Skinflint Skim Food.

You ma have watched Current Affair last night, and heard about the "adulteration of our milk" with a thing called "permeate." I can honestly say that I have been lucky enough to have milk fresh from a farm, and thus have something to compare supermarket milk to.

I can therefore also say that there IS a difference. You can see that supermarket milk is more transparent ("thinner") than fresh minimally processed dairy milk. No it doesn't taste the same, but then all processing of milk alters the taste from the rich bacteria-laden brew that comes out of a cow's teat. Some of that is actually beneficial.

Adding permeate is just adding back what's left after extracting most of the useful parts of whey, which is in turn wat's left of milk after extracting the most useful parts of milk for making cheese. So yes permeate is a long way down the ladder from milk, and shouldn't be there - but at least it's not going to be any more harmful to your health than milk. And in some cases the thinner milk is actually good, such as in baking.

So really, permeate should go into the bread instead of full cream milk, thus reducing the cost of bre... Hang on, that's right, bread already uses he minimum amount and form of milk possible, adulterated by whatever the bakeries use to stretch the milk as far as possible...

Adulteration of food is nothing new. Frederick Accum was among the most vocal and active of anti-fraud activists, back in the early 1800's no less. He used a then still fairly high tech medium - he published a book - to actually name the merchants and manufacturers, and they shut him down with legalities and innuendo. Today, you still notice manufacturers shutting down sites where the public are encouraged to name and shame, and more importantly, you still notice that adulteration of food is taking place, just that the handling of it takes a different form.

In Accum's time, he noted with some grim glee that each of the primary foodstuff and pharmacy manufacturers were poisoning one another in a circular spiral of karma and bad digestion. He didn't need to specifically note however that this was also true of the general consumer too, the person whom all these adulterations eventually filtered down to, en masse.

Today we find that as each manufacturer uses some technique to stretch their ingredients, we lose once. Then because most of those ingredients in their turn come from a source that has already diluted or adulteratd these basic building blocks, we're losing out in a geometric progesssion...

But times have changed.

Where in Accum's day it was a case of slip in whatever you could and bank on the public's ignorance to not recognise poison in their food when they encountered it, our time is a time of disclosure.

Nowadays it's a case of slip in whatever you can, disclose as little of the true nature of the additives or find some loophole to allow you to remain within disclosure law as you can, and bank on the public's ignorance to not recognise poison in their food when they encounter it...

In Accum's day, there were as yet few additives. (Which are nowadays produced mostly by laboratory processes from waste products from another manufacture stage.) The reason was that there were then no processing plants able to manage this process. There were none, because the energy that ws needed and that we would soon unlock in the form of electric power from fossil fuels was not yet available, along with the spike in the production of poisonous emissions and greenhouse gases that would march hand in hand with the exploitation of fossil fuels.

In our day, we have added more illnesses and cancers to our repertoire than at any other time in the development of the world, not a mean achievement by any means. And do I think that the increase in additives, onset of pollution and huge increase in the incidence of cancers and other illnesses is all coincidental? What do you think?

Once again, I can never overtstate this enough - manufacturers could not get away with this shit if it wasn't for one very important group - US - the buying public. If we don't use every avenue open to us to bring these greedy companies to heel, they will continue to poison us. It's that simple. Check products carefully. Read labels, and at all times keep yourself aware of the latest deception being practised on us by nitpicking loophole seekers.

This is the price of keeping your own health, and the health of your family and people you care about. Let someone else forge the pioneering work of attempting to assimilate these poisons into the human genome...