When certain things pop up that motivate me to take the time to comment, then I post a blog. I had one such occasion this evening. The kids came home with some food stuff for their school lunches – they went with Mum of course! Well, they came back with Kraft, Chicken In a Biskit. They know that we NEVER buy Kraft (Philadelphia Cream Cheese being the only seldom exception) but their usual 20 pack Arnotts Shapes were out of stock.

I have scanned the ingredients for you so you can see what’s in them. It should be illegal to call this stuff food, let alone feed it to kids. Firstly you will notice that the first three ingredients are some of the biggest scourges in our highly processed nutrient poor western diet. And look, they call it oven baked as if that’s got to be good for you – well at least, I guess, it’s not deep fried!

 1. Wheat Flour – that has anything that was nutritious removed from the wheat leaving just the white carbohydrate endosperm. See my “The Whiter the Bread, The Quicker Your Dead” post.

2. Vegetable oil – They only use vegetable oil for one reason – it’s cheap! And you can bet your bottom dollar that this vegetable oil will be high in trans-fats, another toxin to the body.

3. Sugar – say no more

Then look at the fourth most common ingredient – flavour enhancers including chicken meat and Flavour Enhancer (621) which is Monosodium glutamate or commonly known as MSG. Now MSG is a neurotoxin, if you have any doubts, you can pick up the book at the Lifestyle Therapies Wellness Bookshop called “Health & Nutrition Secrets” by Neurosurgeon Dr Russell Blaylock. You can also watch a number of his videos online, like this one.

Most people have no idea that Kraft (also Nabisco) is now owned by the cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris. In an excellent investigative story run by the Chicago Tribune called “Craving The Cookie” it exposed that Kraft and Philip Morris (before they merged) were collaborating research as far back as 1991. They employ expert scientists called physiological psychologists who “conduct fundamental studies aimed at integrating consumer needs and perceptions into the product and package development process”. The only consideration large corporations have of consumer needs is that they seek to have you need to buy their products. They study their target markets like rats in a cage to get us psychologically and biochemically addicted to their products.

Large food manufacturers even have the gall to call this processes “value adding”. Well the only value adding large food manufacturers do is remove any possible nutritional value from the raw ingredients, introduce their own toxic addictive chemicals under the guise of flavours and additives, place it in seductive packaging, spend millions advertising and marketing the brand and add to the profit they make from the sale.

They add to their profit and take from you and your children’s health.

So back to our Kraft Chicken In A Biskit, the last point being consistent with everything else I have written about, is that it is made in China! The home of melamine milk! So they take the cheapest raw ingredients, add addictive toxic chemicals, make it with the cheapest labour in a very dubious regulative environment to make the highest profits and dare to sell it to my children as food.

Well this makes me so mad, I just want to tell people so they will WAKE UP to what’s happening to them and their children. Because it’s not getting any better and if you agree that it is bad, with the advances being made in the areas of biotechnology and nanotechnology and the research dollars and experience at the hands of these major corporations, the average shopper going into a supermarket doesn’t stand a chance.

And we wonder why we are getting sicker and sicker with more chronic diseases. The things that keep the aging population going include antibiotics, complicated and expensive surgery such as organ transplants and bypasses and the pharmaceutical industry and their ability to find drugs that we have to take everyday to keep us going as we age, but that’s a story for another day.

UPDATE: March, 2010
I was asked to comment on this article by John Rolfe, the consumer affairs reporter for The Daily Telegraph.
Here is the article.