Get 20% off DeleteMe US consumer plans when you go to joindeleteme.com/Adam and use promo code ADAM at checkout. DeleteMe International Plans: international.joindeleteme.com/ Get up to 60% off your Babbel subscription at Babbel.com/FACTUALLY. Rules and restrictions may apply.
I highly recommend an episode on academic science. The capitalistic monopolization of Big PI and paper mills that control the narrative of the truths of our universe. Along with the abuse of trainee scientists. It would definitely be eye opening for someone that isn’t aware of it.
Lina Kahn was appointed chair of the F.T.C. by President Biden, and she has been valiantly fighting against industry consolidation and anticompetitive practices. Please make people aware of the President who appointed her because Donald Trump would replace her, if he comes anywhere near the White House, again.
Hey want to have your mind really blown? Look up Wirtz pump then read this.. I figured out how to generate electricity using gravity, water and a design called a wirtz pump if you pump up to a second tank and then pipe it to fall driving the pump its perpetual now offset via chain drive the paddles above the water line and use buckets instead of paddles to mitigate loss if you incorporate rainfall into the top tank you can find nominal values that allow the system to run for the life of the material. you can have basically free electricity after the cost for material which I have gotten down under 500 dollars using an old washer motor and this system can be built to spec based on need or simply to run a fridge and lights which would be the cheapest option for 500 dollars. Much love and sun yall I am giving this information away to do the most good I would like you to peer review this please. Will you please peer review my system and help me show people free electricity? I will be live frequently to answer questions everything is Fair Use and I already did once with a minimal explanation I will do better next time I have cptsd hooah much love Mr Conover I appreciate your time and consideration. I have put enormous effort and time into developing this in a viably cheap way also, I love life very much but I love yall more. Thank you for helping me realize I can jump out of the jar.
I used to be Meat Cutter at Sprouts until a couple years ago and this interview is dead on for everything I experienced before leaving. When I started working in the grocery store industry in the mid 10s, a lot of the old folks were retiring to great big retirement plans in nice houses. They used to say that once you got in at your local grocery store, you were set for life. I came to be in the Meat Department because they were the highest paid outside of store management. Over my years at sprouts, I watched them condense their services in what i imagine was an attempt to sell the company and cut labor. We went from cutting a wide selection of various meats and being one of the only local grocery chains that made our own sausage to, at the time of my leaving in 2021, largely receiving pre-cut Meat and not grinding any meat in store. The meat and grocery industry used to be a staple of the middle class. People could come work at a local grocery chain, join the Union, and make great money all the while customers could come in to the store and build a relationship with the people bringing them their food. Now, most of the meat you get is packed in a centralized warehouse by low wage workers in dangerous conditions and the meat cutters are largely just stocking shelves. Oh and btw, the "Sprouts" brand products you see on their shelves are just relabled big name brands. The chicken is now from Foster Farm, the pork from Tyson, and the beef from JBS.
As a former Meat Cutter in the Meat Department of a Southern California Vons grocery store, I agree with your observations and can say that we too were seemingly headed the same direction as of when I left.
I remember knowing as a child (late 80s/early 90s) that working at the grocery store was a good job, & now people just see it all as entry-level, minimum wage type stuff instead of as a career. All of the stores we went to had people cutting & grinding meat. My mom would ask for particular cuts all the time. Her best friend's husband (they were about 10 years older than her) had excellent retirement benefits from Kroger & owned a nice house in a middle-class neighborhood in Nashville even before he married her, so on a single income. Thinking about this, there were so many jobs that used to be seen as important, as in we respected the people doing them, but as companies have devalued those people's labor by not paying them a true living. Nit just subsistence, wage, they've also worked insidiously on the culture so that *we* devalue those jobs and people.
I noticed the quality of meat in stores going down over the years until I gave up a few years back. And I don't mean how it looked or anything, because I'm not a meat expert... but my gut more and more often said, "I'm sorry... what is this? We're not doing this." I'll leave out the TMI... but as much as I miss meat, it's not worth the aftermath. I even tried the expensive hamburger that claimed to be from happy-hippy-dippy grass-fed free-range cows. No dice, but then who knows what kind of liberties a food label can take with the truth behind their product. Or maybe the cows sat right beside a field full of pesticide-laced corn. A few months ago I tried one last ditch attempt at salmon and even that was a big "nope." It was farmed salmon which I'm sure doesn't help, but that's all my local grocery store has. it's all about making money *right now* to the bigwigs, to heck with the customer's health, nevermind humanity's ability to stay on this planet indefinitely.
note for non southweaterners: sprouts is a health food grocery store chain. great produce with everything else more expensive than a giant chain store to comoensate
I used to work for a printing company that would print the labels and packaging for various products (including meat products). The label and packaging orders for both the generic & brand name versions of the same products would come from the very same companies and we would print one right after the other. This is how I learned that the generic products are exactly the same as the brand name products that they are sitting next to, on the shelves.
Cargill, Tyson, Smithfield own 95% of U.S meat production (industrial slaughter and distribution). Farmers today are either serfs or multinational corporations.
Most Americans don't understand that economic power structures shape politics. The idea that you can just vote every few years and get your way when billionaires are literally writing the laws and funding both parties is a joke.
Smithfield was acquired in 2013 by China's top meat producer, which is known today as WH Group. The $4.7 billion deal marked one of the biggest takeovers of an American business by a Chinese company at the time. I refuse to buy anything owned by any Chinese company.... located in this country.
@@matthewgagnon9426how is this a good comparison to having your employer provide your housing? we have children who are still dying now from all sorts of causes. maybe not in the same ways as under serfdom but not a good comparison point for debate.
I never ate strawberries my whole life because they tasted sour. I thought, ok I don't like strawberries. At 62 years old I started growing my own, for my husband. I tasted one. And now I eat strawberries. They are sweet!
Sometimes literally. I stopped getting ground beef for a couple of years if I could help it because I'd keep getting *bone chips* jammed between my teeth when I'd eat a homemade burger.
But he's making the wrong point about cantaloupe. It isn't grown in the US, they market muskmelon as cantaloupe here. The stuff in France actually is the real thing.
I've done software consulting for a lot of companies and the worst industry by far has been the meat packing/producing industry. One of the big companies were horrid to me and my co-workers from name calling, gaslighting, yelling, swearing at us, etc. I had to comfort co-workers who would break down crying almost every day while working with that customer. Sadly, because the project was big money, our upper management didn't want to push back on the customer's behavior and told us to just "bear with it for the sack of the company." I left half way through that project, lol.
I go through that too with customers. I finally told one to f**k off yesterday because I was in a state of real disassociation and I felt like nothing is real. Part of psychosis. The vompany should pay the copays for therapy.
"hey, it's hard we know, but it doesn't affect us directly so can you suck it up so we can make way more money than we'll pay you and your team? Thnx."
The merchandising part wrecked me. I used to be a merchandiser. Got laid off in 2008. I tried getting back into it, but the pay is awful. I was making $15/hr fresh out of high school doing merchandising. I got bonuses because I was good at it. After 2008, into present most are around 12/hr. Few stores are organized for local demands. The orders are based on algorithms which end up sending crates of lobster to places that live paycheck to paycheck. It's grotesque.
I used to do merchandising years ago, but left when I couldn’t do anymore while pregnant. I actually enjoyed it for the most part, but the pay sure wasn’t great lol.
Worked for a local pepsi distributor and got fired in my 3rd week because the lead had a "gut feeling i wouldn't work out through the summer" without any coaching or hands on training, and it was $18.50/hr in WA state ($16.XX minimum wage right now). Local Frito Lay and Coke started at like $22.50 lmao
We have an entire genre dedicated to showcasing what a dystopian nightmare technology will become under capitalism and the genre is called "Cyberpunk" heh
I agree, I was in the Navy even back in 1996, when I was in UK the difference was night and day, even candy like kit kats. I know all governments are corrrupt but the US has become so corrupt that it is starting not to be able to function.
Anytime I cook for myself with raw starting materials, and especially home grown produce I notice the same thing. Processed foods, and inbred stuff grown in a place with no ecosystem left can't provide what truly healthy food can, there's an infinite number of ways biochemistry can go, and our sense of smell literally evolved for billions of years to find good stuff. Also other great reasons for town size communities to be self sufficient is potentially eliminating the need to get rid of organic waste, lessening habitat loss, societal cohesion, and making sure most food grown gets eaten.
And the lack of food safety standards and the decrease in quality of living, life. And the wars, and poverty, and human suffering, and pollution, and corrupt sorry MORE CORRUPT politicians if you can even call them that, the warlords, the slavery, the "human and little people traffic cones", etc. etc. etc.
@@noahboucher125 It's not just restaurants either. The quality of many everyday goods and services have gone down. Furniture, electronics, tools, communication, infrastructure. Things in society are just made to order and don't last for the long-term.
