Big Food Making You Sick?

This mother in Colorado seems to think so:

But some days, her imagination gets away from her and she wonders if it’s only a matter of time before Big Food tries to stop her from exposing what she sees as a profit-driven global conspiracy whose collateral damage is an alarming increase in childhood food allergies.

[snip]

Her theory — that the food supply is being manipulated with additives, genetic modification, hormones and herbicides, causing increases in allergies, autism, and other disorders in children — is not supported by leading researchers or the largest allergy advocacy groups.

That only feeds Ms. O’Brien’s conviction that the influence of what she sees as the profit-hungry food industry runs deep. In just a few dizzying steps, she can take you from a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese to Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds to Donald H. Rumsfeld, who once ran the company that created the sweetener aspartame.

[snip]

Ms. O’Brien encourages people to do what she did: throw out as much nonorganic processed food as you can afford to. Avoid anything genetically modified, artificially created or raised with hormones. Don’t eat food with ingredients you can’t pronounce.

Once she cleaned out her cupboards, she said, her four children started behaving better. Their health problems, which her doctor attributed to allergies to milk and other foods, cleared up.

“It was absolutely terrifying to unearth this story,” she said over lunch at a restaurant in Boulder, Colo. “These big food companies have an intimate relationship with every household in America, and they are making our children sick. I was rocked. You don’t want to hear that this has actually happened.”


Robyn O'Brien's conspiracy theories may seem a little over the top, but her personal experience with Big Food is quite similar to our own. When our firstborn started on solid food, everything he ate seemed to be making him sick. This continued for years, as we experimented with different foods and had him tested for all kinds of allergies. Only when we threw out the processed foods and began cooking from scratch with organic brown rice did his health improve. Whether he was experiencing "allergies" or just "reactions," I don't know (and frankly don't care). What did become clear is that something about the way modern "food" is processed to death was making him sick.

As I've posted on other occasions, getting control of our food supply was a big reason we moved to the country and began small scale farming. Yes, there are certain foods that make our kids sick no matter how they are raised or processed; even if we grew our own organic wheat and threshed it by hand, or our own open-pollinated organic corn, our kids couldn't eat it. The key has been growing the things they can eat (eggs, chicken, lamb, goat, goat milk, fruits, vegetables) and buying organic, minimally-processed versions of the things we cannot grow (rice, beef, certain vegetables at certain times of the year, etc.)

It's interesting that awareness of problems with "Big Food" seem to be spreading. My only fear is that with stories like these in the New York Times, some will come away thinking we're a bunch of kooks. Robyn O'Brien might seem a bit paranoid, and perhaps she is. But she does seem to be exactly right about what Big Food was doing to her kids and ours.

Alternative Tacos

At yesterday evening's Knights of Columbus meeting, it was my turn to supply refreshments. I chose to make tacos, which are always a big hit. To save time, I bought everything---including the taco seasoning---in one trip to the grocery store.

Once the hamburger was browned, I stirred in the packets of taco seasoning and let it simmer for 15 minutes. As I went about grating cheese, slicing lettuce, and so forth, I couldn't help noticing that the simmering taco meat smelled a bit odd. Not spoiled or anything, but different from how taco meat smells when we typically cook it for the kids.

My wife buys organic spices in bulk from Frontier Herbs and keeps them in quart mason jars in the cupboard. It requires some foresight and planning, but they're outstanding seasonings---and, bought in quantity, always available when needed. When we make tacos, we typically brown three pounds of hamburger with some onion. We then add water and one tablespoon of each of the following: sea salt, cumin, chili powder, and paprika. It's incredibly simple, very cheap, and smells and tastes wonderful.

As last night's store-bought-seasoned taco meat smelled and tasted so different, I picked up a seasoning packet and took a closer look at the label:

Spices and color [whatever that means], corn masa, salt, dehydrated onion and garlic, cocoa powder (processed with alkali), hydrolyzed soy protein (caramel color), citric acid, autolyzed yeast extract, natural flavors [usually means MSG], disodium inosinate, disodium guanylate, maltodextrin.

Ugh. No wonder our kids have had such bad allergic reactions to this kind of store-bought stuff. My spell-checker didn't even recognize most of those ingredients as real words...makes me wonder why I ever thought any of those ingredients were real foods. Next year, I think I'm going to treat my brother Knights to our family's own Yeoman Farmer tacos. Will be interesting to see what kind of feedback we get.

What am I trying to say with this post? It really isn't hard to make your own taco seasonings --- or any of the other seasonings you might think you have to buy in a little packet at the grocery store. Do a little research. Buy a good variety of bulk herbs. And go for it.