Why the Breakfast Most Americans Will Eat Today Is a Corporate Scam.

Just one of many unhealthy breakfast fares.

 

 

This article is just the tip of the iceberg on the scandal of commercial food. Breakfast food is a tiny segment of this very unhealthy undustry.

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As seen on:

http://www.alternet.org/story/152260/why_the_breakfast_most_americans_will_eat_today_is_a_corporate_scam?page=entire

 

Wake up and smell the McCafé: Cold cereal, donuts and orange juice are breakfast staples because somebody somewhere wanted money.

Breakfast in America is a corporate scam.

 

Not all of it. But nearly every breakfast staple -- cold cereal, donuts, yogurt, bagels and cream cheese, orange juice, frappuccino -- is a staple only because somebody somewhere wanted money. Wake up and smell the McCafé.

Seeking to provide sanitarium patients with meatless anti-aphrodisiac breakfasts in 1894, Michigan Seventh-Day Adventist surgeon and anti-masturbation activist John Kellogg developed the process of flaking cooked grains. Hence Corn Flakes. Hence Rice Krispies. Hence a rift between Kellogg and his business partner/brother, who wanted to sweeten Kellogg's cereals in hopes of selling more. Guess who won.

In pre-Corn Flakes America, breakfast wasn't cold or sweet. It was hot, hearty and lardy, and it had about 4,000 calories. "Breakfast was the biggest meal of the day. Eaten before you headed out to do a whole day of farm chores, it had to keep you going until dinner," says food historian Andrew F. Smith, author of Eating History: Thirty Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine (Columbia University Press, 2009). Pre-industrial Americans loaded up on protein-rich eggs, sausages, ham and American-style belly-fat bacon along with ancient carb classics: mush, pancakes, bread.
The Great Cereal Shift mirrored -- and triggered -- other shifts: Farm to factory. Manual to mechanical. Cowpuncher to consumer. Snake-oil superstition to science. Biggest of all was food's transition from home-grown/home-butchered to store-bought.

"Cold cereals are an invention of vegetarians and the health-food industry, first through Kellogg's and then through C.W. Post, which steals all of Kellogg's ideas," Smith explains.

"These companies realized early on that people like sugar, and kids really like sugar -- so they shifted their sales target from adults concerned about health to kids who love sugar. It's a thoroughly American invention."

As is orange juice, another breakfast contrivance marketed as healthy for kids. Media buzz about vitamin C and advances in pasteurization spawned the orange-juice industry in the 1930s, turning an obscure luxury into a household necessity.

"Orange juice has come to symbolize purity in a glass," writes agriculture expert Alissa Hamilton in Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice (Yale University Press, 2009). Her research reveals a highly processed product whose use of cheaply grown foreign fruit now mandates a massive carbon footprint:

"Orange juice marketers have succeeded in creating an aura of golden goodness around the product. The idea that orange juice is 'an essential part of a balanced breakfast' is familiar and for the most part unchallenged."

Hamilton is outraged that commercial orange juice is "advertised as pure, fresh, and additive-free. Those who buy orange juice buy the stories that the industry tells."
Major companies use "flavor packs" engineered by the same firms that create perfumes for Dior and Calvin Klein to make their juice smell and taste "fresh" despite its long shelf life:

"Flavor packs aren’t listed as an ingredient on the label. ... The formulas vary to give a brand’s trademark taste. If you’re discerning, you may have noticed Minute Maid has a candylike orange flavor. That’s largely due to the flavor pack Coca-Cola has chosen for it."

Tropicana, meanwhile, is owned by PepsiCo.

"Ask yourself why, like most people, you drink orange juice," Hamilton urges. "You probably say the reason is that it is good for you, or that it is high in vitamin C, or that you grew up drinking it and like it. If so, then I must frankly tell you that, when it comes to orange juice, you are acting like a robot."
Although popular on this continent since the early 19th century, donuts were a dessert not specifically associated with breakfast until Dunkin' Donuts popularized that notion in the 1950s.

