Some of the data below may not be accurate enough, or in need of
improvements, please bear with such an 'amateurish'
approach: this is an essayin fieriand
the contributions of my readers will help me to improve it.
What has this kind of stuff to do with searching? More than you
would think. In our world of concealed realities and orchestrated
propaganda, web-searching capabilities (and a minimum of brain)
are a pre-requisite for finding out, and highlight, some awful
truths. A "reality cracking" activity which can and should open some sleepy eyes, at
least I hope. Capable searchers will for instance be able to check my 'strawberry
data' by themselves.
You'll surely feel a 'rant' component in this writing, indeed, but I have three kids,
and it's getting more and more hard to find some 'safe' food for them:
I really believe that someone should pay for the awful mess we are condemned
to live in. Have an happy new Millennium, there'sa shimmer
of hope, after all.
Strawberry fields... forever by Fravia+ version
January 2001
You wont eat strawberry-cakes anymore... nor salmon... nor smarties, I'm afraid... Bonae valetudinis quasi quaedam mater est frugalitas
The machinations and intrigues of the food-industry (actually a bunch of agro-food-chemical conglomerates) have recently been
rightly criticized, at least for meat-matters,
following the BSE-scandal in Europe and the genetically modified, and hormones-pumping
practices in use in the States.
Yet one of the most curious aspects of the political management
and of the media coverage of the BSE-crisis was the continuous and
never hidden greatest worry and concern for the interests of the
'producers'. In fact consumers are considered
a nuisance whenever they don't just shut up and consume.
"The new habits of the 'insecure consumers' are putting great
strain on the meat-producers": in other words, as soon as they understand -all
attempts to hide it notwithstanding- that they can get the
Creutzfeldt-Jakob if they eat meat from BSE-infected animals, these
"naughty
consumers" refuse to perform their consumeristic duty and do not buy
any more their
usual amount of shit. This hurts
economic interests, Oh waja, hence the imperious need to find solutions
a posteriori. (Alas for the consumers, as we will see, there are not
cheap alternatives to their infected milk-drinks and contaminated meat-meals).
Note that the offenders: in this case those that took the criminal decision to feed
herbivores (as the name implies cows were originally created to feed on grass, duh) with
meals made out of
crushed carcasses of dead animals (this being a more convenient, even if absolutely
unnatural, fodder) thus de factokilling people in order to make more money,
have
not been and will not be punished. Quite the contrary, they will probably be
refunded with public money, following the well-known principle of
our beautiful society where all profits must be private and all
losses should be public. This holy principle does not apply only to the food-poisoning practices discussed here:
it's a general law... and the recent FED intervention on the share
markets -to save private actionists from private losses- testify a similar
approach.
Those who have bent backwards in order to
defend the criminal practices of the meat producers have not been
punished either. I still remember UK-politicians cheerfully shoving
contaminated meat down their own kids' throats in front of the
cameras at the beginning of the BSE crisis in England years ago (years ago!),
where and when
backing the national meat-producers was more important -and of
course more economically and mediatically rewarding- than alerting fellow humans
about the
real dangers.
As a side note, since European citizens are -rightly- beginning to
sue the representatives of the lobbies that have for so long wrongly
defended the meat producers, I am wondering wether the many overweight
US-citizens who cannot be seated anymore on a plane three in a row
will soon have the right to sue those american "meat cum hormones" advocates (and
powerful lobbies) and/or their own McDonald's hamburger chains.
But infected milk and dangerous meat-meals are just the beginning
of these considerations:
there are in this context some more
general questions that I would like to point to.
The first, in my opinion quite important and relevant one, is
"what are strawberries made of?"
Data are data, I have been told more than once.
Now please note: The global production of strawberries in the
whole world would not be sufficient to cover 5% of the North
American demand for strawberries alone. This generates the obvious
question: what are the remaining 95% of strawberries made of? Not only in
the States but also elsewhere, of course.
The answer is simple: a distillation of sawdust and strawberry flavour
(aroma), plus soja and other chemical craps. Nice isn't it? Your
and your kids' 'strawberry' cakes, 'strawberry' ice creams,
'strawberry' syrups, 'strawberry' jelly, 'strawberry' candies,
made out of sawdust and chemical products, everything
but a single strawberry. It's a great feeling, eh? The film 'Matrix'
is nothing but a gentle dream in comparison. Aromas instead of real food.
