Some More News - SMN: America's Toxic Food System

Episode Date: August 9, 2023

Hi. In today's episode, we look at America's food system, why corn is in nearly everything we eat, how factory farms are bad for consumers and the environment, and why capitalism makes it so hard to eat healthy. Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1twJu3Ft1PgRBwt4ON9oH_b7EhmpuCmu8KbtlctuHTxk/edit?usp=sharing Check out our MERCH STORE: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/somemorenews SUBSCRIBE to SOME MORE NEWS: https://tinyurl.com/ybfx89rh Subscribe to the Some More News and Even More News audio podcasts: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-more-news/id1364825229 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ebqegozpFt9hY2WJ7TDiA?si=5keGjCe5SxejFN1XkQlZ3w&dl_branch=1 Follow us on social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomeMoreNews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/SomeMoreNews/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SomeMoreNews/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@somemorenews If you want to take ownership of your health, try AG1 and get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D AND 5 Free AG1 Travel Packs with your first purchase. Go to https://drinkAG1.com/MORENEWS. Check it out. Go to https://eightsleep.com/MORENEWS and save $150 on the Pod Cover by Eight Sleep. That’s the best offer you’ll find, but you must visit https://eightsleep.com/MORENEWS for $150 off. Eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. Stop wiping and start washing. Go to https://hellotushy.com/MORENEWS and use promo code MORENEWS for 10% off your first order.

Oh, holy dough balls. Oh, I just ate so many dough balls. Hey everybody, it's been a busy day working in the news store and I haven't been able to get lunch. So I grabbed something from the 9-11, which in case you didn't know, it's just a 7-11, but they give you a bunch of weird pamphlets. God, what did I even eat?

Chili vanilla chumbo. that can't be good re-wetted beef high fructose corn syrup higher fructose corn syrup thiamin mononitrate and dickle butter that also can't be good what is dickle butter hold on god it says here it's the butter made from the milk of dickles. That sounds made up. I think someone's pranking my phone. You know what we should talk about today? America's toxic relationship with food. I think it's still in my esophagus.

It did taste great though. It really pinged the endorphins. So you may recall that we, but more specifically, not me, did a video about how our fitness culture and body shaming have really gone off the rails. The way we talk about health as it relates to how we eat is based on a lot of misinformation about obesity and weight loss,

which isn't to say that there aren't a lot of health problems in this country related to our diet. We basically shame people for their eating habits while simultaneously making it impossible to eat healthy. As a result, Americans young and old and Cody-aged alike are facing an increased risk of diabetes and heart disease. We're really bad at food in this country, not just in terms of nutrition, but really every aspect.

For example, we produce enough food to waste 40% of it, but somehow also have more than 30 million undernourished Americans. That math doesn't seem right, but it is. The images on the screen just said so, and there's no way to change them. I can't change them. So that's the episode.

Our food, why is it bad? What's wrong with the system? Why can't I get a normal bag of spinach? It's always way too much in the bag and goes bad in like two days, it gets all wet, but a Ziploc bag exists, put a seal on it. Make it better, spinach fools. It's a broad subject is my point.

And we're only going to scratch the surface of it with this video and perhaps do more videos about it in the future because I said so, and I'm hungry for more dough balls. Let's begin with how we get our food. You know, from the ground. In the early 1900s, over half of Americans were farmers or lived in rural areas. What choice did we have? Lunchables hadn't been invented yet. Farmers diversified their crops and livestock to either compete with local farms

or to provide alternatives to their nearby neighbor's farm. This tended to benefit everyone at the time since local patrons wouldn't have to travel miles into the next county for certain foods to put in their icebox, which is old timey speak for refrigerator. So everything was Jake, which is old timey speak for okay. And nobody called the system horse feathers,

which is old timey speak for whack ass. That isn't to say that things were perfect, old timey speak for perfect. Droughts and famine in various areas still existed. Also, they were almost all very racist, but it was sustainable in terms of food production. Diversifying crops was generally how agriculture worked over the last 13,000 years.

So it made a lot of sense to do it that way. However, with the rise of technology, thanks to the Industrial Revolution and two world wars, everything began to change. Certain crops were prioritized for the war effort and factories became the primary employers in the country over farms. Technology began to replace workers

and farms were expanded to specialize in a niche crop or livestock. Starting the 1940s, breakthroughs in farming machinery, irrigation and pesticides brought in bigger yields in crops, which led to bigger money, which led to more capital investment by private financial backers like the Rockefeller Foundation, who are still involved in American agriculture to this day. These financial investments led to mass farming on a global scale with an intense focus on high-calorie crops such as wheat and