@@empanada223 Yep. It's all cheaply made for the exact purpose of making consumers buy more. It's all about the money. Bad for consumers and bad for environment because of production requirements and the fact that it ends up in landfill. The only people who benefit are the ones selling it. It's really sad
Ive never been the biggest fan of peaches, so many other fruits I’d choose before a peach. 10 years ago i was visiting pike place and randomly bought some peaches and other fruits from one of the fruit stands there, and that peach blew me away. I have never had a better peach and have spent so long chasing that high… I’ve almost convinced myself i was crazy, but it may have been just one of those perfectly grown, expertly picked local pieces of fruit
Even an amateurly grown fruit, peach or not, can taste better than an industrially produced one. I was in the same boat as you when it came to peaches, and the ones my parents, who were never really farmers of any sort, started growing were the first I ever started eating. Sure, my mother used to maintain her own little veggie patch when I was a kid (not that it helped me eat my veggies), so planting a small fruit orchard was her dream, but while she picked out the trees for the orchard (I was in my late teens when she finally found an opportunity for it), I did the bulk of the labor. At least my father rented a backhoe, which made the digging easier (when you live on ground that has a LOT of limestone, it is not a good idea to go manual with digging), but for measuring, testing, planting, and then laying down a drip irrigation system, that was me (the system absolutely was entirely by me, including burying the lines to protect them from the scorching Texas sun). I will say that the orchard ended up being worth the increased water bill, and the drip irrigation, its automation, and only watering at times optimal for minimal water loss helped keep the bill from skyrocketing - more so when she started canning and selling the stuff on the side (my best friend's mother especially loves the figs that she grows). Granted, peaches are still far down my list of fruits I will go for (give me a decent pear or plum - and especially anything citrus, though none of that seedless crap - any day), but I also yearn for a decent peach too. Regardless, that taught me to seek out local wherever possible. Is it easy? No, and I really only started being able to after I left the US, and even what I found is probably not as local as I would like. Still, is it better than the industrial "fruits" sold in the US? Absolutely.
@@DavidRichardson153 good ripe peaches don't transport well: bruise easily, have short shelf life. So they are shipped green. I learned in Iowa about 1972 that a peach worth buying comes from a roadside stand. It pained me to read in a Zodiac news filler paragraph a few years later that the best peaches in Georgia are (were?) fed to hogs because they won't make it to consumers before they rot! If I walk up to a peach display in grocery store and don't smell them: I keep walking! A quote on a 1980 food and recipe themed calendar still sticks with me: "You may have to sit up all night to eat a perfect pear." Sorry, I don't have the attribution on that one.
@@robertacomstock3655 Yeah, I learned that long ago when it came to tomatoes. In fact, my father, for a time, tried to push me into taking a job that involved overseeing tomatoes being shipped as well as the artificial ripening of them. I did not then, mainly because finding a possible opening or route to it was impossible at the time, which was about 10 years ago, but I still would not take such a job, just for different reasons now, with what was discussed in the video being some of them. Unfortunately, this picking-green and artificial ripening, that is what you get when you consolidate everything into one source for thousands of stores. Sure, there are places where you can still get proper peaches - farmers markets tend to be the best choice - but that is not as reliable as I or anyone else would like, and of course, even they can come with their own issues (probably still better than the corporate and industrial... everything, but important to keep in mind). At this point, unless we get a torrent of anti-trust victories and monopoly breakups akin to the days of Teddy Roosevelt, we are just not going to see any real improvement.
PNW peaches also receive a solid amount of chill hours, which significantly improves their taste. I have had farm fresh peaches in Texas that taste nowhere as good as your standard store bought peaches in New Jersey. I mean... Eating a peach should be euphoric!
@@robertacomstock3655 back here, the wallmart food chaine supply have a gas chamber for the bananas to ripe them before shipping to the store. otherwise they are hard and green
Which is sad as baby carrots were one of the og food waste fixes as it was a great way of using broken and crooked carrots that could not be sold otherwise.
As a teacher, our school food is a joke. I teach in a district that receives free government provided breakfast for every student...I didn't realize Honey Buns counted as a grain much less part of a healthy breakfast. Learn something new everday.
I was teaching in a district that was basically 50% farming district, next to even MORE farming districts. All free lunches. The food was disgusting. I ate it and got food poisoning from it at least three times in a year. The healthy option included soggy cheeseburger and soggy fries with chips or a dessert on the side. Did you know canned sweetened strawberries on top of a cup of whipped cream is a fruit? And you know the fries are a veggie. Or how about a cup of ground beef and a bag of doritos? That's a main entrée, I'm not even joking.
@@EALoArt Same story. My favorite, are the moldy buns they serve as a side. The kids joke about it, I'm glad they find humor in the ridiculousness of the situation. I also love how we have a big nice kitchen, with all the modern appliances you could need. Yeah, we only use the ovens, to heat up all the frozen food we buy. Can confirm soggy everything!
I grew up on a farm in NW Iowa, and when I left after joining the army, small farmers were starting to go under. Large farming took over and now have waaaay too much power. The monopoly needs to be broken.
I too grew up in Iowa, left 40years ago when I joined the Army. I remember how the family farm was going under during the 1980s. I now live in Korea and work as a Government contractor. I have access to the Commissary and gave a good laugh when he was talking about strawberries. that was the first item that we noticed was really bad. Korean strawberries are amazingly good. Apples, kale, cabbage, the list goes on and on, so much better here. When all you get is bad you don't know it's bad.
Pueblo Colorado is the center of Colorado's local agriculture. From May to September, our farmers sell locally grown foods cheaper than the grocery stores. We buy in bulk and can about half for the winter.
We were just talking about this last night. Every time we travel we think food is going to be so expensive. We were especially shocked at how cheap it was to eat in Japan. I wonder what they think of our food prices here 😬
Japan is a special case, because their mom and pop restaurant margins are wildly thin. There's something called the ramen shop problem, where owners of known cheap cuisine (ramen, donburi, karage, etc) can barely afford their ingredients, but customers refuse to pay more. Economists and journalists are begging these owners to charge more lol But your point totally stands! I just think cheap Japanese food is an interesting example specifically.
it would be amazing to at least have the OPTION to go to a local grocery store and buy local foods, especially produce obviously, but meat and eggs too. almost everything in grocery stores is identical national super huge companies foods/brands only. if i didnt live in the suburbs with HOA I think i would eventually get some chickens, at least.
HOAs should be required to be an actual democracy like everything but structural maintenance voted on by everyone and you have to go door to door to get the people who didn’t vote to vote. Voters shouldn’t be able to downvote structural maintenance but the board shouldn’t be able to delay it either. Sadly they really are just replacement for absent community and community government
TL;DR: The problem isn't really the overall energy cycle of ethanol, it's why and how the US makes so much of it. Ethanol is for sure not helpful, but not quite for the reason mentioned. The main concern with burning fuel is how well its byproducts help the Earth retain the huge amounts of energy it's getting from the Sun all the time, not the (much smaller) amount of energy contained and then released by the fuel itself. On that front fossil fuel would still be "worse" since that's just solar energy from millions of years ago that could easily have been left in storage. The argument that gets made is that on the emissions front, ethanol is technically carbon neutral, but only if you just consider the fuel itself. All the CO2 released from burning ethanol came from the atmosphere in the last year or so as the plant grew. The issue like Austin started getting at is more about what we do to the land, water, and air in pursuit of growing and converting all the corn. It's not the energy in the ethanol and when it's released, it's the energy, waste, and environmental degradation required to get a gallon of the stuff in the first place. I'm mostly pointing this out because that technically-true bit about ethanol being carbon neutral is why it's so easy to push as an alternative and the energy gather/release thing in this episode might confuse the issue. Storing and using what we're getting from the sun in relatively short time spans is the direction we _want_ to go with energy, ethanol just happens to be a wildly roundabout and wasteful way to do it and _that's_ the real problem.
Can't help but feel a bit of Schadenfreunde to see one of the Brazilian barons that the US helped take over the goverment in the 64 coup is now doing in the US what they did in Brazil... We wanted to do rural reform, but the biggest aircraft carrier in the world came down and stopped us from doing it...
you got a new follower from mexico. I´ve been watchint some of the previos episodes for the past few days and I really enjoy the topics discussed and the way these are presented. it is informative and funny at the same time. keep up the good work
My understanding is in a lot of these cases the mega companies also control the feed production companies so they can wrestle out competition before it begins... Impossible to compete if the same food costs you 2x as much
In many cases, like in poultry, they are also the suppliers of the animals. So they can punish producers by selling them (and it absolutely pains me to say this) lower quality animals that they know will have a higher mortality rate.