...strawberry fields,
nothing is real... living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see...,
And please
don't be so naïf to believe that this applies only to
strawberries
Next time you see an automatic food-distribution
machine, for instance at a petrol station, ask yourself what are the components
of those "mars" bars and all
those other "crunchies" that kids (and idiots) continuously buy
and chew and buy.
You're in for quite some surprise.
Do yourself what I have done on my own: I went down to the
kitchen and took as an example a small tube of 'smarties' (by Nestlé):
lively coloured candy shells that kids sooo love, not least because
they are actively advertised and pushed through the usual TV-imprinting
methods. Now let's have
a look together I'm located in the European Union, hence there's on the box at
least a list of ingredients, emulsifiers, colours, glazing and flavouring
agents (note that in many parts of the planet you would'nt find even this
minimum), and here
they are, let's read and rejoice together: they are very
instructive.
Ingredients: sugar, cocoa liquor (what's that? How much cocoa? What
else composes
that "liquor"?), wheat flour, cocoa butter. What's that? That's not swiss-chocolate
either any more, after the European Parliament shameful and scandalous directive
(see below) is it? How much cocoa 'butter'? Is copra (a substitute for chocolate
made of dried flesh of the coconut) present? Which
other components did they put in that 'cocoa-butter'?), skimmed milk powder
(skimmed? Can you have a 'skimmed powder'? Or are they "powdering skimmed milk"?),
butterfat (how much 'butter' and how much 'fat'?), lactose (that's not milk either, eh. What about glucose? Is glucose the 'modified starch' below par chance?),
whey powder (whey? From which milk?), modified starch (how and why 'modified'?).
Emulsifiers: Soya lecitine. Soja? Note that in 1997 15% of soja-production (mainly in
the States) was genetically modified,
one year later, in 1998, 40% of the soja was GM guess how much
of the soja that the average bozo eats today within his tasty tacos and
juicy sausages
is genetically modified
Colours: E 100, E 101, E 120, E 133, E 160e, E 171. For all these
chemical products
and concotions
see both Dangerous food additives (reversing labels),
by Maxine+, and Dangerous food additives (second installment)
by Kuririn. You'll also easily find on the web the complete list: search for
"European Parliament and Council Directive of 30 June 1994 on colours for
use in foodstuffs (94/36/EC)". Be prepared for some longnamed and not exactly reassuring
chemical compositions. Glazing agents: carnauba wax (Carnauba? That's the same wax used for shoes!),
bees wax.
Flavouring: vanillin (vanillin is NOT vanilla: it's a cheap
by-product of paper
manufacture, duh, aromas instead of food once more) The trend is clearly towards
substituting 'real food'
with 'chemically indiced illusions' surrogates. The (infinite) list of flavouring
substances (see links below) will give you an idea of the huge SCALE of
this 'nothing is real' phenomenon.
An impressive list now go -my kid- and eat your
bright coloured smarties or your tasty
tachos, or your tempting mars bar, or your crunchy-smunty-crispy-choko-genetically
modified corn
flakes with a small funny dinosaur model inside the box.
And, pray, what components are hidden inside a sausage? Want to know
what's in a sausage? The answer I am afraid is everything BUT meat (a matter
of fact which -alas- can be only 'relatively appalling' in our BSE and
hormones infested meat-world). In a sausage you have some bread-rests
mixed with inner and unsaleable (and untellable) parts of
cows, pigs and chickens. As a sidenote: we don't even need to tap here the awful
"chicken-conditions" theme, go and have a look inside a chicken
production farm, and bring your vomit bag with you. Moreover you can (and they of course do)
produce 'pure' albumin using 100% chicken excrements. Back to our sausages... apart from
the many chemical components we also again find sawdust (a very
common food-component), tofu, and our previously encountered 100%
genetically modified soja.
You may resort to eat some good salmon, of course. Wild salmons
do not exist anymore (I asked in a big distribution market of a big European
city... main importer of Salmons speaking to me "Wild salmons? Haven't seen them in
years, maybe you can still find a couple of them in Ireland if you
fly there personally and pay enough to be allowed to fish them").
