Fiat foods

These are either drugs or inedible industrial products which have been foisted upon the world through a century of heavy propaganda and government policy, financed by fiat money.


1. Refined flour and sugar

Historically, whole grain flour and natural sugars have been consumed for thousands of years. Whole grain flour, being produced from the whole grain, would contain the germ and bran, which contain all the nutrients in the wheat. As Weston Price documented, elaborate rituals existed for preparing whole wheat and it was eaten with ample animal fat. Industrialization changed things drastically for these two substances, effectively turning them into highly addictive drugs. Wikipedia explains: 

An important problem of the industrial revolution was the preservation of flour. Transportation distances and a relatively slow distribution system collided with natural shelf life. The reason for the limited shelf life is the fatty acids of the germ, which react from the moment they are exposed to oxygen. This occurs when grain is milled; the fatty acids oxidize and flour starts to become rancid. Depending on climate and grain quality, this process takes six to nine months. In the late 19th century, this process was too short for an industrial production and distribution cycle. As vitamins, micronutrients and amino acids were completely or relatively unknown in the late 19th century, removing the germ was an effective solution. Without the germ, flour cannot become rancid. Degermed flour became standard. Degermation started in densely populated areas and took approximately one generation to reach the countryside. Heat-processed flour is flour where the germ is first separated from the endosperm and bran, then processed with steam, dry heat or microwave and blended into flour again.

In other words, industrialization solved the problem of flour perishing and ruining by removing all the nutrients from it, effectively turning it into a highly addictive drug.

Sugar, on the other hand, had existed naturally in many foods, but in its pure form was rare and expensive, since its processing required large amounts of energy, and its production was almost universally done by slaves, because few would choose to work that exhausting job of their own volition. As industrialization and capital accumulation allowed for the replacement of slave labor with heavy machinery, people were able to produce sugar in a pure white form, free of all the molasses and nutrients that accompany it, and at a much lower cost.

Refined sugar and flour can be better understood as drugs, not food. Sugar contains no essential nutrients, and flour only contains very little. The pleasure that people get from consuming them is not the pleasure one gets from being nourished, it is the pleasure you get from a hit of an addictive substance. In Bright Line Eating, Susan Thompson explains how the refining of sugar and flour is similar to the refining process that has made cocaine and heroin such highly addictive substances. Whereas chewing on coca leaves or eating poppy plants will give someone a small high and little energy kick, it is nowhere near addictive, as evidenced by the fact that many cultures had consumed these plants for thousands of years with little adverse effects. But the industrial processing of these plants into their modern highly potent drug form has made them extremely addictive, because it allows the person consuming them to ingest large quantities of the pure essence of the plant without any of the rest of the plant matter that comes with it. The high is magnified as is the withdrawal that follows it and the desire for more. Thompson makes a compelling case that the processing of these drugs is very similar to the processing of sugar and flour in how addictive it makes them. She even cites studies that show that sugar is eight times more addictive than cocaine.


2. Polyunsaturated and hydrogenated "vegetable" and seed oils

A century ago, the majority of fats that were consumed consisted of healthy animal fats like butter, ghee, tallow, lard, and schmaltz, with smaller quantities of olive and coconut oils. Today, the majority of fat consumption comes in the form of toxic heavily-processed industrial chemicals which are misleadingly referred to as "vegetable oils", mainly soy, rapeseed, sunflower, corn, and canola, as well as the abomination that is margarine. The diet change that would likely cause the largest improvement in a person's health with the least effort is likely to be the substitution of these horrific industrial chemicals for healthy animal fats.

Most of these chemicals did not exist 100 years ago, and those that did were mainly used in industrial uses, such as lubricants. As industrialization spread and the government-stoked hysteria against animal fats increased, these toxic chemicals have been promoted worldwide by governments, doctors, and nutritionists as the healthy alternative. The spread of this sludge across the world, replacing all the traditional fats used for millennia is an astounding testament to the power of government propaganda hiding under the veneer of science. The late Dr. Mary Enig of the Weston Price Foundation had spent her life warning of the dangers of these chemicals, with very little attention. Here she lists the different kinds of fat available, while here she discusses their impact on health. These are extremely valuable reads I highly recommend.


