Fellow conspiracy realist, this is a classic episode that you want to hear while you're naching. Back in twenty twenty, we started exploring the wide world of food conspiracies. I believe this is where we give This may be the one where we start our obsession with Checkers and they're amazing fast food motto you've got to eat, Yes, you got us eat. Yeah. I liked ooh, I like that translation too. That's a little more hardcore and some all gothic one must eat well. Yes.
I would also say that this may also be an episode that you don't want to be nauching while while listening to just.
You know, results may vary whatever your thing is.
We're going to talk about a wide range of food conspiracies, some of which are not gross and some of which are, you know, little gross.
All right, we tricked you a little, folks. This is not super appetizing, Yeah, not at all.
And this is right before COVID happened, too, so we're not really sure how that is going to affect things, like the way we thought about food before COVID weird.
Remember when people were putting their groceries in the garage for like a cool down period.
At Washington, Washington. I loved it. I loved it. I loved it when everybody had to wear a mask. It just made things easier, you know.
And that just saying there are still ancompromise people out there, and long COVID is very much still a thing. So maybe even consider wearing a mask if you go to a big public situation, just saying.
Yes, exactly so, without further ado, let's roll the tape. We'd love to hear your.
Thoughts from UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt Noel is on jury duty.
Yes that is true. They call me Ben. We were joined, as always with our super producer, Paul Mission Control decand or uh or Paul Nitella decad. You know, we'll go for different I always think we could do more case specific nicknames. But most importantly, you are you. You are here,
and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. Matt, I'm gonna I'm gonna exercise full disclosure here I have I have not had a feeding period today, so I neither of I I'm very interested invested in what we're going to talk about.
Yeah, you are going to hear many stomach noises. These are against our will. It's our bodies rebelling against our life choices. But it's just what we have to do sometimes. You know, I'm gonna be imagining a oh delicious toasted banana and Natella sandwich.
Yes, hold that image in your mind. I will imagine a burrito bowl. Oh maybe some chocolates and chocol some mutant live stock, and some aprodisiac gum. Oh wow, that all together. It's a combo meal. You actually save money if you buy those at once. It's amazing. You're right, this this episode is about food, perhaps not in the way you think. It's often said that you are what you eat, right, And like many cliches, that is a
cliche because it is true. It doesn't matter whether you live in Mumbai or Malibu, or whether you're orbiting the moon or one of the moons in the Solar system. You, like every other living person, have to eat to survive over the long term. It's one of the biggies, you know, like you have to sleep, you have to breathe, you have to eat. So it's no wonder that the world of food is so rife with conspira theory as well as genuine cover ups. It's it's wide rife with corruption.
Wide rife is a phrase that a good pal, Frank Mulharan taught me. So, Frank, if you're listening, I still think you made it up, but I think it's awesome.
Oh like Frank, Frank, Yeah, Frank, that Frank I never know. I have never known his last name.
Well, he has been We've just compromised him.
I just yeah, Frank is the best shout out to you, Frank, Did you.
Ever listen to this? And we know that while conspiracy theories quote unquote may be treated like they exist in the realm of folklore, right or urban legend, we know that in the case of food, which is such a massive business, many of the things that were once called conspiracy theories were later proven to be true right in one way or another.
Yes, everything from some artificial sweeteners to a lot of other food additives, to hormones in you know, meats and other products that we eat. We've on this show covered a lot of it and seen a lot of it to be at least somewhat true.
And I'll never forget the day. And I say this with an air of gratitude, Matt, I'll never forget the day you ruined orange soda for me. Orange soda. Uh huh. You've told me about rominated vegetable oil. Remember this.
I do remember that a flame retardant. I believe at least that's the way the chemical was originally created for that purpose. It's in your mountain dew right now, your citrus drinks your orange Sodas.
You know, I've still never tried mountain dew. Am I missing out? It has an interesting history. I've just never tried it.
You know. Thirteen year old me would like take you right now to a convenience store and purchase at least three different types of mountain dew. But older or me would say, I drank diet mountain dew the other day, and I know I shouldn't have, but I had to because I needed I needed some diet mountain dew.
Sometimes you have to do the do right. Yeah. Yeah, So we have covered a lot of this stuff. Romanated vegetable oil, the vast insidious conspiracy of the sugar lobby. Both of those things are true. The dangers of DuPont, for instance, would be another thing. Corporate shenanigans, strange origins of aspartame, strange origins of aspartain for sure. Nesley just trying to make the Mad Max dystopian fictional world a reality here on Earth within your lifetime. So that's something to look forward to.
The non water world, I think, is what it would be called.
Yes, Oh, well done, Yes, the non water world. Just so, what we've seen though, with the realm of food related conspiracy theories is that we will never run out of idea. Is you know, check out those episodes we mentioned if you haven't heard them yet, But you don't have to listen to them to enjoy today's episode or be incredibly terrified by it. Because as the state of food on this planet changes, the conspiracy theories and the opportunities for
corruption and evil deeds also evolves. The rumors change. And before we get to some of the really crazy stuff, let's just paint the picture of the people alive now and the stuff that they're shoving down their gullets. You Paul, you dear listener, and me included.
Yes, the facts are there are a lot of human beings hanging around on this planet and a few of them floating in orbit around it. Currently, the world population, if you go to worldimeters dot info, is seven billion, seven hundred and fifty seven million, three hundred and four thousand, and then the number just.
Keeps growing, right, okay, just under seven point eight billion. I always love when we play this game because whenever we pull that number up, what that means is we go back at the end of the episode and see how many people have been born. We can also be a little grizzly and see how many people have died.
