” Sometimes progress is a road that we go down one time, but not a second. We learned that it was not a great way to go, but we had to try to figure that out. This is called “science” by the way. We learn more from mistakes than we do from staying still.

I’ve had the honor of interviewing one of the pioneers of food science, Alina Scezniak, because she was an alumna of MIT where I also went to school. To be honest, I do believe that some of the early scientists saw their work as crucial to the survival of the United States. The scientists in the company she worked for were trying to design food that could be preserved for indefinite periods of time in case shortages were on the horizon. They needed to create foodstuffs in a way that maintained its crunchiness or chewiness, or whatever characteristic defined it. Frozen dinners in metal trays took a lot of effort to research and produce. Different scientific scales were developed to measure progress in terms of cooking times, humidity, crunchiness, mouth feel, and the like. It was a revolution in home economics.

After the wartime era, we also saw another shift in the economics of household expenditures. This was the time that women were entering the work force more broadly as a two-income household became necessary to afford a home and children. No one had time to prepare a from-scratch dinner. Commercials and entertainment programs demonstrated the delightful time a family could have eating a heated-up frozen dinner on TV trays while watching the evening news.

The advent of the microwave moved the frozen dinner preparation from the stove to the microwave, shortening the cook time by far while introducing a casual source of radiation into the home. Now mom can just microwave some Chef Boyardee for the kids and hubby and a Lean Cuisine for herself. Popcorn, which takes very little time to cook in oil on the stovetop, now takes 1 minute and 15 seconds to cook in a chemical and metal laden bag in harsh factory reject seed oil. You can have it with artificial butter and inflammatory flavorings too if you like.

In parallel to the advent of food preservation related science, genetically modified foods snuck into the modern food system. The DNA of corn, soybeans, and wheat were altered for seemingly righteous purposes. Drought resistance, bug resistance, and larger yields were bred into the genetics of these plants. Resistance to harsh pesticides and herbicides were also bred into plants to accommodate the increasing using of glyphosate and other harmful, cancer-causing agents. What a wonderful cycle of consumption for the economic well-being of the chemical companies! They modify the genetics of plants so that they are literally the only plants that can grow in contaminated soils, contaminated by those same chemical companies.

This is evil. It does not matter if the original intent of the food scientists was to save humanity during times of food scarcity. What these chemical companies are doing now is destroying the lives of small farmers and raising their suicide rate to unprecedented levels. All of this is occurring while autoimmune diseases, diabetes, heart conditions, and childhood obesity are on the rise. It is not a coincidence.

Patents on these genetic strains also make a handy weapon against the smaller farmers whose crops get contaminated by pollen carrying over on the wind from nearby GMO-seeded fields. They can then be sued for patent infringement by the large companies like Monsanto with their team of lawyers. This is modern day biological warfare against our health and the health of the American food system.