Hmmmmmm, I knew that tasted fishy.

An excerpt adopted from "Fast Food Nation," by Eric Schlosser.

Two things I want to say:

1- When you have to over compensate for doing something it should be clear that the original thing is probably the result of ridiculously tortured thinking, and a better and more efficient solution is out there: exhibit A here, you need to add chemicals to processed foods to make them taste like real food (or, for that matter, to keep them from decomposing.) Solution: eat real food. Food that needs chemicals to taste like food is not, in the first place food. This is entirely different from spicing, which you'll surely notice if you read the article.

exhibit B, an example from Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma:" waste products at factory farms. Where waste used to be used as fertilizer, it is now too far from farms to be used as such, and, in the gigantic quantities that you accumulate when your feedlot consists of tens of thousands of animals, is poisoning the water supplies for hundreds of miles. In addition, chemical fertilizers must be used to replace the nutrients in the soil no longer naturally replaced by "waste."

This is not just silliness, it is indicative of a way of thinking that is destroying the very things humans need for their survival. Five hundred years ago, there was no such thing as waste. When there is only so much on the planet to make waste out of, isn't there a predestined end to that?

2- If you want to know what you're eating (say, if you're vegan, vegetarian, keep kosher, halal, etc., simply conscientious) it's impractical if not entirely impossible to do this and eat any processed foods. As an example: I bet you didn't know (if you hadn't read this book or the article) that you've ingested parts of thousands if not millions of bugs called "Dactylopius coccus Costa" whose dessicated shells are used as red and pink coloring in such obviously meat laden products as pink-grapefruit juice and Dannon Strawberry Yoghurt.

Oh yeah, not to mention that we really have no clue what most of the thousands of chemicals the average person ingests on any given day actually do to the long-term health of the human body.

Things aren't this complicated, and there's hope on the horizon. People are finally starting to realize, in large numbers, that things aren't this complicated in the real world.

We just make it that way.