No matter where you look in Ukiah and in the remote outer orbits of Mendocino County, you find idiotic opinions from morons badgering you to think, vote and even eat just like them.
Their stupidities are seen on bumper stickers, in letters to the editor of the Ukiah Daily Journal and on ballot initiatives. The diet squabbles annoy me.
Reasonable people can disagree on how often Stretch Pelosi should have plastic surgery, or whether the pancreas is an organ or a muscle. But these food controversies really are beyond debate.
I don’t care if you eat lactose-infused gluten or sugar glazed cheezie plops. But there are plenty of people out there, and many of them are presently grazing the aisles at the Ukiah Co-op health food emporium, who think their job is to tell you what to eat. Or not eat.
Take salmon. Please. I see bumper stickers asking “Do You Eat Farmed Fish?” For some, the right opinion and ultimate answer, is to eat only wild caught fresh salmon. Food snobs think farmed fish are beneath them and have no place on the tables of trendsetters.
But why? None of us has ever eaten a chicken or a turkey or a hamburger from an animal that wasn’t raised on a farm. Apples, grapes, peanuts, bacon, rice, wheat, shrimp, carrots, cabbage and a thousand other foods (I counted ‘em up) are all produced on farms. Salmon is forbidden? Enlighten us please.
For the first time in our history, or at least since Adam & Eve, we are on the edge of eliminating hunger across the entire planet. It’s mostly because of better science, which quickly gets us to genetically modified food.
Progressives, who like the rest of us have been eating genetically modified corn, wheat, rice, etc., for the past 50 years, are terrified and upset by GMOs, so they invent lies about Frankenfoods and children born with six toes. Not one fatality has ever even been suggested as coming from GMOs. But hundreds have died in just the past few years from eating filthy, diseased produce from organics farms.
Let’s review, because our silly neighbors haven’t thought it through. If everyone eats only wild fresh salmon the world supply of wild salmon will be exhausted by Monday.
If we refuse to allow GMO corn, millions will starve to death all across the globe.
If we urge everyone to eat only the fashionable agri-chic goods on display at the Farmers’ Market our food will soon be scarce as cocaine, and just as expensive.
Don’t believe me? Go to the local Farmer’s Market on a Saturday morning and marvel, or gasp, at the prices. Try to contain your mirth when you consider all the seriously comic prattle going on about how backyard, organic farming techniques are the future.
We bought a handful of berries from some tilty heads running a patch out in Potter Valley. Their sign assured us the fruit picking was done “by the light of the moon.” The berries were three times what Safeway was charging, and almost as flavorful.
Sustainable? Folks, that’s exactly what modern farming has been bringing you for more than a hundred years. Walk into any supermarket in Ukiah (or in Eureka or Utica or Uniontown, New York) and check out fresh, colorful produce on display at reasonable prices, 12 months a year. A vast array of meats, including pork, beef, poultry and seafood is yours for the asking.
Here in the 21st century you eat better than any of the kings, presidents and elites have eaten in the past 2,000 years. Yet our progressive friends are having a tantrum because labels on the kale don’t provide personal information about the owners of the acre of dirt the stuff was grown on.
Food labeling has been a fad for the past few decades, with pesky “activists” demanding calorie counts, sugar levels, carbohydrates as a percentage of daily requirements, etc. They want detailed dietary information on everything from Ho Ho’s and hamburger to Pop Tarts and poultry.
How has all the well-meaning bullying gone so far? Are your fellow citizens looking lean and healthy?? Have they lost weight? Less obesity? Diabetes now cured because everyone is aware of the percentage of high fructose corn syrup in a Big Mac?
Big Ag feeds the planet, but progressives prefer a catchy slogan. They go for phrases like “Farm to Table” and “eco-sustainable.” What they get are $6 tomatoes, meat prices that would make a vegetarian out of Hulk Hogan, and the smug, self-satisfied feeling that they alone are capable of wise, healthy nutrition choices.
Food today is a trend, a fashion, and right now it tells us something about where we are as a culture. What was once the hard work of tilling the soil and toiling til dark is now a hobby for retired English professors and software engineers. Gentlemen farmers in L.L. Bean costumes practice squinting into the sun as they survey their ranchettes for magazine photographers.
The accompanying stories will inevitably compare them to boutique winery operators of the 1990s. Maybe Covelo will be the Next Napa.
