The Future of Food
By James Corbett, Corbettreport.com, 6-11-2024
If it is true that “you are what you eat,” as the old adage has it, then what does that make us?
As consumers of heavily processed, chemically treated, GMO-infested gunk, we in the modern, developed world have solved the problem of hunger that plagued our forebears since time immemorial by handing our food sovereignty over to a handful of corporate conglomerates.
The result of this handover has been the creation of a factory farming system in which genetically engineered crops are doused in glyphosate and livestock are herded into tiny pens where they live their entire lives in fetid squalor, pumped up with antibiotics and growth hormones until they are slaughtered and shipped off to the supermarkets and fast food chains.
There are plenty of documentaries and exposés detailing the dangers of this industrial farming system that we find ourselves beholden to. Any number of activists ringing the alarm about these problems. Numerous campaigns and marches organized to raise awareness about these issues.
Yet still, nation after nation gets fatter and sicker as traditional diets based on fresh produce sourced from local farmers are displaced by the fast food pink slime sourced from the industrial farms of the Big Food oligopoly.
But, as bad as things may be, they’re about to get even worse. As crisis after crisis disrupts the food supply, the “solution” to these problems has already been prepared.
New technologies are coming online that threaten to upend our understanding of food altogether. Technologies that could, ultimately, begin altering the human species itself.
Food As A Weapon
So what is food, anyway?
To a normal human being whose head is screwed on straight, that sounds like a dumb question. Food is fuel for the body, obviously.
Oh, sure, we could get fancy about it. Scientists might talk about the caloric content of different foods, or measure their macronutrient levels. Sociologists might point to food as the basis of human community, drawing people together into families, tribes and communities to break bread and engage in social relations. Theologians may even discuss the transubstantiation of bread and wine and the communion with God that such sacred acts of consumption make possible. . . .
. . . But then there are the psychopathic would-be world controllers. These Machiavellian schemers would define food in a very different manner. To them, food is a very different thing altogether.
To those seeking to rule over nations, food is a weapon.
For millennia, attacking armies have known that a city can be conquered by blockading it. Eventually, the besieged city’s inhabitants will run out of food and will either starve to death or surrender.
The English knew that food was a powerful tool of control. They created the conditions that led to the Irish Potato Famine and then stood idly by as millions died or were displaced, because—in the memorable words of Charles Trevelyan, who was in charge of the British government’s response—”the judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated.” But the Irish were neither the first nor the last to feel the brunt of the British Empire’s indifference to their hunger; just ask the Bengals about their own famine.
The 20th-century example of this “food as a weapon” mindset that immediately springs to mind is the Holodomor, a brazen act of genocide perpetrated by Josef Stalin’s Soviets against the Ukrainians in order to force through his campaign to collectivize agriculture in the USSR and to silence the agrarian peasants who were rebelling against that policy. The ensuing famine killed millions of Ukrainians.
But the Holodomor is certainly not the only time that food was weaponized in the previous century. Who can forget arch-globalist Henry Kissinger’s National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests? This now-infamous document—drafted by Kissinger in December of 1974 and adopted as official policy by President Ford in 1975—argues that since “[g]rowing populations will have a serious impact on the need for food,” food aid to the developing world may need to be tied to mandatory sterilization programs or population reduction quotas. Even the coolly calculating Kissinger was forced to concede that such a scheme would turn food into “an instrument of national power.”
But that was then. This is now! Surely this “food as a weapon” idea has been retired, hasn’t it?