Oh Monsanto

I have seen a lot of yelling about GMO food lately and the whole subject clearly illustrates how willing people are to make false and misleading associations in pursuit of illusory simplicity.  Case in point:  Monsanto and GMOs.  Monsanto and their ilk are a big problem.  A lot of their tactics are disgusting and/or evil.  They use their legal power to exact unreasonable control over farmers and crops.  They display a shocking lack of concern for people's health and environmental standards.  They are a poster child for corporate malfeasance, for good reason.

But people have this problem where they associate Monsanto with all GMO products and that is a big issue.

This has been big news lately because the US Congress passed a law that would prevent individual states from having laws that require GMO labelling.  I have no doubt that Monsanto wants this, no doubt that they intend to profit from it, and no doubt that they have legally and illegally tried to influence this legislation.  But that doesn't mean that GMOs are bad, or that the law is bad, it just means that Monsanto wants a particular outcome and they will get it in ways that are bad.

GMOs aren't bad as a group.  There certainly are some that aren't good - after all, there are thousands upon thousands of them so inevitably some aren't good for us.  But non GMOs aren't bad as a group in *exactly* the same way.  Eating rhubarb leaves is totally going to make you sick or die, even when they aren't GMOs.  GMO Golden Rice is a fantastic idea that could save huge numbers of lives.  Fact is, the health benefits or lack thereof in a food have essentially nothing to do with whether or not that food is GMO or not.

This is why I don't think mandatory GMO labels are at all a good idea.  Note the mandatory in that sentence - it is the important part.  If people want to label their food 'GMO Free' then I haven't got a problem with that, though I think it is misleading and worthless at best.  Not appreciably different from 'New and Improved' or 'Better than the next leading brand'.  However, forcing people to label ingredients in food implies that the government has a public health interest in doing so, and in the case of GMOs that is completely false.  It tells people that GMOs are dangerous enough that the government feels is *must* regulate them, which has no scientific basis.

GMOs aren't the problem.  Specific crops, GMO or not, are the problem.  Associating Monsanto with GMOs is a rhetorical tactic that tries to turn people's reasonable concerns about big business's corrupting effect on food and politics into a reason to hate all GMOs.  They aren't the same thing, they shouldn't be lumped together, and a strike against one is not a strike against both.

There are plenty of issues with agriculture these days.  Massive monocultures are a problem.  Excessive use of pesticides is a problem. (Which can be mitigated by GMO crops!)  Corporate control over huge swaths of genetic varieties is a problem.  Unfounded panic over all GMO crops is not going to help any of these issues.

The flip side of the coin is the conflation of 'natural' with 'healthy'.  It is a similar sort of tactic, but has the same issues.  Natural things are not especially healthier than man made things.  Rocks are very natural.  So is poison ivy.  Same with porcupine quills.  I don't recommend eating any of them.  GMO Golden Rice, high calcium carrots, and pest resistant corn are great, and I recommend eating them.  The word natural is just a smoke screen, a meaningless waste of space that evokes feelings of quiet country lanes and small gardens without making any falsifiable claims.

If you don't want to eat GMO food, go ahead.  I don't want to eat cheese, and that is equally arbitrary.  However, the government has no business forcing everyone to use GMO warning labels because there is no public health reason to do so, in the same way that cheese does not need a warning label because there is no public health reason to do so.  Feel free to put a big "CHEESE" label on your cheese, or a non GMO label on your non GMO food.  Have a blast!  But before we expect the government to step in and enforce labelling we should have actual reasons for that, and at this point we absolutely do not have those.  The government is not responsible for making the food industry cater to people's irrational fears.

Betrayed by my own brain

Tonight Wendy cooked up a new dinner for us.  I try to be optimistic about these things but I am not generally the sort of person who seeks out new meals - I figure out what the best dish for me is at any given restaurant and simply order it every time.  Why eat something less than the best?  This same sort of thing applies to new meals at home because even though Wendy's experiments are usually quite tasty I am regularly apprehensive.  Call it cowardice, call it caution, either way I sniff and taste her new concoctions with trepidation.  Here is the new thing from tonight, a dish called Shakshuka, which is essentially eggs poached in a spicy tomato and onion sauce.

