This is a bonus post. It was going into a link log, but it's just too long. So, I'm still about a half-dozen posts behind where I ought to be, this winter. Let's count this as the post I didn't write for 1.25.24.
There are enough food items you don't buy if you believe it might be sensible to follow the Bible's guidelines about what not to eat, right? I don't insist that food be certified kosher because I'm not an Orthodox Jew. It may be that I avoid food that Moses pronounced inherently unclean just because I was a sucker for a misbelief, which circulated in the mid-seventies, that people had a really hard time with "swine flu" if and because they were exposed to it by ingesting pork, whereas people who didn't eat pork merely had "sore-throat flu," which was less bad.
Well, that was wrong. Sore-throat flu was swine flu. Same virus, milder reaction. It might also have been spread by eating pork, but it spread through the air. People who kept kosher and/or vegetarian, or who just avoided pork, tended to be more health-conscious and, on average, a bit healthier, although some people are health-conscious because they're anything but healthy. So the pork-free might have suffered less from swine flu than the pork-fed. An alternative explanation is that swine flu, like COVID, circulated in a year when a demographic generation was reaching the end of its average life expectancy in any case, and most people who died of swine flu were, like people who died of COVID, geriatric patients who succumbed to pneumonia, and most people who had swine flu probably felt worse than most people who had COVID, at the time, but were less panicky and worked right through it. Teachers sort of hinted that it would be all right by them if people would just stay home on the final day of swine flu when nausea was the dominant symptom, but lots of school lunches reappeared on school floors anyway, because it did not always take exactly 24 hours for each dominant symptom to give way to the next one. Some people fast-forwarded through the sick headache stage directly into being sick.
Nevertheless. I had sore-throat flu, but not pneumonia, and my parents told my surviving grandmother that this was because we didn't eat pork or other things proscribed in the Bible. So for the rest of my life I just never have. I may have inadvertently eaten things that had pork in them--you don't know whether the chicken, turkey, or beef sausages from a company that also makes pork sausages are really 100% pork-free--but I don't knowingly eat pork. I've never wanted to. I think all meat is sort of yucky if you think about it, but pork is extra-yucky. But that's just me. It's none of my business how many other people eat pork and like it but I will say that people who eat a lot of pork smell different from people who don't, to me, and not in an alluringly exotic way.
So anyway...that was enough of a food quirk to separate me from other people, but there was also cheese, which I didn't think of mentioning first because my body does not regard cheese as food. That deep internal reaction that is generally described by a word that violates this web site's contract is, in my case, that cheese is vomit or a synthesized version of it, what the bleep are you trying to pull, and back out it goes. It's none of my business whether other people like cheese, either, but I will mention that blindfolded tests show that people can't smell a difference between parmesan cheese and human vomit. And other kinds of cheese are generally agreed to smell worse than parmesan.
But nooo. This was not enough. As a child I was skinny and sickly and undergrown and a deadweight in any sport and a drag on any kind of outing or vacation. As a teenager I matured more slowly, with more angst, even than most teenagers, who are bad enough Heaven knows. As a theoretically young-adult at university I managed to have mononucleosis for most of two years without even having kissed anybody. This led directly into the polycystic ovarian syndrome and sterility. Then, passing over the encysted gland cancer scare and the viral arthritis scare and the Norwalk Flu melodrama in my twenties, we come to the celiac sprue that appeared in my late twenties, which forced me to face the fact: I am a celiac, the descendant of four generations of female-line Irish celiacs. I finally stopped refusing to consider that possibility once the only other alternative was colon cancer. No pork, no cheese, AND no wheat. What the bleep was I supposed to eat now? But I went gluten-free, and became healthy and strong and cheerful. And Mother and the surviving relatives on her mother's side of the family also went gluten-free and felt better than they'd felt in all their lives before, too. So I don't eat wheat and, frankly, I don't miss it. I liked wheat-based food at one time. I don't now. Once you learn that something is harmful to you it doesn't taste good any more. Wheat is not inherently harmful to most people even in Ireland. If your body digests wheat, good luck to you, enjoy it.
