Techno-Slop: It’s What’s For Dinner, Decrees New York Times

Originally published via Armageddon Prose Substack:

 

Techno-Hell Roundup: Surveying the latest transgressions against decency, morality, and humanity itself by artificial intelligence and its biological architects.

Future Processed Food Says Newspaper of Record

“Finish your techno-slop, Timmy, or you won’t get any dessert [more techno-slop, but with a dollop of high-fructose corn syrup].”

Shoutout to Collapse Life for bringing this story to my attention about a month ago, which I meant to report on at the time but haven’t gotten around to until now.

Via The New York Times (emphasis added):

““Industrial agriculture” is a phrase used to signify “bad,” evoking toxic chemicals, monoculture crops, confined animals, the death of the small family farm and all kinds of images people don’t like to associate with their food. Factory farms are a constant target of environmentalists, documentarians, animal rights activists, spiritual leaders like Pope Francis and the Indian mystic Sadhguru, and leftist politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders.

Even the manosphere podcaster Joe Rogan has called for banning them*, while Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s pick for health secretary, has blamed industrial agriculture for making us sick and fat. The United Nations has pointed out that it does $3 trillion in damage to the global environment a year.”

*The goddamn “manosphere” back at it — pumping out its toxic masculine sludgy misogynistic propaganda, like that gigantic multinational food corporations don’t care about you except to milk you for cash while they sicken at which time their pharmaceutical partners, many of which are owned by the same parent companies, can swoop in for more profiteering while you slowly die and are left with nothing of your former middle-class wealth to pass on to your children!

Related: ‘Lab-Grown’ Meat Increases Blood Pressure, Inflammation, Depression: Study

Continuing:

“Agriculture in general does have real environmental downsides. It’s the leading driver of water pollution and shortages, deforestation and biodiversity loss. It generates one-fourth of the greenhouse gases that heat up the planet.

And it’s eating the earth. It has already overrun about two of every five acres of land on the planet, and farmers are on track to clear an additional dozen Californias worth of forest by 2050. That would be a disaster for nature and the climate, because the carbon dioxide released by converting wild landscapes into farms and pastures is already the most damaging source of agricultural emissions, worse than methane from cow burps or nitrous oxide from fertilizer.”

Related: Letitia James vs. Beef: The War on Food

How weird! Suddenly corporate state media is concerned about flyover farmers’ livelihoods’ when high-fructose corn syrup bans are on tap

The kids on the interwebs call this “concern-trolling.”

Eventually, they cut the bullshit and get to the point, which is not that corn syrup bans would harm flyover country bumpkins in Darke County in Western Ohio, as the lede insinuates — whom, by the way, The Guardian, like all liberal media, despises and whose interest the paper would never defend in any other context — but that they might eat into giant multinational food corporations’ bottom lines, like Cargill and Tate & Lyle, lead manufacturers of ultra-processed foods, otherwise known as techno-slop.

Via The Guardian (emphasis added):

“In the farms and fields of Darke and Shelby counties in western Ohio, Donald Trump enjoys near-unfettered support. In the 5 November election, more than 80% of voters here backed the president-elect – the highest rates of any counties in Ohio.

But western Ohio is also prime corn growing ground, and with Robert F Kennedy Jr Trump’s pick to head the Department of Health and Human Services, many here may find themselves struggling if Kennedy is allowed to reshape America’s food industry to his liking…

Trump’s backing of Kennedy has also appeared to put major corn and seed oil lobby groups in a bind.

The Ohio Corn & Wheat Growers Association declined to comment on what effects Kennedy’s potential appointment could have for its growers.

The US Corn Refiners Association, whose member companies include the agribusiness and food giants Cargill and Tate & Lyle Americas, also declined to comment on how Kennedy’s agenda might affect its industry, though a spokesperson shared a statement saying: “While high fructose corn syrup contributes to calories in the diet, there is no scientific evidence that high fructose corn syrup is a unique contributor to obesity or diabetes.””

Related: UK Mandates Backyard Chicken Registration To Fight Bird Flu

Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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