By Arjuna Seneviratne –

Arjuna Seneviratne

No one has ever called a fat person healthy. Fit fat people do not exist. Excesses of blubber and water don’t make the fitness grade you now. Without some other illness or ailment that the person cannot control, the run-of-mill fat people balloon themselves by stuffing their faces with excessive amounts of the resources of the planet for no good reason that they can reasonably justify for themselves. Being six times one’s healthy BMI is no health-wise good folks although whether that looks good or bad is up to individuals since beauty is in the eyes of the viewer.

Now, while a pretty large majority of people would probably agree with me on the health issues of obesity and might pity a fat person on the one side and roundly condemn the person on the other, they will embrace another fat entity with alacrity although that entity is fat for very similar reason.

I am talking about the modern vegetable.

Look at that thing that you love so much: huge, fat, shiny, tasteless and filled with what? Nutrients?Nah.Minerals?Nah. Then what? Well, just biomass mostly. Carbon based materials that do zilch for our health and wellbeing. They have become so bloated because they are created by trick and truck to enhance their size and appearance and fed by a cocktail of killer toxins to keep them alive since their ability to keep themselves alive naturally has been compromised by the very unnaturalness of their design, birth and existence.

We…? LOVE ‘EM! Despite the fact that doctors and others are promoting us to “be just the size that will make us win”, despite the fact that we are very clear over-sized is under-healthy, we seem to have been mass hypnotized into ignoring this simple, straightforward truth. Why? Because we are nuts, let me tell you.

OK … enough giggles and politically incorrect comparisons and anecdotes. Let’s get down to the science of this thing and the meanness with which something that is very bad for us has been coaxed into our subconscious selves as something that is good for us, great for us and looked for by default over everything else.

Good people, the so-called agro-scientists of this world (read: the yay-sayers of the food and agrochemical mafia) insist that we must must must cultivate crops that have an optimal yield. They repeat this like a mantra, to everyone who cares to listen and force it down the throats of those who don’t through power, pressure and barrel loads of money and political clout. What they are saying to us essentially is simply this: we need more and more and more biomass to feed the world so that it is not hungry. Excuse me? Seriously? By that argument, there should be little to choose between eating a tasteless, nutrient less, water logged and bloated karavila and a ream of A4 sheets for all the good either of them will do you because both of them have very little food value. The former is marginally more palatable than chomping on A4 sheets … marginally. Try it. I’ve done it. I really cannot taste much of a difference between a steamed new-look, new-age, obese karavila and a piece of paper.

So, folks, why do these scientists lie to us? That’s stupidly easy. To grow more biomass we need to grow the hybrids and to grow those we have to bumkiss the seed mafia and the agrochemical mafia and toe every line they put in front of our feet in terms of … he he … MONEY. We also have to use up a huge amount of energy to cultivate them that we really cannot afford these days. You and I (dumb ignoramuses by choice) grin, gleam, and run to a supermarket for … what do we call them…? Ah yes… “fresh vegetables” – regardless of the fact that they have very little vegetable in them and are far from fresh.  We also contribute substantially to poisoning our earth, cannibalizing critical energy resources and feeding the medical industry with a generally sick body they can profit out of. What do we call people like us? That’s easily answered as well. Losers folks, losers.

The point I am trying to make, and which I will promote as strongly as the mantra of the agrotoxin based yield optimization gurus is this: It is not yield density(YD) that is important you coots, its nutrient density (ND) where ND is defined as the amount of nutrients in a food relative to calories. What vegetables have high nutrient density? Indeed, what type of produce can reasonably be called vegetables since they have everything that defines them as such and have nothing that doesn’t? The very ones that you thumb your nose at because they don’t shine enough, they are not fat enough, they don’t look clean enough – plus – ugh – some of them have … (horrified whisper) worms in them.

I am talking about naturally grown heirloom or indigenous varieties. Unit for unit, eating 1/10th of a genuine, nondescript of an heirloom variety will give you 10 times the food value of eating the equivalent, toxin-manufactured, genetically engineered, hybridized bloat that you call “food”. You eat that heirloom variety and you also substantially reduce the sum total of resource usage in the world because you don’t need to eat as much to feed yourself.

The science is clear. It has been clear from the 1940s when scientists first began making foreboding observations of the rapid dilution of minerals in the environment. Many studies over the last 70 years have not only strengthened this understanding of the rapid and irreparable damage to the soil but point squarely at agrochemicals and overfarming for yield optimization as the chief culprit. The issue is exacerbated by the food mafia trying to give us bigger, cleaner looking food on the outside but which is dirty, disgusting and useless on the inside while either preventing actual foods from getting to the people or undermining their desire for real foods through their marketing techniques. What we have ended up with is far far less karavila in karavila plus a load of gunk that is not only useless but downright dangerous for us.

More recently, in 2004, Dr. Donald Davis of the University of Texas and his fellow researchers Drs. Melvin Epp and Hugh Riordan of the Bio-Communications Research Institute in Wichita, Kansas have proved a rapid drop off of mineral content in 43 garden crops. These were the literally “mission critical” nutrients protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin and ascorbic acid. They site three factors, a) An inverse relationships between crop yield and mineral concentrations—the widely cited “dilution effect”; 2) Apparent median declines of 5% to 40% or more in some minerals, vitamins and proteins in groups of vegetables and perhaps fruits; and 3) Recent side-by-side plantings of low- and high-yield cultivars of broccoli and grains found consistently negative correlations between yield and concentrations of minerals and protein, a newly recognized genetic dilution effect.

So folks, bigger vegetables – like bigger people, aint better. Bigger vegetables do not feed a body’s needs but rather, feeds the addiction of a body to consume sweet nothings in excess. You will need five hybrid carrots to give you the same food you get from one heirloom carrot. You will need 20 servings of fruit and vegetables a day instead of the usual 5.

So folks, next time, when you want to give yourself food and I mean food, it is best that you do not succumb either to addiction to cosmetic traits in something masquerading as a fruit or vegetable at a supermarket or engage in your favorite pastime of reading labels on packages for nutrient lists and scrutinizing expiration dates. Just get the heck out of the supermarket and go buy some ugly looking, wormy but super charged vambatu from a little ol lady who grows it in her backyard. Those don’t come with expiration dates or nutrient lists. They don’t need to be proven to you as food. They are the real deal. The worm in that ugly brinjal won’t kill you. The poison laced shiny dark fat flub of an aubergine in that well lit box we call a supermarket will.