News like this is everywhere. You'd think the message was getting across to the public. And you'd also think that if the message was getting across, people would boycott some of the perpetrators, one by one. What are you actually eating when you buy processed / "supermarket fresh" foods? Do you know?
Because if the message was getting out, you'd know. How can these sorts of things happen and people not know about them, again and again? Here are seven just pulled at random off a search results page:
- https://www.counterfraud.gov.au/news/general-news/eyes-bigger-their-stomach-deceit-australian-food-market
- https://foodfraudadvisors.com/top-5-food-frauds-of-2022-so-far/
- https://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/news-and-media-releases/articles/tackling-australias-$3-billion-food-and-fibre-fraud-problem
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0924224421003848
- https://www.cbsnews.com/media/food-frauds-10-most-adulterated-foods/
- https://www.foodsafety.com.au/blog/consumers-fooled-by-fake-food
- https://www.ideagen.com/thought-leadership/blog/the-5-biggest-food-fraud-cases-ever-pulled-off
Note the dates, all over the place. And I've sounded off about these for over a decade:
- https://tedamenu.blogspot.com/2022/07/no-hope-for-food-knowledge.html
- https://zencookbook.blogspot.com/2007/03/meat-to-please-you.html
- https://zencookbook.blogspot.com/2008/07/another-supermarket-caught-out-stealing.html
- https://zencookbook.blogspot.com/2008/10/vegetables-meat-or-both.html
- https://zencookbook.blogspot.com/2008/12/enough-to-make-you-sick-hell-yeah.html
- https://zencookbook.blogspot.com/2009/05/meet-other-strange-meat.html
- https://zencookbook.blogspot.com/2009/07/proved-right-again-by-research.html
Those links are to articles where I wrote about the state of food fraud. There are others where I wrote about straight-up fraud of other items than food, but people who produce adultered/fraudulently-altered food and the mountains of food and "nutrition" misinformation deserve a special place in a quite special Hell of drowning in a hot stew their own products, over and over and over.
So What Is This?
Artificially reddening meat to make it look appealing was A Thing last century, a thing that probably caused quite a few stomach ulcers, digestive issues, and even cancers. We'll never know. Because no-one commissioned those sorts of studies. That would be informing the buying public, and we don't do that, only mis-inform...
Initially this was done with a compound that's an irritant and inflammatory chemical. Why? Because the food corporations spent billions in their advertising to show lovely unnaturally red meat. They did it because people thought brown meat was rotten. (It isn't. Meat oxidises on the outside and turns brown and that's a natural process. We age meat to brown it, by cooking it. The browning indicates a piece of meat that's at a perfect stage for cooking.)
So - stupid people are at the heart of this, but stupid people only get that way if they're not educated. So education is to blame, or in this case, lack of the correct knowledge and so butchers and supermarkets started to add inflammatory chemicals to their meat to make it red, their sales went up, and people started developing more bowel issues...
There are now some methods used that don't involve those irritants, but I'm still a bit pissed off when I get this sort of thing:
The brown parts of that are the type of meat I'd actually prefer in my shopping basket and they indicate almost perfect ageing. (Of course I know the entire cut is the same age, but the pink parts have been treated to look like something they're not, the chemical originally used has been quite emphatically outlawed for decades, and now I wonder what fresh bastardry the producers of this cut have found to pump up their bottom line...)
This is a supermarket that has vowed to reduce their use of known harmful chemicals in the foods they sell, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't develop new harmful chemicals. And it's still fraud as defined in that video I first linked to.
BTW: That meat was great, despite the pink stuff. We enjoyed the meal I cooked with it and some vegetables and herbs from our garden and other unprocessed ingredients.
Coda.
As some of you know I grow vegetables in our tiny front yard which is also our outdoor area so we've done, I think, a great job of integrating both. I'm doing this to remind us both - to remind you, reading this - of where our food actually comes from. I'm not some organic/hand-everything wonk but I like it if I can eat food that has only been watered, fed with compost and minimal dry granular fertiliser, and a combination of pesticides that I know are minimally harmful and home remedies known to work, and I've designed garden beds that farm their own worms and put timed reticulation on that. I don't like the daily grind of watering and weeding and de-pesting. It comes down to the Spoons thing. I'm one of the lucky(?) small group for whom spoons are a bit limited.
But supermarkets and large food corporations would really like you to forget how easy it is to grow your own. Those worthy organisations (yeah, it's sarcasm) would prefer it if they could just put walls around their customers and populate that with cement, asphalt, and grass. Because then you'd be entirely dependent on their foods and they could charge exactly enough to keep you on the point of slavery, where your entire income is used to just survive and work.
