“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, January 30, 2009

Mercury is retrograde

Could the Bush Administration have trashed America any worse than they did? It now turns out that there are measurable doses of mercury in high fructose corn syrup, and if you don't know how many products contain hfcs, you should find out.

When I was a poor food scholar I used to get up people's noses by banging on about how food was ideology, etc. I was told that “we” didn't need any “muckraking” of the Marion Nestle sort. And a food scientist at my university told me that the Food and Drug Act of 1906 made sure that all food was safe (!) and that “the consumer” would make sure it had what it “demanded.” Clearly I shouldn't have worried my pretty little humanist head.

Now call me picky but I never ever demanded mercury in my Coca Cola, breakfast cereal, chocolate bars, yogurt, bla bla bla ...

Given increasing evidence that there's a connection between autism and mercury consumption by fetuses and infants, perhaps this might explain the rather alarming rates of autism I see around me here in Northern Cali.

1 comment:

rjgree01 said...

I'm glad you blogged about this story - great insight. I read a story about the mercury-HFCS connection a few days ago and immediately thought of a line of yours from a previous post: "I know that my body probably contains mercury. . . " Probably because corn is in just about everything. You may be on to something about the autism link. . .