Soylent Green is coming to a grocery store near you

You remember the movie, Soylent Green? It starred Charleton Heston in a post-apocalypse dystopia. In this, not distant future, food choice is practically non-existent. Only the rich have access to meat, fruits and vegetables. Everyone else eats Soylent Green, an engineered wafer-shaped foodstuff, ostensibly made from soy, or so people think. It isn’t until the end of the movie that Charlie discovers the main ingredient for Soylent Green. It’s people.

If the thought of eating dear Uncle Festus makes you queasy, you better reach for a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. The future is here and the first steps toward synthetic food and fewer choices are underway. Actually, that’s not entirely correct. Food manufacturers have been working to limit our choices for decades. At the same time, they’ve been telling us that we have more choices than ever, but is that true? Judge for yourself.

Try buying raw milk, pastured beef, or real fermented food in a typical grocery store.

Look at how much smaller the full-fat cow milk section is in the dairy case vs. the low-fat soy and rice ‘milk’ section. For that matter, look at how the real butter section has shrunk.

Try buying tallow (beef fat) or unadulterated lard.

Want eggs from pastured chickens with a natural balance of Omega 3/6 oils or pork from pigs fed a natural diet? Fat chance.

Try buying fresh fruit or any kind of real food at a train station, bus station, gas station or airport.

Fresh raw cheese? Fugettaboutit.

Want some heritage variety popcorn instead of the stuff that tastes like Styrofoam? Keep dreaming.

Our government subsidizes large-scale production of corn, soy and wheat, the axis of evil junk food. This policy is directly linked to poor diet and health.

Still think you have choice? Try buying food directly from a farmer and in many states, you can expect the agriculture department to shut the place down, as if old McDonald had been doling out kilos of cocaine.

Finally, the effort by big business to water down and eliminate truthful food labeling is indisputable proof that some sectors of the food industry and government itself don’t want you to know what you’re eating.

Further proof can be found in an article recently published in The Guardian’s online news. The article is ostensibly about cloned meat working its way into the food supply, but then, if you can believe it, the article takes an even darker turn. Here are some choice quotes:

In addition, news of the sale of the cattle - which are owned by Smiddiehill Holsteins, based at Albrighton, Shropshire - comes as ministers and their advisers are warning that significant food shortages could arise in Britain unless urgent moves are taken to ensure that the country adopts a sensible, balanced food policy. A national debate on the issue is urgently needed, they say.

Translation: Do as you’re told and don’t complain, or you’ll starve. This is a classic ‘compliance through fear’ tactic.

Suggested ways for transforming the attitudes of consumers and the food industry include rationing by putting up prices and encouraging supermarkets to stock a smaller range of identical products.

Translation: This is the real goal of the Industrial Food Complex. Lower costs, reduce competition, and increase profits by limiting choice. To the IFC, people are no different from factory-farmed cattle. The way they see it, if cows don’t get to choose what they eat, neither should we. Here’s one more.


‘We are missing the point if we put all the onus of choice onto consumers,’ said Lang. ‘Choice is part of the problem, not the solution. Do you load responsibility on every consumer or do you constrain their choice? We can’t ask consumers to spend 24 hours thinking about which of an aisle-full of nearly identical products to buy when so many are inappropriate…’

Translation: You’re too stupid to decide, on your own, what to eat, so a fascist alliance of government and industry is here to help. All of this — cloning, engineered foods, and ‘choice editing’ (what a wonderful bit of Orwellian double-speak) — all of this is being done under the guise of ’sustainability.’

The argument goes something like this: Cloning and choice editing improve food quality and production efficiency — thereby conserving natural resources and achieving a state of sustainable food production.

If this was true, government would be encouraging wider local food production in the developed world. Your neighbor, down the street, in the McMansion on five acres, would be able to keep a cow and get subsidies for growing food. What we have now is the exact opposite where government, backed by the IFC, has actively engaged in a willful pattern of small family farmicide for the sole purpose of eliminating the competition — family farms — and taking over the food supply. Google Monsanto’s bid to patent a pig if you still need convincing.

Anyone who doesn’t think that the real goal of the IFC is to drive food production to the cheapest most profitable level possible — nutrition and personal health be damned — is delusional.

Fight for your food. Buy local. Grow local. Vote local.