rice, with the federal government encouraging farmers to plant even more. This became even further expounded upon in the 1960s and 70s thanks to the Nixon administration's USDA Secretary Earl Rusty Butts, who rolled back New Deal policies that controlled supplies and pricing, and as a result, refocused the industry entirely on output as opposed to the health of the land itself. But I guess not caring about health isn't surprising coming from a man nicknamed after his rusty ass

caused by never wiping his anus after taking huge and upsetting dumps. No citation needed. After the shit ass guy and over the next 50 years, the number of farms would dwindle while the size of farms would get bigger. And not just in terms of acreage, but livestock too. Now firmly part of the capitalist system,

factory farms took a page from the automobile, real estate and porn industries by operating under a bigger is better motto. Selective breeding and hormones have led to chickens being four times bigger than they were in the 1950s. And from 1975 through 2009, the average weight of a cow rose by over 300 pounds. Turkeys are so big, they can't do each other anymore.

As a result of increased specialization, mechanization, rollbacks on farm protections, and the advent of chemical pesticides, fertilizers, and antibiotics, the US agriculture workforce declined from 41% to 2%. Because of all this change, now only a handful of companies have control in the majority of sales of our food and food production.

This is how we get to things like price gouging, such as what happened with eggs earlier this year. Although the avian flu helped with that as well. Also, I ate a lot of eggs, so that might've been my bad, or my boss's bad, I guess. I don't know, whatever. I ate the eggs, I'm egg boy, fine, I ate them. And along with the problems with pricing,

this history also led to an arguably bigger problem with the modern diet. That problem is undernourishment. Not to be confused with people lacking food entirely. This is a separate and very serious epidemic where people not only aren't getting access to enough food, but what food they do get is lacking in nourishment. And a lot of that happened

because of the farm industry's focus on caloric intake as opposed to diversity of crops. And what's even more whack ass, if you're eating foods that are typically richer in nutrients, it still might not be enough. The past few years and decades and more years of high yield farming has ripped soil of its nutrients, which in turn make our crops less nutritious as well. A study of USDA

data from 1950 to 1999 showed that 43 different crops saw a decline in six different nutrients within that time span. Other studies have shown that the rise of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere has also made our produce less nutritious. While CO2 is good for plants in order for them to turn sunlight into food, the increase in carbon dioxide has made them pack in more carbohydrates over other nutrients such as protein, iron, and zinc. And then of course, there's the fact that instead of eating a large variety of foods, most Americans, whether or not they realize it, are really only getting one type of food. We transform it into sugar, fuel, plastic,

and enough food stuff to fill a supermarket. It doesn't exist naturally. Corn is entirely a manmade phenomenon. We grow it on the farm, in a lab, or even underground. Ah, yes, the answer was right in front of us. Much like the puddle of corn cream that's canonically still on the floor under this desk. Smells like rot now.

The United States is obsessed with fucking corn, and corn fucking, I guess. The reason is pretty simple, and that's because corn is just really easy to grow here. It's a very adaptable crop that's easy to breed. Early on, it was a good source of booze, so it always had multiple uses. And as production rose in the 1930s,

several things happened. For one, scientists found more and more ways to improve crop productivity. And secondly, the government began subsidizing specific crops after the Dust Bowl. This created a lower risk for farms that grew corn as opposed to other vegetables and also fruits. We heavily encourage the production of corn.

That's either because or explains why the US consumes four times as much corn as the entire European Union. And not just with our mouth holes, but our everything holes, like our societal holes. It's a whole metaphor that you get. Societal holes. Even if you don't eat corn,

you have likely consumed corn without corning it. Since corn is used as feed for livestock, it's in our chicken, beef, pork, and milk products. Not to mention the creature that shits out our circus peanuts. It's in our snacks, sodas, and candy, usually in the form of high fructose corn syrup. It's even used as a processing aid,

so produce like carrots, broccoli, and celery look fresh at the grocery store. So yes, this means other vegetables are also corn. All is corn. Corn is all. You like fuel and junk? According to Bloomberg, over a third of our corn is used for ethanol.

You got one of them babies I keep hearing about? Perhaps that little flesh biscuit needs a diaper change. Well, that diaper is made of fibers and plastic made from corn and has tape with adhesive made from corn. Perhaps you drop the diaper out of the realization that it's corn on corn. It plops on your nice carpet that is made of American textiles,

which are made with corn fiber. So now it's corn on corn on corn. You get dizzy at this revelation and lean on a nearby wooden chair that's coated with varnish, which likely contains corn. These rapid epiphanies cause a headache, so you get a Tylenol or a leave or aspirin, all of which have a dissolvable coating made from corn.

You abandon the medicine, the poopy carpet, and the poopier kid, forget about the baby, the corn has it now, and put on your running shoes to escape, but realize that they're also made with corn. That's when you decide instead to take a relaxing bath to distract yourself, but without shampoo, because it also contains corn.

