American Tomatoes

Do you know what a cucumber or a tomato tastes like? This may sound like a silly question, but with the way our diet evolves, and the contemporary food industry manufactures food, many Americans have no idea what a vegetable tastes like.

Many Americans, as well as their counterparts in the developed world, have never tasted a real tomato, a cucumber or a strawberry. For many, the only encounters with vegetables have been through an industrial mock-up food, which advertising presents as the real thing.

As kids, a tomato with a slice of bread would have been a wonderful part of our diet. Sometimes, with just a little more on the side, it would make an entire meal – and a good one as well. I can still recall biting into a ripe tomato with a pinch of salt spread on it, and long forgotten tastes and aromas feel my watering mouth, as if it were the best dessert I was fantasizing about.

The tomatoes of my childhood looked nothing like those we buy today. They came in odd shapes with lumps and bumps, and could have any variation of red, yellow and green. No two tomatoes looked the same. As fruit and vegetables had short shelf life, we had to eat them within a few days. So we made them a major part of our diet, and together with all other vegetables and fruit, ate them with every meal, and between meals. They were our diet, and when we were hungry we simply opened the fridge, found a vegetable or a fruit we liked and snacked.

But these days have gone. Farming has long been replaced by manufacturing, and tastes and flavours have disappeared from our diet in favour of shelf life, color and shape. After all, it’s not the taste but the form that you see on TV, and it’s not the aroma but the color that you see through the plastic bags that separate you, the shopper, from what you buy.

While some still reminiscence of the days were our diet was full of flavour, recent generations only knows the tasteless produce they grew up with, and mistake them for the real thing. No wonder that children nowadays relate healthy to tasteless. No wonder that parents promise a treat to ‘good kids’ who eat this hated food.

By creating produce that is easy to advertise on TV, easy to store, easy to ship, we have created a corporate heaven. But what is the price we pay?

The obvious price is obesity and our health. Fruit and vegetables are hardly considered a normal part of our diet anymore, but rather a medicine one must swallow to keep healthy. But this is only part of the picture. The more subtle price is of us losing our judgment and ability to discriminate. So now, instead of manufacturers competing to satisfy our taste in food, they fight to change our taste to fit their manufacturing.

If this trend continues, we will all end up eating artificially shaped and flavoured lab-manufactured protein. Is this is the world we want our children to inherit?

The Missing Link: Intelligent Design and Al Qaeda

(image: http://www.savagechickens.com/tag/crabbit)

Scientists at Florida State University believe they've found a gene that predicts a person's likelihood of becoming a gang member. The discovery of the ‘gangster gene’ is hailed by human right activists, who vow to challenge our socially unjust legal system, and reverse cases where gang members were sentenced for crimes committed by their genes. 

Scientist are still perplexed by the origin of the gene that together with its cousin, the Obesity Gene (discovered in the UK in 2007), seem to have materialized in the US and the rest of the western world out of nowhere – in contradiction to anything we thought we knew about genes and evolution theory. 

“This is a big blow to Darwin, and the ultimate proof of Creationism and divine design”, hailed a source in the Church of Intelligent Design who refused to remain anonymous. Further questions by our correspondence about the intelligence of this design were dropped at the sight of a shotgun. 

Anonymous source in the not so intelligently designed intelligence services was heard blaming Al Qaeda biological warfare for spreading the genes, by penetrating every major food manufacturer in the country. “The fact that complete lack of obesity has been observed in Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen or any of the countries Al Qaeda operates is the undisputable proof that this is biological warfare we are facing,” our source said. 

Food manufacturers around the country vow to do everything in their power to contribute to the anti Al Qaeda patriotic efforts and to their bottom line. They agreed to develop new technologies to modify the genes and introduce new chemical sterilization techniques to all foods they produce. This effort will be financed by a new anti Al Qaeda tax imposed on imported foods, and on any food manufacturer that is not a member of the CRFC (Contributing to Regulators Food Cartel).