So, to be fair, that number is going up and down constantly.
Yes, yes, that's absolutely true. So that's a ton of people. Well, that's millions of tons worth of people. Read And unless there is a global, very large scale regional disaster catastrophe like a plague, an impact event, a coronal mass ejection, you know, all the Old Testament stuff.
In less, wide scale nuclear warfare.
Wide scale nuclear warfare exactly, unless something like that happens, this number of people on the planet seems set to grow, and every single one of these seven point eight billion people, every single one of them has to eat, just like the fast food chain checker says, So what what on earth? The guy, I don't know, what's the most Have you ever cooked a large meal or a meal for a
large group of people? I? Yes, okay it without you know, without diving too much into the personal life, how many people?
Largest one for me was on a grill for about twenty five something like that.
I'm probably around the same. And to be clear, that was a cooperative thing, you know.
Yeah, yeah, it wasn't just me, yeah right, but you know it was the amount of food purchased in order to feed that many people was significant.
Yeah yeah, and just the logistics involved, right, because you want people to be able to eat roughly at the same time. So how would you feed heat billion people? How what do living people eat? You know what I mean?
Oh, sure, we can talk about that. Throughout the world, there is a staple grain in any given region roughly because people human beings are grain eaters because it's something that will fill us up. It's relatively cheap to create and it or to well, it's relatively cheap and easy to manufacture. Essentially through farming. Right, So things like corn, rice, and wheat together, those three, just those three make up
fifty one percent of the world's total caloric intake. So if you look at corn, it's about twenty percent, nineteen and a half, rice sixteen point five percent, and wheat comes in at about fifteen percent. And there are also a lot of other roots that have I guess you would call them like starches, kind of these foods that will fill us up.
Yeah, yeah, stuff like and tubers or cassava potatoes. Then we also have another genre, right, soybeans or sorghum and plantains. Most of the world's food, just a little over half of it, is this sort of stuff. It's super efficient to grow. You can find regional, regional specific varieties, and we have also as a species, spent a lot of time genetically modifying these before the concept of genetic modification existed.
Right, Yeah, that's the old by hand genetically.
Modifying mendel, the mendel and the peapods. Right, yeah, there you go. So we have a different category though, and this is an exciting category. And ever since the moment that you were born, this category has been growing, it's been exploding, it's been metastasizing. Some would say if they're being more critical because people, you know, people tend to eat these grains cheap, they're affordable, they can be ubiquitous in certain areas. But that's I would say, that's maintenance food,
that's survival food, that's keeping the machine running. Everybody has, the vast majority of people have some sort of favorite dish. And that's when we move into the realm of what I would like to call aspirational food. Oh okay, you know,
in some parts of the world, it's funny. If you are a vegetarian or a vegan, or you have any friends who are, you should know that in some parts of the world, if you if you say you're a vegetarian and you refuse to eat meat, if someone offers it to you, you know who lives in that area, they will no matter, they won't assume you're rude. That's somewhat of a myth. No matter. You can be really polite and people understand maybe you don't eat it for
some reason or another. But in some parts of the world, people will assume that you're not doing that because you're poor or you've never had the opportunity to eat whatever delicacy this is being proffered towards you. Oh, okay, And this is a telling cultural thing because people want to eat, you know, the meat of the gods, the food of the king, the royal cuisine, and globally speaking, it's more possible to do that than it wasn't any other point
in history. You know. The Atlanta, Georgia, for instance, has one river of any note un running around it or through it right now as a couple of artificial lakes shout out to Chattahoochie, shout out to the hooch. And that means that we if we were trying to eat ocean bound food or something, we would only eat the stuff that came from that river or those lakes, because otherwise there'd be no way to get you know, crab lags to us or something that's yes, it's a long
way away. But now we have these huge networks that can transport everything from point A to point B zip SAPs up, you know, just like the improv game. But it's steak right, or it's a it's a it's antelope wards, it's shark fin, you know, things like that.
Thank goodness for that. We always make this joke thank goodness for that Legal Seafood.
Yes, ah, we we've talked about that, but yeah, what a what a weird name.
Yeah, it's a brand, everybody. That's not a concept, it's a brand.
It's it's a restaurant that calls itself Legal Seafood. You know. That's like, that's like going out of your way at a fast food restaurant to guart to have a sign, a large sign that says, you know, we guarantee that almost one hundred percent of our burgers have never been spat in. You know, it's like that's the McDonald's guarantee, almost almost one. Right, we have these these gargantuan avenues of shipping and trade, and we also have hand in
hand with that. Concurrently, we have a great deal of global development. You know, in the times for many of us listening, in the times of our grandparents are great grandparents, people were limited to the food that was locally available, and things like say an orange might be a luxury, it might be something you get as a birthday present, you know. Yeah, and that's changing now because people are in these rapidly developing areas and they are able to
eat aspirationally. Now we can have meat every day. Now we can dine on whatever the cave are of our mind's eye may be.
Well, yeah, or even things that are maybe processed in package that are coming from far away. We can we have access to those foods now they're being shipped to us, rather than us having to create them here at.
Home again before it all collapses. Yeah, there's that moral crossroads moment that some people have had, and I've had it myself. We say, well, it's quite possible that wild seafood will no longer be a thing before you know,
I die or you die, or whomever dies. And then you have the choice, you say, do I do I join the embattled and outnumbered good side trying to save the planet, and do I, you know, do I recuse myself from the seafood game for the betterment of the world, Or do I, like the vast majority of people who eat seafood, say I gotta get mine before the house burns down? You know?