You put on some music to calm down, ignoring the fact that the device you're listening to is battery powered, meaning that it also contains corn starch. Then the first song on your playlist is the goddamn band Korn. Everything goes black as a faint bursting sound echoes in your head.

One week later, they bury you in a fiberglass casket, which yes, made of Korn. Then you wake up as seaweed because you didn't clear enough engrams from auditing in your previous life. The point is K, everywhere corn. This show, it's corn. Corn.

There's no escape from the corn. We are all children of the corn. And while corn, the vegetable, isn't bad for you, the reason this history of corning is so corn-darn troubling and perhaps something we need to rethink is because it's a wildly inefficient way of actually feeding people.

As you might've noticed, a lot of the corn uses I listed have nothing to do with actually eating corn. And in fact, only a jaw-dropping 1.4% of corn production actually goes directly toward food. A little under 5% if you count high fructose corn syrup, which you shouldn't. But because of ethanol, bioplastics,

and other non-food products, our government overlooks the problems of our corn economy and bends over backwards to allow farmers to shuck as many cobs as it possibly can. So much so that over $2 billion worth of this stuff doesn't even leave our farms and is just left in the field or plowed over. Between 1995 and 2010, $90 billion of US tax dollars

went to corn subsidies. It's the United Corns of corn, baby! We are all AmeriCorns in our hearts. No, wait, we are all undernourished AmeriCorns. Because while farming subsidies are, in theory, a perfectly fine idea, you would imagine that they would actually go toward the farming of food and not a bunch of other stuff,

and also garbage. And if you're wondering if all this corning has a negative impact on the environment, the answer is a big corn yes. Corn needs a lot more fertilizer than other crops, which creates damaging runoff into the Mississippi River and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico. The fertilizer also causes air pollution

that one study found is linked to 4,300 premature deaths a year. Here's another study funded by the National Wildlife Federation and Department of Energy that found that when you account for the growing and processing, corn-based ethanol is actually worse on the environment than gas.

Again, I'm not trying to insult corn. Lord knows corn is watching this. But going all the way back to early farming, the entire point was crop diversity. That's how we get our vitamins and nutrients, by eating a bunch of different things. But after a hundred or so years of industrial farming and crop optimization, croptimization,

we've simply landed on corn for everything. I'm not sure why we would expect that to have a good result. But corn isn't the only problem, of course. There's also corn. Corn is a crop we overgrow and feed heavily into CAFOs. CAFOs sound a little like corn, the C, but actually it stands for concentrated animal feeding operations.

You know, those horrifying farms where animals are kept in small cubicles like a Minecraft world. Originally used for poultry, CAFOs grew in popularity specifically for pig farms. They're a great way to systematically torture and kill a living creature while automating production and in turn also killing the family farm industry.

Neat for them! CAFOs pack in thousands of chickens, cows, and pigs into small indoor surroundings for as long as 45 days at a time or more. And as I alluded to, CAFOs use corn in conjunction with hormones to help fatten up cattle, pigs, and poultry much quicker, making them and their milk scientifically less nutritious

than grass-fed animals. Grass-fed beef in particular, isn't just better for the cow and the cow consumer, but also the planet since open grazing allows for healthier topsoil and microbial turnover. Grass even makes better biofuel than corn. There's also the added benefit of not torturing animals, if you're into not doing that.

But let's get more into the hormones that helped create bigger cattle and increase the size of chickens so corn much that farmers are now trying to find ways to shrink them. In the 1920s, it took three months and nearly 12 pounds of feed to get a chicken to a sellable size. But with hormones, you can get a good size bird

within seven weeks. Similar results occurred with pigs and cows too. Is there a downside to scientifically inflating animals for the sake of faster production, you ask? Glad you asked that. Turns out that the European Union banned hormone use in 1989 and continues to refuse any imported meat and dairy made in this manner.

As recently as 2007, the European Food Safety Authority or EFSA reviewed a study by their scientific panel on contaminants in the food chain or CONTAM in coordination with the Scientific Committee on Veterinary Measures Relating to Public Health, or SCVPH. That study showed all six popularly used hormones for livestock, quote, may pose endocrine, developmental, immunological, neurobiological, immunotoxic, genotoxic, and carcinogenic effects, particularly for susceptible risk groups such as pre-pubertal children.

So yeah, the EFSA's Contam along with the SCVPH called BS on CAFO's use of hormones and their SOL on selling such US products in the EU, so I'm gonna STFU ASAP. In short, a lot of initials say that eating hormone-induced food could uptick your risk of various ailments up to and including cancer.

But even if eating beef treated with hormones, let's call them Hornburgers, doesn't hurt a human specifically, to get those animals that big also requires a lot more feed and water, which produces a lot more waste and methane. It's all still part of a system that requires more resources and hurts the air,

water, and soil more than a regular ass grass fed cow. On top of saying no, no to hormones, European farms are becoming more cage free too, because maybe it's fucked up to put them in cages. You'll notice that I barely talked about the humane reasons to not have this obviously inhumane system. And that's because they're just generally bad from a cold, emotionless Vulcan perspective.

