We Live in a Sick Society, Part 2

...continued, Part 2. ( Part 1 Here )

3) Corporate America has led us down a primrose path that is killing us! As the industrialization of America continued after WWI and WWII, petroleum was used more and more. Besides being used for gasoline and diesel fuel to power cars and industrial plants and tractors and factories, they started making more products from it. Plastics, fertilizers, herbicides, etc. Things were produced on a GRAND scale. The "market farmer" with his mule powered plow and cultivator could no longer compete with the huge agricultural concerns using tractors and combines that were raising crops on thousands of acres fertilized by petroleum products.
The overuse of agricultural lands in the heartland led to the dust bowl conditions of the 30s, which contributed to the Depression occurring.After WWII, tons of petroleum created pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers were dumped and plowed in on every acre of land that large agricultural companies could get their hands on.
Supermarkets sprang up like dandelions on a suburban lawn. Suburbs sprang up to house the millions of people that wanted city living without being in a city. Family farms were sold at a rapid rate as sons who had seen Paris and London and Amsterdam during WWII decided that family farming was "backwards". Everyone wanted in on the new America...and corporate America obliged.
Instead of a local butcher or greengrocer, housewives converged on supermarkets and bought prepackaged meats, vegetables in cellophane and eggs in neatly compartmentalized cartons. Radio ads and television ads extolled the virtues of products and assured America's wives and mothers about the "healthy" supermarket products. Why, instead of the drudgery of baking fresh bread, buy Wonder Bread! It's HEALTHY! We put VITAMINS in it! (Although currently, those vitamins are joined by the leavings of barber shop floors in China. Yes, they use Chinese hair in most commercially made bread. EWWWWW!)
Ad campaigns sold Americans on the virtues of pre-prepared frozen dinners (and still do).

For farmers it was worse. If you couldn't go BIG, you usually got forced out of the markets. Stores wanted UNIFORMITY in their vegetables and fruits. Food factories wanted uniformity as well. Tomatoes were expected fresh, year round, so they had to be varieties that could be shipped across the country. Most tomatoes in supermarkets are picked green, packed into warehouses and boxcars, and exposed to a gas to ripen them when they are shipped the thousand or more miles across the country to end up being labeled "fresh picked" and sold to the public.The same with celery and spinach and lettuce and...well, you get the idea.Many varieties of vegetables and fruits became scare. Some may have become extinct.
The same thing happened with livestock. Pigs and cows and chickens had to be UNIFORM, so the cuts and appearance was the same week after week. They had to be ready for market faster and gain weight faster. Slower gaining breeds and the "non-uniform" animals were left by the wayside. Even dairy cattle suffered the same fate. Go to a commercial dairy and look around. You'll see mostly Holstein cattle. Occasionally Jersey cows. I remember a local dairy that had only Guernsey cows...sadly, they closed down in the 1970s. But what  joys their milk and butter were! Creamy, sweet and the milk actually had a naturally yellow cast to it because of how high the butterfat content was. Luscious milk.
On farms in older days, you raised a "lard pig", a "bacon pig" and a "ham pig" for the family's needs. "lard from the "lard pig" was used for soap, cooking lard, baking lard, etc. Of course, the meat was used too, but the value of the pig (or hog) was in it's fat. Long, leaner breeds of pigs made better bacon, so they were used for that. But no part of the family pig was wasted! I remember my grandmother and grandfather butchering their pigs when I was little. NOTHING went to waste. Intestines were cleaned out and used as sausage casings (hint, do the final rinse in salted water!!). My grandmother even caught the blood draining from the pig to make blood sausage (don't say EWWWW! until you've tried it! It was yummy!).
Today, pigs are raised in confinement, in cages they can't even turn around in. They never feel the sun on their back or are able to root in the dirt. Their tails are cut off so that they don't bite them off of the pig in the cage next to them. And they are oh-so-uniform.
Sadly, many of the older "heirloom" breeds of livestock are endangered. A few are already extinct.
They weren't valued by livestock producers because they aren't as predictable as the uniform breeds they use. They take longer to reach butchering size, they may not have the perfect marbling of fat desired, etc.

Corporate America also convinced Americans that their breath stank, they sweat too much, they needed better cleaning products, their houses smelled bad, etc.
Dozen upon dozen of cleaning products, hygiene products, air fresheners, etc.  YAY! MORE chemicals becoming the normal day-to-day products in our homes! Of course we needed them....all the advertisements said so!
Never mind that many of the cleansers and air fresheners caused allergic reactions or over-loaded our bodies with toxic chemicals...our houses sparkled and smelled better! Never mind that that antiperspirant contained aluminum (which an overload of can be a contributing factor in Alzheimer's), WE smelled better! Never mind that the long term exposure to all these modern chemicals had never been adequately studied...our whole world smelled better!
And plastic. Plastic, the wonder material of our age. Toys, kitchen utensils, food containers, anything and everything that could be made of plastic...was.
The more plastic we put in our homes...the more things changed. Things like childhood cancer rates, adult cancer rates, asthma in children and adults, severe allergies,etc.
Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.
And corporate America keeps on selling. And we keep on buying.
Now we have Genetically Modified Foods. These "miracle foods" were supposed to save starving populations across the world. Instead, they are now found to be causing more severe allergies, decreased soil fertility, hive collapse in bees and other catastrophic problems.
Monsanto is the worst of these offenders. They want to control the food. You control the food, you control the population. There is a revolving door between Monsanto and  our government agencies. If you work for one that gives you a basic "lock" on getting lucrative employment with the other.
If you want to get "up to speed" on how damn evil Monsanto is, I suggest you set aside some time to watch a few movies.
Most are free to view online.
Patent for a Pig
King Corn
Food, Inc.
The World According to Monsanto
Also, do a search on youtube for "India's Cotton Suicides" for more info.

Tomorrow, Part 3...the Medical Profession and Our Sick Society...