Frankenfoods of The Anthropocene

The evolution of our food production over time deserves a prominent place in the long list of technologies whose impact ranged from bad to worse to terrifying. Today’s obesity epidemic is the direct result of the incredible changes which took place in our food industry over the course of just a few decades.  Just as our civilisation began sending humans to space, societies back on Earth began eating crap: much of it, ironically, modelled after space food.  Industrial food processing came at the cost of poor nutritional quality and a disregard for tragic health and social repercussions. 

Although our foods last much longer on the shelf, we can’t exactly call them foods anymore.  Some of them are so toxic that they can conceivably outlive human civilisation itself.  Over time our food was transformed from a nourishment to an addiction and from a social experience to a lonely transaction.  Human societies developed their own version of industrial farm feed loaded with carcinogenic chemicals, high glycaemic index ingredients and levels of fat, sugar and salt our bodies had never been exposed to over hundreds of thousands of years.

Nutritional quality was compromised to scale up production through necrocapitalism, cakeconomics and supermarketization.  The farm-to-table process was hijacked by profit as food production shifted from feeding humans to making more of them: bigger, fatter human sheep addicted to industrial feed and commercial breaks.

The food industry became a drug cartel distributing toxic foods, witnessing its profits skyrocket just as humanity’s health plummeted.  Healthcare and pharmaceutical conglomerates lined up to profit from this disaster, not believing their luck: the food industry had done all their work for them, providing a constant supply of millions of patients with metabolic diseases, cancer, and almost every illness that exists. Capitalism profited from destroying our food, then profited again from destroying our health. 

All this was perpetrated in the altar of sales margins.  What better way to hit the big financial figures than to make your farmed humans bigger, hungrier, trapped in life-threatening food addictions for which of course, they received all the blame and all the stigma.  The food manufacturers just received the cash.

To feed a rapidly proliferating human cattle population more farms were created consisting of subjugated animals converted into food objects.  Just like their owners, they were fed through intensive agriculture of monoculture crops grown in ecologically degraded endless expanses rendered toxic to all other life. 

Humans may think they are on top of the food chain, but it’s not a chain.  It is a circle, which means that you eventually eat all the toxic substances you’ve produced.  The human farm is just one of many within a circle of interconnected industrial farms, all chained to each other through profit and abuse.  Every growth hormone, every piece of microplastic or pesticide passes from one farm to the next, eventually contaminating the entire circle.  The food circle is owned and operated by Earth, not by humans.  However much humans try to compartmentalise their food production into farmed systems, these farms will always find ways to communicate with each other via the Earthnet of Things.  Whatever we do to our food supply will come back and haunt us.

Equally impressive technological innovation in the industries of marketing and advertising enabled demand for frankenfoods to flourish.  Clever, misleading advertising campaigns catapulted sales, making junk and snack food an essential on the family dinner table, and setting consumatrons firmly on a path to diabetes, obesity and cancer from the very first days they come into existence.  The earlier in their life they get sick, the bigger the profits for the food and healthcare industry.   

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist.

Follow me on Bluesky @tsakraklides.bsky.social

Discover my Books Here

Note to my readers: I keep my site FREE because it’s not right to paywall existentially important content during an existential crisis.  But if you appreciate any of the work I’ve done over the years, please consider joining as a paid subscriber so it can continue!  I have minimal overheads, no sponsors to sell myself to, bosses who tell me what to write, or staff I have to pay.  It’s just me.  This freedom does mean though that your support is vital. Thank you so much.