Bagels were an ethnic niche item until Connecticut-based Lender's established the first fully automated frozen-bagel factory in 1965. Cream cheese was not a breakfast cheese before Kraft began promoting its Philadelphia cream cheese (made in New York).

"In the 1970s, bagels and cream cheese became part of the American breakfast experience," Smith says. "Meanwhile, chocolate milk was an invention of Nestle," which in 1948 premiered its Nestle Quik powder, ancestor of today's Nesquik.

Traditional elsewhere, yogurt was considered freakish in the US when General Mills began promoting it heavily as a "health food" in the early 1970s. The US yogurt industry is now worth over $4 billion a year. A single one-serving container of General Mills-owned Yoplait fruit yogurt contains 28 grams, or seven teaspoonsful, of sugar. (Health food?)

While coffee and tea have been in this country since colonial days -- hence the Boston Tea Party -- Smith sees them driving the latest breakfast revolution.

This one too is corporate.

"When Starbucks shifted from selling beans to selling coffee drinks in the '80s, that created something very different in the United States." Traveling in Italy, Starbucks founder Howard Schultz observed ordinary Italians deeply concerned about the quality and flavor of every cup of coffee they drank.
"Schultz saw that as something Americans would buy into. In fact, they did -- and that set everything else in motion. Starbucks created the coffee-breakfast industry in this country. What they're selling is an experience. That's an incredible shift."

Before Starbucks, "coffee in America was generic. It didn't have to taste good. But now everybody's talking about this special blend that just came in yesterday from Guatemala."

They're talking about it not just at Starbucks, Tully's, Peet's and Au Bon Pain. They're talking about it at McDonald's. Burger King sells Starbucks-owned Seattle's Best. McDonald's promotes its McCafé as a "unique blend of fresh espresso beans [that] results in a high-impact, full-bodied, dark-roast coffee with flavor attributes that enhance its complexity, like spicy and earthy tones and a slight caramel sweetness." Touché.

By switching from cheap to premium coffee, fast-food chains are now rebranding themselves from fast to -- well, slow; as the type of place where patrons linger sipping legit lattes, using free wi-fi and nibbling breakfast food -- which is how these chains earn most of their money, Smith explains.
"The fast-food industry makes far more profit on breakfast than on anything else. In those first four or five hours of the day, they do a huge business."

Fast-food breakfasts cost little to make: Cheap carbs, eggs and processed cheese augment meat portions that are smaller than those used in burgers -- "and it's pork, which is cheaper than beef," Smith says. Burger King added Quaker Oatmeal to its menu in August.
A five-ounce order of Sausage McGriddles contains 420 calories and 22 grams of fat. That's a lot, but not compared to pre-Kellogg's breakfasts in America.

"One hundred and fifty years ago, Americans consumed two to three times more calories per day than they do now" -- mostly at breakfast, Smith says. Yet obesity and diabetes weren't at epidemic proportions "because half of Americans still lived on farms or did manual labor in cities."
And now we don't. We wake up, eat dessert, then sit. Breakfast in America today is disconnected from class, career, ethnicity and the functionality of bodies burning fuel. Its history is hewn of cravings, insecurities, subliminalities and false confidence conjured by strangers who tell us how to start our days, because they can.

Anneli Rufus is the author of several books, most recently The Scavenger's Manifest

A sad and revealing tribute to Labor Day - The uprising of '34.

In 1934, Southern textile workers took the lead in a nationwide strike that saw half a million walk off their jobs in the largest single-industry strike in the history of the United States. For a time, these new union members, in response to New Deal legislation, stood up for their rights and became a force to be reckoned with in the South. Then management moved in and crushed the strike. Some mill workers were murdered, thousands more were blacklisted, and many were so intimidated that "union" became a dirty word in Southern communities for decades to come.

Little known, barely publicized, rarely acknowledged in history books, the General Textile Strike of 1934 remains a stirring, yet amazingly forgotten chapter in Southern history. The Uprising of '34, a film by famed documentarian George Stoney and independent filmmakers Judith Helfand, (Producer of Blue Vinyl and other documentaries), and Susanne Rostock, examines this hidden legacy of the labor movement in the South and its impact today. For decades, it seemed as if all memory of the General Textile Strike had been buried with the workers who died in its front lines. Stoney and Helfand spent nearly six years tracking down and interviewing surviving strikers and their relatives in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and North and South Carolina.