Yeah? Yeah, for me, seafood died. Most of seafood that I have access to died in two thousand and seven when the Deep Water Horizon went down. That two thousand and eight, whenever Deep Potter Horizon went down all of my golf shrimp. I just I had to say, no, thanks, I'm sorry, man, I know me too.
It changed you, it really did as a person inside and out. Yeah, yes, mostly inside.
Yeah, all that oil and flame retardant again.
I know. But if there's ever a fire, you know, yeah, that'll be fine. So you're right, though, we have more and more people who not only want to consume something more than you know, a porridge or staple grain every day, they can also now do it. Yeah, you know, and that that does tie in in some ways with an increase in the quality of life. We would be remiss if we didn't point out that also ties into things like the increase of early onset diabetes, obesity, all those
other terrible problems. A lot of that due to the process snacks, and of course, again I use the word previously, the insidious actions of big sugar. Yeah. So let's look at the meat, right, If we have more people eating the same amount of stuff, then logically we'd also want to grow that industry, right, we want to satisfy that demand.
Well, yeah, and to do that, and guess what, we need more of that grain, which is great. So now it's not just humans consuming all the grain. It's also our food consuming.
All the grain.
Because really, if you love it, you hate it, doesn't matter. There's no denying that meat itself is extremely inefficient because it's a thing you gotta feed to, then slaughter and eat. To produce a single kilogram of beef, which is highly popular, at least in these old United States and many other places in the world, it requires twenty five kilos twenty
five kilograms of grain to feed the animal. One kilogram of beef equals twenty five kilograms of grain and roughly fifth fifteen thousand liters of water.
So not only the fresh water that is.
Quickly becoming they're problematic finding enough fresh water for all of humanity.
Nestley about it, they're really yeah, they're really torn up about it.
The grains that will feed us, in the water that will quench our thirst, it's all being used in these processes. In pork, if you look at that, it's still a big issue. A little less heinous at least from the amount of stuff needed to create pork, and then chicken is a little less than that, but still all three are problematic.
Yeah, we can also see the problem with space just not the final frontier, I mean just the geography. This scale of the meat industry has left a mark in the way that we use land. Currently, about thirty percent of the Earth's surface is use for livestock farming of some sort in some way, and since food, water and land are scarce or arable land are scarce in many parts of the world, this could also represent an inefficient use of resources. There's something else we have to talk about.
This is a messed up in gross This is the one that I have some money on. This one. Industrial livestock, especially in the US many other places, relies heavily on intense and profound application of antibiotics, the same kind of stuff that will fight an infection for you or one of your human loved ones. If you are feeling peaked, then you know you should be able to in theory, have an antibiotics regiment of some sort and then boom, you will be cured onto your happily ever after whatever
the next problem becomes in your life. However, because there's so many antibiotics being used to keep animals alive in unnatural circumstances, right, what we're seeing is that this gives this gives some of these infections a chance to evolve at a faster pace than normal, and this renders antibiotics less and less effective each passing year. In the US alone, eighty percent of antibiotics are consumed not by humans but
by the livestock industry. So good god, if you think about it, this is a crappy voice of dark humor, but I just have to make it. If you think about it, the last hamburger you ate, if you ate in this country, in a way, it had better access to medicine than you did. It just didn't get to consent to it. Wow.
Wow, man, that's it's really rough. And this is very like you guys know in a lot of these situations, Ben and Nola and I have to like be humorous about these things because it is so intensely upsetting. As somebody whose grandfather died as a direct result of an antibiotic resistant bacteria infecting him like this, it horrifies me
and it really pisses me off because just listen to this. Already, in twenty twenty, more than twenty three thousand people are like projected or estimated to die every year inside the United States alone, just in here due to some form of resistant bacteria, and you know that number is not going to go down because unless we completely change our ways and somehow the bacteria just decides it's not going to evolve anymore, right, and become resistant to a lot
of these things. Because at this point, we are to continue giving our livestock antibiotics at this levels because we will have to because we have to create more food. It's just we're in a rough position.
Right, and nobody nobody wants to purpose It's the hazard of the common good, right. Nobody wants to purposefully step down their own lifestyle for a minute benefit net benefit to the planet unless they know everybody else is also going to be helping. Well, no people do that, But no one wants to be in a situation where you know, we slave way and eat gruele for the rest of
our lives. And then there's some elite steak eaters out there, you know what I mean, and they're reaping the benefits of fewer people participating in the meatia industry, but they didn't have to change it all. It's like it's it's kind of like how if you're ever in a if you're ever in a bad traffic situation. You see a bad driver and as long as everybody else is a defensive driver, the bad driver can be as horrible as
they want until they hit something. Yeah, and they you know, they there's a system to punish them, but how often does it work? Right? So, so I know there's a lot of gallows humor here. But if you like steak, if you enjoy a good I don't know, Korean barbecue, right, or a good bacon buddy sandwich as they in the United Kingdom, then you'll be glad to know that these drawbacks, which are real, have done nothing to hinder the popularity
of meat. It still remains aspirational, you know, it's associated with success. Globally, our species consumes around three hundred and fifteen million tons of meat per year. By twenty thirty, that number is going to reach four hundred and fifty
three million. That's an increase of forty four percent. Gets a little fuzzy as we go further into the future, but experts can make a ballpark, you know, like cocktail Napkin guess as to the rates of meat consumption in twenty fifty and the highest estimate they have is five hundred and seventy million tons, and with that, you know, there becomes a lot of hidden fees, just like buying a car. You have the deforestation that will occur. You
have the increasing likelihood of an antibiotic resistant infection. They could just mow down humans the way that the original popular gross Michelle bananas were mowed down. Right, And again that's all just assuming no large scale disaster occurs before then.