The size of these CAFO farms also depressed property values due to changes in groundwater, air quality, damaging local roads with farm vehicles, and an increase in both noise and odor. They also harm the environment through polluting freshwater sources and emitting greenhouse gases. But most of all, they do suck for the animals.

In roughly 100 years, we basically went from a diverse farmland to a giant corn and animal torture factory that doesn't even result in a properly nourished population. The ends don't justify the means because both the means and ends are garbage. So why do we do it?

Well, after corning some ads, we're gonna go beyond the farm and talk about the next stage of our food production. Will it be just as bad as our farming industry? Of corn it will. But first, corn, corn these corns. And heck, maybe Cornbow might show up. Who can corn?

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Just get them out of there. And we're corn. If you're just corning in, we talked about the... Has it... Immigration... Corn! Corn. the, the, the, emigrate, corn, corn, but also the long history of the farming industry and its many incentives towards growing and wasting less nutritious food that also hurts the environment and tortures livestock.

As we've pointed out, this is a big issue and we're only scratching the surface, just the corn tip as the scholars say. And now we're going to talk about what happens to that food after it leaves the farm and goes to the big city, presumably to dye its hair and meet Pauly Shore. We're talking about processed food. It's of course a common lament that we Americans

eat ultra processed pre-packaged junk all the time. And that's true, but what exactly does it mean when a food is processed? Well, it's kind of easier to actually describe what unprocessed or minimally processed food is, which is just food as it is. Now, there may be removal of inedible parts, drying, crushing, roasting, boiling, erotic tickling, freezing,

or pasteurization to make these foods suitable to store and safe to consume. But other than that, the regular missionary position apple is just that. Good, healthy, and boring. Pears are doggy style. Processed food, however, changes food from its natural state by adding sugar, salt, fats, and artificial colors or preservatives. So unlike a normal apple, those apple jacks have gone through some shit. Ultra-processed foods are stripped of most nutrients and vitamins and are made mostly

from substances extracted from actual food, such as fats, starches, added sugars, and hydrogenated fats. They may also contain additives like artificial colors and flavors or stabilizers. They're made of so many parts of food rather than just food. They're essentially food Frankensteins. No, not like that one.

Yeah, sort of that one. Examples of ultra processed foods include frozen meals, soft drinks, hot dogs, cold cuts, fast food, packaged cookies, cakes, and salty snacks. Studies are showing that a diet primarily of ultra processed food and fast food dining is associated with the higher risk of cardiovascular disease, coronary disease,

and cerebrovascular disease. And let us never forget the corn of it all. A great majority of these ultra processed foods and fast foods contain high fructose corn syrup, which honestly isn't that much different than sugar in terms of your health. The big difference is that while the glucose and sugar is broken down throughout every cell in the body,

fructose is broken down in the liver. As fructose is being broken down, good cholesterol goes down and bad cholesterol levels go up, which contribute to high blood pressure and fatty liver disease. Our body's breaking down fructose also leads to buildups of uric acid, which can cause gout and kidney damage. But just to be clear,

switching from high fructose corn syrup to sugar doesn't make you healthier. But what makes high fructose corn syrup slightly more insidious is that it's yet another example of our corn obsession, and a sneaky way for companies to stick sugar in your food without flagging it as such. Of course, some companies know that consumers got wise to the impact high fructose corn

syrup has on their diets and decided to rename and relabel it in an ingredient list as HFCs, various chemical definitions that I'm not going to pronounce, and corn sugar. And of course, another thing that's helping the marketing of ultra-processed foods, aside from getting a high fructose makeover, is the actual marketing. Moms have to get hearty snacks. 10 grams of protein, 100% real cheese. Mom's gonna be so proud. Hot Pockets, you'll love them.

So will your kids. Hot Pockets! We don't consider enough how subtly nightmarish and dystopian our food ads are. Brushing aside that this 2018 ad features a food aisle completely devoted to one flavor of one product, like it's the freaking matrix, or the fact that their tagline is, "'Give them a taste of freedom'

in some weird attempt to invoke patriotism." Brushing all of that aside, what the fuck does it even mean for a snack to be hearty? By definition, that just means any food flavorful enough to satisfy. But I guess it sort of sounds like healthy. Maybe they mean it's hearty in that one Hot Pocket snack contains nearly half of the recommended saturated fats

you should eat in a day, lest your heart explode. But hey, you know, I guess it has real cheese and 10 grams of protein, so let's give it to kids. And of course, this is just one ad. In case you haven't been to a grocery store because you're Tom Cruise, hi Tom, that place is riddled with packages, bags, boxes, sacks, sacks in boxes, and stickers designed to entice kids

