I've been reading a lot of books about canning, salting, pickling, root cellars, and preservation of food in general. One thing I find fascinating and disturbing is that the methods described do not work any more. Methods of preservation that worked fifty years ago are no longer viable — procedures that would in the past keep something fresh for the winter now sees the food rotten within the week. The old timers interviewed wrote it off as the weather, but I think it's more than that.
As you know, food these days, meats especially, are injected with an incredible amount of antibiotics because the conditions we create food in are so terrible these days. The end result of that is that food pathogens are incredibly strong and can resist almost everything nature can throw at it (since they've had to adapt to our high-power drugs)… so these days everything rots faster than fifty years ago.
Along those same lines, every once in a while people lecture me about how I can't be healthy as a vegan because I'm not getting B12 or Omega-3 fatty acids and so on, telling me that I have to eat animals to get that since humans can't “create” them… The punch line to that is that animals can't create them either. For example, fish get the Omega-3 fatty acids by eating algae. The reason I mention this is that on factory farms (and fish farms), the animals don't eat the source plants any more than meat-eater humans do, and thus don't have those vitamins and acids in their flesh, making them useless to humans.
Ah, the modern world. We're so proud of this luxurious monstrosity we've created, but it will eventually kill most of the life on this planet. Hopefully the next species to achieve market dominance manages their assets a little better than we did.
Post a Comment