3. High fructose corn syrup

In the 1970's, and as government policy had pushed for the mass production of corn and made its price very cheap, there was a large surplus of corn crops looking for places to be used. This abundance of cheap corn led to the development of many creative ways to utilize it to benefit from its low price, and one of these was to use it to extract a sweetener, High Fructose Corn Syrup. In 1983 the FDA blessed this new substance with the classification of "Generally Recognized As Safe" and the flood gates to its utilization opened in a barely believable manner. Since the US has very high tariffs on sugar, the price of sugar in the US is usually double or triple the global price. While the US has very high subsidies to corn, the price of corn is generally lower in the US than the global average. Once a sweetener was made from corn, it became more profitable to use it for sweetening products than sugar, and since then, American candy, industrial food, and soft drinks has become almost universally full of HFCS, which is arguably even more harmful than regular sugar, on top of being nowhere near as appetizing or desirable. If you've ever wondered why candy and soft drinks taste much better everywhere on the planet than in the US, now you know why: only the US sweetens its candies with HFCS while the rest of the world uses the more palatable sugar.

There are many problems with HFCS, but perhaps the most important is that it can only be metabolized in the liver, like toxic substances, and is responsible for causing a lot of liver damage worldwide.


4. Soy

Historically, soy was not an edible crop, used instead to fix nitrogen in the soil. The Chinese first figured out how to make it edible through extensive fermenting in products like tempeh, natto, and soy sauce. Famines and poverty later forced oriental populations to eat more of it, and it has arguably had a negative effect on the physical development of the populations that have depended on it for long.

Modern day soy products come from Soybean lecithin. The squeamish may want to skip this, but here is how the Weston Price Foundation described the process by which this is prepared:

Soybean lecithin comes from sludge left after crude soy oil goes through a "degumming" process. It is a waste product containing solvents and pesticides and has a consistency ranging from a gummy fluid to a plastic solid. Before being bleached to a more appealing light yellow, the color of lecithin ranges from a dirty tan to reddish brown. The hexane extraction process commonly used in soybean oil manufacture today yields less lecithin than the older ethanol-benzol process, but produces a more marketable lecithin with better color, reduced odor and less bitter flavor.

Historian William Shurtleff reports that the expansion of the soybean crushing and soy oil refining industries in Europe after 1908 led to a problem disposing the increasing amounts of fermenting, foul-smelling sludge. German companies then decided to vacuum dry the sludge, patent the process and sell it as "soybean lecithin". Scientists hired to find some use for the substance cooked up more than a thousand new uses by 1939.

While there are many great uses of soy in industry, its use in food has largely been an unmitigated disaster as this extensive discussion by The Weston Price Foundation explains.


5. Low fat foods

The notion that animal fats are harmful has spurred the creation of many substitutes to fatty foods that contain low or no fat. Without delicious animal fat, these products all become tasteless and unpalatable, and the best way to make them palatable was to introduce sugars. As a result of trying to avoid fat because of government hysteria discussed below, people have become very hungry and needing to binge on endless doses of sugary snacks all day, with lots of chemicals and artificial barely edible compounds thrown in.

All of the above-mentioned foods, and many more, can better be understood as industrial products that should be avoided for a human to thrive and be healthy. Yet even as technology and science continue to advance, we find people consuming ever-increasing barely believable quantities of them. Faster and more powerful machines can reduce the cost of producing these materials very significantly, and as industrial technology has advanced producing these foods has become less and less expensive.

There is very little that industrialization can do to improve the cost of producing meat which needs to grow by walking on large areas of land, graze and get sun. Food is one area where industrialization is not always useful, because it has allowed us to indulge in addiction to unhealthy foods in very concentrated doses. Substitution of capital and modern power for human time has come at the expense of nutrient content. Food prices are kept low by making people eat more industrial foods, which are based on heavy industrial processing rather than time spent in preparation.

The promotion of these foods works out very well for governments looking to feed their people on the cheap, for agribusiness looking to make large profits, and for the con artists who profit immensely from pretending to be scientists and doctors while promoting them, as we'll see below.