and adults alike to follow your nose, go after those lucky charms, or psychologically abuse and ostracize a talking rabbit. And these mascots and corporate tie-ins absolutely work for children of all ages and races. Studies are showing that brightly colored packaging, cartoons, or the association with a film or TV character helps kids convince their parents to purchase certain items

or go to certain restaurants. Also, make no mistake, these companies are also preying upon adult nostalgia too. It's equal opportunity. There are also several fast foods and ultra processed foods that are marketed as healthy in their ads, because it turns out that word is meaningless. Many health claims might be true

because they focus on specific aspects of the product while ignoring the really unhealthy parts. Honey Nut Cheerios claims front and center on the package that it can help lower cholesterol. But also three cups of the cereal hits the daily sugar limit recommended by the American Heart Association. Prego traditional no sugar added tomato sauce may not have added sugar,

but one serving contains nearly a quarter of the daily sodium limit recommended by the FDA. A healthy choice chicken and parmigiana frozen dinner is literally branded healthy choice, even though it contains eight grams of added sugar and 22% of your daily sodium intake limit. Well, heck, that's not a healthy choice at all. That's irony, you jerks.

How dare you make me discover irony? I have avoided it for so long, but here it is in my face. Oh, in a lot of cases, the bar is simply so low that some companies can build entire marketing around being slightly healthier than their competitors. Can I help you? Yeah, can I get the love handles, double chin, and some blubber? Do you want the double blubber?

Sure. And I'll have the same thing, but instead of the blubber, can I get some fender thighs and a badonkadonk butt? Please drive around. When you get greasy fast food, what are you really getting? Introducing the new Subway Fresh Fit Meals with new better-for-you sides and drinks. Rocketing past the badonkadonk butt, Subway was able to claim it was healthy,

mainly because they offer better side dishes than most fast food. But no, eating a loaf of bread with half of your daily carbs isn't healthy. And in some cases, it's not even healthier than other fast food. One of their sandwiches has 36 grams of sugar. McDonald's may have more sugar, but 36 grams is already the recommended amount for the day.

Also, it's pretty wild that out of all of these terrifying characters, not one of them turned out to be a sex criminal. While Subway absolutely cannot make that same claim. That's a point to Mickey D. Congratulations, Grimace, you freak. So as you can see, read, and be utterly confused by, healthy has become subjective and loose

when it comes to advertising. Speaking of which, the FDA is having trouble cementing a firm definition of healthy and how it can be defined, especially since several of these corporate food industry giants consistently fight back in the courts against them. And the FTC isn't doing much either.

Because obviously these foods aren't about feeding you nutrients and keeping you healthy. They're about enticing you to buy them again and again, which is also why they were scientifically designed to be addictive, not to nourish you, but to keep you buying, which is easy when it's nearly impossible to eat healthy in this country. It's not hyperbole to compare it to something

like the opioid crisis, where working class communities who are in pain and can't take time off, medicate themselves with Oxycontin, since it was less expensive and more available than other medical treatments. Healthy foods are more expensive and take time to prepare. So for most people,

it's simply easier to grab some Pizzones on their way home from work. Obviously, overdosing on Pizzones is a tad less serious and more delicious than Oxycontin, but you understand the analogy. Or you don't, in which case, that's your fault. We explained it perfectly. Listen better.

And just to be clear, these eating habits aren't because those people are necessarily lazy or uninformed. In a lot of cases, they literally have no other option. After all, stores like Trader Joe's and Whole Foods specifically target high income neighborhoods. So if you don't have a car and or live in a low income neighborhood,

then you're simply out of luck. This is what we mean when we talk about food deserts in the country. But of course, even giving the poor access to fresh food doesn't mean they can afford it. That's why they're poor after all. And not only do you need to afford the food, but the tools and space to cook the food.

You need a kitchen with actual counter space, a working oven, pots and pans, that weird little spatula that only seems to exist to pick up pie slices and so on. Or you could pay $70 for a new microwave and heat up a 50 cent frozen bean and cheese burrito that you can eat in three minutes. Well, four minutes, unless you like scalding your mouth.

But even if you could afford it, there's still a problem that most Americans now have, which is that nobody has time to cook anymore. Americans spend an average of 37 minutes a day preparing and cleaning food. Compare that to 1965, where that number was 112 minutes a day, specifically for women. Oh yeah, remember when women didn't have jobs

and were heavily encouraged to be homemakers? Not cool. Just to be clear, I'm not advocating for forcing women to do things, except perhaps forcing one specific woman to stop selling my phone number on the internet. Please, just, I can't take it anymore. But the point is that once women began to move into the workforce, which again, I'm bravely for,

food companies saw that as a very specific opportunity. Who's got time to make dinner when you're busy making history? Colonel Sanders' Kentucky fried chicken tastes great, and it's so convenient you can get it right in your neighborhood. Lady Godiva didn't stop to fix dinner. Why should you?