Yeah, and it certainly feels like one is on the way with every passing moment. But for now, let's switch gears a little bit and let's talk about some of.
Some foods that are.
I don't know, less scary, less scary, but still have some issues that are gonna make you not sleep at night. I mean, before we do that, we're gonna take a quick word from our sponsor. Let's just cross our fingers and hope it's not food based.
So I hope it's blue apron and we're back. Yes, that's some hard hitting stuff. No, you know, many people in the audience today we may be seen as preaching to the choir for people who live the Michael Pollen esque plant based diet, or people who are vegetarian or vegan, or some you know variation thereof, or you may be you may be an avowed carnivore and saying, you know, this is over hyped, hippy and hippy stuff. The thing is, you know, we're not vegetarians. We're not practicing vegetarians. I
was for some time. But what we just told you, that's true, and what we're about to tell you now is also true. Let's take a lighter tact, maybe, as you said, Matt, and examine some foods that are often the mainstream, not associated with these various drawbacks. Like, sure, we get it, there are tons of problems. They're profound, abiding problems with the meat industry. But what about you know, what about desserts? What about the sweet stuff?
Huh oh yeah, sure, but dude, let's go into chocolate. My one of my favorite things in the world. Chocolate probably one of your favorite things too. My wife would my wife would give me up in a minute for a lifetime supply of chocolate. I guarantee you that it's not her fault. I wouldn't blame her. I would say, you know what, you're right, I would take that deal. And no, it's not true. None of that is true.
But in Western Africa. Let's just go there to where anyone of the places where cocoa actually comes from, where the stuff that becomes chocolate comes from. It's a commodity crop. It's grown primarily for export to other countries. The United States is one of those places that takes in a whole lot of it. Sixty percent of the Ivory Coast
export revenue comes from its cocoa. And as the chocolate industry has become bigger and bigger and bigger, as more and more massive companies become conglomerates, and then they all depend on their chocolate goods that they export across the globe, so has the demand for cheap cocoa, So super cheap, as cheap as we can get it, Just give me it as much as you can for as little as
I can possibly pay. Check this out though, that, as you can probably imagine, has a pretty big effect on the people actually cultivating and gathering the cocoa.
Yeah, that's right. The average cocoa farmer or earns less than two dollars per day, that is, income below the poverty line. And in case I was a question, and as a result in this intensely competitive market, people often result to child labor to keep themselves able to stay in the game price wise. Most of the children laboring on cocoa farms are between the ages of twelve and sixteen. This is again, cannot stress this enough, and I'll stress this again later. This is not a rumor, that's not
a conspiracy theory. Twelve to sixteen year olds and reporters have found children as young as five working in the cocoa industry. Forty percent of these children are girls. Some stay for a few months, others end up making a living into adulthood on this. Yeah.
And one of the ways that the larger buyers of the coco they get away with it by claiming that this is a third party kind of thing, right where we are just acquiring from this group of essentially what would be farms or farmers or gatherers of this product, and we have no visibility into those companies as to what their practices are. We just know that we are buying from this supplier, essentially. There's numerous documentaries online where you can find that pretty well documented.
And you'll hear companies saying, often in good faith, is saying that while we have this list of standards to which our suppliers must adhere, and if we find out that something is wrong, then we will go investigated or we'll stop working with them. And of course, when the rubber hits the road, the picture is not always as clear cut as we would hope.
Even incentives to make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen usually monetary, but those funds perhaps find their ways into other hands.
And again, it's such a huge, huge business. Every coast alone, we said it's a lot of its export revenue is tied up in coco but thirty they produce thirty eight percent of the cocoa in the world, and West Africa overall creates two thirds of the world's annual cocoa crop. It's insane. And that doesn't even count some other adjacent countries in the region where you can grow this stuff. It's a lot to have to walk away from and it's a lot to figure out. Of course, if you're
the kind of person who's bothered by child labor. Once you love chocolate, you can find things that say they are ethically sourced and say they are for instance, free trade, or that the people work in the industry are paid a fair market rate, But really the burden of the burden of proving that has been passed to the consumer because for one reason or another, large corporations don't have the best track record. So that's chocolate. So we ruined chocolate.
Oh yeah, but that's okay. You don't need chocolate.
Come on, yeah, why don't you just settle settle up with some some delicious natilla. Right, that's like chocolate, you know, something that's less chocolate, more hazel nut, maybe some other alternative ingredients to give it that smooth consistency and texture. It's still you know, it still hits those savory notes, but it's not as bad.
That's right, it's not as bad. And you're definitely not going to get any trans fats in there.
Right, because you won't be eating trans fats. You'll be eating palm oil. In the US, palm oil is mostly used in processed foods. And a while back, Uncle Sam said, we got to get rid of this trans fat. This trans fat is everywhere. It's nuts. I can't have it. You know, we have a duty as a marriage ends. And so they moved, you know, they they tried to reduce the amount of trans fat that could be in
your snacks at your local grocery store. It backfired. They started using palm oil, and they started using a lot of it. The Center for Science and the Public Interest reports that palm oil is now the second most popular food oil in the world, the first being soybean oil, and a lot of palm oil comes from countries like Indonesia. Indonesia is one of the largest palm oil producers and next borders in the world. It also used to be home to a lot of orangutans.