The Uprising of '34 is a startling documentary which tells the story of the General Strike of 1934, a massive but little-known strike by hundreds of thousands of Southern cotton mill workers during the Great Depression. This is a heartfelt testimony, often spoken for the very first time, contains extraordinary archival footage of the strike itself and the miserable working conditions that led to the walk-out. Mill owners' non-compliance with New Deal legislation resulted in speeded-up production, which forced workers to produce the same in eight hours that they used to in 12 and for wages far below the federal government's newly established minimum.

The mill workers' defiant stance — and the remarkable grassroots organizing that led up to it — challenged a system of mill owner control that had shaped life in cotton mill communities for decades. Sixty years after the government brutally suppressed the strike, a dark cloud still hangs over this event, spoken of only in whispers if at all.

 Excerpted from:

http://www.amdoc.org/projects/truelives/pg_uprising.html

What's It Going to Take for Americans to Stop Eating Chemical-Laden Industrial Food?

 

This is a topic that's near and dear to my heart!

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The simple act of sitting down together to eat real food on a regular basis can jumpstart the kind of lively discussions that get people engaged on the issues of the day.

As seen on:

http://www.alternet.org/story/152189/what%27s_it_going_to_take_for_americans_to_stop_eating_chemical-laden_industrial_food?akid=7484.295159.Trmj-x&rd=1&t=18

By Kerry Trueman

Laurie David is a force of nature when it comes to lobbying on behalf of Mother Nature. An author, film producer and environmental advocate, she's best known as the producer who convinced Al Gore that his climate-change slide show could reach a lot more folks if he made it into a movie.

David's still concerned about melting glaciers. But her current campaign tackles another kind of erosion; the loss of community, civility and informed debate in our culture. Her latest book, The Family Dinner: Great Ways to Connect with Your Kids, One Meal at a Time, makes the case that the simple act of sitting down together to eat real food on a regular basis can jumpstart the kind of lively, enlightening discussions that get our friends and family engaged on the issues of the day. And isn't that the first step to pulling our civic discourse out of its muddied ditch?

She addressed this subject at the Omega Institute's Design By Nature conference in Rhinebeck, New York recently, and kindly agreed to answer a few questions while she was in my neck of the woods. So, with the historic Hudson River Valley--widely regarded as the birthplace of the modern environmental movement--as our backdrop, I sat down with David for a chat about where our country's at.

Kerry Trueman: How does this new mission to revive dinner table discussions mesh with your environmental advocacy? Is conversation the gateway drug to conservation?
Laurie David: There are all kinds of environments. But the very first one we learn anything at is our family environment. I have teenage daughters, and I see from my own personal experience, how grateful I am that I insisted on this ritual of family dinner. It's not just about eating, it's about all the things that happen at the table that we're not even conscious of.

Everything that you worry about as a parent is improved by sitting down to regular meals. This is how we raise civil children, this is how we pass on our values. If we let go of this, we'll be letting go of the very basic things that teach us how to become part of the community, and how to care about the world.
Kids are spending something like seven and a half hours a day looking at some form of screen, and that doesn't include texting time! I call it digital overload. They're not outside playing, they're not spending time with their family. We're not even watching TV together anymore, everyone's on their own separate computer.

That's why it's critically important to hold onto the one ritual that the day gives you, so that everyone can stop leading separate lives and come together. I hope that my book will help make it easy for them. There are some amazing recipes, but also great conversation starters. For some people, it's just as difficult to figure out what to talk about at dinner as it is what to make for dinner.
We have to alleviate the pressure on ourselves that dinner has to be this fancy affair, three courses and a homemade apple pie. If you're having peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on whole grain bread, that's good enough. The key to the whole thing is sitting down and connecting.

