“The Time is Now” More Than Ever

This was an interesting weekend because instead of focusing on energy I spent the weekend learning about food. Sharron New, a good friend of mine who runs the website Local Food Beat and is extremely knowledgeable about food, was kind enough to give me an enlightening lesson regarding healthy foods which was then followed by a hands-on tour of Whole Foods in Annapolis. The experience was an eye opener.

Part of the lesson included excerpts from Kevin Brown’s book The Liberation Diet. It was interesting to learn that Crisco was once a waste product of the cotton industry originally meant for use in the fabrication of candles by Procter & Gamble, but was then repackaged for the food industry when electricity and the light bulb became the norm. In his book Brown writes "You have to take an industrial waste product, or by-product or trash, something very worthless or inexpensive, call it a health food, put it in a nice package, and then attack the competition relentlessly. That’s the formula."

I also had a chance to view these two documentaries, “King Corn” and “The Future of Food.” These fine productions demonstrate the stuff that is going on in the food industry. See these films and you will think twice about the foods that you put in your mouth. I encourage everyone to Google “Confined Feeding Operations.”

This got me thinking about the energy industry. The packaging of by-products such as Crisco and Hydrogenated vegetable oil, or should we say corn oil, are very similar to what has been happening in the energy industry. How many by-products come from the oil and coal industry? Styrofoam comes to mind and plastics are a menace to our world; we all know that, but it is continuously packaged as a life enhancing product. Fleece for example is what happens to recycled water bottles after you discard them and I say discard instead of recycle because when we are done wearing fleece we throw it away and the cycle ends. Remember glass bottles, they were recycled forever. The list of oil by-products is long.

Coal by-products are also easily found as it is shown in the following graphic by the National Energy Foundation:

This graphic easily demonstrates how waste is often turned into a product, by distorting the truth with some fancy ad campaign anyone with lots of money can turn trash into gold. This would be okay or at least legal if it did not come with such important health risks.

We as a society must take the necessary steps to reverse the course we have allowed our industries and government to take. Their strategy has been not to worry about the human cost and to maximize profits. This has put all of us in a bad place, we have become obese and unhealthy and if things get worse as they’ve been trending, where will we be in twenty years?

Every day we get closer to the point where we will have to grow our own food again and fortunately thanks to some forward looking job creators we can now make our own energy. If we act together now we can make a better healthier future.

by George Lopez