Yeah, or least fifty percent of the world's wild orangutans have disappeared. They I mean, that's not even really a good term for it. They're gone.
It's not like a lost situation. They're not on an island waiting fighting the black smoke or something.
No, you cannot make it up in vantage season about this. It is just they're gone. And the problem is just the groups of orangutans who could be reproducing, could be you know, making more of them, have reduced in size and number, and eighty percent of the orangutan habitat has either been just depopulated or totally destroyed. All of the places where they could have lived are just gone. And this this is not a trend like that just started happening.
This is something that's been going on for a long time and has it's not going to stop. There's no signs that this is going to stop anytime soon. If you look at government maps, just of the way different countries are planning out the land, how it's going to be used. It's just the same thing because it's the same problem we're running into with more of us, with more consumption. We need more land to make the same stuff we're making.
Now, I want to show you something and we'll post it on our face page. Here's where it gets crazy. This is a clip from fairly recently of an orangutan attempting to fight a bulldozer that's destroying its habitat oh Man. That is heartbreaking. Yeah, and it's it's very short video. You can you can find it here. But but yeah, palm oil is has a direct connection to this.
And just to clarify here what we're talking about with you know, making use of the land in that same way, it's because palm oil is derived from the fruit of palm trees, these oil palms, primarily the African oil palm. But it's the way you get it is by use by smashing up essentially the fruit of these palm trees.
And in order to get enough of that fruit to make as much palm oil as is needed, you have to plant as many of these palm trees as you possibly can, and the only way to do that is to have enough land to plant those trees, so you wipe everything else out and put those palm trees up.
This problem continues in Malaysia. Pete swamp forests are being obliterated, and these disappearing forests are home to things like the pygmy elephant. For everyone who has a soft spot for tiny, cuddly baby Yoda like things, this is the elephant version of that he just remembers Dumbo, and the clouded leopard, tons of rare birds. Again we had. These are all facts, not even into the next act of the show. Yet everything you just heard is one hundred percent true. These
are not conspiracy theories. These are proven incidents of child labor in some cases, slavery, corporate corruption followed by cover ups. And this is just the beginning. We will be back with some of the most bizarre, strangest food conspiracies in the world, and we'll also tell you the best we could determine the likelihood of these. We'll do that after a word from our sponsors. Here's where it gets crazy,
fellow conspiracy realist. Not only are there more food related conspiracies than you might ever imagine, new ones are cropping up all the time. We can divide these into several rough, kind of broad categories. But within any of these categories you're going to find you're going to find at least several instances per year of a new specific tale popping up within them.
Oh sure, You've got everything from corporate malfeasance, just something that a corporation decided they had to do, either for a bottom line or for a pr they just had to save themselves. Illegal government meddling, where you've got some large thing like the FDA coming through and making changes or enacting something particular.
Zill and the forestation.
There we go hidden costs of food, which is kind of what we were talking about, Like antibiotics, these things just what it actually takes to make make that beef of yours that you're eating right now. I'm not going to judge you. Keep eating, and it's fine. I might have some later. I'll do my best not to. You can also look at fad diets like which.
Breadth or arianism, yeah, oh yeah, where.
You just need air. Yeah, all I need is the air. Oh, don't sue us, Please, don't sue. Bizarre medical claims are another one. There's all kind of these are kind of the big the Big five. I guess that we can put these things into.
So we found a couple that we thought would be enjoyable and maybe surprising to many of us in the audience, because you, like us, have dug into a lot of these things before. So we've heard about allegations of detrimental thing X due to consuming fluoridated water, sure and tale as old as time. We've also heard things about, you know, the meat industry and livestock and the way animals are mistreated.
We've also heard stuff about the maybe the food pyramid so popular in the US here being ultimately an illicit collaboration between the government and several food producing interests. Oh for sure.
And don't even worry about the pesticides and herbicides that all that stuff's great.
Oh yeah, oh yeah, Neo nicked tinoids all day baby. By the way, we did a video on that and it turned out we were right. Yeah, it turned out the science and it wasn't. We didn't fit it out in a lab. We just dug into the science and it was there. It was published, it was not classified. And then years later, oh oops exactly, and then someone has the nerve to say, well, it's not a conspiracy. Yes it was. It was absolutely conspiracy to cover up
the deletorious effects of pesticides. Anyhow, No, let's before I go on some weird ted talk rant, let's let's look into some of the things we found that we thought might surprise you. Let's go big. This is a weird one. Afrid Deasi at gum. Now, before we started researching this episode, I had never heard of this.
I like the idea.
I'm sure there's some kind of.
Just in the concepts like an aphrodisi at gum.
So the idea then with this gum is that you would chew this, and while chewing it, you would ingest substances that made you so blindingly unreasonably horny that you couldn't do anything else. Okay, it turned you into uh, a sexual version of the Tasmanian Devil cartoons. You know, it's just kind of like whirlwinding around, trying to trying
to get intimate was something. And this story comes to us because Hamas, which is a governing authority and Palestine, was for a time convinced that the government of Israel have been sending Palestinian kids this aphrodisiac chewing gum to make them, you know, excited, to mess with their hormones and distract them from the struggle against oppression and the
you know, the the tension of violence between those two entities. Objectively, the evidence is pretty scarce, but we do have on record one of the spokespeople for Hamas in a two thousand and nine article from BBC.
