Transcript
Mark Levin (0:00)
He's here.
Producer (0:01)
He's here. Now. Broadcasting from the underground command post deep in the bowels of a hidden bunker somewhere under the brick and steel of a nondescript building, we've once again made contact with our leader, Mark Le Ven.
Mark Levin (1:33)
Foreign. Mark Levin Here, our number, 8773-8138-1187-7381-38111. You know, three hours on radio may seem like a long time. It's really not. And so sometimes I lead with information or discussions or stories or whatever. Now you might say, why is he leading with that? Because I don't follow the crowd. Because sometimes I think there are things more important than the media looping the same story over and over and over and over again. And to give you an update on the looped stories, I'm a big critic of the media. I think there are so many wonderful opportunities, whether it's visual, whether it's simply oral in any respect, to really contribute to the well being of society with actual facts and information and knowledge. And you make the final decision. Now, some of you are going to be very upset with what I'm going to say. As far as I know, my wife might be very upset with what I'm going to say because I made a decision 10 minutes ago to leave with this story and I've been working on this program all day long. And yet I came across this at the Free Press, which is a great site and you don't have to always agree with everything in the Free Press, but it's very well done. Barry Weiss's operation and it's entitled In Defense of Processed Foods. Now before I get to this, I've talked to you before about processed foods and that without processed foods about 100 years ago, people would have starved. You know, we talk about organic food now or fresh fruit and that sort of thing. What happened in the early 1900s and decades later, the population moved heavily from rural and more sparse areas into the cities. There was huge, huge mobility and movement of people to try and get jobs. And that includes immigration and so forth and so on. So you had slums that were created and housing projects. People were really dirt poor, but this is, this is the way they could find jobs, they felt. But there was no way to put fresh food. Freshly butchered beef. Beef would get rancid, but people couldn't afford to throw it away. They would eat it. They'd eat other stuff that had chemicals on it, not chemicals through the processing of it, but people themselves would put chemicals on it, not knowing how bad they were. And you had significant instances of stomach cancer and so forth. Dysentery. I haven't even read this entire article. Part of it I'm going to read newly to myself and to you. But that's how Heinz ketchup came to be. Heinz was a simple man. He mortgaged his home to develop a. A beef sauce. And his first product went nowhere. So he went broke. Then he had another idea. This time it would be tomato based. And he'd put it in a clear glass bottle so people could see what they were buying and what they would be using. Well, that took off because it hid the flavor of the rancid beef. Fish. They did not have freezers. The kind of freezers we are talking about were not even invented yet. But most people couldn't afford it if they were. They barely had refrigeration. So fish, if you caught it, you had to eat it pretty quickly. Pretty quickly. Things like milk would sour very quickly. So the problem was you had a concentration of people, particularly in the inner cities, huge concentration of people, and there was no food. And to the extent there was food, it was very expensive in the context of those days. And it didn't last long. The transport of the food didn't last long. That's where processed foods came in and were invented and fed at least two generations of Americans. Now that's where I'm coming from. Now let's read this by Professors Jan Adukowitz and Gabriel Rosenberg. And this is an excerpt from a new book that they wrote called Feed the People why Industrial Food Is Good and How to Make It Even Better. And the introduction to this by the Free Press is the following. Processed foods have become the go to villain in America's health story. Picture the packages crowding supermarket aisles. Frozen dinners, canned food, soda, chips. They're packed with preservatives and additives and often blamed, especially by champions of the Make American Healthy agenda for soaring rates of obesity, chronic disease. And it goes on. But just how harmful are they really? That's the central question in this new book. And in this excerpt. These professors contend that processed foods, even ultra processed ones, aren't the dietary demons many make them out to be. And today's calls to purge them entirely and quote, unquote, eat clean, they suggest, offer no magic fix. In fact, such advice even might leave the situation worse. Now, let's get to the content of the book in some respect and I figure this might interest all of you, actually. So I'm reading this anew for you and me. In 1929, the canned meat company Libby McNeill and Libby printed a now legendary pumpkin pie recipe on the side of the cans of its 100% pure pumpkin. 