KT: I'd like to borrow a question that Prince Charles asked in a speech at the Washington Post's Future of Food conference earlier this year: "Why it is that an industrialized system, deeply dependent on fossil fuels and chemical treatments, is promoted as viable, while a much less damaging one is rubbished and condemned as unfit for purpose?"

LD: Why are we going down this industrial food supply road? I think the answer is money. This is part of what's exciting to me about the new food movement--we have the individual power to opt out of that system. And if we care about our health, if we care about the planet, we're going to have to do that.

But it's doable. And every piece of this, all the solutions to the factory farms, the industrialization of our food supply, and all the chemicals and antibiotics that are in our food, this is completely doable for us as individuals. We have to start cooking at home, again, we have to start buying fresh ingredients, organic if possible, locally, if possible.

We have to reject the trillion-dollar processed-food industry that's taken over our lives. Instead of buying salad dressing at the supermarket with 19 ingredients, we should be taking the three ingredients and the four minutes it takes to make salad dressings at home.

We have to just opt out of that system and start supporting food locally to the best of our ability. It's not about being perfect. "Perfect is the enemy of the good," I totally believe that.

It's about saying, you know what? I can decide for myself how many chemicals I'm putting in my body, how many preservatives. All the repercussions of supporting that system, I can choose to opt out of that, and I can educate my small circle of friends.

You can choose to do better. A perfect example is Meatless Monday. I have a chapter about it in my book, and I make all the arguments you can discuss at the dinner table. You can decide, as a family, we're going to get off this treadmill of eating too much meat. We can't sustain this, it's not healthy for our bodies, it's not healthy for the planet, and it's a big myth that this is the only source of protein we can consume.

You want to help global warming issues? Start eating a little less meat. That's a small but perfect example of how powerful the individual can be. And then educate your friends and family.
KT: Speaking of educating folks, Bill Gates is putting his faith and some of his considerable resources into promoting biotech, agribiz-as-usual solutions for feeding the world. If you happened to cross paths with him, how would you try to persuade him to scrap the GMOs and really get behind regenerative farming methods?

LD: I would ask him, what do you want to eat at the end of the day? What's interesting to me is to find out what people who are part of the industrial/chemical system of growing food are eating themselves. I once ran into a gentleman who worked for a huge tomato company. You know, if you buy tomatoes from Florida off-season, they're picked green and gassed to turn them red. This is a gazillion-dollar industry.

And I said, "Do you eat these tomatoes?" He said, "Oh, I could never eat those! We eat organic food."
I don't understand the arrogance we have as a country that we can do things better than Mother Nature can. We have to go back to being humble, to respecting what Mother Nature provides us, and stop screwing with the system because we think we can do it better.

The oceans are being depleted, the air is being destroyed, because of us. The climate--who ever thought you could screw with the climate? But we're doing it, and it's not an opinion, it's not a theory, it's not a belief, it's a fact. The globe is warming and humans are causing it.

And the fact that we're not running to solve this problem when all the solutions already exist is just mind boggling to me.

KT: Neil Young once sang that "even Richard Nixon has got soul." Well, at least he gave us the Environmental Protection Agency. Now Republicans want to abolish the EPA. Why don't today's conservatives embrace conservation? And how did contempt for science become so rampant?

LD: The EPA, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species act, they all had support from both sides. I don't understand it, honestly, I don't have an answer for it. You would think they would care just as much about clean air and water and protecting public lands as you and I do. The only explanation is that it comes down to greed and arrogance--arrogance that we're not going to run out of our natural resources.

The biggest problem we're facing is that people are getting misinformation from advertising, from politicians who are tied to lobbyists who are tied to corporations. It's very difficult to move forward on things when people are misinformed. We have to work on getting back to truth, inconvenient or not.

If Jesus Came Back…

As seen on:

http://theinsanityreport.com/home/index.php/2009/09/11/random-thoughts/if-jesus-came-back/

By Kriss

If Jesus came back…Glenn Beck would have his roving band of lunatics pressuring the White House to distance themselves from his “Socialist” beliefs.

If Jesus came back…Sean Hannity would label him an enemy of Israel and therefore Enemy #1 of the United States.

