Nature ‘ain’t good enough
The simple maxim of “You are what you eat” may have more layers of meaning than we suppose. The body/mind matrix is under attack. The corporate doctrine has staked its claim on the human being with the goal of turning us all into walking coronaries, where the capacity to think is eroded by an excess of sugar, salt and array of potent chemicals. The mass production of food is intimately linked to our environment and the sensitive ecosystems of flora and fauna which are presently being vacuumed up into the vast processing plant known as Western economics.
Our extraordinarily unhealthy diets are tied to an agriculture system that is designed to generate profit at any cost, despite what the “green” corporations will tell you. Chemical intensive and mechanized production; migrant labourers paid subsistence wages; massive wastage; long distance shipping; producers caught in “hostage” contracts that they cannot escape from and large government subsidies allowing corporations to do as they please and to stay above the law. The cycle of exorbitant profits at the expense of the world at large is not showing any signs of improvement.
From the shopping mall lights to the candle-lit Vatican, the corporate ethos is re-designing the world. Standardized food production is depleting diversity by ruining soils and aquifers and contaminating endless stretches of land and water sources. Meantime, rural communities are driven out, forcing them to submit to the centralisation of city life, where more often than not, displaced families find themselves forced slum dwellings, a low income bracket or debt bondage and eventually poverty.
Meanwhile, the majority of us are living in Ronald MacDonald’s worldview where not just our body is being placed between two calorie saturated baps but our perceptions. We are accepting the deliberate assault on the taste and appearance of our highly processed food as supermarkets spill over with largely unnecessary products while attaching themselves to towns and villages thereby bankrupting local community shops. The coming of the huge supermarkets has sounded the death knell for community and family cohesion. For most of us, the urban infrastructure and work place has left us very little choice but to shop at such places. This adds to the erosion of the idea of civil society and local clusters of self-sustaining systems. They are already disappearing under the barrage of dehumanizing and downsizing measures that technology is inevitably increasing.
Corporations hold tenaciously to their credo of “efficiency” or rather, what is good for their profits. In fact, the system of corporate control is largely immoral and value-less except in terms of profit margins on balance sheets. Now that fresh, natural foods have been pushed to the periphery, we are forced to eat unnatural foods. Most of us who cannot afford natural or organic goods ingest daily quantities of foods that have been produced with insecticides, synthetic hormones and wasteful packaging. Indeed, 80% of anti-biotics are currently used in processing of cattle and livestock which ultimately ends up on the dinner table. With the new innovation of bioengineering, Nature herself can be patented and sold to the highest bidder – all in the name of eradicating poverty and feeding the world, while in reality delivering the exact opposite.
Knowledge is also being redefined towards strict protocols of consumption. Intellectual Property Rights are recognised only when knowledge and “creativity” generate profits – usually for a tiny percentage of the planet’s population. The shift from common rights to private rights is one of the primary tenets of “globalism” and is perfectly aligned to the new colonialism of multinationals. 19 The patents so enamoured of agri-chemical and bio-tech companies are now being used to not only define which direction the market should go but to block other firms’’ entry. Rather than being essential components in the monopoly of the seed business to extend invention and creativity, they are only required to increase market leverage and control, acting as an enforcer of IPR protection. Patents are deeply connected to universities and all manner of institutions with bribes and pay packets fixed accordingly. Creative enterprises and inventions are systematically co-opted and redirected to the same centralized market commodity.
Science too is working for government and corporations where true discovery, research and innovation is sucked into commercialisation where knowledge is exploited for profit and where specialisations and studies that could benefit humankind are slowly forgotten in favour of commercial spin. One example of this is genetic engineering.
The merging of the computer revolution and the biotechnology revolution into a single technological complex foreshadows a new era of food production – one divorced from land, climate and changing seasons, long the conditioning agents of agricultural output. In the coming half century, traditional agriculture is likely to wane, a victim of technological forces that are fast replacing outdoor farming with a manipulation of molecules in the laboratory. – Jeremy Rifkin
The capacity to adapt and evolve is lost through human tinkering that is born from both ignorance and hubris. If we create ever more “advanced” herbicides nature will create “super weeds” that quickly adapt so that stronger and stronger chemicals are needed.
The agri-chemcial and bio-tech giant Monsanto has genetically engineered its patented soya-bean to increase its herbicide sale while charging farmers a technology fee for buying more chemicals to fend off the adaptation capacity of diseases the chemicals themselves produce. With increasing problems arising from enormous fields suffering fromdepleted top soils and with synthetic copies of crops that cannot sustain themselves long-term, serious questions regarding the long-term health and economic viability of such farming has yet to rise above the push for short-term profits.
