Poison, Eat, Inject: Coming To A Town Near You In India Soon
By Colin Todhunter
08 June, 2012
Countercurrents.org
Walk down many local high streets in the UK and see the shell of what they once were. Where local grocery stores, banks and quality clothes stores used to comprise the cornerstone of a thriving local community, there now exists a sense of decay and loss. The only people who shop here these days are the low paid, those in receipt of old age pensions and people on welfare. Most of the manufacturing jobs were outsourced abroad because it was ‘good for the country’, but not good for many of the people, who ended up jobless or underemployed.
The banks centralised, ‘rationalised’ and left. Their former premises have been converted into bars selling beer at bargain basement prices, where people can drink away their empty days. The clothes shops have been replaced with second hand stores and the grocery stores selling fresh produce are now betting offices or pawn shops, offering people the chance of a few pounds to get them through till the next payday or welfare cheque. Betting or booze, take your pick, they are opiates to dull the senses by any other name.
The big supermarket chains and retail megastores opened up a few miles away on the edge of town, catering to the car owning people with good credit ratings who could spend their hard borrowed cash on all manner of goods. Their hard ‘earned’ cash was never going to be enough given the downward pressure on wages and their decline in real terms for many years now. So debt became the saviour and pumped up the economy. The years of ‘maxing out’ on the credit cards were laughingly known as the boom years, until the market became saturated with debt that no one could afford to pay back. Many western nations lived in a bubble… then it burst!
Still, there’s always decent food if you can get to the edge of town supermarket, isn’t there? Wander down the massive aisles, and cast your eyes on aisle after aisle of brightly coloured produce from all over the world. There are no seasons in the modern supermarket. Everything appears ripe, appears fresh, even if it was picked green then artificially ripened between field and shelf. A seemingly endless supply of food from all over the world. Food grown for export, food as cash crops, food grown on fields in other countries. It’s no coincidence that most of the world’s poor tend to be involved in the production of food. It ends up on the tables of others in far off places.
And just look at those shelves. Chicken breasts, chicken wings, whole chickens, half chickens… all tightly wrapped in cling-film. Well, at least it looks like chicken. I guess before they were slaughtered, they looked like chickens, clucked like chickens and acted like chickens. Or did they? People prefer white meat from the breasts. So the chicken is pumped full of hormones to make its chest develop more in comparison to the rest of the body.
People want convenient food, always available. So, why not pump animals full of growth hormone and antibiotics? Why wait months for the chicken to grow when weeks will suffice? As the chicken buckles under the weight of its growth and its internal organs have difficulty in coping with such rapid growth, what eventually appears on the supermarket shelf is the ‘idea’ of a chicken.
The meat looks like chicken meat, it’s labelled as chicken, so it must be chicken. Right? But why focus on the illusionary chicken? We could quite easily apply the same logic to say the cow or the pig. These are animals that are made sick by chemical-industrial agriculture, some of which never see a field or even daylight, imprisoned in their shed. And people eat these sick, unhealthy animals. And while we are at it, why not apply the ‘idea of the chicken’ analogy to the banana, tomato of some other food item too, which has been painted and pumped?
With this amount of hormones, antibiotics, food additives, preservatives and colourings, artificial sweeteners, aluminium, sulphur, flavour enhancers and heavy metals being put into what we eat, is it any wonder that we are becoming sick?
Severe anemia, permanent brain damage, Alzheimer’s, dementia, neurological disorders, reproductive problems, diminished intelligence, impaired immune system, behavioural disorders, cancers, hyperactivity and learning disability are just some of the diseases linked to our food. Of course, just like cigarettes and the tobacco industry before, trying to ‘prove’ the glaringly obvious link will take decades as deceit and lies are passed off as ‘science’ by the corporations involved in food production.
In the meantime, enter the pharmaceuticals racket, sorry, I mean industry...yes, the very industry in the US that’s spends more on lobbying politicians than any other industry and more on marketing its bogus miracle drugs than researching them. The very industry that is involved in the manufacture of all those poisonous chemicals and additives that find their way into our food.
Big pharma has the US Food and Drugs Agency in its pocket and regards chemical industrial food production, the consequent diseases produced and chemical industrial ‘healthcare’ as a huge money making scam. Why prevent illness when you can produce it, then cash in on it? The production of contaminated food, the manufacture of bad health and the subsequent government sanctioned drug pushing in the name of pharmaceutical-led ‘healthcare’ begs the question, what price human life?
As India opens its doors to western agri-business, chemically laden western supermarket brands and drug pushing pharmaceutical companies, I beg the question what future your health? Indeed, what future India?
Colin Todhunter : Originally from the northwest of England, writer Colin Todhunter has spent many years in India. He has written extensively for the Deccan Herald (the Bangalore-based broadsheet), New Indian Express and Morning Star (Britain). His articles have on occasion also appeared in the Kathmandu Post, Rising Nepal, Gulf News, North East Times (India), State Times (India), Meghalaya Guardian, Indian Express and Southern Times (Africa). Various other publications have carried his work too, including the London Progressive Journal and Kisan Ki Awaaz (India's national farmers' magazine). A former social policy researcher, Colin has been published in the peer-reviewed journals Disability and Society and Social Research Update, and one of his articles appears in the book The A-Z of Social Research (Sage, 2003).
Due to a recent spate of abusive, racist and xenophobic comments we are forced to revise our comment policy and has put all comments on moderation que.