Oh man, he was talking about the Batistas, Brazilian family that dominated Brazilian Beef before buying Pilgrim's Pride control in USA for about $ 3 bi. When our current president Lula was arrested, Batistas plea bargain was one of the most expected. Brazilian development bank (BNDES) financed the purchase of the American competitor. They got their plea bargain and were free of investigation, but nothing was said about BNDES or Lula's government actions, at the end they just throwed shit in the fan and said all 1800 politians they helped finance during election campaings were corrupt, and recorded the president at that moment in a fake conversation about a bribe of about $ 3 mi. Of course those cases were never proven, but they were free, and their only secret was kept safe. Smart guys and with the best lawyers, of course they knew if USA had a proof that they bought the American company with bribed financing, they would loose Pilgrim's. They are on the news again here in Brazil regarding their energy sector investments, about 2 weeks after buying a few bankrupted companies, the governemnt issued some legislation that implies electricity customers will pay for their companies debts and not them lol. But their biggest goal is still transfering their JBS meat company from Brazilian to American stock market looking for your market's huge valuation. Be aware of these guys
My body rejects JBS beef, as I learned by choking and spitting 90 % of restaurant beef orders in midwest USA. Started with grocery beef when I lived in Alaska in the aughts. Thanks, Hy - Vee for alternatives. Not sure about their burger in tubes, but Hy - Vee butcher counter has edible food AND ideas! (stuffed pork chops, 8 bratwurst flavors) And just as I learned to enjoy doing dozens of things with tofu, I saw an expose on evil colonial behavior of Cargill and get another source of consumer activist's guilt!
Speaking of "seedless lemons," I recently bought a bag of them at Trader Joes and they're awful. They're thick-skinned, bland, and barely have any juice at all.
Incredible episode. Horrifying yet also weirdly hopeful? Like, the problems are so big but the solutions could be so so popular if only people knew more. People power can fix this!
They also have more stringent laws against pesticides, and other chemical compounds in or on food. The EPA in the USA, and most agencies within our Government who are supposed to be protecting us don't. Our food is full of pesticides that are banned in other Countries.
I travel to the Netherlands once or twice a year to visit my best friend. The food is always substantially cheaper and tastes better, even the fast food.
I used to drive by that NM cattle thing between El Paso and Las Cruces twice a month when I lived over there. It does smell awful and it gives apocalyptic vibes. I feel so bad for the cattle and anyone who has to live there.
26:16 reminder of an old Drew Carey joke "Hey during the break they found water on Mars! You know what this means? Another bottle of $4 imported water."
grow as much of your own veggies as you can, once you get good at it, even a small back yard can give you a significant proportion of your veggies during your local growing season.
The junk food is starting to become unaffordable too. Our processed food is designed to be as addictive as possible. Now that they have people hooked on the food, they can increase the price and not worry about sales decreasing. It took great will power to put back the $6 bag of Doritos at Target yesterday, but I conquered my addiction and bought some nuts instead...probably produced by some nut baron, but what are you going to do?
Flamin Hots are one of my fav snacks and since I have bought them pretty regularly I see how much the price increased. Don’t have the exact dates on hand but sometime around the beginning of Covid, an 8.5oz bag of Xxtra Flamin Hots was $3.69 on Amazon Prime. About 2 years after that (aka 2ish years ago), they were $5.65. I think they’ve been around 5.3x for a while now. It’s crazy
But yeah doritos are getting hit by shrinkflation hard, they selling smaller bags half filled with air for the same price they used to sell big family sized bags. It's getting absurd
You’re not a snob about the apples. I grew up with apples in our backyard back on the East Coast. Then we moved away from that place. Now my parents are back on a farm in Northern California that has apple trees, and I bit into one the other day and it hit me. Here’s some of the key differences I noted. Fresh apples have a floral note to them, it’s complex the way honey is complex compared to granulated sugar. There are also tannins in the apple that dry your mouth ever so slightly and amplify the crunch. These all disappear as they age off the tree. Some apples are good shippers, like Granny Smith. Some are awful shippers, like Gravensteins, which used to be abundantly grown in Northern California, but have dwindled to a few gnarled trees on personal farms because there’s no market for apples that bruise to the point of being unrecognizable when shipped. They make great cider though.
American food never seized to shock me. I'm European (German/Czech) and grew up with the conviction, that cooking - especially as a central part of family life - is the most normal thing. I never really understood sentences like "I want a man who can cook" or e.g. cooking for a date as something special, as it is often shown in American Romcoms. I always thought the implication to be "He/she can cook EXTRAORDINARILY good" or something. Later, when I met more peers from America I realized how shockingly different it is over there. The peak was last year, when I visited a friend who was in New York for an exchange semester: The kitchen of her shared, shitty, overpriced flat seemed completely unused. After two days I understood why: normal cooking with fresh ingredients is impossibly expensive, like 2 to 10 times more expensive than just ordering or eating outside. And EVERYTHING is so oily! Never before have I seen oil/fat dripping from a pizza or Burger or even Chinese food... It was so dystopian. I gained around 5 Kilos (10 pounds) in less than two weeks! To be fair, love the pancakes for breakfast though.
That company scares me more than most. A massive piece of the global food supply is being actively controlled and manipulated by this single private family that we know basically nothing about. It's like if the Bush family never got directly involved in the political system.
Why in the hell doesn't the farm bill subsidizing healthy produce. No wonder why we are so unhealthy as a nation. Madness. They subsidize corn for ethanol. Our farming system is insane. It makes no real sense. Grrrr
And that's what frustrates me. Because why isn't that alone enough to start a food revolution in this country? The fact that these corporations in congress do not subsidize healthier foods or more produce is because they are also in cahoos/deals with the Pharmaceutical industry that has to make money from people being sick. But that's not true. We know that a healthier society leads to a more productive society, which means a greater economy so to me, there's something else going on some type of agenda as to why these corporations wants us to be sick and poor in america.
Look to Citizens United for so much of our political power NOW going to the greedy rich 1%. Big GREEDY business CEOs pull all the strings with the vast majority of politicians today.
@bsinita_wokeone To create a vicious cycle. The same greedy big business CEOs all sit on Board of Directors on OTHER corporations. We get sick from the food we eat, then we have no choice but to get Healthcare insurance from those sane greedy CEOS that also sit on United Healthcare, or Kaiser or Blue Cross. The greedy rich cover all their bases.
RE: Mike Rowe @~39:30, Loved watching Dirty Jobs with my Mom growing up. Finding out Rowe was a union busting class traitor was so disappointing. Great video, thanks for sharing Worker solidarity forever ✊
I daily check news headlines via Google. Very common are "Food recalls." Everything from microplastics found in all brands of bottle water to what's VERY common now: Listeria and Salmonella in ALL KINDS of foods on the market!! Yummy. 😫🤮
The criminalization of self growing and butchering chicken or cattle has many consequences such as the criminalization of Muslims and other cultures where they have a moral objection against factory meats
funny thing. due to my local winco being employee owned. most everything there is dirty cheap and very nice. hell at night when its slow they let the homeless in to get what they need like water and non perishables but winco is just that a west coast only store. and living in a city were the first few started in california and now i think the furthest one is in new mexico... hard to say. honestly no idea how the backend works
Omg. I miss WinCo! They also do not accept credit cards, only debit, cash, and check. This keeps their payment processing costs super low and they pass those savings on to customers.
I have to wonder how they treat their employees--none of them look happy. They all look beaten up. Once, some years back, a small handful of employees tried to go on strike against their workplace situation. Yes, Winco has the best prices, freshest produce--NOTHING like it at Costco where there is ALOT of mold in their frozen fruits and veggies!!! But, there is alot of suffering with their employees. They don't stick around very long, either. It didn't use to be that way long time ago.
@andreah6379 sadly depends on states. California as I've worked there it's pretty good and there plans are very nice tho this is California were we treat works a lot better then say flordia or texas
Fiji water ... and meanwhile there are people in Fiji who have a very difficult time finding regular supplies of fresh water. In Mexico, Coca-cola drains the fresh water supply, uses that water to make carbonated and other drinks sweetened with high fructose corn syrup housed in plastic bottles (that create piles of non-biodegradable plastic trash), and sells it back to people in Mexico (and the U.S.). It's the same price or CHEAPER to buy a bottle of coke in some places than to buy a bottle of water. All these monolithic companies spend more on advertising (more like dishonest propaganda) than they do on paying employees or upgrading equipment. Thank you both for this conversation!!!!!
Dude is straight up Marxian in the way he talks about his 'bubba barons brigade', I love it. That's the kind of obsessive fascination we need if we are ever going to deconstruct these oppressive exploitative systems silently infecting every facet of our existence, unironically creating a second 'do we have freewill' discussion but on a practical level, i.e. the illusion of choice observation. The conversations around and about the agricultural industry is a perfect example of what I refer to as 'The Great Unravling', in that the revelation of one unethical exploitative practices and strategies only leads to another and another and so on. Therefore, making it a logistical nightmare to implement any degree of change let alone improvement to any one system without disrupting another. Processed food that comes in a package with an ingredients list is far cheaper to produce and has more arms of revenue generation and automation potential than whole organic food that requires more human hands in order to get that food to market. Then there's the pharmaceutical industry that benefits from the diabetes you will inevitably contract as a direct result of the food you have access to. I have to make myself end it here, because I've already reached the point of that great unraveling I mentioned, and the video ended like 5 minutes ago. plus I need to pee...
@@gabe6646 that's what I strive for with every comment, even if it's a negative topic or if someone disagrees with me I hope they at least had a good chuckle.
I would love if anyone has more videos, resources on this subject. It's definitely something I realize I knew next to little about and would love to learn more. Great video and topic guys!
Don't miss the part where he says Monopolists fund Fascism! Just keep repeating that over and over to anyone that cares about democracy (or any semblance of it)
I am watching what is left of a local based food system disappearing in my area, we have a few farms trying to hold on and survive outside of the monopoly system but it’s been hard watching them struggle.