'Farmed' salmons -those that we all eat-
have a
white meat and are held in North-Europe's Fjords' water inside
huge congested cages, continuously sprayed with antibiotics,
squeezed among an high percentage of dead fishes and faecalies.
Their sloppy white meat doesn't look 'salmonish' enough and will
be coloured pink through carotene and other colorants. No wonder
the prices have rock-bottomed and you'll nowadays find salmon as
an 'elite' food only inside old books: you're eating the appalling
Norwegian equivalent of the chicken-farms. In recent
times (November 2000) European doctors begun to WARN people to
avoid eating salmon more than twice a week.
Wonder why? See below :-(
As a side note: the EU-already poor laws regarding food-safety and
maximal limits of chemical products have been purposely bent
downwards even further in this case, granting exceptions and derogations for the
Scottish salmon production farms 'in order to guarantee the
survival of the local salmon-breeding industry and jobs'.
The downward-spiralling quality concurrence of the
Norwegian and Icelanders (who -being outside the EU- not only kill whales but also
produce salmon in even more
inexcusable conditions) was indeed economically damaging the Scottish salmon
producers,
another nice example of the foremost law of globalisation:
"quality of life will be lowered everywhere for profit purposes".
Please don't think I'm too rude with our 'nice' Norwegians... they are responsable for
50% of the Atlantic
salmon farming monstrosities and are not nice at all: Note that
most farmed
salmons have
cataracts,
also are completely blind, and are so malformed that the bodies look like
carps, and not like (the disappearing) real salmons any more. Moreover real wild
salmons are disappearing because they have not had as much anti-parasitic treatment as
the farmed exemplars, who frequently escape their farming-prisons and
-breeding with them- transmit all sort of vermin (and cataracts).
Since we are searchers, and stalkers,
we stalk and search, thus we even find individual names, eh...
A responsible of this situation
is Dr Reid Hole, a Norwegian "Goebbels-like" scientist, who is
"Director of technology and development"
for the Dutch-Norwegian 'Nutreco Aquacolture' conglomerate (biggest salmon producers
of the world). I would like to report a couple of his own
phrases: "We have monitoring systems in place!"; "I don't accept that we speak
of these things
without evidences!". Another dangerous clown is the Canadian/Usa/Norwegian "aqua bounty farm"
scientist Dr Garth Fletcher, a "Mengele-like" figure, who is actively
breeding genetically modified monsters: salmons that weigh ten times a normal fish, look
like huge ugly deformed carps and concentrate in their bleak meat even higher PCBs and
dioxin levels that the normal
sickly farmed exemplars already do. A couple of his own phrases: "What's wrong with
Frankenstein? I have no problems
with this"; "Look at chickens instead... they now grow in six weeks!
A three months growth
would be far too slow... if you want
to remain in the market you must deliver the finished products quickly!" A very nice guy,
doing a very nice job, as you may infer.
Recent data and scientific evidence of these mischief have now prompted
the EU-legislators to reduce previous limits to as less as a 1/10th (sic!)
of the originally 'admitted' quantities... to no avail:
most salmon-producing member states (among them
the United Kingdom) have NOT implemented the new limits
for 'Norwegian competition' reasons.
My own determination (and advice for all readers, wherever they are): NEVER AGAIN
salmon for kids. In fact PCBs and
dioxins, intensively
present inside all farmed salmon,
are very dangerous for pregnant
mothers, weak persons (PCBs are quite immuno-toxic, alas) and especially children,
who have
a relatively light 'body weight'.
To be honest you may actually eat -once a week- farmed salmon without big damage
(provided your body is heavy and big enough) but I believe you
better use a much simpler (and more effective) rule of thumb: You see salmon somewhere?
Do not touch it with a badger pole. And let's hope that the salmon industry will go down
the drain with its monsters. Good riddance.
Alas! Such ominous food-rascalities do not regard only salmon! The number of additives and chemical
components hidden inside every single
'massive-production' food is huge, and far from being completely
documented on the labels in the relatively small part of the
world where there are labels that is, and where there are also agencies
that check that these labels correspond to truth, that is, and
where these same agencies have also more political clout that the
lobbies of the producers, re-sellers and distributors, that is. Cross your
fingers, readers, you'll need that.
