Snack rant

[muckefuck]

Just had breakfast. On the back of the bag of trail mix, it says:

DID YOU KNOW--that nuts are a natural food product, not created in a laboratory...

Jesus, Mother of God! Are we so alienated from the means of food production in this country that we have to be told that NUTS GROW ON TREES?

monshu informed me recently about the revised FDA regulations on insect parts in food and about how some people are protesting that they aren't stringent enough, should be better labeled, etc. You just want to smack them and say: "HELLO! Unless you're a Jainist constantly wearing a gauze mask you eat bugs all the time! The air is full of them, your body is full of them, they're going to get in your food." No, we shouldn't have to pick weevils out of our rice as we eat it, like Third Worlders do, but we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking we live in a world where total purity is possible.

I'm not a back-to-the-land kind of guy, but I think this level of ignorance about where food comes from, how it is processed, and so forth is just inexcusable. And it leads to unrealistic policy, as people try to legislate a world more contaminant-free than it can ever actually be.

Comments

[0595.livejournal.com]

I thought nuts were coming from, like, plants in the ground or something. I don't like nuts themselves, but I love peanut butter and I'd prefer to think peanut butter is made by some magical faeries.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

See, muckefuck? The "laboratory" thing is misdirection. They're really trying to reassure the nervous consumer that the nuts are natural as opposed to supernatural. I.e., to make clear that they're grown by good sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, rather than by soulless longaevi whose motivations we know nothing of.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Strangely, peanuts do grow on plants in the ground. But they're not really nuts, which confuses everything.

But I can understand that misconception given the whole grown-up-in-Oklahoma thing. In Missouri, we had walnut trees.