Here in NC the hog shit becomes a big problem during hurricanes. That on top of the undrinkable water because of Chemours toxic waste dumps into the river makes me confused why people would want to retire here
Industry. All this nonsense is for industry. Seedless means less steps and equipment in the manufacturing process. What humans want or like in lemons is totally irrelevant
Something I don't think people take time to look at . You can make 90 loaves of bread out of a bushel of wheat at 4.00 dollars a loaf that's 360.00 dollars a bushel an they paid the farmer maybe 5.00 dollars a bushel for the wheat you can find this amount of inflated profit in all the food industry ❤❤❤😊
I spoke to someone who lost her pension after working at a chicken packing plant for 30 years. The factory went under. I knocked that door in Waterloo, Iowa. I bet that was connected to the consolidation under Reagan.
This was a great interview, I learned so much. Such a horrifying industry. You should read THE INVISIBLE DOCTRINE by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchinson. It's about neoliberalism and I found it similarly horrifying. But it's a very well-written polemic. Would make a great episode if you could get the authors on!
Not even 6 minutes in and Adam is having a hard time not pointing out that the problem is the means of production have been siezed from the laborers, i feel his pain
Also some other amazing reads detailing the absurdity of our food system: This Land and Meatonomics. This Land... It really blew my mind. I had to put the book down for several days at a time because it was just so upsetting.
Ideally, food is a human right and not a product. We should not trust markets where big landowners and companies prefer to burn part of their crops rather than take a small decrease on their profits.
I work a job where weight loss meds come up all the time, and its very disheartening for people in the team chat to disparage the people who are seeking those meds. Like, yeah, a lot of them are really mean to us I will not defend that there's no excuse to treat customer service workers the way our customers treat us, but them being overweight isn't something to make fun of. Most of them are struggling financially and live in a country where the food they have access to isn't good. A lot of them live in food deserts or areas where the fresh food their stores do get are almost rotting, and often don't have the time to make healthy homecooked meals regularly. And it feels like every day me and my co workers have this same exact conversation.
I would love to see Austin Frerick in conversation with Chris van Tulleken, who wrote "Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food ." It would be fascinating!
from a canadian perspective, a lot of these kind of things are slowly dying here and more so going with local places that can supply local farms. the food quality of a lot of these things are so much better and muuuch cheaper comparitavly since the amount of transport alone is nomrally the big price difference between them
Laura Scudders was a California snack manufacturer. Potato chips, corn chips, etc. (pretty good BBQ potato chips, for the time.) Smuckers brand PB that I get now locally, packaging as I remember in SoCal, renamed.
1:00:00 Adam, the first-principles (of physic, here) failure of any bio-fuel, like ethanol, is that plants have solar energy conversion efficiencies in the low single digits while photovoltaics are in the high teens and lower 20s percent. Then, on top of that, there's all the other innumerable inputs and outputs versus PV's fairly numerable, and better, energy-wise, inputs and outputs. There might be niches, but under an economy wide fossil carbon tax and no subsidies, biofuel has very little room to exist.
We need some, as it's a better engine anti knock additive than lead! This was learned by "The Man Who Killed Millions" or "Poisoned Everyone" or the like, on You Tube. Forgot presenter / channel. Dude developed Nitrogen fertilizer, Zyklon B, and other fun stuff. Reported his results that ethanol worked much better but lead was much cheaper. Yeah, the carbon footprint in, to energy output extracted is indeed abysmal.
57:55 only cantaloupe worth buying in America is from the "burbs" of Pecos,TX - limited season & is actually sweet & juicy! I've been a cantaloupe snob my entire life because of those melons. There are some other small local growers in my AR area that do produce melons just as good but it ends up being random luck at at farmers market
Fruits, veggies, meat, used to be tasty before they all started to be changed to fit the industrial and distribution systems. Apples, berries, carrots, pears, peaches all used to taste amazing before they started messing with them. What they've done to tomatoes is criminal!
Our country right now seems intent on blaming victims for their problems when you can pinpoint individuals and companies that have high jacked America.
I only buy watermelon in the summer. Have always waited eagerly for summer to enjoy watermelon in season and peak flavor. I bought a watermelon last week and it has zero flavor. If it wasn't for the Tajin I've been dousing it in, it would be almost inedible.
Tell me if I am wrong but, it is my understanding is that bug meal can be added to any foods and labled only as "natural ingredients." I think the general population would prefer that bug protein, meal, or other bug content intentionally added to food be specified as bugs on the food label. I don't think that is unreasonable.
Really now, it shouldn't even be "a thing," anymore. Only because hate against this group has risen with the reichwing do such words even raise our eyebrows. I just want to go back to a more live-&-let-live country...
@andreah6379 100% agree. Hense me pointing out that it's casual. No concern about it, no further discussion. This is what a healthy conversation looks like.
I was drawn to the title of the clip because yesterday I shopped at Jewel/Osco and everything is at least twice the price during Covid 19. My other complaint is that both guys talked way too fast. Unfortunately my mind runs a little slower than theirs, but the subject does need uncovering.
Get 20% off DeleteMe US consumer plans when you go to joindeleteme.com/Adam and use promo code ADAM at checkout. DeleteMe International Plans: international.joindeleteme.com/
Get up to 60% off your Babbel subscription at Babbel.com/FACTUALLY. Rules and restrictions may apply.
I highly recommend an episode on academic science. The capitalistic monopolization of Big PI and paper mills that control the narrative of the truths of our universe. Along with the abuse of trainee scientists. It would definitely be eye opening for someone that isn’t aware of it.
debes hablar español durante el anuncuo por Babel para demonstrar lo que tu has aprendido
Lina Kahn was appointed chair of the F.T.C. by President Biden, and she has been valiantly fighting against industry consolidation and anticompetitive practices.
Please make people aware of the President who appointed her because Donald Trump would replace her, if he comes anywhere near the White House, again.
@@adammiranda384 HAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHA
Hey want to have your mind really blown? Look up Wirtz pump then read this.. I figured out how to generate electricity using gravity, water and a design called a wirtz pump if you pump up to a second tank and then pipe it to fall driving the pump its perpetual now offset via chain drive the paddles above the water line and use buckets instead of paddles to mitigate loss if you incorporate rainfall into the top tank you can find nominal values that allow the system to run for the life of the material. you can have basically free electricity after the cost for material which I have gotten down under 500 dollars using an old washer motor and this system can be built to spec based on need or simply to run a fridge and lights which would be the cheapest option for 500 dollars. Much love and sun yall I am giving this information away to do the most good I would like you to peer review this please. Will you please peer review my system and help me show people free electricity? I will be live frequently to answer questions everything is Fair Use and I already did once with a minimal explanation I will do better next time I have cptsd hooah much love Mr Conover I appreciate your time and consideration. I have put enormous effort and time into developing this in a viably cheap way also, I love life very much but I love yall more. Thank you for helping me realize I can jump out of the jar.
I used to be Meat Cutter at Sprouts until a couple years ago and this interview is dead on for everything I experienced before leaving.
When I started working in the grocery store industry in the mid 10s, a lot of the old folks were retiring to great big retirement plans in nice houses. They used to say that once you got in at your local grocery store, you were set for life. I came to be in the Meat Department because they were the highest paid outside of store management.
Over my years at sprouts, I watched them condense their services in what i imagine was an attempt to sell the company and cut labor. We went from cutting a wide selection of various meats and being one of the only local grocery chains that made our own sausage to, at the time of my leaving in 2021, largely receiving pre-cut Meat and not grinding any meat in store.
The meat and grocery industry used to be a staple of the middle class. People could come work at a local grocery chain, join the Union, and make great money all the while customers could come in to the store and build a relationship with the people bringing them their food. Now, most of the meat you get is packed in a centralized warehouse by low wage workers in dangerous conditions and the meat cutters are largely just stocking shelves.
Oh and btw, the "Sprouts" brand products you see on their shelves are just relabled big name brands. The chicken is now from Foster Farm, the pork from Tyson, and the beef from JBS.
As a former Meat Cutter in the Meat Department of a Southern California Vons grocery store, I agree with your observations and can say that we too were seemingly headed the same direction as of when I left.
I remember knowing as a child (late 80s/early 90s) that working at the grocery store was a good job, & now people just see it all as entry-level, minimum wage type stuff instead of as a career. All of the stores we went to had people cutting & grinding meat. My mom would ask for particular cuts all the time. Her best friend's husband (they were about 10 years older than her) had excellent retirement benefits from Kroger & owned a nice house in a middle-class neighborhood in Nashville even before he married her, so on a single income. Thinking about this, there were so many jobs that used to be seen as important, as in we respected the people doing them, but as companies have devalued those people's labor by not paying them a true living. Nit just subsistence, wage, they've also worked insidiously on the culture so that *we* devalue those jobs and people.