If Jesus came…back Lou Dobbs would be ranting and raving every day about how Hey-Zues and his “12 disciples” were in this country illegally.

If Jesus came back…Orly Taitz and other Birthers would be demanding to see his birth certificate.

If Jesus came back & talked about diversity…Glenn Beck would go on Fox & Friends & call him a racist with a deep seated hatred of white people.

If Jesus came back…the Bush Administration would have locked him in Gitmo & waterboarded him 183 times for the location of his 12 disciples.

If Jesus came back…and he promoted talking to and be understanding of our Muslim brothers/sisters, Darth Cheney would call him a traitor.

If Jesus came back…in the middle of Jesus’s speech to the world about peace & love, Joe Wilson would stand up and shout “You Lie”.

If Jesus came back…Republicans would fight giving him more funding to feed the poor cause the poor should just work harder.

If Jesus came back…the GOP would protest him giving a “Back to School” speech for fear of “indoctrination” because of his communist beliefs.

If Jesus came back…most people on the right wouldn’t know cause he’d be working for some “community organizer” group.

If Jesus came back…he’d probably be on the terrorist watch list.

If Jesus came back…his trial wouldn’t have been public. He would have been renditioned to a country with lax torture laws.

If Jesus came back…Sarah Palin would talk about how he palled around with terrorists, thieves, hookers and pimps.

If Jesus came back…Fox & Friends would ask if he went to school at a Madrassa.

If Jesus came back…Glenn Beck would use a Youtube video of him using a little boy’s 7 loaves of bread and a few fish to feed the poor as proof he wants to “Spread the Wealth”.

If Jesus came back…Fox News would have the following headline: “Jesus of Nazareth…Savior or Communist Community Organizer? We Report, You Decide”.

If Jesus came back…he’d have to remove his sandals like everyone else in the security line at the airport.

If Jesus came back…Michael Steele would appear on Meet the Press talking about how Jesus is rationing miracles.

If Jesus came back…Right Wing blogs would talk about how Jesus’ apostle Peter supported euthanasia.

If Jesus came back…the RNC would sue him for copyright infringement.

If Jesus came back…and gave a speech about “Laying down our arms”, the NRA and their members.
 would show up to his sermon with assault rifles and signs that said “Pry it from my cold dead hands”.

Change or Die: How People Cling to Outdated Traditions That Will Hurt Them in The Long Run

From Alternet - written by Courtney E. Martin.

A debate within a gentlemen's club reveals how some men cling to outdated sexist traditions that may come back to haunt them.

July 14, 2011

 

I can still remember sitting at the kitchen table in my childhood home and reading my dad’s words, typed by his hard candy-wielding secretary, Helen, onto a piece of official law firm letter head. “I will not belong to a club that would one day admit my son, but would never admit my daughter.”

 

At just 12 years old, I was suddenly awash in a sense of my own importance. Now, nearly 20 years after I first read those bold words, this very same bastion of outdated tradition is starting to see the writing on the walls.


The El Paso Club, a 134 year old “gentlemen’s club” in downtown Colorado Springs—once a haven for local businessmen to have a drink and block out the discomfiting progress of the outside world—has finally had to consider the future. Some members have suggested letting women in, arguing that the club is on “a death spiral” if they continue the male-only tradition; others feel that allowing women to be members would be tantamount to death itself. According to the Colorado Springs Gazette, Randy Kilgore, an insurance agent, declared, “We can’t decimate a 130-year old men’s club to let in a few women. It would be the end of the club.”


This is the silver lining of an otherwise ugly recession. It destabilizes us. It makes us uncomfortable. It forces even the most incurious of us to question long-held beliefs. A report from the Population Reference Bureau last year showed that more than 70 percent of Americans age 40 and over felt they had been affected by the Great Recession, and no doubt, many more would join the majority after the release of this week’s disappointing job numbers. We’re facing hardship, but we’re also facing ourselves. Or as poet Theodore Roethke wrote, “In a dark time, the eye begins to see.”


