As a kid I always found the commercials for both Frosted Flakes and Kool-Aid a little terrifying.
Waking up to find a tiger in your kitchen is never a good thing. Yet no one screamed or tried to phone animal control or worried about getting their heads chewed off. Instead they ignored the whole situation and happily poured milk on their sugar infused flakes. That should have set off a few alarm bells right there. What kind of cereal tastes so good you’re willing to ignore a tiger in your kitchen while you eat it?
And then there was the Kool-Aid guy peddling his chemically coloured crystals. A juice pitcher on legs smashes through the kitchen wall leaving a silhouette in his wake and everyone’s reaction is to reach for the water and sugar? I don’t think so. Who cares if Kool-Aid only costs pennies per glass (especially now that we don’t even have pennies) when the ruined wall just set us back thirty grand? You can buy a whole lot of Perrier and champagne for that kind of change. No one in his right mind would dreamily raise a glass of Scary Black Cherry or Berry Blue only seconds after their house had been smashed to smithereens.
There is only one explanation. Sugar makes us act irrationally. Think about it. If you were a coke head and someone smashed through your wall with a bag of cocaine in their hand, would you grab the coke or worry about the wall? Exactly.
I recently tuned into an interview with author Michael Moss, a Pulitzer prize-winning investigative journalist with the New York Times who wrote a book titled Salt Sugar Fat; How the Food Giants Hooked Us.
He suggested it all started with Frosted Flakes. Adding the sugar made them not only taste grrrrreat as Tony the spokestiger assured us, but they made the profit margins pretty grrrrreat too. He paints a chilling picture of how three ingredients; salt, sugar and fat made cheap, tasteless, nutritionally void food as addictive as drugs.
We would never consider giving our children crack or heroine, but we have no problem handing them a box of Smarties.
What dummies. We’ve been played and we need to wake up.
Selling processed food has morphed into an evil science and we are its drugged up guinea pigs. In boardrooms and labs people concoct their addictive formulas. They are nothing more than dealers’ intent on getting us hooked and taking our money.
Without the addition of salt, sugar and fat, processed foods would be inedible. We would never be able to crunch our way through a bag of Cheetos. We would be grossed out at first bite. Breakfast cereal would be about as appetizing as digging into a bowl of shredded cardboard. Cookies and crackers would be like eating dried flakes of wood. Obesity would go the way of the Dodo bird along with the epidemic of diseases and raft of emotional trauma it causes. There would be no diet industry, no fast food joints, no middle aisles in the grocery store.
But they do add salt, sugar and fat and then dress their products up in fancy colours and market it to the masses with feel-good catch phrases such as Kool-Aid boasting of its “rainbow of flavours kids love, and a good source of Vitamin C moms can feel good about.”
Add a few vitamins and minerals to a product and it comes off sounding like a health food. And we buy it. We have a blind faith in the food industry. If it wasn’t good for us, they wouldn’t be allowed to sell it, right? That’s what I always thought until the blinders came off and the grocery store stood there like the Emperor with no clothes. It’s like finding out someone you trusted has been poisoning your drinking water on purpose.
The addict in us shrugs and says, “It’s all a bunch of hogwash. They’re always changing their minds. What’s good for us today, is bad for us tomorrow. We all have to die of something. Three doughnuts please and a double double.”
Or we recognize the truth but feel so overwhelmed we don’t know what to do about it. If we can’t eat processed food what’s left? How do we eat out? How do we shop? How do we cook? You know there’s been some thorough brainwashing going on when the idea of living on a diet of fruit, vegetables and lentils seems strange, but drinking blue sugar water seems normal.
And the food industry laughs and counts its money.
Shannon McKinnon is a humour columnist from Northern BC. You can catch up on past columns by visiting www.shannonmckinnon.com