Thu 25 Jan 2018, 14:34 PM | Posted by Guest Blogger
Guest blogger this week is Marianne Lewin, Unite member
In 1906, American novelist, Upton Sinclair, published The Jungle, a book that exposed the dirty, unhygienic and exploitative nature of the US meat industry. His novel had so much impact at the time that it led to the introduction of legislation to checks on the health and hygiene standards of meat processing. In the modern age of highly processes foods, there is a serious need for a new Upton Sinclair or two. Take this extract, from the book, The Diet Myth, by Professor Tim Spector, about the manufacture of cooking oil in parts of China. The oil is called Gutter Oil.
“It gets name from being literally sucked out of drains and sewers, sieved to remove unpleasant solid sewer contents, then processed in home-made labs. It is a lucrative and still thriving business, even though as well as containing known carcinogenic chemicals the oil is likely to increase the risk of heart disease and other illnesses. Last year a gang was arrested for supplying over three million litres of it to a hundred cities. They had achieved its extra flavour by adding fat from decaying animal carcasses. This toxic substance is giving modern Chinese cuisine a bad image and can’t be good for the nation’s poor gut microbes either.”
The whole point of ‘manufactured’ food is to simulate real food by the cheapest and therefore most profitable means. Manufactured food in the West, coupled with wall-to-wall advertising and continued austerity (manufactured food being cheaper), is responsible for the plague of modern diseases, of which obesity and Type-2 diabetes are the best known. We may not be as badly off as the users of Gutter oil, but that is the trajectory of capitalism.
(The Diet Myth, by Professor Tim Spector, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2016, p 85)