But then. Glyphosate. Good Lord. In 2016 and 2017 I could hardly eat anything sold in a store except garlic and onions, which (like a few of the spices) come with their own built-in pest repellents and don't seem to need a lot of spraying. Meat and eggs were the safest things (although they're not 100% glyphosate-free if the animals were fed contaminated food) but flavorings used with them might contain "Roundup Ready" soy. Day after day after day I wrote this blog on a diet of African coffee abd what grew in my not-a-lawn. Some corporate brands responded quickly to the pleas of fellow celiacs and me for glyphosate-free food, and let's review the honor roll again...
Planters nuts
Zatarain's rice mixes
Fritos corn chips
Bush's pinto beans (but only the pinto beans, for years!)
Hunt's plain tomatoes and Garlic & Herb pasta sauce
Dole pineapple
Clif "high-protein" candy bars
M&M's
Jif peanut butter
While Cheerios, Quaker, and Nature Valley cereal products...tried but failed to meet the need for clean cereal products. For a while Cheerios were celiacs' favorite cereal. Then they were contaminated. Then the plain ones were clean, but the fancy flavors weren't. Now there's another, differently toxic, contaminant causing different patterns of reactions in some people. It's hard to keep up,. Farmers are failing to get with the program. We have to forget all about that stupid old twentieth century greedhead idea of "high input, high yield" monocropping and start rotating crops, relying on hand cultivation and working with naturalk predators to control nuisance species, in other words going back to farming the way people did before about 1930. It's a long road. Farmers might as well start sooner than later. Whenever they start, there will always be a price toi pay for having poiisoned land with "pesticides."
(When I started doing Glyphosate Awareness chats my intention was to cut farmers some slack with regard to the "pesticides" they were not spraying directly onto food, but yes, farmers, you have to break those addictions too. Vicious Spray Cycles really do make harmless nuisance species into major menaces to crops. And yes, I know it's hard. I watched my father do it in the 1970s. Years we could plant acres of corn, beans, tomatoes, potatoes--crops that traditionally do well in our part of the world--and hardly have a fresh-picked meal for ourselves, let alone a crop to sell...I'm sorry. If you'd taken the plunge in the 1970s you'd have had time to adjust by now.)
We still don't have a glyphosate ban but things are so much better than they were a few years ago, as food manufacturers are observing the bottom-line benefits of keeping glyphosate out of the food supply. Even store brands of corn, peas, and green beans are likely not to have had glyphosate sprayed on them these days. Coconut, which I avoided for many years, is available (in "good" expensive brands) in a clean, edible condition. Pricey specialty foods, not available in all the big-chain supermarkets and certainly not competitively priced when they are available...aren't as much more likely to be glyphosate-free as those who pay for them have a right to expect.
Frankly, this web site's mission is not to promote pricey specialty foods, even though some of them are being made by entrepreneurs like Grandma Bonnie Peters. This web site is not elitist. This web site expects its readers to think for themselves, educate themselves, read and do research, as the elite do; it does not expect them to spend money as only the rich can. I'm not rich and I don't expect most of my readers are either. The readers I can picture in my mind are mostly in the 15-to-25-year-old age bracket, in which, traditionally, Americans think there's something wrong if someone does have a lot of money. I have seen some specialty foods that claimed to be glyphosate-free, and I'm all in favor of that, but I've never seen the actual foods even offered in a store. 'S up with that? Clif Bars came out of these years as a popular brand that is now in most big-chain supermarkets and even some local convenience store, so they're on the list now, although in 2019 I thought of them as a specialty item. Other brands failed to cross that line.
So, yes, the food brands endorsed here are mostly owned by the evil Blackrock corporation. I regret that. Food that the average American can look for just is owned by Blackrock and we have to deal with that, for the time being, although it's certainly something we want to change. I'm all in favor of food that people can buy from trusted local organic farmers but I have no way of knowing who their trusted local organic farmers might be. Probably those people sell only to a list of friends, or at most to a local farmers' market, and don't want their names on the Internet.
