What the? The poor are so poor that they can only eat meat every meal, but they can't eat cabbage? Our Chinese cabbage 3 cents a pound, pork 15 pieces a pound, meat can be 50 times more expensive than the dish! But in the United States, it's so hard for poor people to have a hamburger in their left hand and a piece of chicken steak in their right hand and want to eat a plate of boiled cabbage. So what exactly did Americans go through? Why can't the poor even afford to eat vegetables, but they can eat meat?
Capital and vegetable baskets
Being able to afford meat but not vegetables sounds like a magical thing, but that's the case in the United States. How is this done? It's one word, volume.
A food company in the United States
This volume, of course, does not refer to the volume of the workers, but the inner volume of the major multinational food companies. Before 1970, the top 5 food companies in the United States could only account for about 25% of the market share; But now, the top 4 food companies in the United States can account for 80% of the market share, and each food company is eager to kill each other and monopolize 100% of the big cake.
If you want to roll, you need to sell it at a low price, but capitalists are not philanthropists, so they have to work the cost price. In order to reduce the cost price, capitalists began to find another way - antibiotic chicken.
The so-called antibiotic chicken refers to chickens raised with feed containing antibiotics.
Antibiotic chicken
This chicken first appeared during World War II. During World War II, American soldiers fought desperately on the front line, but the supply of logistic meat could not keep up, and the US Logistics Department gave this problem to major food companies in the United States, asking them to study how to make chickens grow strong in a short period of time. At that time, the first food company to come out on top was Merck, and the miracle drug they launched was vitamin B12 extracted from streptomycin, which can make chicken seedlings stronger in a short period of time.
And Merck's nemesis, Ledler also grasped the study of "magic medicine". A researcher named Thomas Jux, who took inspiration from vitamin B12, began to mix his long-studied chlortetracycline into the feed fed to chickens.
Thomas Jux
Thomas Jux did a set of experiments in which healthy chicks were hungry for a while before they started feeding them. After actually starting feeding, Thomas divided the chicks into 4 groups, one group fed regular feed, one group fed feed containing vitamin B12, one group fed feed containing streptomycin, and one group fed feed containing chlortetracycline, for a total feeding time of 25 days.
After 25 days, a miracle occurred, and the chickens fed the ordinary feed were dead, and even if they survived, they were very thin; Chicks fed vitamin B12 and streptomycin grew in a similar state and were very strong; But the best in body, apparently, is still fed to the chicks fed with chlortetracycline feed. These chickens are large and the meat is tight enough, so as soon as this antibiotic chicken enters the market, it occupies the market of traditional chickens with the trend of destruction and decay.
The contrast of the chickens
Here's a fairly obvious comparison of the data.
In 1950, it took a chicken 70 days to grow from shell to adulthood;
In 2008, the same process took only 48 days.
But the size of the chicks in 2008 was twice as large as the chicks of 50 years ago, and the main part of the change was the chicken breast, for the simple reason that people liked to eat chicken breast.
Chicken farm
From this situation, it seems that this is the progress of human technology, farmers who raise chickens, originally 3 months can raise a batch of chickens, but now in 49 days can raise twice as many chickens, the number of growth, resulting in farmers to make more money; Consumers can buy bigger chunks of chicken for less.
But is that really the case?
According to Carol, a farmer who has signed a chicken contract with Tyson (the largest food and meat federation company in the United States), chickens can grow to nearly 5 pounds in about 7 weeks, and can already be slaughtered and sold, but the growth rate of chicken bones and internal organs cannot keep up with the growth rate of meat. This causes the chicks to act like a balloon that has been hurriedly inflated, and the chicks, which look bright and strong from the outside, will actually fall because of the weakness of their legs when they take two steps.
Antibiotic chicken
The antibiotics added to the feed, after entering the chicken body, exist in the chicken meat, and people eat antibiotics and enter the human body. Antibiotics in medicine, often used for injection to fight diseases caused by bacteria, but in fact, antibiotics are difficult to distinguish between pathogenic bacteria and beneficial bacteria, will kill all bacteria, serious, will lead to the lack of vitamin K in the human body, once bleeding will be difficult to coagulate.
The human impact of the misuse of antibiotics is more than that. Antibiotics are generally used for diseases caused by pathogenic bacteria, once abused, superbugs will appear, and 23,000 people in the United States die every year due to the abuse of antibiotics, so what if thousands of people eat chicken containing antibiotics without knowing it?
Superbugs
Poor fat poor fat
In the United States, the poor are mostly wide and fat, while the rich are slim, why? Poor people often can't eat good things and work hard to earn money, it is reasonable to say that the skin should be covered with bones; And the rich are pampered, clothed to reach out and eat to open their mouths, how can they not be fat? Of course, it is capital that creates iniquity.
Let's start with dinner for an average American family. A family of 4, 5 cheeseburgers, 2 cheese sandwiches, 2 small Sprites, 1 large Dr. Morgan (a common drink in the United States), even if you count the packaging fee, it only costs $11.48, a burger only costs about $1, and this $1, go to the U.S. supermarkets everywhere, a single broccoli can not afford.
America's poor
And even if such a family grits its teeth and buys vegetables, it has no time to do it, because it starts work at 6 o'clock in the morning and leaves work at 9 o'clock in the evening. This is the life of the poor in the United States, has been running for a living, but it is difficult to buy cheap vegetables, in order to save time and living expenses, can only eat high-calorie foods like burgers day after day, people are getting fatter, this fat, not simply weight gain, but a pathological obesity.
