John Carter

Mar 19

We Westmen have become accustomed to thinking our condition synonymous with wealth. Sure, we might have trouble paying the bills, we might not have as much stuff as our neighbours, we might go on Instagram and see lifestyles of unthinkable luxury, but we’re not living in the filthy slum hives of the third world. Our streets are not full of refuse and excrement. Famine does not stalk through our thoughts.

We’re the fortunate sons of history.

We’re rich.

Or so we tell ourselves.

Consider the supermarkets. At a glance, their shelves groan with abundance. Aisle after aisle packed with a dizzying variety of ultrapalatable foods, ringed with a perimeter of cheeses, breads, meats, vegetables, and fruits obtained out of season from distant lands with friendly climates.

Yet, peer behind the curtain, and it’s a mirage. The processed foods stocking the aisles are almost entirely built from derivatives of corn and soybean oil, laced with generous quantities of artificial flavouring, preservatives, emulsifiers, and other chemical agents rubberstamped into the food supply by captured regulators. For all that they are calorically dense, these packaged items are not in any meaningful sense ‘food’. They are addictive drugs shot through with poisons.

Then there are the unprocessed foods. These are suffused in pesticides and herbicides, painted and waxed so as to preserve their appearance and what flavour they retain from the mineral-stripped soil in which they were chemically fertilized. The meat is hormonal and antibiotic, injected with dyes to simulate freshness, stitched together from scraps using glue to give the appearance of steak.

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