Viagraberries and AIDS-vaccine Pear?

This is an except directly out of the book "Last Chance to Eat" by Gina Mallet published in 2004. I picked it up at Strand Books last week, and highly recommend it.

She details the declining taste and quality in food along with the rise in industries such as CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) and Aquaculture (farm raised fish), among others.

This is the Epilogue from the book. I was going to do just small excerpts but I couldn't decide what to pull out, it is all good. It made me laugh, and then cry :(

"Imagine flying over North America and Europe in, say, the next couple generations. The first thing you notice is how much of the land is doomed with transparent plastic. All fruit and vegetables that can be are grown under glass, and those can't are gone, with the exception of some field crops. As far as the eye can see, wind turbines march across the land, even into the sea, like armies of giant cranes. The coastlines are back to their old shape, though, because the fish farms are no more. All factory farms have been banned since excrement, human and animal, was threatening to overwhelm the earth. Fish and beef are produced in small quantities and the animals are treated kindly. Pigs play football in their spare time and calves swing baseball bats-both sports are popular among animal brethren.

The foodscape has changed at ground level. The two foods that scientists discovered to be the healthiest, most likely to extend life, were alcohol and dark chocolate. As a result, people became drunk and got fat. This sent scientists rushing back to the lab. How could it be that the healthiest things were in fact the unhealthiest? This latest crisis of confidence in food science prompted the government finally to step in, and alcohol and chocolate are now strictly rationed. Each consumer is given coupons with which they buy their weekly share, along with their beef and fish rations. This hasn't stopped wave after wave of lawsuits from consumers claiming their lives are being shortened. While they wait for justice, however, they can go to the foodeasy. Foodeasies sell forbidden food after dark.

Once the amount of time the industrial human spends watching something rather than doing it was put at 90 percent, the authorities decided that the human aiming at eternal life, "kick the death habit," must change diets, concentrate on lighter food, mainline liquids constantly. So the state authorized hydration stations, run privately, which look like old time Coke machines and dispense organic, plasticlike packs of liquid nutrients, flavored and sweetened artificially. At first, there was fear that the water might run out; but then a cheap way to desalinate the oceans was discovered, and global warming did the rest.

Food often looks different. Eggs now come shelled in transparent packs of some kind of organic material. Milk no longer exists; it has been replaced by genetically modified soy, once it was found there was no way to wipe out pathogens in industrial cattle. There is no butter because of the cow problem; it has been replaced by genetically modified canola oil spread, which tastes of nothing. There is no honey because the bees were redundant once we had genetically modified plants, and only bumblebees were needed, with the occasional vibrator. There are no more apples because they were too much trouble to grow, and we are now in a trade war with China and cannot import them.

The most popular fruit is the GM Viagraberry, a huge strawberrylike fruit, strawberries and raspberries crossed and spiked with Viagra. After much polling and many in depth focus groups consensus was reached on the favorite fruit, the strawberry, of course. Raspberries scored high, but they are no longer grown as they are too labor intensive a crop, and no machine seemed able to pick them as capably as humans, so the search was on to find some way to keep the flavor. Viagra was no-brainer as the increasingly aging population has no end of sexual problems.

It is now common for transgenic fruits and vegetables to be spiked with vaccines, vitamins, and mood-changing drugs, excellent add-ons when it comes to sales. The AIDS-vaccine pear is hugely successful and has revived pears as a fruit. Onions are banned because they rotted too fast in the markets. They have been replaced by transgenic scalery, a mix of celery and scallions. Another successful transgenic cross is the pinemelon, a smooth orange melon tasting like pineapple, pinapples themselves proving too unreliable a commercial crop.

Only one supermarket chain is left. The only one necessary because most people don't cook, they eat takeaways as in "Come on over for a takeaway," and takeaway cooks buy wholesale. Takeaway is almost all ethnic-industrial sushi, fajitas, lasagna, chicken tikka, fish and chips.

There are still a few restaurants serving Grandads, as meals are now called, and they are patronized by old and older people, those who still remember what an omelette fines herbes used to taste like. The chefs are French almost without exception as they were the only cookds to hide their books when the Food Police decided to eliminate all gastronomically incorrect cookbooks, the kind that featured verboten foods like butter and wine, beef and fish. Some restuarants are licensed to serve the small amounts of meat that has been organically raised and closely supervised, and a Porterhouse steak is what Beluga caviar once was - expensive, and hard to get. You need atleast five people's rations to buy it. On nights that steak is advertised, the restaurants is invariably sold out, although some pesky perfectionists grumble that the meat is obviously wet-aged, not dry-aged.

It is generally agreed that the best place to eat a Grandad is at home, but then the problem arises how to find a home that still makes Grandads. After the supreme technological kitchen of the nineties was declared environmentally unfriendly, those who had them felt so guilty that they tore them out and replaced them with the sole essentials for modern eating: the microwave and the refrigerator. People who kept their old kitchens are frowned upon as insensitive. "Have you thought at all about how the non-aligned nations have to eat?" Owners of old kitchens are careful not to boast, but their kitchens are regarded the same way a fine Boulle cabinet was once, as a priceless antique. See the great six burner stove and the copper hood, the bar sink and dish sink, the silent Rolls-Royce of a dishwasher where the only sounds is the click when the cycle changes, the glistening freezer-fridge, the home coffee roaster, the blender, electric beater, food processor, the maple chopping block, the battery of knives, so many wooden spoons and metal whisks, the gleaming cookware...

Guests who attend a Grandad are invited by self destructing email. Which means the invitation is destroyed the moment the recipient reads it, so no one else gets wind of it and tries to crash. To get invited to a Grandad, you have to join a Health Club, the cover for Grandads, an you receive a password with which you can log on to an encrypted Grandad newsletter that gives you the address of new foodeasies, and accounts of recent Grandads that featured leg of lamb with flageolets verts, osso bucco, pork roast with crackling, and of course Montrachet and Haut-Brion, and Scharffen-Berger Chocolate from the foodeasy. Sometimes a Grandad veteran gets carried away - usually after too many glassed of contraband Dom Perignon - and cries when he talkes about the bad old days, when people ate so well and enjoyed their food. But he is quickly shushed because it is all too painful. Food is dead, continuity is dead, and the new Ice Age finally closes over our heads."


I titled this Viagraberries and AIDS-vaccine Pear? for two reasons, one to get your attention, but two because this is sadly not far from the truth. Our food is fortified with all kind of nutrients. To the scientists putting them in there it doesn't really seem to matter if we actually absorb them it is more of a marketing gimmick. In Michael Pollan's book "The Omnivore's Dilemma" he says that we used to think that food of the future would be in the form of a pill, now it is more like the pill is in our food. This is especially true right now, when food scientists are trying to genetically modify rice to be anti malarial and spraying store bought cold cuts right here in the US with bacteria killing viruses. Viruses sprayed on your food trigger an immune response in your body even if you do not get sick. This causes unnecessary strain on your immune system. All of this is done to hide shady and unsanitary manufacturing processes that leave the products vulnerable to pathogens.

Stand up for your right to eat the food you want! If we don't this bleak picture will be even further upon us.