I noticed the quality of meat in stores going down over the years until I gave up a few years back. And I don't mean how it looked or anything, because I'm not a meat expert... but my gut more and more often said, "I'm sorry... what is this? We're not doing this." I'll leave out the TMI... but as much as I miss meat, it's not worth the aftermath. I even tried the expensive hamburger that claimed to be from happy-hippy-dippy grass-fed free-range cows. No dice, but then who knows what kind of liberties a food label can take with the truth behind their product. Or maybe the cows sat right beside a field full of pesticide-laced corn.
A few months ago I tried one last ditch attempt at salmon and even that was a big "nope." It was farmed salmon which I'm sure doesn't help, but that's all my local grocery store has. it's all about making money *right now* to the bigwigs, to heck with the customer's health, nevermind humanity's ability to stay on this planet indefinitely.
note for non southweaterners: sprouts is a health food grocery store chain. great produce with everything else more expensive than a giant chain store to comoensate
I used to work for a printing company that would print the labels and packaging for various products (including meat products). The label and packaging orders for both the generic & brand name versions of the same products would come from the very same companies and we would print one right after the other. This is how I learned that the generic products are exactly the same as the brand name products that they are sitting next to, on the shelves.
Cargill, Tyson, Smithfield own 95% of U.S meat production (industrial slaughter and distribution). Farmers today are either serfs or multinational corporations.
Serfs had a place to live and food to eat. These Modern day lords don't even give us that
Most Americans don't understand that economic power structures shape politics. The idea that you can just vote every few years and get your way when billionaires are literally writing the laws and funding both parties is a joke.
Smithfield was acquired in 2013 by China's top meat producer, which is known today as WH Group. The $4.7 billion deal marked one of the biggest takeovers of an American business by a Chinese company at the time. I refuse to buy anything owned by any Chinese company.... located in this country.
@@ShubhamBhushanCC Serfs also had huge numbers of their children die.
@@matthewgagnon9426how is this a good comparison to having your employer provide your housing? we have children who are still dying now from all sorts of causes. maybe not in the same ways as under serfdom but not a good comparison point for debate.
I never ate strawberries my whole life because they tasted sour. I thought, ok I don't like strawberries. At 62 years old I started growing my own, for my husband. I tasted one. And now I eat strawberries. They are sweet!
Love this guy even though he is a reporter of impending doom. He needs to investigate every system in America. Will be buying the book!
Adam: "Baby Carrots are whittled carrots."
My brain: "Yes, baby carrots are widdle carrots."
🤣🤣🤣
😂😂😂
The widdlest of carrots
😂😂😂
Well, they do save the shavings and bag them as grated carrots.
"When you cut corners so much, at some point you're cutting bone"
Damn, that's a good line
Sometimes literally. I stopped getting ground beef for a couple of years if I could help it because I'd keep getting *bone chips* jammed between my teeth when I'd eat a homemade burger.
But he's making the wrong point about cantaloupe. It isn't grown in the US, they market muskmelon as cantaloupe here. The stuff in France actually is the real thing.
I've done software consulting for a lot of companies and the worst industry by far has been the meat packing/producing industry. One of the big companies were horrid to me and my co-workers from name calling, gaslighting, yelling, swearing at us, etc. I had to comfort co-workers who would break down crying almost every day while working with that customer. Sadly, because the project was big money, our upper management didn't want to push back on the customer's behavior and told us to just "bear with it for the sack of the company." I left half way through that project, lol.
I go through that too with customers. I finally told one to f**k off yesterday because I was in a state of real disassociation and I felt like nothing is real. Part of psychosis. The vompany should pay the copays for therapy.
Name the company or SHUTUP, coward.
It's so hard finding work when you're smart enough to see the bullshit from the inside.
"hey, it's hard we know, but it doesn't affect us directly so can you suck it up so we can make way more money than we'll pay you and your team? Thnx."
If you left, why not name the client? Don't other people deserve to know potential abusers?
The merchandising part wrecked me. I used to be a merchandiser. Got laid off in 2008. I tried getting back into it, but the pay is awful. I was making $15/hr fresh out of high school doing merchandising. I got bonuses because I was good at it. After 2008, into present most are around 12/hr. Few stores are organized for local demands. The orders are based on algorithms which end up sending crates of lobster to places that live paycheck to paycheck. It's grotesque.
I used to do merchandising years ago, but left when I couldn’t do anymore while pregnant. I actually enjoyed it for the most part, but the pay sure wasn’t great lol.
Worked for a local pepsi distributor and got fired in my 3rd week because the lead had a "gut feeling i wouldn't work out through the summer" without any coaching or hands on training, and it was $18.50/hr in WA state ($16.XX minimum wage right now). Local Frito Lay and Coke started at like $22.50 lmao
It's insane work and hours for so little
We have an entire genre dedicated to showcasing what a dystopian nightmare technology will become under capitalism and the genre is called "Cyberpunk" heh
So sorry!
"We're paying more for garbage."
Capitalism.
Anytime I travel outside the US, fist thing I notice is the food quality difference.
I agree, I was in the Navy even back in 1996, when I was in UK the difference was night and day, even candy like kit kats. I know all governments are corrrupt but the US has become so corrupt that it is starting not to be able to function.
Anytime I cook for myself with raw starting materials, and especially home grown produce I notice the same thing. Processed foods, and inbred stuff grown in a place with no ecosystem left can't provide what truly healthy food can, there's an infinite number of ways biochemistry can go, and our sense of smell literally evolved for billions of years to find good stuff. Also other great reasons for town size communities to be self sufficient is potentially eliminating the need to get rid of organic waste, lessening habitat loss, societal cohesion, and making sure most food grown gets eaten.
And the lack of food safety standards and the decrease in quality of living, life. And the wars, and poverty, and human suffering, and pollution, and corrupt sorry MORE CORRUPT politicians if you can even call them that, the warlords, the slavery, the "human and little people traffic cones", etc. etc. etc.
I can't travel to another state, never mind another country!
I don't know how people do it....
Germany here, you have lots of excellent food... but also a lot of crap. The bread in your stores vs here... but the same kind of product.
Its not just that its more expensive, its also worse. Its basically poison.
I went to a restaurant with my dad recently and as a 70 year old man, he pointed out that food quality has gone way down in the past 20 years
@@noahboucher125 It's not just restaurants either. The quality of many everyday goods and services have gone down. Furniture, electronics, tools, communication, infrastructure. Things in society are just made to order and don't last for the long-term.
I was going to comment the same.
Yep! People from other nations come eat American food and they all get sick. Stomach aches and nausea… it’s bc the quality is so poor.
@@empanada223 Yep. It's all cheaply made for the exact purpose of making consumers buy more. It's all about the money. Bad for consumers and bad for environment because of production requirements and the fact that it ends up in landfill. The only people who benefit are the ones selling it. It's really sad
Ive never been the biggest fan of peaches, so many other fruits I’d choose before a peach. 10 years ago i was visiting pike place and randomly bought some peaches and other fruits from one of the fruit stands there, and that peach blew me away. I have never had a better peach and have spent so long chasing that high… I’ve almost convinced myself i was crazy, but it may have been just one of those perfectly grown, expertly picked local pieces of fruit
Even an amateurly grown fruit, peach or not, can taste better than an industrially produced one. I was in the same boat as you when it came to peaches, and the ones my parents, who were never really farmers of any sort, started growing were the first I ever started eating.
Sure, my mother used to maintain her own little veggie patch when I was a kid (not that it helped me eat my veggies), so planting a small fruit orchard was her dream, but while she picked out the trees for the orchard (I was in my late teens when she finally found an opportunity for it), I did the bulk of the labor. At least my father rented a backhoe, which made the digging easier (when you live on ground that has a LOT of limestone, it is not a good idea to go manual with digging), but for measuring, testing, planting, and then laying down a drip irrigation system, that was me (the system absolutely was entirely by me, including burying the lines to protect them from the scorching Texas sun). I will say that the orchard ended up being worth the increased water bill, and the drip irrigation, its automation, and only watering at times optimal for minimal water loss helped keep the bill from skyrocketing - more so when she started canning and selling the stuff on the side (my best friend's mother especially loves the figs that she grows).
Granted, peaches are still far down my list of fruits I will go for (give me a decent pear or plum - and especially anything citrus, though none of that seedless crap - any day), but I also yearn for a decent peach too. Regardless, that taught me to seek out local wherever possible. Is it easy? No, and I really only started being able to after I left the US, and even what I found is probably not as local as I would like. Still, is it better than the industrial "fruits" sold in the US? Absolutely.
@@DavidRichardson153 good ripe peaches don't transport well: bruise easily, have short shelf life.
So they are shipped green.
I learned in Iowa about 1972 that a peach worth buying comes from a roadside stand.
It pained me to read in a Zodiac news filler paragraph a few years later that the best peaches in Georgia are (were?) fed to hogs because they won't make it to consumers before they rot!
If I walk up to a peach display in grocery store and don't smell them: I keep walking!
A quote on a 1980 food and recipe themed calendar still sticks with me: "You may have to sit up all night to eat a perfect pear." Sorry, I don't have the attribution on that one.
@@robertacomstock3655 Yeah, I learned that long ago when it came to tomatoes. In fact, my father, for a time, tried to push me into taking a job that involved overseeing tomatoes being shipped as well as the artificial ripening of them. I did not then, mainly because finding a possible opening or route to it was impossible at the time, which was about 10 years ago, but I still would not take such a job, just for different reasons now, with what was discussed in the video being some of them.