The economic fantasy that Monsanto so often relies upon before getting away with easy gains from its customary exploitation is beginning to be seen for what it is. 20 While Monsanto pushes its hybrid “Round-Up” soya bean on unsuspecting countries such as Argentina, the “miracle” is already disappearing from several studies suggesting serious health concerns. What is especially worrying are the repeating patterns of research showing growth reduction and serious atrophying across a broad range of bodily functions in animals. One study found that:
…55.6percent of the offspring of female rats fed genetically engineered soy flour died within three weeks. The female rats had received 5-7 grams of the Roundup Ready variety of soybeans, beginning two weeks before conception and continuing through nursing. By comparison, only 9percent of the offspring of rats fed non-GM soy died. Furthermore, offspring from the GM-fed group were significantly stunted—36percent weighed less than 20 grams after 2 weeks, compared to only 6.7percent from the non-GM soy control group.21
After only 10 days the rats showed significant health problems including “smaller brains, livers, and testicles, damaged immune systems and digestive function, partial atrophy of the liver and potentially pre-cancerous cell growth in the intestines.”22 The understandable concern is more than justified when we know that children are more likely to be at risk from the potential dangers of GM foods. This is due to their fast-developing bodies which are more susceptible to allergies, nutritional problems and the danger from antibiotic resistant diseases. 23 As one author states: “Mice avoid eating GM foods when they have the chance, as do rats, cows, pigs, geese, elk, squirrels, and others. What do these animals know that we don't?” 24
Genetic engineering primarily involves the introduction of genes containing DNA (dioxyribonucleic acid) procured from humans or animals into the cells of bacteria, yeast or other animals. One of the outcomes is termed a “transgenic” animal. Other delightful experiments include chicken or toad genes introduced into potatoes for disease resistance and to increase shelf-life and size, 25 or inserting mouse genes into tobacco plants or genes from fire-flies which make the leaves glow at night.26 Cancer research scientists in the US bred a creature called the “oncomouse”, which was genetically engineered to develop cancer yet since its introduction in 1981 and copious amounts of money, the cure for cancer remains elusive. There is always the potentially lucrative market of animal organ transplants. Mice have been specially created to lack an immune system so that they can grow human organs, such as ears, externally and even internally.
Through this ecological roulette we have already been exposed directly to large amounts of genetically engineered organisms (plants, microorganisms, viruses) and are thus subject to an extremely high level of risk. The particular quality of risk inherent in genetic engineering is due to the fact that the source of the risk is creatively alive, it can reproduce and cannot be retrieved in case of damage. What is more, horizontal transfer of genes can and does take place, where spontaneous hybridization occurs much more often than expected after genetic manipulation. The use of herbicides is effectively useless after a few years.
When transfer of transgenic plants to other plants, even from a range of a few kilometres by pollen, it is inevitable that the advantages of such a science - aside from the ethical issues - are founded on ignorance and will result in terminal harm to the ecosystem through plants foreign to the natural environment. Nature, like humans are involved in experiments that are preventing any kind of long-term sustainability but creating enormous short-term profits for the few at the probable expense of our bodies and minds. In other words, genetic engineering has long since been proven not to work and indeed acts as a highly dangerous genetic pollution into the food chain with significant health risks.27
If we are to believe that the earth’s ecology of which we appear to be part, is a complex expression of self-organizing systems that grow from within and are geared towards self-renewal, then man-made mechanistic, and exclusively reductionist applications defined by their lack of creative adaptation pose a threat to the finely tuned and delicately balanced equilibrium of our ecosystems. Genetic engineering views nature as a vast machine from which more dollars can be extracted while herbicides, insecticides and false promises to alleviate world poverty gradually reduce the natural equilibrium dependent on the natural functioning and growth of crops. To be in favour of quantity will always equal a decrease in quality. Those that think like machines and act like machines are determined to view nature as a machine are at the forefront of colonizing nature.
“We manipulate nature as if we were stuffing an Alsatian goose. We create new forms of energy; we make new elements; we kill crops; we wash brains. I can hear them in the dark sharpening their lasers.” – Erwin Chargaff
What’s a Cow Mum?
Animals are also still in the firing line when it comes to genetic modification, standard factory food production, vivisection and a whole set of contradictory values about their place in man’s self-imposed pyramid of consumption. Regardless of our opinions on vegetarianism or the perfect diet to suit each of our body types and regimens, everyone would probably agree that the treatment of animals in each country around the world is usually a reasonably good indication of how well we treat the human population.
This is not saying much of course, for if our human rights are rock bottom then the ethical treatment of animals is not going to up for discussion anytime soon. As such, it remains a problem of education and perception that cannot be separated from our social and cultural beliefs which are now just as entrenched as the factory farming process that spans the globe. It is an interesting mirror that is still largely hidden behind the convenience of market processes. Animals are clinically vacuum-packed and processed to be deposited in the vast freezers amid canned Muzak and the latest special offers. Customers need not even know that is was ever a living being at all. Cows, sheep, pigs, ducks and all kinds of “grain consuming animal-units” can now be safely deconstructed and sanitised for our dinner table.28
The treatment of animals is one aspect of the global Pathocracy that is more than a visceral symbol of our times. Indeed, the processing of beef from the bovine is a direct historical path of pathocratic rule: a symbol of psychopathology normalised for the dinner table. It is not a question of “is meat murder?” Nor if animals should be eaten but the intensity of suffering this system needlessly inflicts on beings that are denied that sentiency.