Yes, this spokesperson, Islam Shahuan, stated quote, we have discovered two types of stimulants that were introduced into the Gaza strip from Israeli border crossings. And then later this person said quote the first type is present in the form of chewing gum and the second in the form of drops.
Yeah. So this story got regional and then global attention when a Palestinie man complained that his daughter had experienced dubious side effects after chewing this gum, and this was reported by the media and Israel and they started trying to hunt down the people that they thought were smuggling this gum or bringing it into the territory and selling it.
One suspect said he got the products from an intelligence officer the Israeli government at a cut rate price, and the officer said, you know, we don't want money, We want to distribute. We want you to distribute these products amidst the young people of Gaza. So the idea, then, it seems like a little bit of a reach, doesn't it. Yeah, it doesn't seem like the most direct way to affect people.
And if you modify even a science is there, and you modify a small part of a person's behavior, it doesn't necessarily result in the effects you want.
Right, Yeah, it sounds like a high cost research project and manufacturing thing that would give you very little gain. And strategic advantage doesn't seem to be a thing here. So it's difficult for me to see a scenario where this is true.
Right right. Also, we looked and could not find an example of the scum, you know what I mean, find these statements, to find any stories. The Israeli military decline to comment on the record, but one source in the Israeli military said, this is absurd. Why would we do this for the reasons that you just mentioned. So that was one we had never heard of. But here's one you may have already heard of in the past. If not, we are thrilled to introduce this to you today.
All right, So let's say you just left Popeyes. You've got one of those glorious new sandwiches that are have to admit, pretty dang good.
Pretty good, right, I enjoy.
The spicy version very much. Well, maybe not Popeyes, maybe not any one particular food chain. Let's just call them mass market food chains, the big ones, the mega chains. Some weird stuff is going on in trying to make enough chickens, enough chicken to fill all of the orders that are just occurring.
They never stop.
I mean, if you've got a twenty four hour McDonald's anywhere near your house, you know, whenever you've been up, it doesn't matter how early in the morning is, how late it is. There are people getting some food. Some of that food is probably going to be chicken.
Yeah, because the ice cream machine will never work for Ronalds. It's always out. That's a different conspiracy, it's true. So how then is all this food supplied.
Well, yeah, so how do you do it? How do you get enough chicken? Well, there is a theory out there that possibly someone out there is making chickens without heads, chickens without feathers, without feet, just with breasts, extra breasts, extra wings, extra.
Meat, extra legs, more meat.
Can you imagine a chicken that is just the meat?
I wish to scream, but I have no mouth, right that old Harlan Ellison's story. Yeah, yeah, it seems like a hellish existence, even if there is not a brain. As we understand.
It, it sounds out there.
It sounds like the science is massively advanced, beyond what we're currently aware of. Versions of this legend, this is Nerban legend, have been circulating for decades, ands and decades, And when I first heard it, you know, it made sense to me on some level because I always thought the fast food stick, their whole thing was weird and delicious and evil but delicious. It's delicious. It's evil and it's delicious. I always thought it was weird. The example
that stayed with me. I don't know if you ever if you ever knew this, but years, years, years ago, I went to a Chick fil A, and I just wanted a sandwich, fries and to coke, and they said, I want a combo meal. Just what's the difference and they said, well, it comes with slaw And I said, okay, that's fine. I don't want any slaw though, I just want a sandwich, fries and to drink. And they said, okay, but when we give you that, it's going to be more expensive than if we gave you the combo with
the slaw. So yeah, yeah, I made the same face that Matt's making now, which is, you know.
You're tilted a little slight eyebrow for because what that means essentially is that I am paying a tax to not have slaw.
I am like I I am required, I am mandated to help them dispose of their coal slaw. God knows where it came from, and God knows they don't care where it goes. But if I refuse to participate in this, in this slaw exchange, this slaw transactioncy yeah, yeah, this slawnspiracy, then I will have to pay a toll. Essentially, I
am being taxed for this. I don't get it either, So you know, having experienced stuff like that and maybe that's maybe I just had a weird one off mentalt with with the wanted to give you person working at chick fil A. Yes, but with that in mind, it's one of those things that can help you. It's a bread crumb along the precipitous slope into the idea of mutant chickens. KFC, not Chick fil A or Popeyes, was
usually the one that was most often accused. The earlier versions of the story were like six legged chickens, and the idea was that the birds were so plumped up by chemicals also that their huge bodies were impossible for them to support, you know, room feet walking, So they have more six state like chickens. Because the you know, the questions, how do they taste?
How does a six legged chicken taste?
No? No, because no one's ever caught one. I'm sorry, I.
Was just pausing for laughter.
I'm all, I heard the booze and the wamp wamp from here. But but it's true. That was the idea, and this rumor was so popular that Kentucky Fried Chicken itself eventually addressed it on their own website in a page that has since been removed. It also tied into I don't know if you ever heard this one, the idea that the federal government make Kentucky Fried Chicken changed their name to KFC because what they were using could not legally nor ethically be called chicken.
Oh so now it's just KFC the thing. There's no chicken involved.
It was going to be legal fried.
There you go, bringing it back, buddy, I mean I do remember hearing that. Actually, I do remember hearing that. And here we have from the KFC website their response to this rumor of mutant chickens or whatever you want to call them.
Uh you, I'll get there. I'll get there. Keep going, you give me a second, worries. Here we go.
We can set the record straight. No mute or genetically engineered chickens are involved in making our delicious KFC chicken. Just one hundred percent real chicken from US farms, which have to pass over thirty quality checks and USDA inspection before being hand prepared by one of our cooks. Ultimately less than ten percent of chickens meat. KFC's high standards for quality, which includes no artificial hormones or steroids, a federal regulation.