The clones are coming — to a supermarket near you

Soylent Green

Source: Richard Morris, http://breadandmoney.com/thefreeradical/?p=138

i've been noticing this too... while the choices of processed crap get larger, the choices (and quality) of the real foods, real produce, real anything, get smaller and poorer.


something similar happened to the cheese factory near my mom. she used to be able to go in, hand the girl behind the counter a mason jar, and ask them for a quart of cream. a few minutes later the girl would come out with the jar full of the most wonderful white stuff on earth. it was unpasteurized, but the great thing about it was that it would NOT go bad. we accidentally left a jar of it in the car for an afternoon in july. instead of going rotten, it turned into sour cream. left long enough in the fridge, it would turn itself into cream cheese. but all that was only possible BECAUSE it hadn't been pasturized.

very few people knew about the cream. then one day, some idiot (and if i ever find out who, i will smite them verily with the squeeky hammer of doom™) tipped off the FDA that they were selling unpasteurized cream. the cheese factory nearly got shut down for it. and yet, nobody ever even came close to getting sick from it.

The grocery store I shop most often to pick up organic (vat pasturized, unhomogenized) whole milk, yogurt, local cheese (including some raw varieties) has most of the stuff in one area - their "health market", so I don't wander around much....it's a pretty straight bee-line from there, across the front of the store, to the other side, where the produce section is.

Anyway, it isn't like I've never wandered around.....and when I have, what Richard describes is true here too - the margarine takes up almost all the area for butter and margarine (in the regular part of the store - in the Health Market area there is a lot of choice for butter - imported, organic, etc.) - with just one row of butter at the very end of the entire case....the rest is all margarine of every variety and type you can imagine.

Milk back in the regular dairy case? Whole is one row.....everything else an abomination - skim, reduced, no-lactose, soy (yeah, soy now sits in the dairy case too) taking up 90% of the milk section.

Then half & half back there? They don't even have regular half & half - it's all sorts of combinations of sugar, high fructose corn syrup laden low-fat or no-fat "like" half-and-half substitutes. The real half & half is back up front, in the corner in the health market (which I find hysterical actually)

I never knew you could kill cheese a thousand different ways until I saw how huge the cheese section is, and not one package with a real seal on it......want real cheese - head back to the health market area.

And don't get me started on the frozen food aisles.....an entire aisle, both sides, for ice cream? One entire length of an aisle dedicated for pizza? Both sides of an entire aisle for frozen entrees? One side for frozen vegetables - with 75% some kind of frozen potato.....and not one package of plain old chopped spinach....?

While this particular market does still have a real butcher counter.....it's cases are slowly being littered by cryopacks and pre-cut, pre-packed meat not cut in-store.....they've stopped carrying any exclusively grass-fed beef, discountinued the organic free-range chickens (which had to be purchased whole) and say no one buys wild salmon (fresh), so they're no longer going to carry it....but in the freezer they have some that comes in flash-frozen (which sadly is from a company that starts the fish off in a farm setting and then releases them to catch them wild - sooooo wrong to label it wild).

Everything seems to be pasturized - conventional eggs, juice, etc....and the produce section is miserable too, although this store does try to buy local and it does, but it is so weird to see folks choosing the factory-farmed produce that's too pretty for its own good over the local less pretty looking stuff, that is often left rotting in the bins......I can't tell you how many times I was happy to see local produce (organic or not) only to have to take a pass because it was in such poor shape from being man-handled and allowed to rot in the bin......the conventional stuff is routinely being picked through by staff to remove any damaged fruits/vegetables, but the organic or local stuff isn't.

Our Farmer's Market opens next week, so the selection of produce becomes again, a moot issue - I'll be there picking up what I don't get from the CSA....I'm again supporting one of the local CSA's.....and we're getting ready to order our next meat, poultry and pork order now that ---- yeah! ------ spring is coming...and when it arrives, it's shortly followed by the first slaughter of the year.

There's one store in town that sells chucks of beef fat and what I think may be unmolested lard. I'm really, really happy about that, it makes my diet easier. They had some locally produced raw milk in their new organic section but that mysteriously disappeared one day. People bought it up quick when it was there.

I put some of the beef fat out for the birds the other day. They brutally attacked it and finished it off in two days. They don't go through the pre-made stuff that fast, even in a snow storm.

Things may be slowly improving. I saw a piece on the news today about the resurgence of cowboys out west, because of the rising demand for grass fed beef.

I've been hearing scattered reports about the same thing. The farmer who I get my beef from now has to "borrow" 65 acres of his neighbor's land in order to keep up with demand. His neighbor gets free beef, and my farmer gets 65 acres of "real" extra pasture.
The farmer who I get my eggs, pork, & chickens from now has a waiting list! I'm glad I got "in" before that happened.