In fact, since the beginning of human evolution, it has been constantly pursuing high-calorie foods. In ancient times, gathering food or hunting was more or less a component of luck, because primitive humans could not guarantee that every time they went out, they would harvest it, so whenever there was enough food, they would overeat and store enough calories, even if they did not eat it; But in modern times, the industrial revolution and scientific and technological progress have made food no longer difficult to obtain, and even a person can get high-calorie food at any time within 24 hours as long as he wants to eat.
Delicious burgers
Syrups and refined carbohydrates often contained in high-calorie foods will affect the body's metabolic blood sugar. The pancreas in the human body will secrete insulin to break down blood sugar, and blood sugar cannot be decomposed completely, which will lead to two consequences, one is that excess sugar is converted into fat, causing people to look more obese; The second is to cause insulin secretion abnormalities, people will get diabetes.
In a small survey of a community in the United States, when the investigator asked if there was a person in the family with diabetes, please raise your hand, all the families in a circle raised their hands; When the problem escalated to "Please raise your hand if there are two people in the family with diabetes", it was still all hands raised and no one put it down. In the past, diabetes was a disease exclusive to middle-aged and elderly people in the United States, but it is now common among children in working-class families.
diabetes
You may say that if multinational food companies do this, will no one report or appeal? Yes, of course, there is, but the result is very embarrassing.
In the history of the United States, there has been a history that in order to make cattle grow faster and shorten the feeding cycle, corn is used to feed cattle, and in order to save costs, the environment for cattle breeding and slaughter is extremely poor, so it has caused a round of bacterial disease in the United States. In 1998, under the pressure of public opinion, the USDA finally issued a standard that as long as a factory that slaughtered beef could not pass the test many times, the plant would be closed for rectification.
Cattle farm
There's nothing wrong with this standard, right? Isn't it within the ministry of agriculture of a big country to close down and rectify the problematic factory buildings? However, as soon as the bill was introduced, these multinationals began to sue the U.S. Supreme Court against the Department of Agriculture, and the Supreme Court ruled that the Department of Agriculture did not have the right to close any factories.
So, what else can you do? The USDA can't break the thigh, an ordinary American citizen, what can he use to save himself?
Capital controls farmland
If poisonous chickens and cattle can be used to manipulate the meat eaten by the poor, do you think the capitalists will spare the farmland?
Monsanto
Among the leaders is monsanto, which has been a stinking company for thousands of years. As for how much "stinks" it is... It can be said that Monsanto's legal department must be very busy, because from the establishment of Monsanto to bankruptcy, in just over 100 years, it has been saddled with 13,400 lawsuits, compensation lawsuits from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, more than 52 countries around the world, 400 cities have launched protests against Monsanto.
How many evil things has such a company done to become a "street rat" that everyone shouts and beats?
Genetically modified soybeans
In addition to producing saccharin, PCB, DDT, Agent Orange, and glyphosate, Monsanto's most evil thing is the production of poisonous seeds. In fact, Monsanto originally mainly produced chemical agents, but it is precisely because the glyphosate produced is too toxic that it can kill wild grasses and plants. Companies in general will certainly find ways to develop other herbicides, but Monsanto's brain circuit is clear, producing a seed that will not be poisoned by glyphosate, and selling seeds is also very profitable.
This was the first genetically modified agricultural product that shocked the world in 1991, "glyphosate soybeans", which are not afraid of glyphosate, so the farmers who bought these seeds reaped a good harvest.
But can Monsanto, which makes DDT and Agent Orange, be a good person?
American genetically modified soybeans
Monsanto has created an overlord clause that requires farmers not to keep seeds for the next year when they buy seeds, or they will sue the court. But there are too many farmers who buy seeds, and Monsanto can't send one person per piece of farmland to focus on whether Monsanto's seeds are used, so there are still farmers who secretly keep seeds. Monsanto spent $1.5 billion in 2006 from Delta & Pine Land to buy a technology that would allow seeds to grow fruit without flowering or pollination, forcing farmers to buy seeds from Monsanto.
Well, then I don't buy Monsanto seeds at all, can Monsanto still buy seeds by my hand? Sorry, but it really can.
Soybean farmland
Because Monsanto has formulated a second overlord clause, even if a person does not buy Monsanto seeds, but as long as the nearby farmland uses Monsanto seeds, and Monsanto seeds fall into this person's field, that is to infringe monsanto's patent rights, directly sue, sue you ruined, want to be private? Yes, sign the Overlord clause to buy seeds. Monsanto: Okay, another seed.
Over time, Monsanto had control over a large amount of farmland. In 2014, Monsanto occupied 70-100% of the global market for a variety of crops, and it also held 90% of the world's genetically modified seeds, and the glyphosate supporting Monsanto seeds was also widely used in more than 130 countries and regions. Harming people, making money, the typical capitalist knocks out the bone and sucks the marrow. The good news, though, is that in 2018, The German company Bayer successfully acquired Monsanto, and Monsanto has since disappeared.
Capital's manipulation of the vegetable basket is certainly not the ultimate goal, and capital only wants to squeeze out all ordinary people. What would happen if the absurd scene of the United States were to be repeated in us?