Eating garbage will make you sick, and then the doctor will give you a Big Pharma pill that won’t make you well, but will make your symptoms a little less painful. It’s a great racket all around. From Colin Todhunter at off-guardian.org:
The modern food system is responsible for making swathes of humanity ill, causing unnecessary suffering and sending many people to an early grave. It is part of a grotesque food-pharma conveyor belt that results in massive profits for the dominant agrifood and pharmaceuticals corporations.
Much of the modern food system has been shaped by big agribusiness concerns like Monsanto (now Bayer) and Cargill, giant food companies like Nestle, Pepsico and Kellog’s and, more recently, institutional investors like BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street.
For the likes of BlackRock, which invests in both food and pharma, fuelling a system increasingly based on ultra processed food (UPF) with its cheap and unhealthy ingredients is a sure-fire money spinner.
Toxic junk
Consider that fast food is consumed by 85 million US citizens each day. Several chains are the primary suppliers of many school lunches. Some 30 million school meals are served to children each day. For millions of underprivileged children in the US, these meals are their only access to nutrition.
In 2022, Moms Across America (MAA) and Children’s Health Defense (CHD) commissioned the testing of school lunches and found that 5.3 per cent contained carcinogenic, endocrine-disrupting and liver disease-causing glyphosate; 74 per cent contained at least one of 29 harmful pesticides; four veterinary drugs and hormones were found in nine of the 43 meals tested; and all of the lunches contained heavy metals at levels up to 6,293 times higher than the US Environmental Protection Agency’s maximum levels allowed in drinking water. Moreover, the majority of the meals were abysmally low in nutrients.
As a follow up, MAA, a non-profit organisation, with support from CHD and the Centner Academy, recently decided to have the top ten most popular fast-food brand meals extensively tested for 104 of the most commonly used veterinary drugs and hormones.
