"Shutup and Eat Your Chemicals"
by Paul Craig Roberts
"I have been thinking for some time about the disappearing quality of food. Consider restaurants. I remember when people went to restaurants to enjoy dishes that even good cooks could not prepare at home. Many mothers and grandmothers grew up with the adage that the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach. Children needed nutritional food in order to perform well in school and in sports. Home cooking served up good fried chicken, baked ham, spaghetti and meat balls, roast beef, pot roast, pork roast, butterbeans, lady peas, corn on the Cobb, and tomatoes. But if you wanted Chicken Kiev, Beef Wellington, Beef Stroganoff, Beef Burgundy, Sole Meunière, Pheasant Under Glass and desserts like baked Alaska and chocolate mousse, you went to a quality restaurant.
Quality restaurants did not jam the space with as many tables as could be accommodated. They left space so that you did not feel like you were sitting at the counter in a diner. Tables had tablecloths and dishes were served on china. Waiters would be in black tie. The clientele was not talking and laughing at the top of their voices, and you could actually have a conversation with your dinner companions. Those days are gone.
In more recent times I have dined at the best restaurants in New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Cleveland, and none of the items mentioned above was on the menus. The menu I experienced at Claridges in London in the 1960s no longer exists at Claridges. The only survivor on Claridges’ dinner menu is sole meunière. Moreover, today the cost of afternoon tea at Claridges for one person is five times more than the bill for four for dinner including vintage port with which I was presented in 1963.
A year or two ago or less, I posted on my website menus from New York City’s famous restaurants at the turn of the 20th century. The extraordinary wide selection of dishes offered, 90% of which are not offered today even in 5-star French restaurants in Paris is astonishing. If you research my website you will find the menus. The prices are also astonishing. You could eat like a king for the price of a fast food takeout today. Of course, money was worth far more in those days. The American people were correct to oppose the creation of a central bank, but it was forced on them and destroyed the value of their money.
To return to my topic of quality food. Recently I purchased from Publix, where I grocery shop, an individual serving of strawberry short cake, a southern dessert that reminded me of my grandmother. It was an easy dessert to make and was always welcome. What was required was some flour, water or milk, cane sugar, sliced fresh strawberries, and whipped cream made by hand-whipping the cream from the top of non-pasteurized, non-homogenized milk, a product no longer available in stores.
Carried away by my expectation of enjoying a taste from the past, I did not read the ingredients listing on the Publix’s strawberry shortcake before I ate a combination of chemicals unknown to me. Here it is: Strawberry, sugar, water, bleached enriched flour (wheat flour, niacin,reduced iron, thiamine mononitrate, ribbon flavin, folic acid), egg white, hydrogenated vegetable oil (palm, palm kernel, coconut, &/or cottonseed), dextrose, soy oil, eggs, food starch-modified, milk, graham crumbs, (whole wheat graham flour, sugar, wheat flour, palm oil, palm kernel oil, honey, molasses, soy lecithin, sodium bicarbonate, salt, natural flavor, cream, leavening (sodium acid pyrophosphate, baking soda, monocalcium phosphate), wheat starch, sodium caseinate, food starch-modified (tapioca), propylene glycol mono-&diesters of fats & fatty acids, polysorbate 60, whey, gums (guar, xanthin, carbohydrate), salt, mono-&diglycerides, natural & artificial flavor, soy lecithin, sodium stearoyl lactylate, pectin, sorbitan monostearate, colors (red 40, yellow 5, lake beta carotene), citric, anhydrous, potassium sorbet (preservative), 010825 Contains milk, eggs, wheat, and soy.
Compare this endless list with the 5 ingredients my grandmother used. Note also that hardly any of the public have any idea what most of these ingredients are. And ask yourself why a preservative is needed for a product that has a shelf-life at Publix’s of two days.
I then turned to Publix’s in-store baked Italian five grain bread. The list of ingredients is almost as long. As the shelf-life is 2 days, I asked the manager of the in-store bakery the purpose of the long list of mainly unknown ingredients. He answered that the dough arrived mixed and that in-store they simply manufactured the product by baking the bread. I concluded that the preservatives, et. al., are for the shelf-life of the pre-mixed dough. The same for cake icing, whipped cream. They come in cans and the store assembles the products.
Compare this to the real bakeries that used to exist. A few still do. Such bakeries bake for the day’s sales based on sales experience. Most cakes were baked to order. Unless they used pre-mixed dough, which I doubt existed in those days, you could get a real product without nameless ingredients. Homes that baked their own bread needed only water, milk, or buttermilk, yeast, cane sugar or honey, salt, butter, and flour.
The centralization of food supply requires a long shelf-life, which requires ingredients that are not good for us. Avoiding spoilage becomes the goal, and feeding us chemicals is the way it is achieved. Moreover, food manufacturers come up with ever more ways to deceive us. For example, smaller pieces of expensive cuts of beef too small to market as steaks are today fused together with meat glue. An enzyme called Activa, fuses together the pieces and a steak is created. The problem is, as Dr. Russell Blaylock reports, that the process releases excitotoxins that raise the risk of gastroenteritis and that fuel cancer growth. Of course, the food industry lobby prevents the FDA from doing anything about it.
The further foods are produced from the users, the less the concern for the users. Other concerns become more important than the quality of the food. Moreover, localized food production is not subject to catastrophic failure as is a centralized one. Thought should be given to the dangers of centralized food production and distribution, but there is no money in it. Reliance on processed foods with additives is likely entrenched as at-home cooking seems to be an abandoned task."
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