Wow, ads have always been like this. That's good to know. So yeah, as described in the book Cooked by Michael Pollan, this was the start of an industry essentially waging war on home cooking. And thanks to the help of capitalism, they won. Work has enveloped us all, much like corn. And the idea of having either partner

stay home to cook and clean is now logistically impossible regardless of who is doing what. Data shows that 66% of the nation live in dual income households in order to afford where they live. Meanwhile, 17% of the country's workforce, whether they're in a couple or single,

have erratic work schedules due to either having rotating shifts, being on call or irregular hours. On top of that, millions of Americans are taking second jobs and side hustles to make ends meet, which further takes up energy and time that could be spent cooking. In 2018, over half of American workers had lunch breaks that were 30 minutes or less, and the overall American average lunch break was 39 minutes long, with 29% of employees admitting to working during their scheduled break.

Roughly the same allotted time is what we give to children in schools. So they'll be trained to wolf everything down for the sake of being productive. That is, if they get lunch at all. This lack of time also compounds health issues, as several studies report that eating too fast can lead to weight gain and heart issues,

whether it's processed food or simply because we aren't giving our brains enough time to recognize when our stomachs are full. All of these factors lead to mass burnout from work making it difficult to find energy to cook or mass burnout from cooking itself after a long day at work or in the case of restaurant workers, both. Burnout itself will lead to poor eating choices

simply because we're grasping for some comfort during these periods. Work burnout is such a crisis that several publications and websites devote easy recipes to cook when you're exhausted because that's the solution to this very normal and not at all dystopian problem in which we normalize having multiple jobs

with cutesy terms like polyworking. Even if you found the time, only 10% of Americans love to cook and 28% just don't know how in part due to home economics classes being cut from our public school systems over the last few decades. There are entire industries now devoted to our lack of cooking knowledge and prep time.

Meal kits like HelloFresh or Blue Apron are an industry expected to exceed $25 billion in 2027. And their entire business model is not only dependent on your total lack of time, but normalizing it. What is being a hero? Sometimes it's choosing playtime over prep time or skipping the grocery store to do something you love.

Yeah, super heroic to spend time with your kids between your multiple jobs. This is really no different than the KFC ad from before and why our work culture and food culture are now intrinsically bound together. When women moved into the workplace and didn't have as much time to cook, we could have seen that as an opportunity

to push homemaking as a shared duty. We could have seen that as an opportunity for partners to each work part-time since they now have two sources of income. But instead of doing that, the system of capitalism simply saw a doubling workforce and moved quickly to milk us dry, and not in the fun sex way, in the not fun sex way.

Everything became twice as expensive and two income houses became a necessity instead of an opportunity. And with every tightening of the work noose, the food industry has been there to offer new and exciting solutions to our total lack of time. Quick, easy food, who needs a home cooked meal anyway? That's for suckers who don't work multiple jobs, you see.

An entire room for dining? Are you yanking me? Toss that out. Make it a second office or a sex dungeon for the milking, or perhaps both if you're in the right occupation. And this ripples down the entire line of how food is made in this country, because the truth of the situation is simple.

Food takes time and space. It takes time and space to grow, to transport, to prepare and eat. But capitalism doesn't like time and space to grow, to transport, to prepare and eat. But capitalism doesn't like time or space. It needs to cram it all into the quickest, most efficient little box as possible. Our own concentrated animal feeding operations for all of us, cranking the food out as quickly as possible

to make as much money as possible. And it's, you know, bad. Seems like I've made that clear. And I'm not done making that clear, because after the ads, we're gonna talk about the final and forgotten stage of our food situation. What will it be?

You'll have to watch this ad, possibly, for one of those meal kit services, to find out. Hi, friend. It's Katie Stoll here to tell you about Hello Tishy Bidets. As we've been talking about, we put a lot of garbage in our bodies, but that also means we dump a lot of garbage out of our bodies. More specifically, out of our holes. Really slopping out like Halloween candy from a pillowcase. And sure, you can wipe that hole with some paper like some kind of primitive human, or

you can try a Hello Tushy bidet and see why they have over 100,000 5 star reviews. And why not? Every Hello Tushy bidet is easy to install, requires no additional plumbing or electricity, and comes with a 30-day risk-free guarantee and a 12-month warranty, even after you've put your butt on it. Listen.

We all love shoveling it in as fast as we can. On my best days, I feel like a fleshy laundry chute. And my point is that we should treat our bottom holes just as good as our top holes. Hello Tushy does exactly that by cleaning your bottom hole with a fresh stream of water that's twice as good as wiping. No more sloth on your hands. So what are you waiting for?

