Rebel News - Independent News and Analysis

Eating Animals
Jonathan Safran Foer
New york: Little, Brown and Company 2009

Why do we behave morally? There's reciprocity and looking out for our genes. For many (most, I hope) of us there's a natural dislike of cruelty. We try not to be responsible for any extra suffering in the world. Humans also desire approval from others and usually being a scoundrel isn't good for your reputation.

Junk food advertising has reached a new low with the recent Doritos "Crash the Super Bowl" ads which portray Doritos consumers as violent murderers who will kill fellow human beings to get a bag of Doritos.

One Doritos ad portrays a man backing out of a parking lot when his car strikes an innocent person who drops a bag of Doritos and falls to the ground behind the car. Rather than trying to help the innocent victim, this man throws his car into reverse and drives over the victim, killing him with the vehicle and stealing the bag of Doritos.

 

There are 14 billion hamburgers consumed each year in the United States alone. The people who eat those burgers, though, have little knowledge of what's actually in them. Current USDA regulations, for example, openly allow beef contaminated with E. coli to be repackaged, cooked and sold as ready-to-eat hamburgers.

This simple fact would shock most consumers if they knew about it. People assume that beef found to be contaminated with E. coli must be thrown out or destroyed (or even recalled), but in reality, it's often just pressed into hamburger patties, cooked, and sold to consumers. This practice is openly endorsed by the USDA.

America is the truest example of what George Bernard Shaw meant when he said "Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for the appointment by the corrupt few." Obama is upholding the tradition and then some.

In fact, in less than six months, he's done the impossible. With congressional Democrats, he's compiled a worse record than even his fiercest critics feared, worse than George Bush, straight across the board on both domestic and foreign policies that include:

What if I put poison in your food and told you about it? How would you react?

Instead of starting off by telling you how this or that is, I’ve got questions for you, the reader. Just follow along and it will all make sense to you. What exactly would you do if I was to walk up to you on the street and snatch your wallet out of your hand? How would you react? Would you let me walk away with it unhindered? What if I slapped you with it, then walked away? What would you do if I walked up to your drink at a bar and poured a deadly substance into it? Would you still drink it? How would you deal with me for perpetrating such an atrocious act, right in front of your face? What if I walked up to you in a restaurant and spit on your food? Or I dumped something toxic onto it? Would you still eat it? Again, how would you deal with me, knowing I just contaminated your plate of food? Tough guy, right? Most of you are thinking “I’d kick your ass”, and that’s great, really.

Multi-national food corporations are increasingly using global food insecurity as a tool for political control. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) reports that “land grabbing” by foreign investors in developing countries has resulted in a new form of colonialism. Spanish NGO, GRAIN reports that rich countries are buying poor countries’ fertile soil, water and sun to ship food and fuel back home. IFPRI researcher Joachim von Braun states, “About one-quarter of these investments are for biofuel plantations.”

I have learned over the past decade if I want to know what's really going on in the United States, I have to cruise through the foreign media to see what's creating a furor or causing a stink. So, while searching for the status of Spain's on-again, off-again criminal proceedings against six Bush Administration war criminals, this headline in Der Spiegel caught my eye -- "Frankenfood Ban is Neither Populism nor Panic-Mongering."

If we are to believe what our trusted international media report, the world is on the brink of a global pandemic outbreak of a new deadly strain of flu, H1N1 as it has been labelled, or more popularly, Swine Flu. As the story goes, the outbreak of the deadly flu was first discovered in Mexico. According to press reports, after several days, headlines reported as many as perhaps 150 deaths in Mexico were believed caused by this virulent people-killing pig virus that has spread to humans and now is allegedly being further spread from human to human. Cases were being reported hourly from Canada to Spain and beyond. The only thing wrong with this story is that it is largely based on lies, hype and coverup of possible real causes of Mexican deaths.