Unfortunately, this picking-green and artificial ripening, that is what you get when you consolidate everything into one source for thousands of stores. Sure, there are places where you can still get proper peaches - farmers markets tend to be the best choice - but that is not as reliable as I or anyone else would like, and of course, even they can come with their own issues (probably still better than the corporate and industrial... everything, but important to keep in mind). At this point, unless we get a torrent of anti-trust victories and monopoly breakups akin to the days of Teddy Roosevelt, we are just not going to see any real improvement.
PNW peaches also receive a solid amount of chill hours, which significantly improves their taste.
I have had farm fresh peaches in Texas that taste nowhere as good as your standard store bought peaches in New Jersey.
I mean... Eating a peach should be euphoric!
@@robertacomstock3655 back here, the wallmart food chaine supply have a gas chamber for the bananas to ripe them before shipping to the store.
otherwise they are hard and green
I would love to watch a video of you two going through the grocery store commenting on everything!
This!!!👏👏👏👏👏🙌
Why don’t we see reports like this on corporate media? $3 candy bars! $7 eggs! See: record profits for all consolidated industries.
Where are you buying eggs for $7? I just bought a dozen for $3.49. If I had gone last week they were $1.99
@@fefelarue2948the pasture raised ones are about $7
@@fefelarue2948Regions, choice of store, life? Thats missing the point
Advertising. MSM won’t bite the hand that feeds them.
Last Week Tonight has covered similar things.
Baby carrots were my favorite snack in the early 2000s but the flavor is just gone now, even the texture is kind of grainy
Same my friend. Exact same.
grow your own! carrots are easy to grow in buckets.
SAME MAN
Which is sad as baby carrots were one of the og food waste fixes as it was a great way of using broken and crooked carrots that could not be sold otherwise.
Yeah, me too. I don't eat them anymore
As a teacher, our school food is a joke. I teach in a district that receives free government provided breakfast for every student...I didn't realize Honey Buns counted as a grain much less part of a healthy breakfast. Learn something new everday.
Regan approved ketchup as a school vegetable during his admin.
I was teaching in a district that was basically 50% farming district, next to even MORE farming districts. All free lunches. The food was disgusting. I ate it and got food poisoning from it at least three times in a year. The healthy option included soggy cheeseburger and soggy fries with chips or a dessert on the side.
Did you know canned sweetened strawberries on top of a cup of whipped cream is a fruit? And you know the fries are a veggie. Or how about a cup of ground beef and a bag of doritos? That's a main entrée, I'm not even joking.
Honey buns… seriously?
@@el_chavez Yelp, and pizza with what we've dubbed plastic cheese. It's sad to see the crap we feed our young people.
@@EALoArt Same story. My favorite, are the moldy buns they serve as a side. The kids joke about it, I'm glad they find humor in the ridiculousness of the situation. I also love how we have a big nice kitchen, with all the modern appliances you could need. Yeah, we only use the ovens, to heat up all the frozen food we buy. Can confirm soggy everything!
It's so interesting that Katie Porter is the only one I've heard address this as a national security issue. Think about it.
Agree 100%. I'd love to see Katie Porter as president.
It is, and more people need to realize it.
I thank God for that woman every day.
Absolutely love, Katie Porter!!!!!!!!
Look at more Perfect Union Videoes and the Work of Lina Kahn at the Biden Harris FTC and the AGRASTATS Scandal
I grew up on a farm in NW Iowa, and when I left after joining the army, small farmers were starting to go under. Large farming took over and now have waaaay too much power. The monopoly needs to be broken.
I too grew up in Iowa, left 40years ago when I joined the Army. I remember how the family farm was going under during the 1980s. I now live in Korea and work as a Government contractor. I have access to the Commissary and gave a good laugh when he was talking about strawberries. that was the first item that we noticed was really bad. Korean strawberries are amazingly good. Apples, kale, cabbage, the list goes on and on, so much better here. When all you get is bad you don't know it's bad.
Pueblo Colorado is the center of Colorado's local agriculture. From May to September, our farmers sell locally grown foods cheaper than the grocery stores. We buy in bulk and can about half for the winter.
We were just talking about this last night. Every time we travel we think food is going to be so expensive. We were especially shocked at how cheap it was to eat in Japan.
I wonder what they think of our food prices here 😬
Japan is a special case, because their mom and pop restaurant margins are wildly thin. There's something called the ramen shop problem, where owners of known cheap cuisine (ramen, donburi, karage, etc) can barely afford their ingredients, but customers refuse to pay more. Economists and journalists are begging these owners to charge more lol
But your point totally stands! I just think cheap Japanese food is an interesting example specifically.
"We are paying more for garbage" YES, ty for saying that.
it would be amazing to at least have the OPTION to go to a local grocery store and buy local foods, especially produce obviously, but meat and eggs too. almost everything in grocery stores is identical national super huge companies foods/brands only. if i didnt live in the suburbs with HOA I think i would eventually get some chickens, at least.
HOAs should be required to be an actual democracy like everything but structural maintenance voted on by everyone and you have to go door to door to get the people who didn’t vote to vote.
Voters shouldn’t be able to downvote structural maintenance but the board shouldn’t be able to delay it either.
Sadly they really are just replacement for absent community and community government
TL;DR: The problem isn't really the overall energy cycle of ethanol, it's why and how the US makes so much of it.
Ethanol is for sure not helpful, but not quite for the reason mentioned. The main concern with burning fuel is how well its byproducts help the Earth retain the huge amounts of energy it's getting from the Sun all the time, not the (much smaller) amount of energy contained and then released by the fuel itself. On that front fossil fuel would still be "worse" since that's just solar energy from millions of years ago that could easily have been left in storage. The argument that gets made is that on the emissions front, ethanol is technically carbon neutral, but only if you just consider the fuel itself. All the CO2 released from burning ethanol came from the atmosphere in the last year or so as the plant grew. The issue like Austin started getting at is more about what we do to the land, water, and air in pursuit of growing and converting all the corn. It's not the energy in the ethanol and when it's released, it's the energy, waste, and environmental degradation required to get a gallon of the stuff in the first place.
I'm mostly pointing this out because that technically-true bit about ethanol being carbon neutral is why it's so easy to push as an alternative and the energy gather/release thing in this episode might confuse the issue. Storing and using what we're getting from the sun in relatively short time spans is the direction we _want_ to go with energy, ethanol just happens to be a wildly roundabout and wasteful way to do it and _that's_ the real problem.
Thank you for having this guest. I got his book roughly 17 minutes into your podcast.
Can't help but feel a bit of Schadenfreunde to see one of the Brazilian barons that the US helped take over the goverment in the 64 coup is now doing in the US what they did in Brazil...
We wanted to do rural reform, but the biggest aircraft carrier in the world came down and stopped us from doing it...
you got a new follower from mexico.
I´ve been watchint some of the previos episodes for the past few days and I really enjoy the topics discussed and the way these are presented.
it is informative and funny at the same time.
keep up the good work
My understanding is in a lot of these cases the mega companies also control the feed production companies so they can wrestle out competition before it begins...
Impossible to compete if the same food costs you 2x as much
In many cases, like in poultry, they are also the suppliers of the animals. So they can punish producers by selling them (and it absolutely pains me to say this) lower quality animals that they know will have a higher mortality rate.
Oh man, he was talking about the Batistas, Brazilian family that dominated Brazilian Beef before buying Pilgrim's Pride control in USA for about $ 3 bi. When our current president Lula was arrested, Batistas plea bargain was one of the most expected. Brazilian development bank (BNDES) financed the purchase of the American competitor. They got their plea bargain and were free of investigation, but nothing was said about BNDES or Lula's government actions, at the end they just throwed shit in the fan and said all 1800 politians they helped finance during election campaings were corrupt, and recorded the president at that moment in a fake conversation about a bribe of about $ 3 mi. Of course those cases were never proven, but they were free, and their only secret was kept safe. Smart guys and with the best lawyers, of course they knew if USA had a proof that they bought the American company with bribed financing, they would loose Pilgrim's. They are on the news again here in Brazil regarding their energy sector investments, about 2 weeks after buying a few bankrupted companies, the governemnt issued some legislation that implies electricity customers will pay for their companies debts and not them lol. But their biggest goal is still transfering their JBS meat company from Brazilian to American stock market looking for your market's huge valuation. Be aware of these guys
My body rejects JBS beef, as I learned by choking and spitting 90 % of restaurant beef orders in midwest USA. Started with grocery beef when I lived in Alaska in the aughts.
Thanks, Hy - Vee for alternatives. Not sure about their burger in tubes, but Hy - Vee butcher counter has edible food AND ideas! (stuffed pork chops, 8 bratwurst flavors)
And just as I learned to enjoy doing dozens of things with tofu, I saw an expose on evil colonial behavior of Cargill and get another source of consumer activist's guilt!
Speaking of "seedless lemons," I recently bought a bag of them at Trader Joes and they're awful. They're thick-skinned, bland, and barely have any juice at all.