Stop wiping and start washing. Go to hellotushy.com forward slash more news and use promo code more news for 10% off your first order. That's hellotushy.com slash more news for 10% off. One month. Just give me a little bit more of that sweet, sweet chumbo. Oh, man. Just give me a little bit more of that sweet, sweet chumbo. Duh, you are back already. I was just licking plastic.

And if you recall, we were talking about America's garbage relationship with food, or rather I was talking and you weren't contributing at all to the conversation, which is really rude, but I forgive you. And now it's time to talk about America's garbage relationship with garbage. This is the final stage in all of this.

As food became streamlined and we became busier, Americans were forced into the chumbo hellscape, which in turn resulted in more and more waste. And we've already mentioned a lot of examples. Aside from all the pollution created by farm subsidies, CAFOs, and generally everything revolving around mass farming that we previously mentioned, our current food industry is literally going to waste.

As we mentioned at the top of the video, we toss out about 30 to 40% of our food. This isn't food lost during production, but food that is purposefully thrown out at every single level of the supply chain. A 2019 study on food waste showed that a third of edible produce grown in Northern and Central California remains unharvested.

And that's a state that's responsible for 46% of fruit and nut production, along with 49% of harvested vegetables in America. It's all just sitting there, being all foodie with no one eating it. While having the crops naturally decompose back into the earth isn't purely bad on paper, the fact is that 21% of our water,

18% of our cropland, and 19% of our fertilizer contributes to food that's never eaten. This was obviously worse during the pandemic, but happens all the damn time either way. Our expectations for produce to be both plentiful and available all season not only leads to some bland-ass food, but a lot of food going to waste. Thanks to corporate buyers, farms are forced to toss food for the silliest of reasons. For example, sometimes a fruit or a vegetable

is perfectly fine to eat, but just looks too ugly to sell. Along with being ridiculously wasteful, that has gotta hurt their self-esteem, okay? You're beautiful. Do not let these companies tell you otherwise. Moving up the chain, out of the 80 billion pounds of food that is thrown out every year, 40% of it comes from grocery stores, restaurants,

and other retail services. In 2021, retailers had 5.12 million tons of surplus food, with 35% of it going to landfills and 19% of it going to charities. As a general practice, most grocery stores overstock on food, anticipating that some of it will be wasted. After all, to them, it's better to have as many items that they can sell so they don't have to fear

that they'll run out. Also, the food we do buy, we end up throwing away a third of it. I'm sure many of you threw out food because it went past the expiration date, or at least that's what you thought. These dates aren't actually when food goes bad, but mostly indicate when food is past its peak freshness.

You may notice that some foods have a sell by date rather than expiration date on them for this reason. Why would they do that? Well, if they make the actual expiration date ambiguous, then you, the food haver, are more likely to toss it out early and buy more. Because once again, the purpose is not to nourish you or avoid waste. The purpose is for you to keep buying.

This is also why retailers and restaurants toss out perfectly good food past those dates too. Food waste is such a problem that it takes up around 20% of all landfill space nationwide. That's just food itself, not counting the packaging that gets discarded, which is probably its own episode, honestly. All of this breaks down into methane, contributing to greenhouse gases. And of course, the biggest offender of this

is the meat industry, which by one study, accounts for nearly 60% of all food production emissions. Gee, maybe we should do something about regulating the meat industry, perhaps in the form of some kind of, like an eco-colored modern agreement. Surely nobody will freak out and embarrass themselves over something like,

since they still in this Green New Deal want to control my life, let me go to President Obama's favorite place and realize that if this goes through, this will be outlawed. I can no longer eat this type of thing. So before they take it away from me, pass it around. Ah, truly heroic act. Remember how hamburgers were outlawed back in 2019? How I long for the sweet taste of cow flesh now that we're all eating bugs like them snowpiercer folk. So it turns out that there's an entire political party

that likes money and rich people way more than they like the environment or basic human decency. Have you heard about this? And this group happens to be heavily lobbied by the meat industry and will proceed to lose their absolute minds at even the slightest suggestion of regulation. There's an entire propaganda machine specifically blasting out misinformation about Democrat policies around meat. There's a study coming out of the University of Michigan

which says that to meet the Biden Green New Deal targets, America has to get this. America has to stop eating meat, stop eating poultry, fish, seafood, eggs, dairy, and animal-based fats. But that is not what the study said. It actually found that reducing red meat intake could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It was never tied to Biden's climate plans. They want to control your transportation. They want to control your food. But the article and Kudlow's outrage set off a right-wing media frenzy. The misinformation spread to online news sites and people's Facebook feeds. Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott and lawmakers even posted about it, falsely claiming

Biden wanted to severely limit red meat. Seems like a red flag when an entire political party can snowball so quickly about a single lie like that. Almost as if they're not a serious party, but rather a tool for the most powerful. Maybe I'll look into those Republicans sometime, give them a bing or two, or however many bings you get with a subscription.