Favored out of context. Quote, there may i ask you to do a Colonel Sanders esque voice.
Oh sure, No mutated chickens are involved in making our delicious fried chicken.
It's a true story. It's pulled from the internet, the official site, or they moved it somewhere else, but you can find that. I love the KFC. KFC just thought. You know, if we throw the word delicious around like somebody throwing a crucifix around a vampire, maybe that'll ward off these allegations. At this point, you know, for most of the lifespan of this theory or this rumor, the technology wasn't there to the scale that would need to have occurred.
Right, sure, just growing meat like that essentially, but that may be the future.
Lab grown meat is already a thing and has been for a number of years now. It's just a question of again making a large enough amount of it, right, So, mutated chicken thing, the idea of no beaks, no heads, extra wings, extra legs, that has a very low likelihood
of being true. However, the way that these individual animals are treated in just normal no smoke and mirrors, skull and bones livestock life, they do have tremendously painful lives right their beaks are chopped off, they are oftentime unable to walk, and they are, of course, as we said, pumped full of antibiotics to stop the infections that would otherwise rage through them. So it's still not pretty, but they do have brains.
Yeah, let's move away from meat. Let's let's get something that's maybe meat adjacent. Would that be okay?
Yeah? About Uh you like fondue, Oh.
My gosh, fondue. We used to have an amazing fondue place in Atlanta, the Melting Pot. No, it was on a pirate ship.
Oh that's right. Uh, Dantana's Dante's Dante's down the hatch. Yeah, and I miss it so badly. Yeah, that place was great. It was part of that fondue craze that swept the US. It turns out that the fondue craze, there's a conspiracy, not a conspiracy theory. The fondu craze was manufactured by what we could reasonably call big Cheese.
The Big Cheese was responsible.
The Big Cheese. Like, we need a sound cue for that. Yeah, technically their name is the Swiss Cheese Union. That's how i'd say in English. Okay, A little bit after World War One, cheese consumption was really low. People just had other priorities. And the Swiss Cheese Union, which sounds like the name of some indie band that we would have been in in college. The Swiss Cheese Union says, all right,
we're going to get together. We're going to reduce supply, we're going to create artificial scarcity, we're going to fix prices. We're also going to limit the types of cheese that you can legally make and then will literally rough people up if they don't play ball with us. And this is in Switzerland, is throughout Europe eventually, and in Switzerland
so in common. They also got the government involved, so the government collaborated with them, and they made a marketing push that was Brene's level clever to get people to convince people they like fondue. Who doesn't like like cheese dep anyway? Right? People love dipping. Dipping is one of the best things about eating in general. You dip stuff and stuff, you know what I mean.
Yeah, sauces are great. And if your sauce is mostly cheese, I mean, come on.
You're ahead, you're winning your light years ahead. You're just sort of you know, it's in some culture. You are a god. You're like, there's a cargo cult about the cheese sauce guy, absolutely, which I would be into. I would hear him out. I'm not saying I convert, but i'd hear him ount.
I mean some Caeso. Caso was just fondue in a different vessel.
Right, Yeah, man, Yeah, I have no shame about the ungodly unclean amount of cheese.
Me too.
Mean, I'm kind of always up for it, sort of like an arsenist, you know. He asked arsenists if they want to see a fire most of the time, I imagine not hanging out with any arsenists that in maware of. Imagine most of the time they're like, yeah, I'll check it out. They might not do anything, but they might want to just window shop.
I literally was just daydreaming about Queso being right here between us and a whole bunch of chips.
That'd be so great. Man, I'm so hungry. Oh so even after this, yeah, I'm hungry as well. So So it turns out that the fon Due craze quote unquote was manufactured. Here's one that we saved for you, our good pal, our super producer Paul Mission Controlled Decad, Paul and Natelladecad's Paul Chipotle Decad.
Oh oh uh, I've heard tell of it. He goes by that sometimes just by the sheer number of delicious burritos and slightly lime flavored chips he consumes.
The Chipotle down the street from us actually has a day in Paul's honor because, yeah, when things are getting rough, he saved the business. Oh really, it's very it's very instant dirational, inspirational story. I think Disney's optioning.
It is that when there were outbreaks occurring at Chipotle's all over the place.
Ding ding ding, Yes, yes, whole in one. There were outbreaks reports of E. Cole I, most famously, I think, but there were other things too, right.
Oh yes, salmonella, norovirus m yum, yum yum.
But that E.
Cole I is always the one that freaks me and probably a lot of us out the most, just because it is you know, poop.
Yeah, yeah, that's what it is. The weird thing about these scandals is they all occurred within a few months of each other in twenty fifteen, and then it happened again in twenty seventeen and that's when a fellow named Aaron Allen at a restaurant consulting group Aaron Allen associates,
said that he saw a pattern. He said, look, I see a pattern, not just in the food poisoning that's occurring, which you know, Chipotle, to their and their parent company did a great job in finding the finding the bad food products, right sure, But Aaron Allen said there was another pattern that was functioning in concert with the incidencies
of food poisoning. He said he saw the stock activity and he was paying attention to it because Aaron Allen says, of course, after there's a scandal again there's some e coli, there's you know, there's some poop in the burritos, naturally the stock price drops, right Yeah. This was at a time when people were very anti feces and burritos. It's
just not where the market was. And his idea was that someone was intentionally doing this, maybe not someone working for Chipotle, but someone with some sort of reach was manufacturing the scandal. They were making the stock price drop, and then they were buying it up again for pennies on the dollar, knowing that it would eventually rise because right because as super producer Paul Decktt can attest Chipotle
is going gangbusters. You know, it'll hit some bumps in the road, but they're they're not in trouble, man.
