as american as mud pie

AS AMERICAN AS MUD PIE



Well, ol’ Chuck over at Of Two Minds must have gotten a bit nervous over my displeasure at his foray into the field of energy. I stay away from his thing, in depth economic analysis. And when he attempted to get into Peak Oil he got a giant raspberry from me. All is not well, go ahead and panic. But he wanted to imply that it was all friggin hunky dory. Well, no harm done. I make an ass out of myself at least weekly. And he did make up for it with this wonderful article:

http://www.oftwominds.com/blogmar11/complicity3-11.html

A great look into how our buddies over at the Fed are doing a great job warming up the anal lube. Stimulate the stock market upwards and save the pension funds and make everyone happy. You really should read it.

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Back in the day, a wonderful discovery was made by The Powers That Be. If you can feed the proletariat scum a cheap and plentiful food, no matter how lacking in nutrition it might be, as long as it filled the belly, all would be well. Now, The Powers That Be ( henceforth abbreviated to TPTB since while I still have to bang out a thousand words here, I can at least make it less monotonous for myself- and during the cold months my fingers tend to dry and split and sometimes it becomes painful to type and I want to make the supreme sacrifice I’m performing here to be meaningful ) are not omnipotent or even at times all that competent. I don’t mean to imply they can just pull levers and perform hocus pocus. But when they find a way to help control their subjects while also enriching themselves, that action can be purposely used in the future. One of the imports from the Caribbean to England was of course sugar. As with all new foods it started as a luxury. But its quick popularity started the whole feedback loop of stimulating additional planting which lowered prices which created more demand which led to it eventually becoming a bulk commodity product which made its profit on volume. Kind of like cigarettes used to be before the local governments discovered that there was a lot of cash to be made by jacking those companies ( minimum wage used to buy you a carton of generic smokes for two hours labor. Now you have to work almost five hours ). Of course, sugar also kept the slave trade going and one could argue that if sugar had no calories it is interesting to speculate if the British might not have abolished that institution earlier. But I digress.

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Sugar has almost as much calories per pound as do cereal grains. It certainly has more than legumes or meat. They are empty calories, but that isn’t the point, is it? The poor lower classes were thrilled, pleased as punch, that they could fill their bellies. It might be hard to relate, you being a fat pampered consumer, but constant hunger and famine were normal back then. Just because the Industrial Revolution lifted all boats doesn’t mean the exploited population had it that good to start out with. They weren’t dropping in the streets as before ( a constant problem for the landowners in their carriages, having to be rudely jolted about as the bodies were circumvented ) but one of the means of living a bit longer was to eat worthless calories. Even just a hundred odd years ago it wasn’t unusual for a working class family to be consuming 20% of their calories from sugar. Look at the tea time menu. Weak tea full of sugar and cookies with sugar. Yes, sugar gets you through to the next meal with no painful alarm bells or a general weakness ( occasionally I find myself loading my coffee up with sugar- and I hate any kind of coffee other than black- just to get to my lunch without losing stamina ). It really does act as a great mud pie.

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The Haitians, and this was long before the earthquake but after the teaming masses of worthless oxygen sucking reproducers used the last tree in the country so erosion wiped out crops regularly, were famous for eating mud pies. The poor would get some mud and, I guess, dry it in the sun ( plenty of solar power in that dump ) and use those to fill their bellies. The British were much better off eating sugar. At least there were pleasant calories rather than just something useless that only filled the stomach. Americans, feeling all superior and grand, get to crow about their excessive calorie consumption. But, truth be told, how far removed are we from eating worthless calories to fill up? Sure, we eat enough to get fat. But it isn’t fat from healthy foods. It is fat from genetically modified soy and corn grown with petroleum. How much of that fat isn’t even from those calories but the growth hormones in the meat and dairy, or, for all I know, a weird side effect of that laboratory tinkering? Our dietary staples are corn based sugar, corn fed livestock and soy fillers and soy oil. Not all of us have to eat this poison, but most of us do. California ships all their water to the suburbs, the fields dry up, and we ship in most of our produce from Central and South America. Extra special poisonous insecticides and human fertilizer there, I’m sure. But the well off can buy domestic organic. The rich can buy hormone free meat and dairy. But most of the poor cannot. Look, whenever some well paid jackass spews crap about Americans being blessed to only have to spend 10% of their income on food, I can’t help but think he has been eating too much of that American Mud Pie. He has brain damage. If you make upper middle class wages, your grocery bill might be 10%. Those of us, and there are more every day, that make a lot less also spend a lot more on food. Far more than 10% and it is all crap food. Even if you grow most of your own veggies, that is just your vitamins. You are still being poisoned by the calorie foods. The average person. You might be luckier, but the vast majority of folks are in the cities and buying all their food.

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You can minimize this, of course. Eating healthy, limiting your French fries and Big Mac’s. But the fact remains most of us are surviving on sub-prime foods. And we are as happy as a sty full of pigs eating stale candy doing it. “Come get it fo I slop it to the hogs” takes on a new meaning.

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