If there is one thing you can rely on the human race to do with merciless efficiency, it is to take something as fundamental and necessary as food – our daily bread, our last great pleasure, our communion with civilisation – and make it utterly, inexcusably wretched.
We have, with our unerring instinct for catastrophe, managed to transform the bounty of the Earth into a buffet of despair.
And as for fast food – well, I won’t waste ink on it. It’s not food, and it’s barely fast. It’s a parody of nourishment, a soulless, plastic-wrapped monument to mediocrity. If you want the gustatory equivalent of a flatlining heart monitor, by all means, queue up. But here? No. We have standards.
The last McDonald’s sold in Iceland – photo taken 12 years later
The recent fires were in LA; the dioxins have been recorded as far north as Sacramento.
Let’s start where all good food does: the land. Or at least what’s left of it. Large swathes of the world now resemble the set of a dystopian film – charred, cracked, or drowned beyond recognition.
The fields of California, the breadbasket of America, have been torched into a biblical warning sign, thanks to fires that, apart from melting Teslas, have also melted something rather more insidious: plastics, chemicals, and the delightful bouquet of toxins that settle in their wake.
Dioxins, the poltergeists of pollution, invisible and persistent, now lace the Californian soil, seeping into roots and leaves, winding their way into the spinach of those earnest, oat-milk-drinking evangelists of healthy eating.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the table, half the world is parched, the other half is drowning. There is no middle ground anymore, only a roulette wheel of misery. Too much water and the crops rot, mold curling into the grain, whispering of aflatoxins and slow, steady poisoning. Too little water and the earth cracks open like an old face in the sun, the roots of a thousand harvests curling in upon themselves, withering.
And when the harvests do come in, they arrive hand-in-hand with another uninvited guest: the microscopic detritus of our modern world.
In a recent newsletter from Riverford Organic Farmers, it was highlighted that in the UK there is neither a Food Minister nor a food policy, successive governments outsourcing food policies to “Big Ag”. That speaks volumes in itself. People care about the food they eat and they expect their governments to care too.
Consider, if you will, the humble grain of rice, the staple of nations, the embodiment of sustenance. It now comes garnished with something new, something unexpected – tiny, glistening spheres of polyethylene, polypropylene, and polyurethane, a veritable bauble of indigestible, immortal refuse.
The plastics of yesterday’s disposable cup, last summer’s beach toy, the infinite microfibers shed by every synthetic fleece, now find themselves reincarnated as an unwelcome seasoning in our sushi.
If you thought the oceans were the only casualty of this great confetti shower of microplastics, you’d be tragically mistaken. The soil, that great, heaving stomach of the planet, the ancient alchemy of rot and rebirth, has become an unwilling landfill.
Every time you step into a supermarket and fondle a plastic-wrapped vegetable, you should know that you’re in a self-fulfilling prophecy – those same polymers, worn down by sun and wind, are now the secret ingredient in the next crop.
The very stuff that makes up the plastic tat of our throwaway lives has made its way into our food, a grimly poetic circular economy.
And then there’s the exquisite horror of microbeads, the pastel-colored scourge of vanity. Once in our toothpastes or lovingly massaged into pores by the skincare industrial complex, they were meant to sluice away dead skin cells and leave us dewy-fresh.
Instead, they have sluiced into rivers, into fish, into soils, and now into everything we eat. Every succulent, pesticide-glazed strawberry, every morally superior farm-to-table salad, is now lightly dusted with these indestructible little spheres. They are in our meat, they are in our grains, they are in the honey that we spread on toast to feel vaguely virtuous.
Of course, there are those who will say, with the breezy optimism of the truly deluded, that it’s all fine, that humans have been eating dirt since they first dragged themselves out of the primordial sludge.
And they are right, in a way. But this is not the rich, loamy, fertile dirt of the past, the soil that smelled of rain and the promise of life. This is the plastic-flecked, chemically embalmed corpse of the planet’s past generosity.
So, what’s for dinner? A dioxin-sprinkled salad, a polyethylene-stuffed fish, a polyurethane-glazed apple? We have created a menu of modernity, a tasting platter of all our sins, a meal that we cannot help but eat because there is nothing else left.
The good news is that once we realise the extent of our folly, we can do something about it! Buy your bread from a baker, your fish from a fishmonger, and your vegetables from a farmer who still has dirt under his nails. It’s a small rebellion, a flicker of defiance against the shrink-wrapped sameness of the supermarket aisle.
It’s a start – one we need more than ever.
That’s just the food.
Some years ago, I came across a study – one of those quietly horrifying bits of research that gets buried under the weight of more palatable news. The researchers tested 1the grapes and the wines of 100 Californian vineyards. Now, given that California boasts some 4,200 wineries and nearly 6,000 grape growers, 100 isn’t exactly exhaustive.
Yet every sample tested contained glyphosate – that’s a toxic herbicide, for those of you still clinging to the belief that glyphosate isn’t linked to decimating the bee population and causing adverse respiratory conditions in humans.
For me, that’s reason enough to drink wines produced by other countries although I’ll admit I haven’t yet found details of how their grapes are sprayed and their wines are produced.
Would you take nutritional advice from the US Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics if you knew they are shareholders in the ultra food companies PepsiCo and Nestle?
Would you take nutritional advice from Amazon if you knew they bought Whole Foods that are now selling pharmaceuticals?
Foodbabe: Investigate What’s Really In Your Food
‘Food Babe’or Vani Hari is a revolutionary food activist, a best selling author and in 2015, Time Magazine described her as one of the “Most Influential People On The Internet”.
Her investigative work is making companies like Monsanto, Kraft and Kelloggs squirm (Yay!).
Bon appétit.
Graeme Dinnen
ResourcesForLife.net
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