I love eggs, tomatoes and onions.  The smart part of my brain knows that the combination of these three things is very much going to be like eggs with ketchup and onions, a dish I know I love.  There is nothing in this pot of which I do not approve.  Unfortunately the other half of my brain has things to say.

Those white stringy bits look like cheese.  We are gonna puke, don't eat it.

That is egg!  We know it is egg.  No cheese!

Puke puke puke, gonna puke.  Poison!  Don't eat it.

Seriously, we watched this being made.  Wendy is adding cheese to hers separately, there is no cheese.  Safe!  Delicious even!

*hands over ears* Not listening to you, it is cheesy poison and we shouldn't eat it, gross!

Even as I forked in the first bits of it my lizard brain was still shrieking "POISON!" at me over my tongue informing me that in fact it tasted like egg, tomato and onion and was quite delicious.  It boggles me how bloody strong these tendencies can be when they are based on nothing at all.  I have managed to train myself after years of hating cheese to react in ridiculous ways to things that bear only a small resemblance to cheese.  However, I can just bear down and eat it and once I get halfway done lizard brain finally shuts up and I can enjoy my meal in peace.

There we go, finished it off and quite enjoyed it.  This is what Shakshuka looks like with cheese on it, stupid lizard brain:

I don't eat that

This past weekend I was visiting some friends who come from Europe but are living in Canada for awhile.  They had lots of interesting comments about our culture but one stuck with me in particular:  Canadians are incredibly picky about their food.  My friends talked about how in Europe when you invited a group over for dinner you would simply cook dinner and everyone would eat whatever it is you cooked - the very idea that you would turn down something the host was making or require them to adhere to your specific dietary needs was very strange. They found it hard to deal with the fact that any time they invited people over for food everyone would supply them with a list of things not to be served and sometimes they were hard pressed to be able to serve anything at all.

I sure know about that!  I have several friends that I would love to invite over regularly but it is an extreme challenge to find a dish in my repertoire that they would be willing to eat.  Ziggyny doesn't like vegetables or sauces so I think the only thing I make that he would willingly consume is fries and rice.  (Maybe fried fish?)  Snuggles is even more extreme in that he has a brutal set of food problems that include wheat, milk products, most beans, and at least a dozen more things.  InTheHat only really hates tomatoes but since I put tomatoes in virtually every dish I would have to get creative to serve him anything he would enjoy.  Of course I have to accommodate my own dislike of cheese and Wendy's dislike of pork and bird too...  This whole mess is the reason I decided to try to suppress my cheese hatred and learn to like the wretched stuff but that has been an utter failure.  Normally I am very strong willed when it comes to food and drink but I have been utterly unable to keep to a cheese eating regimen.  The crazy thing is this is all entirely aside from having to consider somebody being vegetarian, on a diet or *shudder* eating within the confines of the 100 mile local food regimen.

I suspect this wild proliferation of food constraints is largely the result of wealth.  If I was a subsistence farmer and beets were what my family grew I would damn well eat beets no matter how much I hated them.  I despise cheese but I would get over it if the alternative was going hungry.  Clearly if you go back a number of years everybody was on the 100 mile diet but these days it is something to do if you have a very strong desire to eat potatoes all winter and a lot of money to spend at higher end food stores.  We also can actually diagnose food problems these days so instead of people simply being sick all the time or dead they discover their food allergies or sensitivities and avoid foods instead.  This is easy to see in daycares as they have strict rules banning bringing in *any* outside food and whole categories of food are banned from being served for one reason or another.  As the proportion of our income devoted to food goes down and the amount of different options increases the ability for an average person to refuse to eat various things goes way up.

None of this explains why people in Europe would have so many less food issues though.  In theory they have very similar circumstances to ourselves so the only thing I can think that would make the difference is culture.  Perhaps the food being served is simply less variable so everyone is expected to eat the things everyone else cooks.  It might also be that food pickiness is simply not tolerated and people that hate various things just have to suck it up because nobody will cater to them.  It is hard to say.  I will say though that I sure would have a lot more dinner parties if I could expect everyone to simply eat whatever I made with gusto... now I just need to learn to love cheese so I can return the favour.  Blech.