Animals now reflect the reality of ourselves as slaves in more ways than one. At this stage, it is placing the cart before the horse to repair a facet of a system that would produce large gains. We brutalize animals while we anthropomorphosize them, an ironic dichotomy that is a product of societies wholly out of touch with nature and basic animal husbandry.
Take the life of a pack of cheap supermarket beef (i.e. a calf) that begins its life from the “teaser bulls” 29 or “sidewinders,” so called, because they have had the penis surgically re-routed so that it comes out through the side. Unable to penetrate the cow’s vagina it does however leave a mark on the female from a coloured dye marker hung around his neck. The cows are then identified and artificially inseminated. Once born the males are castrated for docility and to improve the quality of the beef. This can be done with an emasculator which crushes the testicle cord or it can be done with a knife stuck through the scrotum and the testicles pulled out. Then comes the de-horning achieved through a chemical paste that burns out the roots of their horns. Electric dehorners are used on older steers or even saws, all without the use of anaesthetics. 30
After having a few months to be with their mothers they are transported to huge mechanized feeding lots for fattening up and slaughtering. (One can imagine the conditions of concrete feeding areas with thousands of cattle packed in for profit). Then come the drugs and a major source of income for the pharmaceutical companies. Growth stimulating hormones, feed additives, including antibiotics, anabolic steroids are implanted in the animals’ ears for slow release. Estradiol, testosterone and progesterone are also given, artificially adding muscle and fat in order to obtain the optimum weight gain in the minimum time. Most of the American beef market consistently uses growth hormones in meat and milk.31 32
Diseases are a persistent problem in conditions where production and profit is of primary concern. Therefore more drugs are needed which the pharmaceuticals are overjoyed to research and produce for their feedlot managers. While the drugged cows stand for hours on end at the trough they consume corn, soya and grains which are full of herbicides. And if we remember soya is the number one genetically modified crop already saturated with herbicides and pesticides before they even get to the cows and with over 80 percent of these chemicals being sprayed on corn and soya - it become a potent cocktail. 33 As if this is not enough, factory farms are busy using manure from chicken houses and pig pens, some factory farms and slaughter houses are mixing cement dust, industrial sewage and oils in order to reduce costs and fatten cattle more rapidly. 34 Antibiotics, hormones and herbicides as well as the possibility of new strains of disease-causing bacteria 35 produced from a number of unnatural practices in feeding and husbandry are posing a serious health risk to the human population. We do not need to do the maths to see that all these toxins are ending up in our own bodies with unknown effects on health and behaviour.
After the steers have reached the required weight they are packed into trucks and transported across often unbearably hot US states where many die through being trampled to death or through lack of water. Those that are incapacitated by broken legs or pelvises are dragged out at the end of the journey (no anaesthetic of course) and left for slaughter. The rest are lined up at the processing plant, stunned with a pneumatic gun, frequently still alive and quickly hoisted by a rear hoof over the slaughter house floor while their throats are cut. The animal is then only a few hours away from being transformed into plastic and polystyrene packing – clean as a whistle and ready for the family table.
The man-made chemicals released into the environment combined with the toxicity of our food may already be seriously disrupting the endocrine systems and sexual development of both humans and animals which countless laboratory studies have already confirmed. 36 With a uniform mentality that is now discussing torture as legitimate to extract truth in favour of freedom (there’s an oxymoron) 37 perhaps it is no surprise that our Earth has become both a slaughterhouse for the soul which by default, must hang the vulnerable and innocent on hooks for it’s own consumption. After all, the financial and economic system demands it. Remember Kissinger’s quote which gave a chilling glimpse into his long held game-plan: “Who controls the food controls the people.” This was given an eerie ring of truth when Catherine Bertini the director of the UN World Food Program announced at the Beijing Woman's Conference in September 1995: “Food is power. We use it to change behavior. Some may call that bribery. We do not apologize”. As a former Confidential Assistant to New York State Governor Nelson Rockefeller perhaps these statements should not come as a surprise.
By now, our toxic food now represents a vast experiment on the human population, the results of which are unknown. From the present state of the collective mind it is not hard to see that we are losing the battle to take back our own destiny and thus our mental, emotional and physical health. Our creative potential is in part, born from our own self-initiated activities and interactions with people. If our interaction with animals is solely based upon destructive dynamics of unnecessary consumption and cruelty, then we cannot be surprised when those same habits are repeated and projected towards ourselves and others. Nature may take on the task of purging some of the instigators of this global war against her in ways more creative than we can presently imagine.
Notes