I am curious what brands of milk y'all are buying? There are a few supermarkets here that are carrying "Grass Point Farms" , which is grass fed, small family farms, and vat pasteurized. Another is "Wisconsin Organics" . Still another is "Farmer's Creamery" (not homogenized, but not sure if it's grass fed) .

It is all vat pasteurized, none is raw. I can buy a share to get raw milk legally (sort of), but the drive is very long (hour each way).

Edit: not all is vat pasteurized. I'm too tired to figure it out now, but I suspect one or two out of the three may be ultra pasteurized. Or maybe they are not homogenized. Arrrgh.

Anyway, I completely agree with the above essay. Buy local & vote with your $$. Don't eat American industrial fractionated garbage.

Now I kinda know what it was like to be a hippie.

We're just now putting in our deposit for next fall's steer also. According to the people who raise our beef, they've sold out 4 months earlier than they did last year and they have a long waiting list in case anyone drops out.

We are having a hard time finding a good, reliable, source of pastured pork and chicken however. Somehow we find someone each year, but we'd like to find a farmer we can buy from now and count on in the future also.

We've decided to drop our CSA for vegetables this year and just purchase through the farmer's market. Although we loved supporting the farm, there was too much stuff that we didn't eat (potatoes, corn, etc.) and we had to supplement with farmer's market purchases anyway.

Unpasteurized dairy is also hard to find after a few cases of e coli were linked to raw milk here a few years ago. We buy unhomogenized slow-batch pasteurized locally produced milk and cream. I can't tell you how many people are shocked that our kids drink whole milk.

During the winter we mostly shop at the local food coop and there's definitely a good variety of local meats, vegetables and cheeses. I have to say though, even at the purported "health food store" it still amazes me how much processed (organic) junk is in people's carts. Sometimes I feel as if I live in this alternate reality because we eat real food that we prepare ourselves 99% of the time.

I've often wondered what Homer Simpson was referring to....."Mmmm... Soylent Green......"

If you have a small enough CSA, you might be able to ask the farmer to just not include the items you don't eat and where extras are in the things you do like, add those in place? That's what I did for the radishes, corn and potatoes....in their place we get extra lettuce/greens when it's available. We also have an arrangement with him that when we're on vacation, our share goes to the food bank or any family he knows that can use the food so it's not wasted.



We can get raw milk here, but it's packaged for pet food (but sold in the health food store) - as much as we'd like to use raw milk, with our son we stick with the vat pasturized whole milk because if anything ever were to happen, I don't want to imagine what we'd go through giving him "pet" food if it caused an illness....DH drinks it (I don't like drinking milk), but for DS, it's the vat pasturized milk. There is only one store I can get it here, and it's not the local health food store, but an employee-owned grocery store.

They sell A LOT of local foods - eggs from the farm we get our meats from, meats from most of the local farms, local artisan cheeses, etc. - so in that respect we're lucky I think....the price on those things though is very high so I'm glad I've met with the farmers around here and can buy direct rather than in the grocery store.

I've heard a lot of comments in the last year about how I should switch DS to skim milk (or at least lower fat) because many are shocked he still gets whole milk (along with whole milk yogurt and cheese, etc).....I'm like "hello - he's in the 7th percentile for weight (BMI), ya want him to fall off the chart?".....and he's a kid who eats like a champ - there's no way I'm changing how he eats - he's tall, lean and strong.....and eats well.

WOW Pennink........we posted that at the same exact time
Great minds think alike

kinda freaky!

Haha - I like that - unmolested lard!! I`ve been looking for some of that actually!

I`ve noticed how it`s getting a bit harder to find `full fat` cuts of meat at the supermarket - all this ground beef and pork that`s 80% fat free - it`s really annoying! I`m worried that they`re going to stop selling anything that`s remotely fatty whilst keeping all the high carb junk...

The 80-20 ground beef isn't "lean" - it's 20% fat content (not calories from fat) so has a much higher percentage of calories from fat than the "lean" beef at 90-10 or 93-7....

80-20 ground beef is 254 calories per 100g; 20g fat so 180-calories from fat, or 70% of the calories.

90-10 ground beef is 176 calories per 100g; 10g fat so 90 calories from fat, or 51% of the calories.

I hate that they trim meats so close now....almost no fat left, even on pork chops. I never buy the lean ground beef, I've always hated the lower fat kind, especially for making a plain burger!

For anyone that lives in the south....my son works at Food Lion and he says that they will order lard for you if you request it. It comes in a big container (sounds like a gallon or so), but it should have a long shelf life.