That is in that's intense equivalent of letting a or purposefully having a certain part of a city or something being run down by depriving it of let's say police officers or or you know, just letting something happen to where the property prices get so low to the point where you can buy all of it and then put up your own thing. That's what was occurring allegedly in the Chipotle market, according to this Aaron Allen Fellow.
Right, right, And again he does run a consulting group, or did at the time. So there's one one more we'll touch on today. And this could be just a bit of a palate Cleitzer. It's a fun idea, right. The world's probably not going to burn down because of
this one. So if you ever been in a Starbucks and said, okay, hi, my name is you know Chanelle or Donovan, I've got the drink that I want whatever, and then you go you wait for them to call your name and they yell out something like Danell or Seanovan or you know something that wasn't a name but
it's it's like slightly off or whatever. There is a theory, an Internet rumor, it's kind of like a fan theory, that Starbucks employees do this on purpose because when people post they're hilariously misspelled or mispronounced names, they're written on the cup. It's free marketing for Starbucks. What do you think about that?
Ah? Okay, here's what I would say. I am and I do not know the numbers here. I have not looked into this, but I imagine that it is not quite as amazing for your social media feed to post a Starbucks cup, no matter what's inside that container. It's probably not as amazing to do that as it would be to do some smaller chain, right with a generic cup of coffee or something like that. Does that make
any sense? Like just that branding within your feed? I can imagine that's not as an exciting as of an exciting thing to post as would be if it was small chain. So perhaps by having that funny moment occur, the Starbucks is back in the feeds, just with you know, Adam's name misspelled?
Oh yeah, yeah, they know you're gonna post it. I don't buy it. It seems a little Rube Goldberg esque, right, It seems secuitous, it seems unnecessary.
But but Starbucks literally needs zero advertising bind.
Right, right, when's the last time you saw Starbucks by itself without you know, like another Starbucks down the street. I'm sure they exist, I just I just think they're increasingly rare. So we're we're in this situation right where where we have to ask ourselves whether this was a Bob Ross style happy accident. Yeah, and I think I think that's the most likely occurrence here.
Did you know I played my first professional music gig at a Starbucks that's a very local reference in Atlanta, played my very first gig no Starbucks. Yep, it was fine. The coffee was perfectly fine back then in the early two thousands.
What a time, those halcyon days. This does bring us to a stopping point where we have simply scratched the
surface of a multitude of food conspiracies. We'll return to some other ones in the future, sure, but we would also like to hear your take on these the ones we examined in this episode, ones that you think your fellow audience members should be aware of whether there's something kind of a funny thought experiment like Starbucks, or whether it's something incredibly disturbing like chocolate, or whether it's something that just makes you makes you think for a second,
it gives it gives you something to grind your cognitive gears against.
I will say there's one thing I'm very interested in here that we touched on, and it has to do with the meat manufacturing processes. And I have read in a lot of places and seen documentaries actually about the effects of specifically cattle on you know, what would be global climate change?
Oh right, yeah, And I've.
Not done the research like we would do for one of these episodes.
On that topic.
And I'm interested in it, but I would like to know. I think we would all like to know if you are interested in that, and we should Should we do an episode on that anytime we bring up climate change?
M h.
It's a bit controversial just from the viewpoints of all of us coming forward, but I think the science generally isn't so well.
Here's the thing, So I think that's the nextll idea for another show we do here at the office called car Stuff. We looked into that. Yeah, the amount of the amount of pollutants that cattle alone released into the atmosphere is it is enormously significant. It's a lot. We have a full episode on that if you want to check it out. We also had an episode on hybrids that that relates to this energy consumption, because you know, when hybrids first came out, many many people were saying,
I can make the world a better place. I don't have to change that much, just have to pay a little more for a car, you know what I mean. But the problem with hybrids, and the problem with some electric vehicles at that time, was that they were pulling their electricity from a power grid. What was supplying that power grid coal coal. That's right, So congratulations on your coal powered car. You just move the pollution a bit further away from your line of mental sight. And I'm
not being detegrated. The technology has come a long way, and overall, I think the world is attempting to find the newer, less long term harmful alternatives. But you're right, there's something sinister about cattle when it comes to pollution, and it's something that a lot of people don't think about.
The biggest thing for me, Ben and Paul and everybody out there is how honestly, like I want to, I'm gonna have a conversation with you off air, maybe we bring it to the air at some point, But how you were able to maintain vegetarianism for a sustained period of time, Because I've been attempting personally in my life to do a little more of that, and I'm not having a lot of success, because I really am Maybe I don't know if it's addicted to certain flavorings or fats or something.
I don't know what it is.
I'm at least trained to eat in a certain way. I'm trying to fight it.
Here's what happened to me, and we can't talk about this on air. But first I became very busy and also very lazy, okay. And then it was dating someone who was a vegetarian, so it made it very easy to say yes to that.
Ah okay, you know, and.
She was a fantastic cook. But but I don't know. It's it's easy to become lazy of relationships and date someone and say, oh, all right, that's the thing you're into. I got yeah, I guess I like scat too. Now you know, well, that one's tough for me, and that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't wait to hear your thoughts. It's right let us know what you think. You can reach.
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