I stopped by the Hometown Food Market yesterday to pick up some munchies.
Yes, I fully realize that the marijuana sub-culture confiscated the word “munchies” many decades ago, to describe a certain type of food cravings generated by the smoking of cannabis sativa. I understand that a person who gets ‘high’ on marijuana typically finds himself (or herself) with a sudden and irrational hunger for junk food — not necessarily because junk food is an ideal substance for quenching the precipitous cravings, but more likely because the smoking activity has successfully removed any ambition for applying oneself in the kitchen. A convenience store seems so much more… well, convenient… than turning the knob on the stove to the ‘on’ position.
Within this sub-culture, the word “munchies” was arbitrarily (and advantageously) applied to both the craving, and also to the highly processed packaged foods that suddenly seem appropriate for addressing said hunger, as in: “I’ve got the munchies, so I need to buy some munchies.” Why hijack two words, when one will fill both needs?
I have no personal experience with this particular situation, so I cannot explain why I suddenly jumped in the car and drove to Hometown Food Market, looking to buy some munchies. Life is a mystery.
Be that as it may, I headed down the “chips and soda pop” aisle, and quickly realized that my actions were at odds with my well-researched beliefs about health and nutrition. If any of our Daily Post readers have shopped at Hometown Food Market, you know that the store is not noted for its selection of organic, health-minded foods. In fact, you might think you had slipped back in time to the 1960s, when the term “health food nuts” was used in reference to highly eccentric individuals who completely avoided supermarkets as nutritional wastelands.
Anyways, there I stood, gazing at the modest selection of potato chips and corn chips, the vast majority of which had been fried in Canola Oil, the evil semi-food product devised by Canadian scientists from the genetically modified “rapeseed” plant in an apparent attempt to poison America. Fortunately, our federal government – in its ongoing quest to protect We the People — has required the labeling of ingredients on all packaged foods, and I was quickly able to locate a variety of deep-fried snack that did not list “Canola Oil” as one of its primary components.
The bag of Fritos brand corn chips displayed just three ingredients:
“Corn, Corn Oil, and Salt.”
Moments later I was headed for my car… tearing the bag open and popping the first delicious handful of chips into my mouth. I set the bag on the passenger seat where it would remain within easy reach during the one-minute drive back to my apartment, and turned the ignition switch. As the engine started, the car radio sprang back to life, in the midst of an NPR radio show about genetically modified human beings – something we seem on the verge of experiencing, now that we’ve genetically modified everything else we could put our hands on.
A scientist was explaining that the DNA coding that uniquely defines each individual human — or each individual dog, or cat, or earthworm — is made up of only four different amino acids strung together in a certain sequence. The four “nucleobases” are identified, by the people who enjoy identifying these kinds of things, as “C” (for cytosine,) “G” (for guanine,) “A” (for adenine,) or “T” (for thymine.) Arrange those four simple compounds in about 3.2 billion pairs and wrap them into a double helix with a bit of sugar and phosphate, and you have the building blocks of a unique human being.
Or so they tell us.
But scientists, being who they are, have not been totally satisfied with this simple arrangement, and have taken upon themselves to switch out the incidental nucleobase — thereby creating organisms that never existed in nature. This has been going on for centuries — unwittingly — when scientists cross-bred plants and animals who were unwilling or unable to breed of their own accord. But technology, and the unraveling of the secrets of the DNA molecule, as sped up the process and made the swapping of genes into a process simpler than getting a divorce.
At any rate, I’m sitting in the car, with the engine running. The radio is playing. And I suddenly realize that I’ve just purchased a bag of chips made with “Corn, Corn Oil and Salt.”
Corn is one of the most heavily “genetically modified” crops in the U.S. GMO corn seed now produces nearly 90 percent of the field corn in the United States — along with more than 90 percent of the soy and rapeseed (Canola) crops. Unlike hybridized plants which are created through cross-pollination, genetically modified plants have strands of DNA technologically inserted to achieve desired characteristics. Those “characteristics” might include, for example, a resistance to the Monsanto herbicide known as “Roundup” — more scientifically labeled as “glyphosate.”
A study published in the International Journal of Biological Sciences in 2009, by a group of French scientists, found liver and kidney damage in rats fed Roundup-resistant corn.
Sadly enough, weeds and insects rather quickly develop resistances to herbicides and pesticides like glyphosate, suggesting that new GMO plants will need to be artificially created to withstand increasingly toxic chemicals. More than 26 species of weeds in 20 states are now resistant to Roundup. And because corn’s pollen is easily transported by wind, conventional non-GMO fields can be contaminated by neighboring farms planted with GMO varieties.
My bag of Fritos — most assuredly consisting entirely of poisonous GMO corn and corn oil, with a sprinkling of salt — was not only going to kill me, personally, but would likely contribute towards the death of Planet Earth.
Without expecting it, my quest for munchies — combined with a seemingly innocent NPR radio program — had now led me into a deep philosophical reverie… which I pursued while absent-mindedly chewing dangerous genetic material…
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.