This is not a fact-based expose post. This is an accusation. I may believe, in good faith, that the situation is worse than it actually is. I hope I do. But I believe my suspicions are grounded.
I couldn't really give Jif peanut butter full marks for flavor and quality. It's sweetened. I like the way peanut butter combines with sweet flavors, but the brand of peanut butter I always liked was JFG, which was flavored and preserved with salt only, and tasted like ground-up salted peanuts. You could really tell that JFG was fresh.
"Lower sodium" food sounded like a nice idea. Some people need a low-sodium diet,. and others can always add salt at the table, right? The trouble is that food that's bottled or canned in a completely "natural" condition, without salt, sugar, or some nastier chemical added to it, has a short shelf life. So food packers started preserving foods with sugar instead. That's fine if the original food was orange segments or pineapple rings, which nature intended to be sweet, but sugar in cornmeal, sugar in tomatoes, sugar in peanut butter...somebody Out There is probably putting sugar in sardines, by now.
Peanut butter manufacturers just loved the idea of preserving peanut butter with sugar because, when peanut butter is not infected with toxic black rot but merely becomes stale and rancid after sitting on a shelf for three years, it shows its age by picking up a nasty, sickish, sweetish flavor.
All the peanut butter packers in today's market are aware of this, and extend the shelf life of their products by dumping sugar into it. You can't tell by the taste whether Smuckers or Peter Pan peanut butter is ten years old. The smell deteriorates overtime but the stuff tasted like sugar from the day one. Apparently America's preschoolers aren't complaining--they're wired to seek high-calorie, high-sugar foods. Adults have always had mixed feelings about peanut butter, it seems. I can't say I really like Jif but it tastes less sugary/rancid than Smuckers or Peter Pan.
Not that I think of peanut butter as food, exactly. Celiacs digest food in different ways than non-celiacs do. For my purposes peanuts are food. Saturated fats, like the oil added to peanut butter to keep the natural ground-up nuts from separating into thin tasteless oil and dry tasteless crumbs, are mild laxatives that sometimes help push glyphosate-tainted food through my body faster. Since 2015 I've bought peanut butter, not every month, but on average probably about once a month.
Jif peanut butter served its purpose until last spring when Food Lion ran the big sale on it., Not that the savings were all that great, relative to the regular price,. That's the old Food Lion trick. When customers have complained about a few packages of whatever-it-may-be, Food Lion will immediately raise their regular price on that item, by about thirty percent. Then they mark down the existing supply to about five percent off the previous regular price, so that it looks as if this is the customer's last chance to get a decent price on this item. Sometimes the customers have already found and complained about all the bad food in the batch. More often they have not. Food bought on a red-hot sale at Food Lion often has to be thrown away.
So I bought a jar of Jif on sale at Food Lion, and I was not thrilled.
Like most of the big-name food brands in the United States, Jif's marketing is ultimately controlled by one huge horrible corporation, but the manufacturers of the original product keep some control over things like labelling. Jif labels proclaimed that Jif peanut butter was gluten-free and GMO-free. Glyphosate-free they never promised, but a friend whose Glyphosate Awareness was raised by cancer used to say we ought to buy and promote things that didn't make us sick, and sure enough, Jif didn't make me sick. There was that. Between 2015 and 2020 that was rare and special.
As we sow, the Bible says, so shall we reap. What can we hope to reap when we've become a nation where nearly all the plant-based "food" has been deliberately poisoned?
Well...as I've mentioned, the quality of life in my neighborhood has declined ever since a Professional Bad Neighbor moved in.
The neighborhood had been a real community when the older generation were alive. Many of them were related to one another; the others were friends, as their parents and grandparents had been. Everyone agreed on the rules and boundaries. Everyone thought well and spoke well of everyone else. Those days are gone.
In the 1990s the neighborhood started to deteriorate. Everyone was hearing the worst of everyone else. Everybody was seeing acts of petty vandalism, and thievery that was below even the scale of "petty." I saw firsthand that deliberate efforts were made to suggest that people who had no quarrel with each other were the ones doing these things to each other.
For years all anyone learned about the identity of our "prankster," or "pranksters," was that a very small amount of the damage really was done by animals, while several people who had been accused died. Then I heard the prankster confess, loudly boasting that he was in the process of "running off all of" my relatives and me in order to buy all the land in the neighborhood. He had not bothered to make any offers to buy any property. He had been deliberately working for years to make people want to stay away from their ancestral homes.
Why would he want our land? It's not more valuable, in cash, than many other family farms in the area. Other family farms have assets ours lack. This man's family had owned such a farm. Two things had happened that might have made him want to leave his ancestral home.
One thing was that his family farm is situated on one of those beds of pinkish "Marcellus" shale. We called it "slates" when I was growing up. It's a kind of layered sedimentary stone that a child can crumble in one hand. By a more complicated process of "hydraulic fracturing" it can be made to yield burnable natural gas, sometimes in a form that shoots flames out the water taps of people whose property is being "fracked." Shale is harder to predict and control, even in nature, than the "frackers" like to admit. Pennsylvania has lost a large amount of land to an underground fire.
The other thing was that this Bad Neighbor's home must have become a sad place for him. In the year 2000 he lived on his ancestral farm, near his parents, one sister, and one brother, with his wife and the one child they had. Between 2005 and 2015, all of them died. A rational person might have considered that something he was doing, such as recklessly spraying poison on the land, could have had something to do with this. An irrational servant of Satan might have suppressed that kind of rational thought and tried to focus on making more people more unhappy with what had been a True Green community.
