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.
This isn’t to say that actual food is impossible to find. Most supermarkets offer organic produce, locally sourced free-range chicken, grass-fed beef, and so on. Such food is, however, extremely expensive. Limit your diet to such items and you rapidly realize how ‘rich’ you truly are.
Over the last generation or so our agribusiness and food distribution system has engaged in a vast sleight of hand. Actual food has been slowly replaced with the simulation of food, without anyone really noticing. Sometimes this was done openly, as with the encouragement to use the toxic sludge called ‘margarine’ rather than the butter we’d been eating for thousands of years. Saturated fats are bad for your heart, you know
. In other cases it was done with no great fanfare: using the engine lubricant called canola oil in place of olive oil to make mayonnaise, or substituting high fructose corn syrup for cane sugar in Coca-Cola. Recipes were quietly altered, by and large no one noticed the difference, and corporations pocketed the difference arising from their lower production costs, happily externalizing the costs inflicted by the ruined health of the general populace that this mass poisoning resulted in.