Don't believe me? Re-read this (https://tedamenu.blogspot.com/2022/07/no-hope-for-food-knowledge.html) that was my first link to my blogs above. I've had one person tell me that processing removes the "stuff" that's in naturally-grown food and my cooking from scratch was putting my health at risk because I could process that out. I'm still not sure to this day if they were a troll or a genuine fwit.
Corporations spend huge sums on what I can only call propaganda. They've contributed much the entire curriculum for some educational systems of the USA and wherever else they could get their shoes under the bed, material they approved and even wrote in some cases. They put their corporate logos and presence right into schools. If you can find the book "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us" by Michael Moss, do read it. It's enlightening.
In Australia where denial of our history was important, don't forget that the governments that wanted most to hide that history 'revised' the curriculum. And most of those predominantly LNP politicians that initiated the changes had documented and large involvements in major corporations.
In such cases it's easy to slip in half-truths about corporations and food. Most school systems are wrong for the prevailing environment, still made to churn out mediocrity rather than excellence. Slaves, in other words.
Even in professional circles (and remembering that these people also came through that same educational system) such as medicine there's deliberately manufactured ignorance. A diabetes website - a government-operated diabetes website - still recommends losing weight by using margarine and denounces the use of butter to this day, despite a) the whole fats causing weight gain thing being a deliberate ploy by the sugar industry to divert the blame from sugar and b) the now accepted fact that margarine and butter offer about the same health benefits and risks.
I could go on. Dept of Agriculture offices well stocked with Syngenta paraphenalia sent to them as lobbying gifts, the GP twiddling their Merck pen that the rep left behind. These things all DO influence us, silently, imperceptibly. If I said the words of a TV ad for cigarettes now, most people wouldn't (thank sanity for that small mercy) have a clue which brand was referred to. But last century, that ad and thousands like it sold tobacco while the tobacco companies quietly took down papers that clearly showed the harm tobacco caused, flooded the rest out under a tsunami of paid studies that understandably wouldn't have gotten paid if they actual intimated that tobacco was harmful.
Here, I'll give you that jingle: "BrandX BrandX you're a star, beat the other smokes by far." Remember that British American Tobacco paid handsomely to put that jingle on TV and radio, hundreds of thousands of dollars, the equivalent of several million dollars today, and still made lots of money from their cigarettes.
This is what we need to fight, something that's had a hundred years to get ahead of us all. Sorry - such a long way round to get to this point. But all those parts of the article are really needed to drive home the unfair use of wealth by corporations to extract all our wealth from us and harm us in the process.
Revolution!
Today, the best ways to revolt against the machine that's doing its best to swallow us up is to DO THINGS. Grow some of your own food. Cook your own meals. Make your own music. Write your own stories.
Write to your local MPs and ministers and the newspapers and the CEOs of these huge corporations and tell them. Find petitions online and sign them, on street corners and sign them. Speak to your friends and family and work colleagues, send them to articles like I've linked above - send them to this article, even.
Go for a walk or a drive and find small market gardens and farm gate stalls, farmers' markets - and buy some fresh food. Learn how to use that fresh food in preference to processed food. Grow your own parsley or basil and use it in your meals. Make fast food a once-in-a-blue-moon thing, not your daily routine. READ EVERYTHING. Every label, every ingredient list. Read cookbooks and online recipes that deal with whole fresh foods.
Play a guitar (or just the spoons, or make music tapping some chopsticks against plates and pots and pans) or sing. Make the words up as you go, make the words about what a rotten bunch of bastards big corporations are and how we need to keep them honest. Tell stories, about how we're being cheated and assaulted by toxic foods, about how you cooked the best dish of just pasta, olive oil, cream, fresh garlic and fresh basil that you grew in an old takeaway tub on the window ledge in the kitchen.
THAT'S the real revolution that'll win.
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If this has struck a chord in you, if this kind of thing makes you angry, then I can only say this: Stay angry! Stand up! Get activated! Let others know! Write to government figures, write to newspapers, to CEOs and managers at companies. Start petitions, sign petitions. Share this article and my others like it, go to my News Stand to see all my other posts and share links to the News Stand and any articles you found interesting. And if you can, donate here or here. Or subscribe to my once a week newsletter and stay in the loop. Just don't sit there and do nothing!
And if none of this has resonated, if none of this has made you angry enough to act, then they've already won, and perhaps you deserve it.
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