"Real, Organic, Natural" Food

With a typical white American family, in the backdrop of a shimmering river as Dad teaches Son how to skip a rock, and Mom and daughter look on, thinking "boys...", accompanied by an upbeat, catchy, lighthearted acoustic track, everything glowing in the bright yellow sun... Nature Valley.

I'm not the first to hit on the "health food" campaign, and I won't be the last. In the last 5 years, America has seen a big surge in "healthy" marketing, a trend which has been growing for as long as we listed dietary tables on the back of mass marketed food products.

We don't like it when our favorite munchies are bad for us, what with all of the "artificial" ingredients used in them. Some of these ingredients can be so bad for us that they have steroidal side-effects. Milk pumped with hormones, anybody?

And, you know what? I'M OKAY WITH THAT. We live in America, and in America we work for money which we have the right to spend on whatever we want. If you put a gallon of hormone treated and untreated milk in front of me and said I could have only one, I'd probably pick the untreated milk.

But there's a point where it gets ridiculous. There's a line you can cross in your insistence on living the lifestyle you think is best, before you start taking it too far. And there are people out there who raise their nose at you and sneer just based on what you eat. They boast about how all their foods come from farmers markets, how none of it is genetically modified or sprayed with harmful pesticides.

"Live life the way nature intended" translates to "grow the food I eat the way nature intended, or I won't buy it", which is really just the current way we say: "Give me what I want or I'll protest."

In fact, the growth hormone "rBST", which is so commonly associated with milk, has no actual effect on the quality of the milk itself. It's nutritionally identical. Don't be mistaken, there will be chemical differences in overall composition. But the difference in IGF-1 concentrations, the hormone that actually affects humans ("Bovine SomatoTropin" has no known harmful effects on humans, even when "injected directly into the bloodstream"), between regular milk and organic milk is on average, 45 nanograms per millileter (3.04-3.12 for regular milks and 2.73 for organic milk)!

And sure, you could point out that the measurement is for "milli"liters, but a nanogram is a number on the order of a decimal with 9 zeroes or more, before it. Just think: .00000000273 grams of IGF-1 per .001 liters of milk. ORGANIC! You're still getting all of those growth hormones in your milk, and you're paying more for it.

What's the difference, really? What makes Organic Milk "organic"? It has the exact same composition as regular milk, in different concentrations. It has IGF-1, rBST, estradiol, progesterone, just like "non-organic" milk.

Does that make milk which has .30 nanograms "inorganic"? Let's define "organic" vs. "inorganic".

For something to be "organic" it must have two things: carbon and hydrogen.
For something to be "inorganic" it must be lacking either carbon, hydrogen, or both.

That makes oxygen an inorganic substance. It has neither carbon nor hydrogen. That also makes water an inorganic compound because it lacks carbon.

So, should we stop drinking water because it's inorganic?

Michael Pollan states: "If you can't say it, don't eat it."
Subtitle: Don't buy products with more than five ingredients or any ingredients you can't easily pronounce.

I want you to tell me that you can pronounce all of those without referencing them to make sure you've got it right. This is a list of all the amino acids that the human body utilizes. The ones on the left are necessary all throughout our lives, while the ones on the right are necessary in particular situations, like when we're babies.

Click on this if it's too small.

Imagine yourself eating a tablespoon of sulfur, or drinking a glass of arsenic. Would you eat Wheat Thins or drink V8 if you read "trace amounts of arsenic" on the Nutrition Facts panel? Hell, no, you wouldn't.

I bet Michael Pollan can't even pronounce 30% of the different hormones, chemical, and other various organic compounds that make up an adult human body, and that's not 4/5, much less 5 entire "ingredients".

QUICK, SAY "CYANOCOBALAMIN!" That's vitamin B12. NOW SAY "EICOSAPENTAENOIC ACID"! That's an omega-3 fatty acid. NEXT, "CANTHAXANTHIN"! That's an anti-oxidant. You know what an omega-3 fatty acid is. You've heard the word "anti-oxidant" before. You know you need vitamin B12. But you probably don't know why any of these things are "healthy" or "good for you" without looking them up. As I write this blog entry, I'm researching things on wikipedia all the time while pulling pictures off of google images.

And how about a salad? Let's count how many ingredients one has... You've got the lettuce/cabbage, some tomatoes and onions, so that's three. Mmm, and salads are always good with dressing, so let's put some vinaigrette and... how about some ranch? So that's 5 ingredients. Oh! But you can't forget the krutons! That makes 6 ingredients.

So if I found a salad pack at a whole foods store made with these exact ingredients, I can't buy it. How many ingredients does the vinaigrette have, anyway? Well, there can be a variety of oils and vinegars, so for simplicity's sake, we'll just say there's one of each. 2 ingredients so far. Salt and/or pepper are other common ingredients, so we're already up to 4. Herbs and shallots are sometimes added based on the flavor you want, and I can't be bothered to research the number of possible herbs that you can use for a vinaigrette. Not to mention, herbs are common additives to salads. And the krutons are hardened bread cubes. Do I need to tell you the recipe to bake a simple loaf of bread?

