Newfangled Food (an introduction)

Aspergillus oryzae, or "Koji", is a fungus/mold used in eastern traditions to make soy sauce, amongst other things.  Soybeans, some grain such as wheat, water, salt, and koji all ferment together and the creation is a delicious sauce known as soy sauce.  I love the taste of soy sauce...the kind that is fermented.  Unfortunately, just like everything else in this industrialized culture of convenience, the majority of the "soy sauce" is in fact not soy sauce at all.  Today one of these packets of gastronomical maleficence conspired to ruin my modest lunch of plain cous cous.  Care to guess what this is:

water, salt, vegetable protein, corn syrup, caramel color, 1/10 of 1% sodium benzoate


The packet said "Soy Sauce" on it.  Regardless of what the lettering on the packet labeled this laboratory concoction as, it is not soy sauce.  On the bright side the packet did say that there was no MSG.  Pheww, at least I dodged that biological weapon.  Keeping MSG out of your body is nearly as impossible as keeping petroleum sugar (high fructose corn syrup) out of your body.  By the way, contrary to the industrial food complex's new line of propaganda:

 your body can tell the difference between petroleum sugar and cane sugar you jack wagin's.  According to research done at Princeton University they found:

The first experiment — male rats given water sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup in addition to a standard diet of rat chow gained much more weight than male rats that received water sweetened with table sugar, or sucrose, in conjunction with the standard diet. The concentration of sugar in the sucrose solution was the same as is found in some commercial soft drinks, while the high-fructose corn syrup solution was half as concentrated as most sodas.

The second experiment — the first long-term study of the effects of high-fructose corn syrup consumption on obesity in lab animals — monitored weight gain, body fat and triglyceride levels in rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup over a period of six months. Compared to animals eating only rat chow, rats on a diet rich in high-fructose corn syrup showed characteristic signs of a dangerous condition known in humans as the metabolic syndrome, including abnormal weight gain, significant increases in circulating triglycerides and augmented fat deposition, especially visceral fat around the belly. Male rats in particular ballooned in size: Animals with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained 48 percent more weight than those eating a normal diet. In humans, this would be equivalent to a 200-pound man gaining 96 pounds.

 Simple sugar, from cane sugar, has been around for a long time.  There are reports of crystallized can sugar from around 5000 years ago in India.  Here's a picture of cane sugar being extracted from the sugarcane.

  
That's how simple it is to get simple sugar.  From this one image you can see how simple it is to get sugar from sugarcane.  One picture...I'm pretty sure from just looking at this picture that I could do that myself with a few simple tools.  Contrast that to this:

That's from a documentary film titled "King Corn."  If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend that you take the time to watch it.

This blog entry started with the application of a packet of "soy sauce."  I brought some left over cous cous for lunch today.  It was plain cous cous and I was looking to add some more flavor to it.  I started rootin' around in the drawers at my station and found a plastic tub full of condiments from fast food fry pits and take out food.  I found a couple of packets of soy sauce and without thinking emptied the contents onto my cous cous.  I started to eat my lunch and realized that it didn't really taste like soy sauce. In fact it tasted sort of bad.  As I continued on I realized that it was really not very good.  I don't like to waste food, and it's all I brought for lunch, so I decided to charge forward.  Luckily I only emptied one packet.

We have become desensitized towards what we place in our bodies.  If you read the ingredients of any industrially processed "food" item from the grocery store, you will likely see many words that make no sense to you.  These words represent chemicals that have been synthesized by chemist.  That is the difference between food and what Sally Fallon, author of the book "Nourishing Traditions", calls "newfangled foods".  Newfangled sounds about right to me.  There are many unnecessary ingredients added to traditional foods bought at the grocery store because it's necessary for profit and function.  These foods are the function of our industrialized convenience society.  Whole foods become fractured and are disassembled into molecular parts.  Even the whole foods that are left whole by industrial agriculture have been genetically tampered with.  The apple that you eat is not how nature intended it to be. You can't tell when you eat the apple but your bodies cells can.

As the days move forward it is becoming more and more difficult to eat natural and whole foods.  This is a travesty.  Americans are overweight and starving to death at the same time.  The foods that we are offered provide energy and nothing else.  Unfortunately the food is compact with energy that we don't use due to our sedentary western lifestyles.  We can exceed our daily caloric need by stopping at a petroleum station and filling up a petroleum cup with flavored petroleum sugar drink while filling up our petroleum tank.  We have become the petroleum people.  Our food is nothing more than a clever way to eat petroleum.

When addicted to a drug, the drug will win in the end.  The drugs victory is your lose.  In our case, it's our lose.  It is still possible, in some instances at least, to still subsist on nutritional whole foods.  One way is to grow as much of your own food as you possibly can.  You have to have access to a patch of dirt to utilize that particular method.  Plus you have to learn a lot about growing food in a sustainable fashion.  Then you have to learn about traditional food preservation.  Plus you have to be willing to spend a lot of time in the kitchen.  In other words you have to make it your mission to enter food culture.  You have to be willing to take responsibility for what your body becomes.  Your priorities must change drastically from the normal convenience lifestyle that we lead in the Western world.

It is necessary that more people begin taking responsibility for their food needs.  It is necessary that people begin waking up to the reasons behind why Americans lead the world in obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.  You are what you eat, and what we eat is industrialized convenience assembled from petroleum sugar and machines.  We are being transformed into units requiring a daily dose of petroleum.  The importance of food cannot be understated.  I'll be musing on this topic.