“What you eat everyday it much more important than what you eat once in a while” Gerry Duffy

I was at my little nephew’s naming ceremony last weekend, and there was loads of really nice food. I was chatting to my brother in law, he had made a couple of the cakes and he remarked “they are lovely, but why wouldn’t they be if you saw the amount of sugar and butter that went into them”. I can definitely affirm that they were lovely and I thoroughly enjoyed trying all 5 different cakes!

That’s the thing, I knew what I was eating. Yes butter, yes sugar and yes wheat, I made a conscious decision to let go and enjoy these treats on the special day. I did unfortunately pay a price, but I knew I was going to and I accepted that.

The thing with modern processed food though is that it is packaged and made to look like it is something that it is not. Massive production plants churning out cheap food made with the cheapest commodity products available, combined in a way that makes them addictive and palatable.  We are being sold items that we believe to be one thing and are usually another, wrapped and marketed in a way that is tempting and appealing.

Low fat is a classic example, the lack of taste of many low fat foods and drinks is compensated for by a bucket load of sugar.

As long as you know what you are being served I think it is then fair if you decide to go ahead and buy, eat or consume it. Take your average white mushroom; I came across an interesting piece of research recently where scientists in US have used a technique called “gene editing” to modify the natural genome of mushrooms to prevent them from browning (How then would you know if your mushrooms were a month old or two days old, when does fresh food stop actually being fresh food?). As a result it is virtually impossible to differentiate between a crop strain created by traditional breeding techniques and those involving gene-editing.  The crucial difference is that they are different, one has been artificially genetically altered and one has not.  I certainly would like to know which was which before I made a purchasing decision.

GM foods need to be labelled as such. If you buy conventional chicken feed then it says on the side of the pack soya from GM sources. However if you eat a bar of chocolate and it contains GM soya you will never know it contains GM soya. The law needs to be clear, genetically modified products need to be labelled as GM; Let the consumer decide if they want to purchase said product or not. GM food is not labelled because consumers do not want to buy it.  Labelling it would have a very real and serious consequence for companies with a major investment in GM technology and related industries (such as herbicide manufacture).  Powerful lobbying groups funded by the global agribusiness industry push their agenda at every turn, and governments listen.  This is a clear example of greed driving choices that are inextricably linked to our health and the health of our planet.

I had to extract myself from this train of thought as I get quite agitated when I start thinking about these topics, and with a piece of cake in hand I decided to go out onto our farm and visit the bees, to steady my nerves.

Every-time I observe the bees, I think how beautiful they are but gradually the mind cranks up a gear or two and my rambling thoughts inevitably reverted to the use of neonicotinoids (the chemicals that have been linked to bee colony collapse disorder).

But on this very fine day when this video was taken the bees on our farm were in no danger of encountering chemicals of any kind and they were having a mighty time.

Enjoy!

Kenneth