Today, A Lesson
As if any further proof were needed, let’s take a walk in a place so bizarre, you’ll swear black was the new white. Let’s talk about how corporations may want to exploit natural resources, adulterate what they produce to make it cheaper, and sell it to us as though it was golden.
Here’s a fast food’s ‘disclosure’ of what’s in the buns they serve their burger on:
The evangelised ‘healthy’ ingredients:
Enriched Flour (Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Water, Sugar, Yeast, Soybean Oil, Contains 2% or Less: Salt, Wheat Gluten, Sesame Seeds, Potato Flour, May Contain One or More Dough Conditioners (DATEM, Ascorbic Acid, Mono and Diglycerides, Enzymes), Vinegar.
Flour has to be enriched because it’s processed so hard that it no longer has all its natural nutritional components; One of the processes that makes white flour white is treatment with a bleach. (And ingesting bleach is never okay, okay? Thank you Mr Donny Dumb Trump.)
Thiamine mononitrate lowers your blood pressure, which is probably important given the rest of the ingredients in mass produced burgers.
Sugar is a slippery word these days and can cover ‘sugars’ of various sources. Most likely high fructose corn syrup as that’s very inexpensive. HFCS increases your risk of fatty liver disease, is the kind of sugar that will contribute to obesity, has been linked to higher risk of cancer and diabetes, and is largely empty of any actual nutritive value.
DATEM is linked to heart injury, adrenal issues, and leaky gut syndrome.
Mono / di glycerides: These are probably part of the reason for those ‘eternal burgers’ that people have by now shown hundreds of on social media. They’re put in to prolong the shelf life of the products, and are a so-called ‘trans fat.’ Trans fats are associated with increased risk of diseases including heart disease, stroke and diabetes. They’re linked to inflammation and obesity, raise LDL cholesterol levels and lower HDL cholesterol levels. Inflammatory disease causes blocked arteries. Probably the reason for the thiamine mononitrate…
Now to the next, innocuous sounding ingredient of most burgers:
Most fast food companies are so proud that they can include
Lettuce
as part of their burgers. Just shredded lettuce, mmm so healthy yeah?
Except. Lettuce is one of the ‘dirtiest’ vegetables in terms of chemical residues. To service the fast food market, lettuces are grown fats, fed lots of chemical fertiliser, and treated with a staggering number of pesticides, traces of which remain on the lettuce the burger company is so proud to be making you ‘healthy’ with. Here: http://whatsonmyfood.org/food.jsp?food=LT You’re welcome.
When it comes to the actual burger patty, you might be surprised to find that most fast food companies actually do serve beef. But to prevent them being dry to eat they have to have a fairly high proportion of fat to muscle. And beef grown for the fast food industry has the same caveats as the lettuce – cattle are flooded with antibiotics, hormones, dodgy feed that’s made down to a price not up to a standard, and the traces are in the ‘wholesome beef’ in those patties.
If the burger happens to use cheese, there’s a fair chance that it’s a very processed ‘cheeselike product’ and also contains a small laboratory’s worth. But of course the chain will promote this as ‘genuine XYZZY Cheese’ and thereby give the impression that the trademarked name ‘Cheese’ is the same as ‘cheese.’
Tomato and BBQ sauces add their own pharmacopeia to the mix, ‘pickles’ used will very rarely have been ‘pickled’ so much as ‘chemically produced’ and the onions they tend to use, tend to be grown as for lettuce tomatoes etc – beware…
Now I’ve used a typical burger / fast food chain’s ingredients, not any particular one, but a blending of different healthy wholesome places.
These corporations are of course also contributing to the destruction of our arable farming land, fertiliser pollution, pesticide pollution, and use of chemicals thanks to their rapacious greed for produce. The diseases they cause in humans forms another overuse of drugs and chemicals to treat those conditions.
The fast food industry also operates on the same ‘just in time’ supply logistics that supermarkets operate on and which caused the stockpiling / shortages / stockpiling issues we’ve seen recently in our supermarkets. But restaurants and fast food places have either closed entirely or seen a 75% drop in turnover due to SARS-cov-2 and the supply chain is now choking on some things.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/15/business/coronavirus-food-shortages.html One such effect is that there is now almost A BILLION POUNDS OF CHICKEN in storage with no place to go but be sold through the normal consumer market. And that’s pointing out how much corporations have been flim-flamming us.
In summary – never expect a corporation to care about you individually, nor about us collectively, but only to care about the dollars they can pry from our corpses. (Hey, they really wouldn’t care, take my word for it.)