Food Terrorism and Other Scary Crap

I’m not the sort of man who cries wolf or gets up in arms doing the Chicken Little thing. If anything, I often get accused of being disinterested in things enough to discount what most perceive to be the End Times. However, this doesn’t mean that I’m ignorant of things around me or that I don’t file away little nuggets of happenstance for future reference.

That said, I’m beginning to wonder about Food Terrorism. That big E-coli scare last year with all the tainted spinach, followed up by tainted broccoli and tainted lettuce, and then the tainted pet food, and now tainted honeybees……whoa, wait a sec Steve…did you say tainted bees? Yup.

I was willing to let slide the tainted spinach and such. Escherichia-coli is a naturally occurring bacteria found in the intestines. Run off from a pig farm or something similar was the published cause. Perfectly plausible excuse, but it still makes me wonder; wouldn’t watered-down pigshit be the first suspect if there’s a hog farm next door to your veggie plot? If so, then why’d it take awhile for the Gummint™ to say so? Sure, they wanted to be 100% sure before they went public; makes sense. But then again, they could have been scrambling for a plausible explanation that wouldn’t scare the public too badly…

Then the pet food poisonings; turns out that a plastic by-product called melamine had leeched into wheat gluten used to make the pet food. Hmmm….all the wheat we grow here in America, and all the wheat we don’t grow by paying farmers subsidies to not grow food, and we’re buying wheat gluten from China. Fat lot of good that move did you, eh? Possibly thousands of house pets killed by kidney failure and all anyone can say is,”Oops!”

And the bees. There’s been an unexplainable malady striking the North American honeybee population that causes them to abandon the hives and letting the hives go fallow, eggs & queen and all. They aren’t producing honey and aren’t producing new bees, and are just dying off. Many bees are showing up with bodies rotted out by some sort of parasitic fungus. As much as 25% of the honeybee population has been lost.

This hasn’t been getting nearly the press coverage as Fluffy and Fido suffering multiple organ failure. Cats & dogs are cute; bees are vile death-dealers with poisoned stingers and an insatiable appetite for human blood….Actually, bees are a hell of a lot more necessary to humans than the bundles of fur splayed out on your sofa. There are dozens of crops that rely on bees to pollinate their species. Without the bees, there’s no pollination and the plants die out. There are 21 food crops in America that rely on honeybees as their SOLE pollinator. Can you say “Decreased Food Crops”? Can you say “Higher Prices for What Food Remains”? What if this fungus that’s killing off bees was intentionally introduced? What if this was Saddam’s weapon of mass destruction?

Some splinter cell could have easily scattered E-coli into a few food crop fields to cause a little mayhem and see what America’s reaction was as a precursor to a larger poisoning. Hell, China could be a willing accomplice with some terror organization in testing out how fast America detected a toxin in food by purposely poisoning pets. And some lab hidden in a far-off cave could develop a toxic fungus to kill off bees, and thus weaken our food supplies.

Or I could be just ranting like a deranged conspiracy-theory kook. I’m not saying this is what actually happened. I’m saying “What if this is what happened?”….or wouldn’t it be some shit if the CIA did economic terrorism and poisoned the pet food to lay the blame on China so we’d stop buying from them? What if the pet food scare was a ruse developed by the Gummint™ to take attention away from the war in Iraq? What if the bee fungus was something developed by the pointy-heads at Fort Dietrich (the Army’s nasty little chem-warfare lab in the Maryland farm country) and it went horribly wrong?

Oh, the list goes on….squirrels and monkeys and other small & fuzzy things are being found with a strain of the plague. Yeah, THAT plague. The Black Death. Ring Around The Rosy. Is it terrorism, or a Gummint™ experiment gone awry?

Scared yet? You should be. And you should continue with your life, and question the motives & actions of the Gummint™, which aren’t always in your best interest, and be aware (very aware) of threats against us from nefarious types who wish us all dead. All I’m really saying is, PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT GOES ON OUTSIDE YOUR DOORSTEP, and question it sometimes instead of being one of the Sheeple.