Probably opened, plucked the seeds out, closed, and repacked as seedless
@@rcavprojects LMAO, I wouldn't put it past 'em!
And they’re almost bitter right??
I stopped buying from TJ after I came home from buying a single batch of spinach with a dead green frog hidden in it. 🤮
Incredible episode. Horrifying yet also weirdly hopeful? Like, the problems are so big but the solutions could be so so popular if only people knew more. People power can fix this!
Food in Europe tastes better and is better for you.
Yep! Regulations work, actually.
They also have more stringent laws against pesticides, and other chemical compounds in or on food. The EPA in the USA, and most agencies within our Government who are supposed to be protecting us don't. Our food is full of pesticides that are banned in other Countries.
I travel to the Netherlands once or twice a year to visit my best friend. The food is always substantially cheaper and tastes better, even the fast food.
Funny you mention maple syrup, I'm a Quebecer and there's literally a maple syrup monopoly in Quebec.
I used to drive by that NM cattle thing between El Paso and Las Cruces twice a month when I lived over there. It does smell awful and it gives apocalyptic vibes. I feel so bad for the cattle and anyone who has to live there.
“Gay little sassy lines” 😂 Well, that sold me. Buying the book now 😂
26:16 reminder of an old Drew Carey joke "Hey during the break they found water on Mars! You know what this means? Another bottle of $4 imported water."
grow as much of your own veggies as you can, once you get good at it, even a small back yard can give you a significant proportion of your veggies during your local growing season.
The junk food is starting to become unaffordable too. Our processed food is designed to be as addictive as possible. Now that they have people hooked on the food, they can increase the price and not worry about sales decreasing. It took great will power to put back the $6 bag of Doritos at Target yesterday, but I conquered my addiction and bought some nuts instead...probably produced by some nut baron, but what are you going to do?
Nuts are controlled by the cartels and olive oil has a mafia. Guess the organized crime had to pick something else once alcohol was legalized.
Yes! Tell me why I went to the corner store on my lunch break and a medium sized bag of chips was $6! And the bag was mostly air!
Flamin Hots are one of my fav snacks and since I have bought them pretty regularly I see how much the price increased. Don’t have the exact dates on hand but sometime around the beginning of Covid, an 8.5oz bag of Xxtra Flamin Hots was $3.69 on Amazon Prime. About 2 years after that (aka 2ish years ago), they were $5.65. I think they’ve been around 5.3x for a while now. It’s crazy
Nut Baron... idk why but I kept cracking up everytime he said that phrase 😂
But yeah doritos are getting hit by shrinkflation hard, they selling smaller bags half filled with air for the same price they used to sell big family sized bags. It's getting absurd
You’re not a snob about the apples. I grew up with apples in our backyard back on the East Coast. Then we moved away from that place. Now my parents are back on a farm in Northern California that has apple trees, and I bit into one the other day and it hit me. Here’s some of the key differences I noted. Fresh apples have a floral note to them, it’s complex the way honey is complex compared to granulated sugar. There are also tannins in the apple that dry your mouth ever so slightly and amplify the crunch. These all disappear as they age off the tree. Some apples are good shippers, like Granny Smith. Some are awful shippers, like Gravensteins, which used to be abundantly grown in Northern California, but have dwindled to a few gnarled trees on personal farms because there’s no market for apples that bruise to the point of being unrecognizable when shipped. They make great cider though.
All the more reason to garden however possible, even if it's just a pot with a tomato plant in a windowsill
Community Garden gang
Well. I'm filled with incoherent, impotent rage. How 'bout you?
Same bro. When I stop being transient, I'm going to grow as much of my own food as possible. In the between time looking for local solutions
Situation Normal, All Fudged Up!
Click click 😊
American food never seized to shock me. I'm European (German/Czech) and grew up with the conviction, that cooking - especially as a central part of family life - is the most normal thing. I never really understood sentences like "I want a man who can cook" or e.g. cooking for a date as something special, as it is often shown in American Romcoms. I always thought the implication to be "He/she can cook EXTRAORDINARILY good" or something.
Later, when I met more peers from America I realized how shockingly different it is over there. The peak was last year, when I visited a friend who was in New York for an exchange semester: The kitchen of her shared, shitty, overpriced flat seemed completely unused. After two days I understood why: normal cooking with fresh ingredients is impossibly expensive, like 2 to 10 times more expensive than just ordering or eating outside. And EVERYTHING is so oily! Never before have I seen oil/fat dripping from a pizza or Burger or even Chinese food... It was so dystopian. I gained around 5 Kilos (10 pounds) in less than two weeks!
To be fair, love the pancakes for breakfast though.
Cargil's middle man scam is called "Plausible Deniability"
That company scares me more than most. A massive piece of the global food supply is being actively controlled and manipulated by this single private family that we know basically nothing about. It's like if the Bush family never got directly involved in the political system.
the devil works hard, but the chat-gpt porn bots with generic replies work harder
That's exactly what a bot would say
@@tatianatub *spiderman meme*
i like when they have a french accent
There's a disembodied butt on my phone that calls me studmuffin
Why in the hell doesn't the farm bill subsidizing healthy produce. No wonder why we are so unhealthy as a nation. Madness. They subsidize corn for ethanol. Our farming system is insane. It makes no real sense. Grrrr
And that's what frustrates me. Because why isn't that alone enough to start a food revolution in this country? The fact that these corporations in congress do not subsidize healthier foods or more produce is because they are also in cahoos/deals with the Pharmaceutical industry that has to make money from people being sick. But that's not true.
We know that a healthier society leads to a more productive society, which means a greater economy so to me, there's something else going on some type of agenda as to why these corporations wants us to be sick and poor in america.
Look to Citizens United for so much of our political power NOW going to the greedy rich 1%.
Big GREEDY business CEOs pull all the strings with the vast majority of politicians today.
@bsinita_wokeone To create a vicious cycle.
The same greedy big business CEOs all sit on Board of Directors on OTHER corporations.
We get sick from the food we eat, then we have no choice but to get Healthcare insurance from those sane greedy CEOS that also sit on United Healthcare, or Kaiser or Blue Cross.
The greedy rich cover all their bases.
This is absolutely fascinating and saddening.
the goal may be monopoly but the end game is oligarchy.
yea i think were past the point of wondering if it's totally intentional or not. straight up wanna be s.p.e.c.t.r.e. a$$ mfs
They already have it. Our elections are a joke and both parties are in the pockets of lobbiests and billionaires.
RE: Mike Rowe
@~39:30, Loved watching Dirty Jobs with my Mom growing up. Finding out Rowe was a union busting class traitor was so disappointing.
Great video, thanks for sharing
Worker solidarity forever ✊
Paid about $3.50 for a 4 lb bag of sugar and $7 for a 5 lb bag of bread flour... FLOUR! we grow entire states worth of wheat!!!
And it is subsidized too by the US taxpayers. Billions of dollars in subsidies for what is basically poison.
We should all grow victory gardens and declare victory against this unhealthy food ecosystem.
Yeah, I started at retirement growing what I can. Taste better. It's not easy here where I live in Alaska where it rains 15 ft a year.
I daily check news headlines via Google. Very common are "Food recalls." Everything from microplastics found in all brands of bottle water to what's VERY common now: Listeria and Salmonella in ALL KINDS of foods on the market!!
Yummy. 😫🤮
The criminalization of self growing and butchering chicken or cattle has many consequences such as the criminalization of Muslims and other cultures where they have a moral objection against factory meats
funny thing. due to my local winco being employee owned. most everything there is dirty cheap and very nice. hell at night when its slow they let the homeless in to get what they need like water and non perishables but winco is just that a west coast only store. and living in a city were the first few started in california and now i think the furthest one is in new mexico... hard to say. honestly no idea how the backend works
Forgot to add qnd they have there own brand of commonly bought things that are cheaper and they get 100% of the money
Omg. I miss WinCo! They also do not accept credit cards, only debit, cash, and check. This keeps their payment processing costs super low and they pass those savings on to customers.
I have to wonder how they treat their employees--none of them look happy. They all look beaten up.
Once, some years back, a small handful of employees tried to go on strike against their workplace situation.
Yes, Winco has the best prices, freshest produce--NOTHING like it at Costco where there is ALOT of mold in their frozen fruits and veggies!!! But, there is alot of suffering with their employees.
They don't stick around very long, either. It didn't use to be that way long time ago.
@andreah6379 sadly depends on states. California as I've worked there it's pretty good and there plans are very nice tho this is California were we treat works a lot better then say flordia or texas
Yeah in Washington all the employees look tired and unhappy
Thanks for the Upstate New York dairy shoutout.
The Fairlife mention has got me sad. I like it because it's lactose free and still tastes like the milk I miss and love.
Fiji water ... and meanwhile there are people in Fiji who have a very difficult time finding regular supplies of fresh water. In Mexico, Coca-cola drains the fresh water supply, uses that water to make carbonated and other drinks sweetened with high fructose corn syrup housed in plastic bottles (that create piles of non-biodegradable plastic trash), and sells it back to people in Mexico (and the U.S.). It's the same price or CHEAPER to buy a bottle of coke in some places than to buy a bottle of water. All these monolithic companies spend more on advertising (more like dishonest propaganda) than they do on paying employees or upgrading equipment. Thank you both for this conversation!!!!!
