Product Marketing: How Companies Are Cheating Us With “Organic” Products
Living fast in Los Angeles isn't always easy, you can't control traffic flow or the amount of people who are driving at once, But you can control the food you eat, or so you thought. Recent high demand calls for a spike in production for organic and non-GMO foods. Reaching a 49. 4 billion dollar industry as of 2017. The older I become the more and more I question how can good, cheap, nutritious, and safe all coincide with one another? Seems too good to be true. After doing a bit of research I wasn't surprised by what I found. First time parents play a major role in the consumer base, most saying that they have at least boughten an organic product for their children in the past. An even larger percentile said to have exclusively purchase organic and non-GMO products.
There is a peculiar way that these companies market their products to draw in a certain demographic (the type that believes organics yield health benefits) and it is quite simple. Using terms such as natural, fresh, local, causes confusion to most consumers who aren't aggressively scanning everything they buy, which is most of the population. The average buyer typically believes that all of those words correlate with that of being good for you, and more often than not assume it’s considered organic. Nearly most of the food that is bought and eaten in the United States is owned by ten parent companies. Each of these companies have an immeasurable amount of branches that reach to the brands that seem privately owned. As health awareness becomes a trendier topic among the public, it couldn't have come at a more ironic time.
The term organic in short means "Free of synthetic pesticides, fertilizers, and basically at the grows at nature's discretion. All of this sounds like a safer alternative to people who are truly trying to take control of what they consume. Monsanto the big bad wolf of the food industry. Which another mega corporation bought. Bayer the world leader in pesticides after Syngenta AG bought Monsanto in 2017 for 62. 5 billion to create the biggest merger in the agrochemical industry. Controversy has surrounded this company for years, due to the simple fact that they are a pharmaceutical company that own a large majority of the brands we all grew up eating.
What do pharmaceuticals and food have to do with one another? Everything. Chemicals are synthesized to aid in rapid growth, to eliminate expensive natural ingredients and replace them with cheap ones, and certain ones are even added to food to make you crave them. That classifies those chemicals as drugs in my opinion. It doesn't stop at the chemicals, they also own the rights to the seeds supplied to farmers who have no other choice than to succumb to the bully that is Monsanto. So why doesn't somebody stop these people? Well the amount of money and power this company holds is ungodly and in America "the land of the free" money talks and bullshit walks. Where there is money involved the corporate vultures start circling their prey, the consumer. People love organic now, so what does Monsanto do, make "organic". Owning companies who make organic and non-GMO even though they are a company who have made billions and billions doing otherwise, talk about an oxymoron. It would be naive to believe that they have the consumer's health in mind.
Round-up (which is different from Round-up for lawns) is a glyphosate herbicide that was created by Monsanto to kill all other organisms that were competing with the crop. A normal question to ask would be "so what happens to the actual crop? wouldn't it die too?" but low and behold Monsanto has done it again. Creating crops that are resistant to the poison they're spraying it with, which means they can increase the amount of glyphosate as much as they'd like, but the weeds are getting stronger too. Like a dog chasing its own tail creating stronger chemical sprays to fight off the weeds that are becoming resistant and creating food that survives through it, soaking up every last bit. There has been a 100 time over increase in the amount and continuity of the herbicide being used in US agriculture since 1974. Glyphosate classified as an antibiotic has been tested at the discretion of many concerned scientists, and this is what they discovered.
The herbicide is considered a carcinogen, causing cellular damage to anybody who consumes it, but particularly dangerous to embryonic and umbilical cells. Shown to blatantly be linked to cancer and infertility, this chemical isn't going anywhere. More lawsuits hit the multi-billion dollar company in the 2016. A man by the name Dewayne Johnson became Lymphoma positive after using the weed killer at his job of several years. The first trial of its kind was rushed due to the aggressive nature of the cancer. In august 2018 the San Francisco superior court favored Johnson after concluding that Monsanto in fact withheld the potential risks and dangers of exposure to the herbicide, resulting in a 289 million dollars in compensatory and punitive damages. With about 5, 000 similar lawsuits this case was the first of many in hopes of shining light of the seemingly inescapable corruption.
The constant fight to create enough food for an ever growing population, in the land of comfort and excess is the reality in which we every day. Research could make deciding the foods you choose to bring into your home and life much safer. Educate yourself on all points of view to then create an opinion of your own. Do not allow yourself to fall for the product marketing because ultimately it is a business. Take everything with a grain of salt, and always remember knowledge is power.
