Deregulate, create disaster, shrug it off

Part 1 of 2 Man looking at supermarket frozen hamburger: “I wonder what noise that used to make?” Meanwhile all of Europe is dealing with a horse meat contamination (they are only testing for horse, not bush meat, yet). It turns out that nine out of 10 prepared frozen entrees have traces of horsemeat. Man eating frozen meal: “I don’t eat beef ... I recently discovered.”We are always shocked for five minutes (only) to find out that a food giant has doctored our food with something we would not think of eating. Pink slime; “Oh, no ... et tu Safeway?” There is nothing these companies would not shovel into their prepared meals if they could get away with it. Meat that passes through several countries, each putting their stamp of approval on it, from China to Rumania to Canada ... what is turning up now is horse meat, game meat from Africa (bush meat) and let’s not get started on fish which DNA testing has shown to be 75 percent of the time mislabeled in the USA. Fish? Really? Sometimes it is colored plankton — basically sea bugs — cooked and squeezed into patties and sold as crab cakes or “seafood.”Offal, giblets, soil, dust, skin, tonsils, lungs, rat feces ... all manner of “meat” is chopped up, like pink slime, and repurposed. For repurposed, read: “made fit for consumption.” And is it? Well, sterilized protein-wise perhaps. But what comes with it, added during processing, may not be. Colorizing meat has long been shown to be a possible carcinogen. And why do you care?We are a capitalist nation perhaps before a caring nation, so let us look at this from an economic point of view. Are we not dealing with enough federal budget worries for Medicare? If we prevent our kids of today eating these chemicals, they may not need a $25,000 treatment for cancer later. Save $2 trillion in entitlement costs down the road. Sounds good, no?Look, things you buy that are suspiciously cheap may, in fact, be suspicious. What, you think a 99-cent burger will be full of healthy ingredients, or when a school kid gets a “full nutritious lunch” for $2.08, or when you go into Sam’s Club and buy wine for 99 cents a bottle — you really think it may be good for you? When we reduce the oversight of government that is what we get — runaway profiteering in the name of economizing. Take last year’s meningitis medicine deaths. In 2008, Congress took away the FDA’s oversight on a federal level and gave it to the states who do not have the funds or manpower to do any checking. Result? Deadly fungus got into these so-called “compound” manufacturers and killed and sickened people. The FDA was powerless to stop it or the companies making it and called in the FBI who is still “investigating.”Put your trust in the markets or in companies? These are the same people who gave us mad cow disease, the meningitis vaccines without FDA control, the same people who are shipping dog meat contaminated with melamine, horse and game flesh from Africa, the same people who gave monopolies to cable TV, the same people who lobbied (and won) to remove any genetically modified food labeling in California, the same people who have made the Dept. of Agriculture agree that farm-raised salmon fed poultry and meat by-products (and GMO corn and soy) is just salmon with no difference between wild caught and farm raised, the same people who said fracking is fine (but waived federal control to protect aquifers), the same people who deride science and fact (“You don’t need to be a scientist to know burgers are good for you!” Yes, you do, these days). More on this in next week’s column. In the meantime, read your food labels carefully.Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, now lives in New Mexico.