Tastes Like (Mutant) Chicken The great McDonald's diet test, and why Ukrainians won't touch your buffalo wings

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http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2004/01/30/notes013004.DTL & nl=fix

 

Tastes Like (Mutant) Chicken

The great McDonald's diet test, and why Ukrainians won't touch your buffalo

wings

 

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Friday, January 30, 2004

©2004 SF Gate

URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2004/01/30/notes013004.DTL

 

 

So then from way, way over there in Ukraine comes this hilarious bit about how

the country's customs officials just confiscated a whopping 19 tons of frozen

U.S. chicken parts that smugglers claimed was sugar.

That's right: The crooks were trying to smuggle American-grown chicken into

Ukraine territory, which is all well and good except it's very illegal, given

how the U.S. genetically modifies billions of its chickens and injects them with

hormones and chemicals and toxins and feeds them ground-up chicken parts mixed

with chicken feces and saws off their beaks and packs them by the tens of

thousands into tiny nauseating disease-ridden cages in massive " Matrix " -like

hellhole factory farms and treats them worse than you treat a skin boil.

Ukraine refuses to take this crap. U.S. officials insist our factory-farmed

chicken is safe to eat. Ukrainian officials look at U.S. officials like they are

childish Neanderthal idiots who must take the Ukrainian officials to be

simpletons and fools.

U.S. officials sneer and pout and stamp their feet and say eat our stupid

noxious chicken parts goddammit. Ukrainian officials note how most of the U.S.

officials are pale and sickly and obese and diabetic and precancerous and

impotent and prematurely balding and sort of homely and piggish, and how seven

of them just dropped dead on the spot from heart attacks just from stomping

their angry little feet like that because they've eaten so many toxic chicken

parts and now their bodies are saying, you know, screw you, I'm outta here.

America, of course, does not give a damn about Ukraine. America laughs at such

petty Euro foolishness, as we slaughter billions of toxic hormoned chickens a

year and happily munch away on fried/liquefied/reconstituted/McNuggeted garbage

food by the ton and say see? See Ukrainian snob fools? We aren't dropping dead!

We are just fine! Ha! We are still big strong superpower, cough cough groan hack

spit!

Except that we're not. Except that every day millions in this country wonder why

they feel so sluggish and drained and ill, or why cancer and diabetes and heart

disease and a thousand other ailments plague our big healthy superpower nation,

when in fact much of the answer is right there, in our little Styrofoam boxes

and in that greasy paper bucket or in that Safeway grocery bag or wrapped in

that oily paper with all the little taco logos all over it. Our nation wears its

denial like a bad neon suit.

Here is another angle. There is this new movie. A documentary called " Super Size

Me. " It appears to be part comedy, part tragedy, all horrific. One young

filmmaker, Morgan Spurlock, becomes a fast-food guinea pig, deciding to eat only

McDonald's food three times a day -- breakfast, lunch and dinner -- for one

solid month, and record the effects.

Maybe you can guess what happens. Except it's far worse than you might imagine.

Spurlock's body, in short, disintegrates. Within a few days of starting the

McDiet, he is vomiting out the car window. He not only adds 25 pounds of flab to

his formerly healthy 6-foot-2-inch, 185-pound frame, but his skin turns blotchy

and pale, he becomes weak and tired, his body begins to revolt.

Even more disturbing, his liver becomes highly toxic, his cholesterol skyrockets

from 165 to 230, his libido drops and he suffers headaches and depression and

the general disgust and nontitillation of his girlfriend.

Spurlock's body simply could not process all the toxins, all the hormones and

binding agents and chemical fillers and reconstituted meats and insect parts and

miscellaneous organs and slaughterhouse by-products, all the inorganic

substances and fake scents and " natural " flavorings that are actually 100

percent synthetic and manufactured in New Jersey.

Maybe Ukraine -- and much of civilized, non-GMO Europe -- is on to something.

Maybe they already understand what Spurlock's movie makes even more obvious and

what we as a nation still insist on denying in favor of blindly ingesting more

highly processed foods and greasy cholesterol bombs that we don't have to cook

or think about or consider the consequences of until it's too late: that we are,

in fact, poisoning ourselves to death.

We consume, by the truckload, what most of civilized Europe considers toxic

contraband, on a par with heroin or kiddie porn or Lynne Cheney. We consider

ourselves omnipotent and untouchable and the world's paragon of virile

capitalist vitality, when in fact the world sees us as this giant flaccid flabby

glutton who blindly believes everything the McDonald's marketing slogans spits

our way. I'm lovin' it!

We hear what we want to hear. The nastiest and most powerful and most flagrant

abusers of impotent FDA regulation, such as Monsanto and ConAgra and Iowa Beef

Packers, will grin sinisterly and tell you it's all fine and there's nothing

wrong with genetic engineering and hormones and radiated meats, even as they

quietly recall another 10 million tons of E. coli-laden beef and pick their

teeth with the bones of your sick children.

Irony bonus round: Ukraine, by comparison to America, suffers from a huge array

of social woes, economic and environmental and social. It is unstable and

somewhat desperate, still recovering from the Chernobyl reactor meltdown and

from dissing angry Mother Russia a decade back and trying to go it alone.

They are a nation in turmoil. They are developing and recovering and little like

the bright and powerful USA. And, yet, even Ukraine won't eat our damn chicken.

Gosh, we say, what the hell is wrong with them?

Gosh, we should be saying, what the hell is wrong with us?

 

 

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Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF

Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. He also

writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed thrice-weekly e-mail column and

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©2004 SF Gate

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