Those 5-minutes dishes preparations that are continuously
advertised, those oh so softies frozen fish dishes or fish fingers
for kids, those potatoes and apples have colorants, aromatic
add-ons, anti-oxidation components, emulgators, stabilisation
elements, taste-intensifiers (these are particularly important
nowadays), edulcorants (sweeteners), and a series of other
components that would be too long and appalling to list. Woha, how
appetizing!
The only components that will most probably NOT be there are
exactly those that you would naively expect and that are so
artfully advertised on the cover of the chemical concoction you
have bought. There WONT be any real egg, any real sugar, any real
butter, any real chocolate, any real 'jumping' fish of the sea inside. In fact most of
those sea-braving ships you see on fish-products covers and advertisements
wont be there either: those fish, as far as some fish-meat should really be present in the
food-products you have bought (and you shouldn't count too much on that),
are farmed onshore (in appalling conditions), they are not even fished at sea
(in equally appalling conditions).
As a side note on advertising: chocolate. The European Parliament, always
yielding and forever flexible whenever any big lobby sneezes, has recently (in june 2000)
allowed to advertise chemical chocolate as 'real' chocolate against
the wishes of the (smaller and financially less strong) lobby of
the few remaining "real cocoa" chocolate producers. Among the main poitical
responsibles of this sordid
decision: the British Conservative MEP John Bowis and the
UK Minister for Europe Keith Vaz. One wonders how much money was
worth a decision that will allow chocolate makers to increase their profits by
choosing the cheapest ingredients... in fact the
replacement fats that may be added to the final product are featured in
the Annex to the Directive: illipe from Borneo or Tengkawang,
palm oil, sal, shea nut, kokum gurgi and mango stone oil.
Notwithstanding the above provisions, the Member States may also
allow (Alas! Such "may" always mean "will") the use of copra instead of cacao butter
inside "chocolate" used to make ice-cream and similar products,
like frozen chocolate bars. Copra is not something they would like to
inform you about on a label, eh: it is the dried kernel (endosperm) and outer
husk (tegument) of the seed of the
coconut palm (Cocos nucifera L.) (coco, not cocoa, eh :-)
mostly used to make tan-oil... when it is not used used in making
soaps... or this "chocolate"). Imagine such a dialogue: "Mummy mummy, may I have a tasty chocolade ice-cream?"
"I'm afraid not, my kid, but you can chew this tasty coconut tegument instead" "Yumm!
Great! Tastes really like chocolate!" "Yes dear, even if it is just soap".
I'm sure you begin
to understand the paramount importance of the taste-intensifiers (and of
powerful lobbies and of paid
politicians) by now...
C'mon guys, where would we
end up if we would forbid an important industry to lie outright to the public?
Moreover -as in the case of the BSE's meat- all
producers will bend backwards in order to SAVE MONEY on all and each one
of these chemical components, substituting poor materials with
even poorer materials every time a possibility to do so arises,
either through legislation loopholes or through simple
"entrepreneurial boldness". BTW the BSE-syndrome was due to cows-feeding
stuff made out of
dead animals carcasses and other unsavoury and unsaleable industrial remains, found first
in
Britain and then elsewhere in Europe as well... I wonder
if feeding products are really different in -say- China or South America or if they there
simply lack appropriate
anti-BSE controls... time will tell, eh.
The negligible fact that you and your kids may possibly (and maybe
even probably) die as a consequence of this approach, as in the
BSE-case, is none of their concern, nor is it a concern of the political
lackeys of the commercial powers that rule our world.
The understaffed agencies that should check at least a minimum of
compliance with (incomplete) food-safety regulations are being purposely kept
understaffed and ineffective and those 'old' regulations that are
being watered down (see the example above about allowing
cocoa-substitutes to advertise as 'real'
chocolate)
are at the same time being more and more replaced by nice sounding but
completely bogus
'voluntary agreements' agreed among
themselves by those very criminal producers.
I may add that the few producers that occasionally respect the
regulations and use 'real' (and safe) products and components
inside their products are more often than not being pushed off the market by the "free
forces of the competition"... if they don't "modernise their production methods"
and "begin to understand the laws of the market"... at least
until the next great food-poison induced human-slaughter, when those 'free forces of the
competition' will be once more saved from self-induced disaster
through public money, while
ad-hoc media campaigns will try to convince everyone that the
poisons in their food products are safe.
