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I really do have an addiction problem: I can't stop thinking about the kung po beef fom my local Chinese takeaway *slobbers* Really, its actually getting to be a problem, if I eat kung po constantly for the rest of my life it'll still be too rarely; I could chew my way through a fu**ing cow covered in kung po sauce and cashew nuts, I swear to God...

 

 

This is a day of food talk. And I've had a minor revelation about the state of the world; consumerism and the illusion of `consumer choice`; all because of food. I shall now share:

Consumer choice, in many contexts (such as within any one supermarket for one) is fabricated to a large extent to keep us worried and insecure about our lifestyles, and this makes us receptive to any quick-fix recipe or `organic` alternative that, hardly coincidentally, costs twice as much the product that's probably been serving us well for years.

 

Its all about baked beans, you see.

 

I'm sure we've all bought baked beans from a supermarket before and this extremely simple & basic purchase illustrates my point right here; you go into the canned food aisle vaguely trying to find something you can live with yourself for eating besides baked beans, but resign yourself to the fate that awaits us all and pass over tinned runner beans and carrots and potatoes cursing yourself in some tiny way for having to prepare all your vegetables yourself (instead of having maids, chefs and butlers to do, obviously rolleyes.gif ) and you know you're only going to actually pick up a simple can of baked beans of five; you are not expecting an assault on the common sense gland -

there are fifteen f**king types of beans on offer on these shelves and hell, you know somewhere deep in your cynical soul that they're all the same - I'd wager a fair sum of money that half the cans you see on the shelves with different labels, from different brand names, and with different levels of alleged healthiness are made in the same bloody factory.

Organic baked beans?

Don't make me laugh.

You've paid through the nose so that your food can taste the bloody same but your deluded sense of self-satisfaction wont allow you to realise there's nothing different in taste between organic fruit, veg and general produce and the genetically modified stuff! Its been tested and the bloody farmers who grow it cant even tell the difference, no; all that's happened is this organic food has become less efficient to produce and more costly for everyone involved - and the infuriating thing is that its all because the media is capable of whipping up such a frenzy that the simple story a few years ago about how a lot of our food was genetically modified without our widespread realisation of the fact has created an entire new industry: the organic food industry - and it is simply an industry that wastes time.

 

Of course, it keeps the money in circulation and whenever that happens the government gets to collect about 22% of our money when we earn it, and another 17.5% when we spend it, so they are hardly going to do anything but publicly support it are they??!!

 

I discovered this in a flash as I discerningly reached for can of Waitrose's finest `organic` baked beans and spied the lonely regular beans on the shelf below. Then I kicked myself for falling for this most ancient of tricks: all they do is slam the opposition to strengthen their own position; It was just like Cartman running for class president all over again ....

 

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Organic food is morally superior. Well, is it? Organic food is still treated with pesticides and fungicides, its just that those chemicals are derived directly from naturally occurring plant and animal sources, and this simple explanation makes everything think everything is okay because anything `natural` in it's origin can't be bad for us now can it; never mind the fact that certain natural vegetable extracts are at least as deadly as anything we've cooked up in a lab; never mind the fact that animal poisons are more virulent than anything man-made at all, no - if its `organic` and `natural` it is better, obviously!!!

Of course none of the poisons of nature are used to treat crops but the point is than by blanketing all things `synthetic` and `man-made` as unnatural and bad, and making all things organic and natural good, we are treading a dangerous path where the decisions about what would be best to use to, for example, keep a certain insect away from a certain crop, cure an illness, or disinfect an outbreak of a disease, could be made because of the label that substance has been given or the category into which we have allowed it to slip, and not its actual benefits.

 

And that's just the morals (but morals are a whole different story anyway wink.gif ) of doing the right thing in extreme and unforeseen circumstances; what about those we can see all too clearly?

 

My main gripe with `organic` food is that the resources we use in countries like the UK and the USA to make expensive, time-consuming and needlessly land-intensive organic foods could be better spent making far larger quantities of `genetically modified` food keeping the cost of our living down and allowing us to maybe help other countries who have no such luxuries! To that end also there is a huge amount of food that is wasted by the regular old-fashioned `GM` food industry because of simply ridiculous things like `how round is my tomato` and other bulls**t like that, so that also is the cause of a helluva lot of needless waste; waste all in the name of our own vanity, and of obscene and damaging standards that we have allowed to be set for us by the same sonsab*tches who make 15 varieties of baked beans and scare us into buying the most expensive one.

 

One more rant:

Genetic modification; tweaking the genes of a variety of potato so that the potatoes grow larger, with less infection, and perhaps even more quickly - this is what genetic modification does for you and this is what has been labelled equally as evil by the media who wish us to buy more papers with more scares stories and then buy more potatoes with more natural chemicals used on them - but gentic modification is what farmers have been doing for centuries, except they called it Selective Breeding` and yes, it is an evil and insidious practice - selective breeding is why we have domesticated dogs who can't even act naturally because they've been bred and bred and bred until they're the biggest joke in the animal kingdom laugh.gif

But in the realm of foodstuffs we have been modifying the genetic makeup of everything we farm for thousands of years, just because people are doing it in those scary sterile labs and faceless white-coated lab technicians are handling the syringes and not a fat, red-faced, burlesque farmer with a flat tweed cap and an "oo-arr!" for every occasion do we feel threatened by this.

 

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And anyway, everything we have, every single item we own, have invented or possess derives from nature, no matter how tenuously, because it all comes from the earth and the sky, all of it: scientific labs and microscopes and test tubes and scalpels and engine oil and plastic toy cars and even the synthesised chemical treatments that might kill or cure us in a hundred years time are all `organic` because we created them from nature, or at least we created the tools that created them, or created the tools that created the tools that... etc etc etc.

There was nothing on this Earth 10,000 years ago that we still have today except all the stuff we have made from what was on this Earth (and mountains and stuff tongue.gif ) - it may not look very similar, but a washing machine and an Oak tree are still both totally organic in their origins, and we can hardly be anything other than organic ourselves and we made the washing machine, from natural substances no less, and even if it did take a few thousand years to get from a lump of iron ore to a steel axle pin that secures a vital part of a washing machine into place it is still created by organic beings from organic substances, however convoluted that route may have been.

 

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