1929. It was an enormous hit and pumpkin pie became a national superstar. But the cans branding wasn't quite accurate and still isn't. According to the FDA regulations, the contents of a can of pumpkin can be made of a variety of squashes that we don't conventionally call pumpkins. And in fact, most canned pumpkin you've ever eaten is probably something called a Dixon squash. Apologies if you're a pumpkin purist, but if you are and you just found this out, what's the alternative? Roasting and pureeing a pumpkin yourself? That's a bad idea. Store bought pumpkins don't have the right starch or water content for the custard. Go to any bakery or grocery the week before Thanksgiving and ask them what they use for their pies and they'll tell you the truth. It's from the can. Now here's the good news. The industry goo is great. To this day, the only ingredient in Libby's canned pumpkin is a mush of assorted squashes. They take millions of gourds grown on an astonishing scale, peel, seed and puree them, cram that puree into shell stable aluminum cans and ship them off to grocery stores by the truckload. The stuff in these cans is nutritionally identical to a fresh pumpkin or squash, if you will. Moreover, it will all. Excuse me. It will sit safely on your shelf for 900 days or more without spoiling. Meanwhile, fresh pumpkins, as you will recall from your front step after Halloween, they tend to rot after a week or so. Now, what's the point of all this? Well, point is I need to put my glasses on because I can't read this. Just hang with me, hang with me. This is all very interesting to me and I think to you perhaps. What's the point of all this, you ask? The point is that we have been trained to think of particular foods as good or bad, or even noble and sinful. So called processed foods, those made with preservatives or other chemicals and which often come in a can, usually fall into the latter category as sinful. It's not difficult to find people deriding whole categories of industrial foods as an unmitigated menace. But like pumpkin pie, the truth is a bit more complicated. In his 2008 book In Defense of Food, journalists and professor Michael Poland famously instructed people to do the following quote, don't eat Anything your great great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. It's a common refrain, intended as an indictment of a modern nutrition system dominated by artificial ingredients. But it ignores a glaring truth. Our great great grandmothers didn't exactly live at a time of peak nutrition. They didn't have electricity or running water. They wouldn't recognize a box of fusilli or for that matter, a mango as food. In their old world, there were no refrigerators in homes, no frozen foods. Canning was a crapshoot. And there were no supermarkets, let alone an FDA to make sure your flour, butter and milk were unadulterated. The result was illness. What I was touching on earlier, foodborne diseases like typhoid fever, botulism were common. Even more ubiquitous were diseases caused by malnutrition. Rickets, a debilitating childhood condition caused by vitamin D deficiency, led to bowed legs, stunted growth, curved spines. These are just the ones whose name you may recognize. Ever hear of maramusmas? Be glad if you didn't. Thanks in part to poor food, our great great grandmother society was chronically unhealthy. In New York City in 1920, up to 75% of all children were to some degree affected by rickets. Average life expectancy in 1900 was 47 years. When the United States initiated a draft During World War I, about 30% of the men who were called up were deemed unfit for combat, largely because of poor health attributable to dreadful nutrition. The solution was a better diet offered by yes, food processing. Pasteurization of milk, originally developed in the 1860s and adopted at a scale in the early 20th century, has saved countless millions of infants and babies lives by eliminating dangerous pathogens. Preservation techniques like canning prolonged the shelf life of many foods, improving food access and reducing food waste from spoilage. These changes came alongside the emergence of a modern regulatory state ensuring foods met new standards of health. Meanwhile, advances in transportation and refrigeration technology in the early 20th century gave birth to a radical new way to buy food, the supermarket, which improved the quality and safety of food for most consumers. Interesting, Mr. Producer. Synthetic preservatives may be to some extent unhealthy, but compare them to the common adulterants found in the swill Milk of 19th century New York City that sickened thousands of children. Rotten eggs are arguably more natural than potassium sorbate, a common anti mold preservative found in today's dairy products. But we would rather eat the potassium sorbate. It's only when you take for granted that your diet won't immediately kill you that you begin to ponder whether it might contribute to cancer or heart disease in a few decades. Now, I want to continue this. I think it's very important, and I'll tell you why when I'm done with the article. But this is very, very important for a variety of reasons. We'll be right back.