You might accuse me of nitpicking every little detail, but the truth is that if you follow Michael Pollan's rules, you won't be eating much of anything that you don't grow yourself.

According to the ad, they use "real" ingredients, like fruit, nuts, and honey.

"Real" as opposed to what? An imaginary ingredient? A fake ingredient? Is High Fructose Corn syrup NOT a "real" ingredient? Is it something that we imagine in our brains without any physical properties? Who decides what a real ingredient is, anyway?

Marketing executives, that's who.

The trick here is that we're deluding ourselves into believing that if it's not "real", "natural", or "organic", it's not "healthy" for us, and therefore not good.

What we really mean by those three popular words, is that we don't want to eat foods which were grown or raised with human intervention. But we often forget that we have an entire globe to feed. "Organic" food costs a lot of money. Genetically modified foods which are designed to grow faster and in greater amounts while being resistant to disease and pestilence are being produced to solve these hunger issues. And last I checked, starving children in third world countries probably don't particularly care about a .4 nanogram difference in the IGF-1 concentrations in their milk. They probably also can't afford to pay 20% more for the certified organic foods that upper-middle-class Americans try to consume on a daily basis.

Preservatives, additives, and other things we consider "not real", "not organic", or "not natural" can harm us, but a lot of the time they're actually meant to help us. Pesticides keep insects from destroying and contamination our food, so it actually gets to our table in one piece. Preservatives keep foods from spoiling, preventing it from aging into toxicity before it enters our mouths.

We also forget that a lot of the plant and animal species which are grown and raised on today's American farms genetically modified by selective breeding. We favor cattle that produce more milk and yield more edible meat, and we grow plants that have higher crop yields and greater resistance to disease and weather factors. We even crossbreed similar species to try and make one that has the qualities we see as "profitable" and "sustainable".

If that's not human intervention, I don't know what is. And we've been doing it for centuries.

ugly truth: POOP vs. PEE

Before you get started on my first entry, I'd like for you to watch the following video. Take your time and process the information. Watch it a second time, if you feel the need to.

I'm a smoker, so for me this TV advertisment has a particular sting. But let's not forget how bad smoking is for you. Understand that cigarettes are harmful and, especially, very addictive. Wikipedia cites WHO claims that in the year of 2004, cigarette consumption resulted in 5.4 million deaths, related to the carcinogenic effects that causes cancers in several parts of the body, including the mouth, the lungs, and the pancreas. Let's not forget about strokes and heart attacks.

So smoking is bad. What am I trying to say here?

The video you just watched is, for the sake of clarity, an anti-smoking ad which claims that two ingredients commonly used in cigarettes can be found in the feces of dogs and the urine of cats. Simply put, when you smoke a cigarette, YOU'RE SMOKING DOG SHIT AND CAT PISS.

That's obviously disgusting, right? Who in their right minds would mix dog poop and cat urine together, set it on fire, and then sit around inhaling the fumes? People who smoke cigarettes, apparently.

There's a lot of myths about cigarette smoking that are simply untrue. For example, a lot of smokers believe that "light" cigarettes contain less "nicotine" or some other ingredient than other cigarettes. That somehow makes these cigarettes "less unhealthy" and therefore "healthier" than "regular" cigarettes. Even non-smokers who try to dissuade friends or family members from smoking often fall into this lie. It would be the equivalent of driving up to a fast food restaurant and asking for a diet water. It's simply ridiculous, and people will give you a look that says: You, sir, are clearly retarded.

And here, now, we have another bullshit advertising campaign that misleads people into believing that cigarettes are made of dog poop and cat pee.

Methane, which is found in dog poop and human fart, is an abundant natural gas found in large concentrations on our planet and even on other planets in the solar system. We pump methane gas into our homes to heat water for our showers and cook our food. Methane is even used as an alternative fuel and is considered by some to be more environmentally friendly than fossil fuels or diesel.

According to "truthorange" the makers of this advertisment, methane powered water heaters and stovetops are heating our shower water and cooking our food with dog poop. That's right, folks, when you take a shower in the morning, you're washing yourself with dog poop. Brown, stinky dog poop that came out of a dog's butt. And when you eat your scrambled eggs and bacon, you're chewing moist, dank dog poop and swallowing it into your stomach, which is already full of dog poop because all your other food was cooked with methane, which is found in dog poop.

And while we're on the subject of food, how did that salad get on your plate? Did you know that 90% of the world's urea goes into agriculture as a fertilizer, according to ICIS? A lot of the bread you eat was made with grains that were planted in and grown on urea-incorporated crop fertilizers. Yes, America breeds hundreds of millions of cats every year and farmers hold them over their thousands of acres of farmland while they pee on your bread and your rice.

So go ahead, have dinner with your family at home tonight. Talk about the news, ask your children how their day was at school. Reach for seconds of soft, mushy dog poop and wash it down with a glass of warm, steamy cat pee. And don't smoke cigarettes.