I am a former corporate jet pilot. One customer insisted on Fiji water on the plane AND insisted on Fiji water ice cubes.
Dude is straight up Marxian in the way he talks about his 'bubba barons brigade', I love it. That's the kind of obsessive fascination we need if we are ever going to deconstruct these oppressive exploitative systems silently infecting every facet of our existence, unironically creating a second 'do we have freewill' discussion but on a practical level, i.e. the illusion of choice observation.
The conversations around and about the agricultural industry is a perfect example of what I refer to as 'The Great Unravling', in that the revelation of one unethical exploitative practices and strategies only leads to another and another and so on. Therefore, making it a logistical nightmare to implement any degree of change let alone improvement to any one system without disrupting another.
Processed food that comes in a package with an ingredients list is far cheaper to produce and has more arms of revenue generation and automation potential than whole organic food that requires more human hands in order to get that food to market. Then there's the pharmaceutical industry that benefits from the diabetes you will inevitably contract as a direct result of the food you have access to.
I have to make myself end it here, because I've already reached the point of that great unraveling I mentioned, and the video ended like 5 minutes ago.
plus I need to pee...
I enjoyed this comment
@@gabe6646 that's what I strive for with every comment, even if it's a negative topic or if someone disagrees with me I hope they at least had a good chuckle.
@@Stuharris I respect that
The Panera Bread cinnamon crunch bagel is actually so good - depressing and insightful interview about the consolidation of American food companies
AKA: Corporate greed. Not new.
I hate cantaloupe too! Glad to see that I’m not alone.
Last 2 I bought tasted like a fake perfume
My grandma grew cantaloupes in her garden in East Texas. They were delicious. I've noticed buying them at the store they are bland and gross.
I would love if anyone has more videos, resources on this subject. It's definitely something I realize I knew next to little about and would love to learn more. Great video and topic guys!
Don't miss the part where he says Monopolists fund Fascism! Just keep repeating that over and over to anyone that cares about democracy (or any semblance of it)
I am watching what is left of a local based food system disappearing in my area, we have a few farms trying to hold on and survive outside of the monopoly system but it’s been hard watching them struggle.
this is a good show, adam. keep it up
Here in NC the hog shit becomes a big problem during hurricanes. That on top of the undrinkable water because of Chemours toxic waste dumps into the river makes me confused why people would want to retire here
who the hell needs a seedless lemon?
I wondered that myself, are these people eating the lemons just straight up?
Industry. All this nonsense is for industry. Seedless means less steps and equipment in the manufacturing process. What humans want or like in lemons is totally irrelevant
Something I don't think people take time to look at . You can make 90 loaves of bread out of a bushel of wheat at 4.00 dollars a loaf that's 360.00 dollars a bushel an they paid the farmer maybe 5.00 dollars a bushel for the wheat you can find this amount of inflated profit in all the food industry ❤❤❤😊
50:58 "These people are barely getting by and you can feel the pain"
Wow
The illusion of choice. From hotels to restaurants to grocery stores to food brands.
I spoke to someone who lost her pension after working at a chicken packing plant for 30 years. The factory went under. I knocked that door in Waterloo, Iowa. I bet that was connected to the consolidation under Reagan.
This was a great interview, I learned so much. Such a horrifying industry.
You should read THE INVISIBLE DOCTRINE by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchinson. It's about neoliberalism and I found it similarly horrifying. But it's a very well-written polemic. Would make a great episode if you could get the authors on!
"You're calling the Reznik Barons B List Barons" is the funniest thing I've heard shouted in nonths 😂
Not even 6 minutes in and Adam is having a hard time not pointing out that the problem is the means of production have been siezed from the laborers, i feel his pain
Also some other amazing reads detailing the absurdity of our food system: This Land and Meatonomics.
This Land... It really blew my mind. I had to put the book down for several days at a time because it was just so upsetting.
'food hurting your health? let me transfer you to our country's private hellthcare industry.'
Ideally, food is a human right and not a product. We should not trust markets where big landowners and companies prefer to burn part of their crops rather than take a small decrease on their profits.
I work a job where weight loss meds come up all the time, and its very disheartening for people in the team chat to disparage the people who are seeking those meds. Like, yeah, a lot of them are really mean to us I will not defend that there's no excuse to treat customer service workers the way our customers treat us, but them being overweight isn't something to make fun of. Most of them are struggling financially and live in a country where the food they have access to isn't good. A lot of them live in food deserts or areas where the fresh food their stores do get are almost rotting, and often don't have the time to make healthy homecooked meals regularly. And it feels like every day me and my co workers have this same exact conversation.
best content in a hot minute here. would love to hear more chats with Austin =)
That explains the weepers in grocery parking lots who are gaslighted by store management. Truly disgusting
I would love to see Austin Frerick in conversation with Chris van Tulleken, who wrote "Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food ." It would be fascinating!
I’m going to warn you that it’s getting worse in Europe as well. The food is not the way it was when I was younger and visiting family overseas.
Wow I’m glad I picked this video, it was very educational and insightful. It also makes me hate capitalism even more.
And don't we all hate greedy CEOs even more when their products make us sick with Listeria, Salmonella or microplastics???
from a canadian perspective, a lot of these kind of things are slowly dying here and more so going with local places that can supply local farms. the food quality of a lot of these things are so much better and muuuch cheaper comparitavly since the amount of transport alone is nomrally the big price difference between them
Try to go to the Asian markets even if it takes me hours because meat pricing tends to be cheaper.
Laura Scudders was a California snack manufacturer. Potato chips, corn chips, etc. (pretty good BBQ potato chips, for the time.) Smuckers brand PB that I get now locally, packaging as I remember in SoCal, renamed.
I a college educated professional job working single mom & I’m struggling. It ain’t just midwestern peeps who r struggling.
You write like a third grader, seriously doubt(and hope) you were NEVER even accepted into any college.
Excessive profits are unpaid wages.
Corporate greed
Processed food is pretty much salt, sugar, and wood chips at this point, the latter of which hides behind fancy terms like cellulose fiber.
1:00:00 Adam, the first-principles (of physic, here) failure of any bio-fuel, like ethanol, is that plants have solar energy conversion efficiencies in the low single digits while photovoltaics are in the high teens and lower 20s percent.
Then, on top of that, there's all the other innumerable inputs and outputs versus PV's fairly numerable, and better, energy-wise, inputs and outputs.
There might be niches, but under an economy wide fossil carbon tax and no subsidies, biofuel has very little room to exist.
We need some, as it's a better engine anti knock additive than lead!
This was learned by "The Man Who Killed Millions" or "Poisoned Everyone" or the like, on You Tube. Forgot presenter / channel.
Dude developed Nitrogen fertilizer, Zyklon B, and other fun stuff.
Reported his results that ethanol worked much better but lead was much cheaper.
Yeah, the carbon footprint in, to energy output extracted is indeed abysmal.
57:55 only cantaloupe worth buying in America is from the "burbs" of Pecos,TX - limited season & is actually sweet & juicy! I've been a cantaloupe snob my entire life because of those melons. There are some other small local growers in my AR area that do produce melons just as good but it ends up being random luck at at farmers market
Fantastic guest. Using this as a basis for research in Japan too
Wow! Great episode!
Fruits, veggies, meat, used to be tasty before they all started to be changed to fit the industrial and distribution systems. Apples, berries, carrots, pears, peaches all used to taste amazing before they started messing with them. What they've done to tomatoes is criminal!
Our country right now seems intent on blaming victims for their problems when you can pinpoint individuals and companies that have high jacked America.
Laura Scudder was a real person and invented the modern bagged potato chip!
I only buy watermelon in the summer. Have always waited eagerly for summer to enjoy watermelon in season and peak flavor. I bought a watermelon last week and it has zero flavor. If it wasn't for the Tajin I've been dousing it in, it would be almost inedible.
What a freaking great episode
Tell me if I am wrong but, it is my understanding is that bug meal can be added to any foods and labled only as "natural ingredients."
I think the general population would prefer that bug protein, meal, or other bug content intentionally added to food be specified as bugs on the food label. I don't think that is unreasonable.
The people who own the land, own the world
If you pay property taxes then you are just a tenant
Let's just say that "Pigs" sounds like a different dangerous animal than a Hog to me...
Coppers
I love his casual use of "my husband." It really takes a lot to casually mention you are gay. Huge respect.
thanks :) -- that means a lot.
Really now, it shouldn't even be "a thing," anymore. Only because hate against this group has risen with the reichwing do such words even raise our eyebrows.
I just want to go back to a more live-&-let-live country...
@andreah6379 100% agree. Hense me pointing out that it's casual. No concern about it, no further discussion. This is what a healthy conversation looks like.
I was drawn to the title of the clip because yesterday I shopped at Jewel/Osco and everything is at least twice the price during Covid 19. My other complaint is that both guys talked way too fast. Unfortunately my mind runs a little slower than theirs, but the subject does need uncovering.