Cheese and insanity

I am slowly working on eating cheese.  I talked about this a little while ago and at the time I was hoping to slowly acclimatize myself to cheese by eating a bit each day.  I have failed at that and have only done so a handful of times.  I suspect it is a bit like dieting in that it really changes my attitude towards food.  I know in the long run it will be better once I convince the deep, dark, primitive part of my brain that there is nothing wrong with cheese but eating things that are gross is a challenge to do when the reward is so questionable and so far off.  I have found one very strange thing going on when I eat cheese that I did not expect however:  I can really feel the two halves of my brain wanting and thinking different things.

By this I don't mean left and right brain, or indeed nearly any division we might normally assume, but rather the logical, conscious part of my mind is actively repeating that cheese is fine and I only dislike it because of 'the incident' and some other part actively screams

Warning warning, Danger danger!

In the past I always experienced my dislike of cheese as a gut reaction to the smell but now it is actually taking the form of a warning, or fear, instead of revulsion.  Somehow the back of my brain still desperately does not want me to eat cheese and has decidedly changed its tactics over the past few weeks.  The desperation and the strength of the warning has not decreased at all though, the only difference is that it takes an entirely different form.  It is utterly bizarre to me that somehow my logical understanding of the situation has transformed the type of reaction I have to it but has not changed the severity of the reaction.

I have not yet tried to incorporate cheese into food I would normally eat.  Thus far I have been spreading cheese on a cracker and choking the mess down at fairly random times.  I still dislike the idea of cheese enough that if my choice were to not eat a meal at all or eat it with cheese in it I would choose to go hungry and as such I don't think eating regular food with cheese in it is a good idea.  I don't want to be subconsciously avoiding meals or developing additional food insanities if I can avoid it so for the moment I will continue eating cheese on crackers whenever I feel up to a bit of a challenge.  I will step into the kitchen with a bit of trepidation, spread the cheese on the cracker with a resigned frown and chew it up with far more clenching of jaws and glowering than is normally associated with such a simple thing.

And eventually, presumably, I will get to like the stuff.  If not, at least I can hope to tolerate it.

Now it is time for me to go eat some cheese.  Unfortunately.

Go for it

I hate cheese.  This has been a longstanding thing with me, ever since I was two.  I talked about it before at some point, though I cannot find the post.  Basically when I was young I had a terrible experience with getting very sick after eating a lot of cheese and have found it repugnant ever since.  However, I was not aware of why I disliked it for years and only very recently found out that my dislike of cheese is not something I was born with but rather something I acquired.  Given that it is an acquired thing I have decided that I can divest myself of it and learn to tolerate cheese when necessary.  Whether I will love it is another thing entirely but I want to train myself such that I can eat things with cheese in them without complaint when necessary, just like I do for eggplant or cauliflower now.  Wendy has been regularly hassling me about doing a cheese project where I eat new cheese on a regular basis, starting with the most bland and working my way up as my tolerance increases.  I think now is the time to start this new project and see if I can shape myself to be the person I want to be.

To begin I think I will start eating a small bit of cheese 3 times a day, once with each meal.  I figure I will let Wendy choose what I start with and slowly try more things as puking (or not) allows.  I suspect it will be easier than I had thought in the past because I am slowly adapting to the idea that my dislike is a mutable thing, something that can be dealt with, instead of an absolute.  I had some cheese by accident at New Year's and liked the dish it was in very well and my response was much less vitriolic than it would have been in the past so I think my brain is slowly coming to terms with the fact that my hatred for spoiled milk is irrational, unnecessary and ultimately subject to change.

Thus it begins - my project to do something I dislike to train myself to do more things I dislike in the future for the dual purposes of enlightenment and making other people's lives easier when they cook.  Also, perhaps for the purposes of entertaining those who read my blog.