But he must have known he was on thin ice when he started harassing me. He is my third cousin. He and I inherited High Sensory Perceptivity from the same ancestors. He got away with some of his pranks because other people couldn't wake up as quickly and see as clearly, in the middle of a dark night, as either he or I can still do. Although I never seriously wanted to harass anybody in the way the Bad Neighbor does, I have the physical ability to do all of the same stunts he does. He is taller, and used to be faster. I am younger and have taken better care of myself. And I'm not going anywhere. The harassment slacked off for a few years.
Then I warned the neighborhood odd-jobs man that his efforts to control kudzu with glyphosate were turning his home into a kudzu graveyard, poisoning the vegetables in his garden (he'd sold me a bag full), and making him sick. He tried to warn the Bad Neighbor, for whom he worked, too. The Bad Neighbor listened to the warning, with some difficulty. (The odd-jobs man neither hears nor speaks very well. People who were brought up better tend to end up braying and bellowing at him, because he seems to hear and understand a little more when they do.) Then the Bad Neighbor brayed, "Oh, she wants some 'Roundup,' does she?"
From that day forward he has done his damnedest to keep the air in my neighborhood full of glyphosate vapors. Especially on Thanksgiving Day, New Year's Day, Easter Sunday, and the weekend of the Fourth of July, because those are days when my relatives were likely to gather at our ancestral homes.
That is the kind of person who wants a "right to spray," Gentle Readers. By insisting that local laws specify that there is no such thing sa s "right to spray" unless it be accompanied by an enumerated "right to stomp a poison-spraying fool into the ground, in self-defense," some of you may be able to keep Professional Bad Neighbors out of your neighborhoods.
This web site does not, of course, officially recommend stomping people into the ground. This web site recommends that all things be done "decently and in order." The decent and orderly way to deal with glyphosate sprayers is to revise our existing laws in a way that recognizes that spraying poison into the environment is a violent crime against people. It is always best to do things in a nice, orderly way. If the nice, orderly way fails, we may need to use whatever other way occurs to us, to defend ourselves against this violent attack.
Well...it's hard to know what a word spoken or printed may accomplish. I mentioned that my cats, who could no longer safely drink from the stream near my home, would not drink town water but would drink either Pure Life or Deer Park water. From a local store, those brands have been delivered, every week, ever since. Hmm. Serena is not as keen on pepitas as Heather used to be, but she loves pepitas from the Price Less store soaked in the broth from a tin of Great Value chicken. She likes Chicken of the Sea mackerel, too.
And, unfortunately for humankind, corporations as loathsome as Bayer can use and pay the kind of human wreckage who demand a "right to spray," too.
Well, you may ask, what has this to do with Jif peanut butter?
This is what. Jif has been one of the few big-name food brands that's shown enough overt friendliness to Glyphosate Awareness to use the "NO GMO" label.
Of course, labelling GMO and non-GMO food products is an idea enthusiastically approved by 96% of all humans polled on the issue, but you have to bear in mind that some people's brains show more glyphosate damage than others.
Consider, once again, the Bad Neighbor. If he'd wanted simply to farm the land, the way we'd all always done it, my elders and their heirs would have welcomed him. If he'd wanted to accumulate enough "big land" to lease it out to a company that rents time-shares to hunters, I would have said, "No! Not them! We can do better than that." And we would have been making money by now. Instead of which...As far as I would know, although several people have made dire remarks about the Bad Neighbor's cows, I think he actually poisoned them himself. He used to be considered intelligent, but that was fifty years ago.
I've told the ugly truth about glyphosate. I'm a target.
Jif acknowledged the truth that, whether specific genetic modifications are harmful or not, people do want to know whether they're eating GMO. Jif is a target.
That jar of Jif I bought at Food Lion was definitely substandard. It did not, however, contain the contaminants that got the plant shut down this summer. No salmonella; no rodent traces. It did contain...bad peanuts. Several pieces of peanut, black with rot. When picked out and put together the pieces did not form a single bad nut. The jar smelled of black rot because several rotten peanuts had been scattered into that batch of peanut butter.
The jar before that had seemed acceptable. But the jar before that had given me some sort of mild food poisoning. It wasn't salmonella. I had noted that "the cats think I smell contagious, and may be right since I do have a low fever," when I hadn't been in town or exposed to any virus. And after the symptoms had subsided, they returned when I ate a little more of that jar of peanut butter. They did not, however, include slimy greenish diarrhea.
The disgusting peanut butter was informative. The food poisoning might have been something other people didn't notice--I didn't have it tested. The black rot is toxic. The Board of Health could and should have shut down the Jif factory for the batch of peanut butter that had the black rot in it, alone. But they didn't. They shut down the factory for completely different reasons--the factory also, later, having been infested with salmonella-infected rats. Most rats are crazy about peanut butter but that does not explain how three completely different, unrelated things went wrong with the peanut butter at the same factory. If rats carried in the toxic agents (which is possible, because some wild rat species are known to drag food and other objects into places when they take food out) they were, at the very least, different rats, not carrying the same toxic agents. At least two, and I believe three, different toxic agents. One after another.
It's a question, not a proof...but if I were a Jif manager, I'd be looking for evidence of deliberate sabotage.
We know that Bayer will stoop very, very low.
We know the corporations are depending on tactics like censorship, whining to our government to protect them from the consequences of what they've done, and using such pathetic wastes of human intelligence as the Bad Neighbor to harass those who tell the truth.
I'd say that we know that Bayer's goons could and would have sabotaged Jif, and the only question is whether, in fact, they did.
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