Free Deranged
Ask Fae Platten about allergies. She was on an airline flight when a passenger began eating peanuts a couple rows behind her. Fae, age four, went into anaphylactic shock and was revived with an EpiPen injection, but she damn near died.
The funny thing is, airlines all over the world give little bags of peanuts away on flights. It’s almost like a death wish, considering you don’t even have to swallow one — the mere sniff of the oil can bring on cardiac arrest. Consider the damage Joe Biden could do at a convention with a bag full of peanuts.
Our instincts tell us the government, particularly the FDA, has standards in place to protect us, but we know deep in our hearts it’s not true.
Consider when we were growing up: the go-to breakfast cereals were literally 90 percent sugar. Frosted Flakes, Sugar Corn Pops and the like augmented by four big glasses of whole fat milk.
Finally, someone realized all that fat was bad for us, so they made Two Percent Milk. Then One Percent. But they couldn’t stop there, so now we have Zero Percent, which when you think about it isn’t milk at all — hell, it’s probably water.
They did the same thing to cigarettes. They took the tasty nicotine-filled Big Red Marlboro and made Marlboro 100s, then they came up with Marlboro Mediums. then Light, followed by Ultra Light, Menthol, Smooth. I submit to you, ladies and gentlemen, that these were no longer cigarettes. At a certain point, they became lettuce.
The truth is the FDA has never much cared about the citizens. It is beholden to the giant food corporations that control the industry.
Consider those healthy snacks Mom would pack in our lunchboxes: Twinkies, Hostess Cupcakes, and the other “cream filled” pastries we devoured didn’t have ANY cream filling (not that that’s particularly good for us). The white stuff we enjoyed so was whipped animal fat and refined sugar, the kind that makes the United States one of the top cancer-ridden places on Earth.
Finally, with the advent of flower power, young, intelligent concerned citizens began looking at better, healthier ways to grow food.
This was the beginning of the Organic Food Movement, which is a method of farming by which all food is soaked in poopy water. This gives the distinctive E. coli flavor so prevalent in lettuce and hamburger meat.
Despite the negatives, we as a culture thrived eating organic food, which also incorporates free range, hormone-free, cage free, and so on.
All this sounds good, but it can get complicated. Let’s take a cage-free egg on a free range. That little son of a gun might be able to roll halfway to Cleveland. You’d have to catch it to eat it, despite all the nasty stuff it rolled in. No thanks.
It all reaches a crescendo with the Non-GMO Project, which I heard of only recently. At first, I thought it was just another gender-defining social network wherein all of us who aren’t GMOs nevertheless are willing to share toilet with GMOs. In other words, a good thing.
But a GMO creates combinations of plant, animal, bacterial, and virus genes that do not occur in nature or through traditional crossbreeding methods, kind of like Bruce Jenner.
Mom used to say just eat a balanced diet and in the course of the week, we’ll get all the nutrients we need — and a lot we don’t. The best breakfast ever is Big Red, coffee laced with cream and sugar and a “cream” donut. Don’t let them tell you otherwise.