Reader Beware: This is a RANT!!
If you’ve eaten potato chips or chicken nuggets lately, chances are you had a bite of hydrolyzed vegetable protein — a salty and savory flavor enhancer used in many foods you may eat every day. The additive is used in thousands of foods including soup mix, sauces, dips, hot dogs, chicken nuggets, potato chips, pretzels and frozen entrees.
The behind-the-scenes food additive came to national attention last week: the FDA issued a mass recall of processed food products when it was discovered that a batch of HVP coming from Basic Food Flavors, Inc. in Las Vegas, Nev., was contaminated with salmonella.
Consumers should also check www.foodsafety.gov daily to see updates to the list of recalled products. Consumers with recalled products are instructed to throw them away.
Yes, that’s right! The FDA is recommending that you throw away products with the related codes on their packages (and eat the cost yourself!). This is unconscionable and one more example of how the USA panders to these food companies, even if they endanger our lives.
What I would like to know is, When Is Enough Enough??????
The endless array of poison in our food has become a fact of life. Last time it was about peanuts. Annoying (and deadly) yes, but at least you could identify products that had peanuts in them and avoid them.
This time, it’s a “Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein” sold in bulk to food processors by a company named Basic Foods. Basic Foods sells their product in 25 pound sacks to companies who use their additive in their foods which millions of Americans ingest.
I really think it’s time to indict and convict the owners and CEOs of companies that endanger our food supply and the lives of Americans through their sanitation and toxic material negligence. That would go a long way toward curing them and making them a bit more concerned about how careful they are in their processing and supply purchases from vendors off shore like in China.
Remember the massive melamine in pet food and baby formulas recalls? Does lead in our children’s Chinese toys ring a bell? How about the E Coli outbreak in spinach and the Botulism problem compliments of the canning process of a company named New Era?
If all of this isn’t offensive enough, President Obama’s “Food and Safety Working Group” recently instructed the FDA to draft “helpful guidelines for growers of tomatoes, leafy vegetables and melons.” I don’t know about you, but the word, “guideline” does not inspire confidence for me. Guidelines are not instructions and they are not The Law.
Then there’s our infamous chemical saturator and food-facsimile godfather, Monsanto, infiltrating the USDA, trying to control and genetically engineer the world’s food supply, and working double-time to harass small farmers and influence Congress to make it financially impossible for the farmers to grow food without Monsanto’s chemical blessing.
How much should you really trust a company that has the audacity to imagine it actually should own a patent on the world’s CORN??? Corn has been a gift to the earth for hundreds of years and now Monsanto wants to claim it as their own invention!
To make matters worse, it’s just a never-ending poisoning-fest for Big Agra and Big Food. And when we aren’t being poisoned by chemicals and salmonella, we are wondering what happened to the taste of what were once lusciously delicious foods.
If you are old enough, ever wonder why that salmon and shrimp from “down on the farm” barely resemble the taste of salmon and shrimp you ate 20 years ago; or why supermarket tomatoes no longer taste like tomatoes; why foodstuffs are packaged way off shore some place; why you have to practically scrub your produce with a Brillo pad before eating it, and why your garden seeds are “treated” (think eradiated) to no longer grow year after year?
We talk about breaking up the big banks, well maybe we should be doing the same for these food masters and conglomerates as well.
I believe very strongly that these recalls should all be PROMINENTLY posted near the shelves where the recalled products would reside had they not been recalled for deadliness. The public simply is not hearing about these recalls fast enough. I say, embarrass these companies where it will hurt them most: right at the point of sale. A well-placed FDA sign would embed itself right where it belongs: In the memories of consumers, for a long, long time. That should make food processing companies think twice about winks, nods and lax monitoring of their own plants as well as the plants of their suppliers. They are lax because they CAN be. They need to know that they will incur massive financial loses if they are not responsible food producers. Responsible food producers do not include salmonella in their products.
Safety has gone out the window, folks.
We can give hundreds of billions of dollars to Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, AIG, Green Car Manufacturers in foreign countries, and a host of other Wall Street and special interest thieves who don’t care about us, because there priority is making huge contributions to politicians.
Our government should be cleaning the USDA and FDA houses, removing them from ties to politicians and the companies they are supposed to be monitoring.
When you have an FDA that actually has the audacity to set “safe levels” of melamine in baby formulas,” something needs to be changed. We need to fund an FDA that Prevents, not just Reports. The agency should be hovering over our food growers, processors and suppliers; demanding they do the same for their vendors; fining them when they don’t comply, and keeping infected food from reaching the consumer. Sure, some things might slip through the cracks, but what we are enduring today is an indication that things are seriously out of control under the current system.
The recalls in our food chain are a never-ending loop and the condition of our food supply has reached the point of unconscionable. What’s next from the FDA: “Safe levels” of Salmonella? How about if they just stick Botulism, Salmonella and E Coli into the food pyramid and give us our daily acceptable allocation? When organizations like the FDA start declaring that there are “safe levels” of toxic substances, we are being desensitized to the poisons and toxins we are being forced to ingest for the sake of the corporate profits. Why are we expected to become accustomed to all these poisons on behalf of Big Business and the politicians they sponsor?
Health and happiness—really!
Kriss
No Comments