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

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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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