What The F**k is in Our Food??

Over the years the U.S. population has increased rapidly, which means we need more resources. Housing and food remain in high demand across the United States. Food manufacturers have found shortcuts to mass produce food quickly and efficiently but all shortcuts come with their drawbacks. I’m sure you don’t think much about your food and what it’s actually doing to your cells, but the introduction of pesticides and mass food production filled with chemicals has been the brewing grounds for harrowing health effects. According to the CDC, the number of cancer cases is expected to increase by 49% from 2015-2050. 49% is a crazy jump and what’s even crazier to me is that no one has sat here and wondered what the f**k is in our food? My mother had blood cancer and after my mother’s diagnosis, I noticed many people in my life were also being diagnosed with cancer. I saw more and more people I know facing either multiple myeloma, leukemia, or lymphoma. Any cancer is serious but these three in particular can be more difficult to treat due to either their aggressiveness, relapse instances, or resistance to treatment. I could not help but wonder why I was seeing more cancer cases and when I finally dug into it I was shocked with my findings. 

As the U.S. population continues to increase it only makes sense that the demand for resources like food would become more pressing. Genetically modified foods also known as GMO foods are often advertised to have a longer shelf life. GMO foods are injected with growth hormones and steroids to support the mass production of these foods. According to the National Library of Medicine, these steroid hormones are an important risk factor for human cancers. Genetically modified foods are bad but it gets worse because shopping non-GMO doesn’t mean you’re safe. In the U.S. Roundup is a popular pesticide using the chemical glyphosate, this chemical has been categorized as toxic yet we still use it on many crops. As of January Roundup has faced 165,000 lawsuits due to the cancer increases, specifically non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Non-hodgkin’s lymphoma is a cancer that develops within the lymphatic system and can develop within many different sites throughout the body. Roundup has also been linked to multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer that develops in the plasma cells of the bone marrow. Although cancer treatment advances have been made leading to less deaths it does not make a preventable diagnosis fair. Roundup is still being used and GMO foods are all over your local grocery store because companies don’t care if you might die after years of eating them, “might” implies uncertainty. No one cares about preventing risks so instead we let hardworking Americans pay thousands and thousands of dollars to get pumped full of chemo drugs that make them feel even sicker, because a life in the hands of the U.S. government means nothing. 

As I discover more about the world I am disappointed, we have chemicals we spray all over our food that have been directly linked to cancer, we have steroids and growth hormones we inject into our foods that have been linked to cancer and yet we still do it. No one cares enough to ask what the f**k is in our food, and no one cares enough to stop it. So we eat our meals to survive and we fill our bodies with poison because in America it will never be about life or death, it will be about money and mass production.