What is your opinion on the modern day food industry?

By Elizabeth G. Willingham – Nutritional Therapy Student – Dorset UK

The original version: The ant works really hard in the withering heat all summer, building his house and gathering up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper he thinks he's a fool and laughs and dances and plays throughout the summer. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.

The modern-day version: The ant works very hard in the withering heat all summer, building his house and gathering up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper he thinks he's a fool he laughs, he dances, he plays and he makes fun out of the ant all summer. Come the winter, whilst the ant is all warm and well fed the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving. The grasshopper continues his quest to do as little as possible for as much as possible stumbling across genetic engineering and other ideas all of which he feels keep him one step ahead of the ant, he feels he is faster and a lot wiser, can eat on the go with his ready meals, play all summer whilst he freezes his new meals made by copying natural things the ant uses and continues to laugh at the little ant who carry’s on regardless.

Will it be the grasshopper or the ant that smiles later in life?

The Modern Day food industry; fast, furious, profits & loss margins and alterations and this is my first thoughts on the topic. Genetic modification basically in a nut shell is cut, copy and paste and one would feel it must be ok if you have copied the gene exactly? I think there are too many grasshoppers around and not enough ants. The grasshoppers are growing in numbers due to the ease of their lifestyle, becoming ever increasingly difficult to alter their pattern of thinking due to the poor nutritional value of the produce they consume.

In nature generally, products grown as mother nature intended them to be, if harmful have other matter around them to counteract the failings, or if one source is not available for all nutrients required one would opt to gather another produce along side to substitute nutrient short falls. However with genetic modification in effect we could copy the genes from both sources to combine it within a new produce grown to that of demand or requirements. Basically speaking instead of eating say broccoli and cauliflower for the individuality and qualities, these could be genetically modified to produce a brocciflower. Therefore it becomes convenience - no need to eat 2 veg when you can eat one and it would probably also contain a nice flavour enhancer to make it more popular and palatable. So it goes against the law of nature, as previously stated in nature one produce may cause reactions that another natural produce may reverse. However if you genetically modify a produce surely there will be no other produce to reverse any reactions.

Arpad Pusztai, a researcher at the research institute in Aberdeen, complied a study on rats that were fed transgenic potatoes; these basically are artificially bio-engineered to include a gene from another species as explained above. The study showed the rats had evidence of organ damage, thickening of the small intestine and poor brain development. The transgenic potatoes that were used in the study had been genetically engineered to contain lectin, this is a sugar binding protein to make the plants pest-resistant. The adverse reactions only occurred in the group that was fed the transgenic potatoes. Another group that were fed plain potatoes mixed with lectin from the same source were normal. The results indicated that the adverse reactions were not caused by the added lectin, but by the process of genetic engineering itself. So it is not only the products used but the actual method that creates further issues that go against the law of nature.

The modern day food industry has altered dramatically over the years and in my opinion not for the better. We now have microwaves, little boxes that send waves of energy into food, the energy then excites the water molecules within the food. This movement of the molecules creates heat thus warming the product. This is a preferred method used by many these days due to the ease and reduction in cooking times. Everything is orientated around speed, people demand more and quicker than they did years ago and are impatient money talks and can obtain things a great deal faster these days. Temptation is at our every move and many people lead into this tempt with out thinking.

Years ago our ancestors lived from the earth at a time where nature and the land governed the foods that were produced, there were occupations such as fishermen, bakers, butchers. All the food was gathered, harvested, killed and eaten fresh by natural processes which in turn offered high nutritional content, affordability in relation to how much of which food you would eat generally forcing a balanced diet to a certain extent. For example chicken was a rich mans food and in effect a food ate perhaps weekly rather than these days at virtually every meal. It offered the best that nature intended, no one played god, they just assisted nature.

The modern day industry is failing the people as it is providing a toxic environment. Super markets have been built every where to cope with the demand for food, many people eat large volumes? Why?, probably because there bodies are starving of the correct nutrition, The ant for example survives on small quantities of good quality food, has small amounts but concentrated good quality essential vitamins and minerals where as the grasshopper survives on large quantities of bad quality food has large amounts of empty calories, deplete of essential vitamins and minerals.

The quality of the food produced for super markets is questionable and many studies have been carried out to show the levels of quality all of which prove disappointing results, modified foods, cattle and live stock are routinely fed substances that cause many adverse effects, and many are kept in horrific conditions all of which pass along the food chain and are allowed to be exposed to the consumer.

Not only is there the issue of failing health due to the modern day food industry but there is also the matter of the effects it is rippling further, such as putting the smaller shops out of business. Other countries that survive on the sale of there produce are no longer needed due to the copy and paste system known as genetic modification.

The topic of the modern day food industry is a vast endless issue that could lead to an abundance of facts and figures, however each individual will have varying opinions to the information they perceive, so perhaps it is easier to ask the question, if we were required to slaughter our own food for consumption would we still eat cattle and live stock in such abundance? Would we eat food if cooked it and then sprayed it with disinfectant you know just to keep it free from germs? Would we dip our carrots, lemons, oranges or alike in food colour just to make them look nicer before we ate them? Would we eat eggs if they were from a cross of a chicken and a dog for example? Who is the wiser the ant or the grasshopper and who will have the more fruitful & quality life in the end?