Food , Food , Glorious Food ...

The End of Food seems to be an interesting book by Thomas Pawlick that i hope to get around to reading .

Since 1950 supermarket potatoes in Canada no longer contain Vitamin A, their iron quotient has been reduced by 57% along with their Vitamin C. Tomatoes have lost 61.5% of their calcium, 35.5% of their iron and 50% of their Vitamin A while gaining 200% more sodium .

Here is found an interesting interview of the author .

A taster of what he says :-

TP: Right now, if you go to the produce section of any supermarket - any one at all – and buy fruit or vegetables, or cottage cheese, or meat, you would have to eat something like five times as much of that food to get the same amount of vitamins and minerals as your parents or grandparents got in the 1950s...

TP: ... the farmer is under contract to produce a certain amount of the product for the corporation. The corporation sells him the seed for a very high price, sell him his fertiliser and tell him how much fertiliser to use. Then they tell him when to plant it, and what to do with it and when to harvest it. It all comes from a basic instruction book. It’s like paint by numbers.

So the farmer is no longer a farmer, he’s just a wage slave; more or less like a peon.

G: A factory worker.

TP: Yeah...

I am sure Marx himself stated that farming would become agri-business and farmers would become proletariatised but be bollocks if i am going to do a google search for an apt quote from his works .The Socialist Party of Canada , however , many many decades ago printed an appropriate pamphlet called The Slave of the Farm .

Another socialist article which may be of interest with its summary that:-

"...Socialists today lean towards being technophiles or simple-lifers, or somewhere in between. Some of us look to a future of socialist restaurants and hotels and less home cooking – others like the idea of having more time for artisanal rather than industrial food production and preparation. All tastes will be catered for. "

Make mine a black pudding supper with a pickled onion !!