Meanwhile, as this web site has noted, some food manufacturers have reacted tot he COVID panic and the resulting economic mess in the tackiest, most disgraceful way--raising prices, lowering quality, and reducing the amount of product sold for the same price.
We can thank those who bought into the anti-soda-pop hysteria, fed by the wine companies but actually originating from those who wanted to raise the prices of Coca-Cola and Mountain Dew, for the fact that one litre of an overadvertised flavor of soda pop now costs (a) more than twice as much as two litres of the same brand cost in 2020, and (b) often three times as much as a local, less advertised brand of soda pop that may taste better anyway. So long, Coke, it's been good to know ya...now anybody who has any sense is drinking RC Cola, or maybe Frostie. Those who refuse Mountain Dew may be few, but their number is increasing., Last week I went back into the store that had the big sale on Mountain Dew, where I'd bought the bottle that relieved the cramps after this year's round of Norwalk Flu. After the sale they still had the same sad, dusty-looking bottles of Mountain Dew on the same shelf.
But even our President called out some brands for shrinking the product and raising the price. Not counting soda pop. Left-wingnuts officially don't count soda pop as food. Left-wingnuts know that people are more likely to vote for proven-to-fail left-wing ideas under the influence of alcohol.
It's an old post but it contains a useful graphic illustrating the List of Shame:
Breyer
Doritos
Gatorade
Keebler
Oreo
Pepperidge Farm
Tostitos
Turkey Hill
Wheat Thins
Some of these brands used not to belong to Blackrock, or even Con Agra. Some of these brands used to be some of our favorites, or our parents' favorites. My elders bought a Pepperidge Farm cookbook and talked about that being a good brand...well it was a good cookbook.
Turkey Hill deserves a special extra bash, here. Whoever is currently running that company should not be making decisions about which color shirt to put on. It should be prison-issued. Selling smaller boxes of Turkey Hill ice cream is minor. Pulling the more interesting flavors off the shelves, showcasing the flavors derived from some combination of corn syrup and coal tar, would...qualify Turkey Hill to be on the List of Shame, but not to be specially called out. But, as mentioned earlier at this web site, Turkey Hill did not just stick with making ice cream flavored with corn syrup and coal tar (the fake fruit flavors containing no actual fruit, or nuts or chocolate or even vanilla). They went on producing the flavors that you can tell contain real ingredients, the actual nuts and chocolate chunks and so on, but they embedded the nuts, chocolate, dried fruit particles, etc., in a matrix of vanilla ice "cream" that is no longer based in actual cream, but in ANTIFREEZE.
Seriously.
If you put a carton of Turkey Hill vanilla "ice cream" into the fire, which is probably the best place for it, it won't explode but it will burn brightly once the cardboard ignites. Real ice cream is wet and will stop the cardboard igniting until it's baked dry, which takes several minutes. Turkey Hill vanilla will actually, once it heats up, send up flames.
If you left a carton of Turkey Hill vanilla "ice cream" on the floor, not that I recommend this, but if you wanted to save the cost of paying the vet to euthanize an old sick dog...
President Biden's special partiality to ice cream, often pale-colored ice cream that looks likely to be vanilla...is probably not an issue. I'm sure the White House staff have put an embargo on Turkey Hill, which used to be marketed in Washington, only twenty years ago, as an independent farmers' product, full of Mennonite farm goodness. "Your minimum daily requirement of Lancaster County," they advertised to people who drove up to Lancaster County every month. And now...feh. The Mennonite farmers of Lancaster County are too peaceable to do this, but somebody ought to run the Turkey Hill "people"--if they are human--all the way across the New York state line. Lancaster County is too decent a place to be associated with an abomination like this.
No information is available about whether unsold Turkey Hill "vanilla ice cream" has been delivered to the DC inner city schools and, if so, whether it's killed any students yet.
There are a few Turkey Hill flavors that are still ice cream--probably slower-moving flavors left over from last summer, before they started using propylene glycol as a primary ingredient--and this web site recomends not buying those either. Let the fools on the Turkey Hill brand drown in their unsold slop. They don't deserve a penny of your money, or anyone else's. They don't deserve to be able to get any kind of money, ever again. Let them eat antifreeze.
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