October 30, 2009 at 04:34:10

Food Fraud

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By Richard Hirschhorn (about the author) Page 1 of 2 page(s)

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For OpEdNews: Richard Hirschhorn - Writer

A Fouled-Up Diet

Too dumb to break mirrors, I allowed vanity to get me on a diet. I denied it was just another “yeah, sure” moment, one more immature effort to get hunky again. I convinced myself it was a calm considered crack at feeling better and getting healthy.

Because I've had some luck with the low-carb thing. I threw away my uninsured anxieties over possible complications, dumped the brown rice, swore off the great (and dirt cheap) big box store chocolate chip cookies, and stocked up on meat and dairy products.

I started losing weight - but it didn't run off in sheets the way it once had. Something wasn't working right. I was only losing a pound or so a week even though I was being a very good boy and keeping myself (I thought) under ten carbs a day. My body just wasn't going into that magical weight loss state of ketosis.

After about six weeks of this slow and disappointing progress, I decided to drop seven bucks and go for the ketone test strips- an investment in the scientific method.

Sure enough, despite my rigorous adherence to well learned methods, the test results revealed only mild, rather than severe, ketosis.

Where the hell were the carbs coming from? I knew my all-beef franks had one carb apiece - it said so on the label. How could that put me over my limit? The chop meat, other beef, chickens, chicken thighs, and pork products all listed zero carbs on the label.

My first impulse was to blame modern technology. It must be the test strips.Whadda waste of money! Just to be sure, I returned to the two big boxes where I save on food, and diligently re-read all the small info labels. Except for the franks, everything else was zero, zero, and zero. The cream in my coffee? Zero. The cheeses for the burgers? Less than one gram!

By this time, a couple of months had gone by. I was sick to my stomach of bacon and eggs and chicken thighs, and had only lost around ten pounds. Then one day, instead of reading the analysis on the little labels, I finally noticed something that was right in front of me on my roaster chicken. It said “contains fifteen percent water”. How had I missed that? The fine print went on to redefine water as broth, a clue as to what might comprise mystery liquid.

It wasn't just the chicken. On every product with a global price point, the meat was watered. One Tyson pork loin admitted it was thirty percent water.

What's up with this?

Well, for enabling, we have to take our hats off to bi-partisanship. Like other examples of duoperation, such as the Iraq War, our dependence on oil and the deregulation of finance, the water in my chicken has been brought to my table courtesy of the grease being spread on both sides of the “aisle”. What's a little water anyway?

Some people diet for reasons other than vanity. They have serious reasons for watching what they eat. They're sick, and could get sicker real fast if they eat the wrong thing. I checked out the label on a well known brand of turkey. It was only eight percent “water", but the “water”, besides the usual chemical suspects, contained sugar. The label still said zero carbs. It was made with sugar, and still had zero carbs - a miracle of modern technology. This is how the asleep at the wheel crowd could kill someone (not to mention ruin my diet fantasy).

How do they get the water into those birds? When did all this start?

If we could go back to the day and peek over the fence, we might see all the high paid execs lining the edges of the pool. Mr. Perdue is floating on a cushion. A column with no end in sight carries the chickens into the hands of the Great Plucker. Then, with scientific precision and ergonomic efficiency, it is determined just how long Frank has to hold each one underwater (on a per pound basis). I'll leave figuring out how they do the pigs to you.

They call it “dope” for a reason. Who could be dumber than a doper? Well, while that's hard to say precisely, I would venture to guess I never met even the most flipped out freak that was so stupid as to buy wet grass. Everyone knows, or so I thought, that watering products was a scam. Can we imagine the gourmet class, the all-natural types, standing at the scale at the upscale organic rip-off market while some smiling face pours water over the nuts, herbs, and other savory spices? How about the hunter carting off a soaking wet sack of deer corn? Yet, while we are laughing at the bong crowd, most of the meat and fowl (foul?) we are eating has been watered.

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