My long term goal is to set up a farm using Permaculture methods, in the process of getting a DA to build a low energy (low running cost) home. Aim to be food self sufficient by 2018.
The bread on Britain’s tables was bleached for decades with a chemical that gave dogs fits, and when the government was asked about food additives in 1951, the minister answering admitted he did not know what the word meant.
It starts with the dogs.
By the 1930s British vets had a name for something they kept seeing and could not explain. Canine hysteria. A dog would be lying by the fire, perfectly well, and then it would be up and running, yelping at nothing, crashing into furniture, fitting on the floor. Running fits, the owners called it. Vets argued about the cause for years.
The man who settled it was Sir Edward Mellanby, Secretary of the Medical Research Council, who had already spent a career feeding dogs carefully controlled diets and writing down what happened to them. He had used dogs to work out that rickets was a matter of diet a generation earlier.
In 1946 he found it. Dogs fed flour treated one particular way went into fits. Dogs fed flour without that treatment did not.
The difference was one step in the mill.
For years the milling trade had been whitening and “improving” its flour with a gas called agene. Nitrogen trichloride. Flour treated with it came out whiter, made a better-behaved dough, and could go to the baker without the weeks of natural ageing flour used to need. Quicker, whiter, cheaper. Every miller’s dream.
Agene reacted with the protein in the wheat and made something new. By 1949 researchers had pinned it down: methionine sulfoximine, a compound that sends the nervous system into seizures in animal after animal. The toxin came out of the bread itself. The treatment made it from the wheat’s own protein.
America banned agene in 1949.
Britain kept bleaching. On 25 May 1951 an MP stood up in the Commons and asked the Minister of Food to what extent flour was still being treated with it. In the same sitting another MP asked what control there was over chemicals added to food that might one day prove poisonous. The answer was that the Food and Drugs Act of 1938 put the responsibility on the manufacturers, and they often took the Ministry’s advice.
When a member pressed him about the 700 additives in use, the man at the dispatch box said he would be very glad to look into it if his honourable friend would explain what the word additives meant. He did not know.
That was the state of oversight in the country whose chief medical research body had just shown that the nation’s bread gave dogs fits.
Agene was eventually replaced. The white loaf still comes with a line on the bag that most people read past: flour treatment agent. And white flour in Britain is legally required to have things put into it: calcium since the war, iron, thiamin and niacin since the 1950s, because milling takes out what the grain had.
On 13 December, folic acid joins the list.
A food that once needed a gas to make it white, and still needs an act of Parliament to make it worth eating, sits at the base of the national plate.
Joel Salatin on growing livestock, and how grain crops only survive because taxpayers bail them out.
Globalism was sold with a promise of prosperity. In reality, it was the greatest redistribution of wealth in human history.
Globalism meant Western factories closed, borders opened, and jobs relocated to wherever it was cheaper and convenient. The industrial worker in Vienna, the Ruhr region, or Ohio became unemployed or was pushed into low-wage service sector work.
At the same time, profits ballooned for the middlemen who produce nothing. Financial conglomerates, importers, logistics giants, tech platforms, and consultants have pocketed the margin between cheap production in Asia and expensive sales in the West.
The result is a super-rich global elite and a left-behind, indebted proletariat. The middle class—the backbone of every free society—was crushed. This represents the greatest surge in inequality in a century. Without globalism, China would never have risen.
The West gave China everything, including its 2001 admission to the WTO, even though China lacked a true market economy or rule-of-law system. It was a voluntary technology transfer: anyone who wanted to produce in China was forced to hand over their intellectual property.
The West looked the other way on forced labor, state subsidies, currency manipulation, and technology theft. Capital on a scale of trillions of dollars has been pumped directly into China.
The West dismantled its own industrial base and rebuilt it in China. The West financed a totalitarian surveillance state that now uses Western money to rearm, buy up strategic ports, monopolise raw materials, and exercise leverage over us.
China did not rise despite the West, but because the globalist West built it that way. Short-term profit was prioritised over national security, industrial sovereignty, and local workforce stability.
A rootless, stateless elite in New York, Brussels, Berlin, and Shanghai feels at home everywhere and takes responsibility nowhere. In its wake are stranded communities, stripped of industry and upward mobility, entirely dependent on supply chains controlled by a foreign power.
This was no mistake. It is how the system was designed to work.
Fred Kummerow told America in 1957 that the fat in margarine was turning up in the arteries of the dead. The government acted on it in 2015. He was 100.
He was a biochemist at the University of Illinois, and what he had done was simple and slightly grim. He got hold of tissue from people who had died of heart disease and looked at what their arteries were made of. They were full of trans fats, a kind of fat that barely exists in nature and came, in 1957, from one place: the hydrogenated vegetable shortening and margarine the country had just been told to eat in place of butter.
He published it in Science. He was 43.
What followed was a career spent being ignored by experts. The oil industry had friends on every committee. His funding grew thin. In 1968 he talked a panel of the American Heart Association into warning about trans fats, and the warning was pulped and reprinted without it after the shortening makers saw a draft.
Kummerow kept working. He kept his laboratory into his nineties. And he kept eating, quite deliberately and in front of journalists, the diet he had been told would kill him. Eggs cooked in butter. Whole milk. Red meat. He had looked inside the arteries himself and he had not found breakfast in there.
In 2009, aged 94, he filed a formal petition asking the Food and Drug Administration to ban artificial trans fats. The law gave the agency 180 days to answer. Four years later it had not, so in 2013, at 98, he sued the United States government.
Three months after that the FDA announced it agreed with him. The ban was confirmed in 2015. The gap between his paper and the decision was 58 years, which is longer than most of the people who ate the margarine got.
He died in 2017, at 102.
And he spent those last years on a second warning, which has been received exactly as the first one was. The problem, he said, was never the cholesterol in the egg. It is the vegetable oil in the fryer, heated and reheated until it oxidises, and then eaten.
On the record so far, that one is due to be acted upon in about 2070.