We live in a profit-oriented society that guarantees a relative
degree of affluence to his law-abiding citizens, so that they can
cheerfully consume as many of the food-surrogates and poisons currently on
sale as the advertisement industry decides.
Is there no shimmer of hope whatsoever?
NO! I mean: YES! There's some hope, at least on the short term. Internet (once you know how
to search, that is) delivers quite some
WEAPONS for self-defence and
educational purposes. Let's see some simple methods:
applying simple EXEGESIS and semanthical
techniques and
reading 'through the lines' some EU-directives
is for instance extremely instructive (if time-requesting) and
you'll find in those texts quite some useful info in order to avoid
determinate products. See an interesting example on the [ad hoc] page.
Another example of clever searching for auto-defense
purposes is an examination of
the counter-propaganda of the culprits: see for instance
[Nutreco Aquaculture
Questions and Answers], where you'll quickly see
that their very own
faq is -to re-use HalVar's words- a clear indicator of nonkosher
methods for raising the stuff.
Another example of the usefulness of knowing how to search the web for "self-defence" purposes are
the ALERTS... See: we have ALREADY
a planetary network of information, yet
'they' -on the other hand- still don't have a planetary effective global control ("divided they rule" said
+ORC :-). Hence if you for instance
seek for -say- Canadian "alerts" using the link below you'll find some useful info in order to
avoid
some specific products,
independently from the fact that you live in Canada or elsewhere. Moreover I bet that things will
develop more and more and
that in a couple of years time even zombies and consumeslaves will be able to
search GLOBALLY for
a lot of 'regional' alerts...
Finally, La va sans dire that knowing all other common seekers' techniques, i.e.
how to search inside hidden databases, how to take advantage of local, usenet and regional
searches and how to kleb
on the "outside referrers" part of the web, last but not least
using own-made bots, can deliver us
some (alarming) bonus-discoveries, since all the 'hidden' data of
the criminals and especially of their defenders are
on the web, eheh :-)
My real hope is that many grass-root organisations (for
instance [consumer agencies] and similar organisations) will learn the techniques needed for effective searching
and will
build on this stuff in order to cross the mischief of the commercial bastards,
or at least
seriously annoy them, collating the experiences of -say- some god-forgotten food-authority in
Sweden with the knowledge of -say- some odd-ball biological farmer in Sicily. Transparence and
the mighty power of many bees flying together (grass-root organisations) are VERY POWERFUL weapons in a world of lies, propaganda,
guarded secrets, criminal lobbying and profit-oriented mischief.
After all, Monsanto went down
the drain with its GMOs...
Some useful links -on the fly- for any seeker adventuring inside the 'strawberry fields':
[EU: food safety and EFA]
[EU: search, simple mask]
[EU: the flavouring directive]
But!: This Directive shall not apply to:
edible substances and products intended to be consumed as such, with or without reconstitution,
substances which have exclusively a sweet, sour or salt taste
Note also that this directive will 'prohibit' something only from june 2001 onwards... and read Annex II in
order to defend yourself better on the fly.
[EU: the register
of flavouring substances]
deserves to be seen... to see how MANY of them do exist.
For self-defence purposes note the following:
Specific remarks, under a numbered form are listed in the column ‘comments’. The explanation hereof is the
following:
...(2) = substance the use of which in certain Member States is subject to restrictive
or prohibitive measures; Couple of flavours worth a special look, of course.
Another example of the utility of a 'reversing regard' on the pertinent
legislation can be found
on the [ad hoc] page.
[CFIA (the Canadians)]
[CFIA search, simple mask]
Try a search here for -say- "blueberry" and have a look at the alerts :-)
[FDA's Center for Food Safety & Applied Nutrition]
[search the FDA's CFSAN]
And, indeed, a nice famous anti-OGM link recalled by
+Forseti: [Greenpeace's true food now]
An interesting and quite valuable link: [transnationale.org] "the citizien portal on corporations" (also in french or spanish).
You'll find various snippets, examples and comments on the
[ad hoc] page