Signs of outdated traditions’ rapid decay—particularly among the middle class—are everywhere. Men who have lost their jobs are picking up the slack at home—upending gendered family roles in exciting new ways, even as it’s under unexciting circumstances. Our interdependence has become undeniable, once again, forcing cloistered individuals and families out into their neighborhoods to community meetings, farmer’s markets, or just to play in local parks rather than fancy summer camps or pricey movies. Conspicuous consumption is increasingly being replaced by collaborative consumption; companies like Zipcar and Netflix let people share their resources rather than contributing to the ever-growing pile of debt and stuff. There’s potential for a renaissance in more egalitarian and robust public life.


My dad was willing to resign from the most prestigious business club in town back in 1992 because of his own values—seeded in the 60s during the rise of the anti-war, civil rights, and feminist movements. Having a daughter with lots of questions about the world and big dreams for her own future helped force him to walk his talk. While I wish that the remaining members of the El Paso Club were questioning their male-only policy out of a surge of long-neglected principles, they’re not. They’re questioning it because they won’t survive if they don’t. Turns out that it sometimes takes an apocalypse—often of the meteorological or economic variety—for some people to change.
Famed psychologist Jean Piaget, argued that what motivates learning is a gap between what we know and what we need to know. Seen for this vantage, the most recent recession has forced so many Americans to reckon with what they don’t know, to experience the “disequilibrium”—in Piaget’s parlance—of learning and change. As painful as this may be, it’s also a good thing. We’re becoming a more mature nation. We’re letting go of rituals, rules, and roles that don’t serve us anymore.
With one palpable exception, of course. While the majority of us are experiencing disequilibrium, the rich have largely remained shielded from discomfort. Wall Street is still getting its big bonuses, despite undeniable documentation of corruption and recklessness. Which is why those at the very top tiers of our increasingly class-cleaved society won’t be shaking things up anytime soon. If anything, they’ll be hunkering down.


The men of the El Paso Club, as prestigious as they may feel, are not super rich and, therefore, are subject to the winds of change. Will they bend and survive or break and die?


So far, they’re dead-set on the latter. The membership voted 31 to 69 to remain a male-only club to the grave. When faced with the choice to change or die, some people will, in fact, choose to die.

Courtney E. Martin is a writer, teacher, and speaker living in Brooklyn. She is also the author of Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: How the Quest for Perfection is Harming Young Women and Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists. You can read more about her work at www.courtneyemartin.com.

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View the article at:

http://www.alternet.org/story/151649/change_or_die%3A_how_people_cling_to_outdated_traditions_that_will_hurt_them_in_the_long_run?page=entire

The scandalous Corporate & GOP hijacking of America

http://youtu.be/DotNcxT7R18

Propaganda Techniques

In many ways, this is the age of "stupid". American people seem, to me, to be more gullible and misinformed than ever. Maybe it has something to do with the echo chamber of the media and Internet, but we do seem to be talked into and "sold" on things and ideas quite easily, and without giving them a moment's thought.

When most people hear the word "propaganda", they think of the tools used by Nazi Germany and other radical regimes. You know that kind - blatant, dated, 40's and 50's "good versus evil" hype. With TV and the Internet, most of us accept advertising as just part of the media, and much of it's cloaked as entertainment. After all, it's fashionable to be part of the crowd - no one has brainwashed us, and we've made the choice to buy a product or idea of our own free will. There's no hocus-pocus about it, and no one has hypnotized us, right?

But, actually, the TV and radio are the most common hypnotic instruments used in modern times, and all but the very poorest of American families own them. After you stop laughing, think about it. With few exceptions, much of TV and radio content is mindless, and neither really requires much thought - in fact, they do our thinking for us. What better way to reach people when they are in the familiar surroundings and comfort of their own homes, (or cars), and in a relaxed, receptive state? Advertisers are counting on that lowered state of resistance to convince us to buy their products, and many of today's politicians and people behind power want us to rely on them for the "facts". In my opinion, too many people are either undereducated, lazy, or both, and rely on what is given them at face value.

Here's a good video  that lists the types of propaganda, using a modern day twist that just happens to use the Bush administration as an example.