Seems bad that a party that claims to be for the working class will, for example, eliminate rules designed to protect family farmers from giant agricultural companies. That's pretty weird, huh? How they say one thing and then do the opposite of that? Again, I'll bing it if I can afford it. And for the record,

I hear these Democrats aren't much better either. Their hypocrisy often comes in the form of cowardice and inaction. Obama, for example, made big promises to fight corporate consolidation in agriculture and then barely made any progress doing that because the food industry is vast and powerful. We need it to live after all.

And so unlike the animals they harvest, the corporate farm industry has had free range to crush small farmers while simultaneously using them for good PR. 96% of American farms are still family owned, which means on the farm, the CEO is usually referred to as Ma. And of all the things you can plant,

the most important is a little bit of yourself. Wherever your day takes you and however it ends, chances are it began with a farmer. Hey there, Monsanto. You're right, 90% of all farms are family farms, otherwise known as small farms, making less than $250,000 a year and producing only 25% of the agricultural production.

So this is a really folksy way of saying that most of the farming industry is actually a small percentage of big companies. You know, like Monsanto, who has spent decades trapping local farmers in shitty contracts and suing them, as well as poisoning their crops so badly that it possibly gave people cancer.

So we're back at the farms, which if you recall, is where we started all of this. That's called storytelling. We're just like the film Interstellar. And I guess the reason why is that it all starts here at our twisted agriculture industry. And this industry really shows how deeply rooted our problem with food is.

And while there are some solutions we can implement immediately, it's certainly not going to be enough. President Joey Joe Biden signed the Food Donation Improvement Act earlier this year, which makes it easier for farmers, restaurants, businesses, schools, and other entities to donate their excess food directly

to members of their community, so it won't contribute to food waste. We could certainly crack down harder on food waste and feed more people along the way, especially with fresh food, by forbidding supermarkets and restaurants from throwing out food like France and Italy did. It turns out that the European Union has similar food waste problems as the U.S., and has also pledged to reduce food waste by half in 2030. But the EU has less trouble

achieving that goal since they operate as a single market, unlike the U.S. We can reanalyze how we eat our food by acknowledging how Americans work more hours than most developed nations and ease off of them so they have time to mindfully cook and eat at a slower pace. But again, these are all superficial adjustments to a larger problem. One that, as I keep saying,

we can't possibly tackle in this episode, except to say that America has a food problem. And like with all unsatisfying conclusions to episodes about problems that make you feel powerless, maybe saying there's a problem is the first step. Identifying the problem and then asking why the problem exists. Because when you think about it,

a country not being able to feed its people, it's a pretty big problem. The need for food is one of the original reasons we started forming societies and governments. It's a basic human need, like water and Ghostbusters pogs. And for that reason, we often judge governments based on how well they can feed their people. We see it all the time where online weirdos

love to post pictures of empty grocery shelves and claim that it's because of socialism when it's actually from a disaster zone or ironically pictures from America. So going by that judgment, what does it say that America can't feed 34 million of its citizens? What does it say that even the people who can afford to eat

don't have the time to? And what does it say that the the people who can afford to eat don't have the time to? And what does it say that the reason we still haven't solved the most basic human need is directly related to the food industry putting growth and profit before actually feeding people healthy food? What does it say that we have a food industry at all? Maybe that should just be a basic right, you know, because everyone deserves to eat food.

I don't think that's a controversial thing to say. I mean, unless the food in question is the new cinnamon chicken jumbo chumbo wad, who chose a weird episode to sponsor, but whatever. Get it today at your local 9-11. Chumbo, the chum, stands for cheetah cum. Yeah, they jerk off the cheetahs. No, no, no, sorry, sorry.

They jerk the cheetahs, as in like jerky. They turn the cheetahs into jerky, then they dip it in the cheetah cum. I'm so sorry about how that ended. I'm sorry that I said those words and that you heard them. I don't know how to come back from that, but I do know how to say like and subscribe. The channel, subscribe.

And the video, the like. Do the YouTube stuff. We've got a patreon.com slash some more news. We've got a podcast called Even More News. And you can listen to this Cheetah Cum show, apparently, as a podcast. It's called Some More News. And we've got merch.

You can check that out. It's a merch store uh maybe some disgusting thing i said in this episode will eventually be available on a t-shirt or a mug um you know what else because i don't without the fans there is none of this wednesday august 9th i'm so honored to be here america's biggest super fansans meet their superstar idols and compete for a once-in-a-lifetime prize I'm gonna take them through my new records all by song You can pick a song and we can sing it together on stage and the title of ultimate superfan Superfan premieres Wednesday, August 9th on CBS and streaming on Paramount Plus