Opposites

Asymmetrical Islamist Grapefruit.

An extremely good pub near where I used to live had two menu blackboards, one headed “Welcome to [name of pub]” and the other headed “Vegetarians”. Given that they had as many veggie options as meaty ones, I doubt the slight was deliberate.

In San Francisco, the opposite of “Organic” is often “Commercial”. Good for a laugh as you check the price of the organic produce….

The opposite of “conventional” is “of mass destruction”. This has several subtypes, one of which is “chemical”; which is divided into “organic” and “inorganic”. My vegetables are “home-made” or “dirty”.

Maybe they’re bridge players? There, the opposite of ‘Conventional’ is ‘Natural’, which is close enough for government co-op work.

My trigger is whenever something is described as having “real” ingredients. It always gives me an impulse to dash out and find the “imaginary” and “complex” versions.

I really want some peanut butter made out of complex ingredients.

Alan, calm down. Note I said “often”. And of course I’ve read Pollan. Understanding his book doesn’t commit me to mis-observing the plain labeling of (some of) the food in front of me.

Perhaps you could take up this egregious usage problem with the real violators, the swank markets of our fair Area.

I found this a little odd, because when I see “Conventional” used as a label, I expect its opposite to be “Nuclear.”

It’s all a matter of familiarity, I guess. When I see “organic” used as a label, I (still) expect its opposite to be “inorganic”.

I really want some peanut butter made out of complex ingredients.

Then what you want is corporate peanut butter made with High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS)

High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is produced by processing corn starch to yield glucose, and then processing the glucose to produce a high percentage of fructose. It all sounds rather simple–white cornstarch is turned into crystal clear syrup. However, the process is actually very complicated. Three different enzymes are needed to break down cornstarch, which is composed of chains of glucose molecules of almost infinite length, into the simple sugars glucose and fructose.

First, cornstarch is treated with alpha-amylase to produce shorter chains of sugars called polysaccharides. Alpha-amylase is industrially produced by a bacterium, usually Bacillus sp. It is purified and then shipped to HFCS manufacturers.

Next, an enzyme called glucoamylase breaks the sugar chains down even further to yield the simple sugar glucose. Unlike alpha-amylase, glucoamylase is produced by Aspergillus, a fungus, in a fermentation vat where one would likely see little balls of Aspergillus floating on the top.

The third enzyme, glucose-isomerase, is very expensive. It converts glucose to a mixture of about 42 percent fructose and 50-52 percent glucose with some other sugars mixed in. While alpha-amylase and glucoamylase are added directly to the slurry, pricey glucose-isomerase is packed into columns and the sugar mixture is then passed over it. Inexpensive alpha-amylase and glucoamylase are used only once, glucose-isomerase is reused until it loses most of its activity.

There are two more steps involved. First is a liquid chromatography step that takes the mixture to 90 percent fructose. Finally, this is back-blended with the original mixture to yield a final concentration of about 55 percent fructose–what the industry calls high fructose corn syrup.

HFCS, which they are finding out is probably not good for us (much less so than real sugar) is an extremely complicated process using highly subsidized crops that are also genetically modified and then dosed with massive amounts of petro-chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fungucides, herbicides and more, then called conventional when none of it existed 100 years ago and what’s called organic now was what conventional was then.

All these chemicals and the modern way of growing food makes us a giant test case where we find out what’s wrong with this way of doing it after it’s been done… to us.

Unfortunately it’s killing the soil; setting us up for Dust Bowl II and the run offs from the chemicals are infiltrating our waterways and groundwater creating hypoxic dead zones including one the size of New Jersey at the mouth of the Mississippi in the Gulf which has decimated the shrimp industry and others in that area. There are many others on each coast and it’s all due to “conventional” food.

They say that organic can’t feed us (which is the corporate machine trying to brainwash us) but it’s conventional that will destroy us.

I’m reminded of the scene in 28 Day Later when the heroes go sprinting through an abandoned supermarket and find that all of the fruit has spoiled except for one display of apples.

The father leans over them and says, “MMMMM, irradiated,” and smiles before happily carries of the fruit.

Of course, he gets the plague and is then gunned down in broad daylight two minutes later, but that’s not really the point here.

I’m still looking for inorganic fruit and veg, but those damn great carbon molecules get everywhere.

Or to put it another way, even if the glucose molecules were so long that they filled the entire universe, leaving no room for the three enzymes, let alone myself or Sam to contemplate them, the glucose molecules would still not be of “nearly infinite length”.