Every once in a while, when shopping for groceries, I pick up the organic stuff. It's horrendously overpriced, I think, but it's good to do an A:B comparison for flavor's sake. Anyway, I picked up a $6 half gallon of organic grass-fed milk on my last trip to the grocery. Imagine my surprise when, upon drinking a glass, I was reminded of what things tasted like when I was younger. It's not that it tastes better or different, rather, it tastes the way it should. Contrasted with what non-organic milk tastes like, I'm struck with how much we've lost over the years.
You see, I was raised in a time before bioengineered food ingredients; before organic was an FDA-regulated label. Back then, there wasn't a distinction - there was just ... food. Reflecting on this, I wonder how much of that distinction was created to artificially manufacture a luxury market. I can imagine that bioengineering helps to increase production yeild - read: maximize profits. Surely doing things the old-fashioned way is less efficient, and acquiring organic certification is costly. But, what do we, the consumers gain from all this?
Every once in a while, the run-of-the-mill half and half I pour in my coffee literally tastes like a chemical bath. Is it the milk that's bad? Well, that milk is the end result of a complex production process. Cows produce that milk - they release hormones based on their treatment, the milk is produced based on their diet, and that milk is treated using who knows what kind of process in a factory before it gets to us. There's a lot of factors involved If the cows are fed a bunch of chemicals, eating food that's produced with a bunch of chemicals, and the production process involves a bunch of chemicals, well, it's going to taste bad. Except, that bad taste wasn't an overnight thing - it's been slowly getting worse over the years, giving us time to taper our expectation as to what milk tastes like. If you'd have handed me that chemical cocktail a few decades ago, I'd have spit it out. Now it's the norm.
Then, you take a drink of that $6 half gallon of luxury milk. Only, there's nothing special about it at all. It's literally just ... milk. It's milk produced on a farm by a cow that eats grass - the way cows are naturally inclined to do. We've become so adapted to the unnatural, chemically altered, bioengineered garbage that we've forgotten what food is supposed to taste like. Is this some kind of magic food? No, it's literally just food. This is food without all the garbage used by the manufacturer to maximize their profits. Instead, they maximize their profits by charging us a luxury tax for the privilege of enjoying normal food. It's absurd.
You are what you eat, and so's your food. Anyway, I think we took a wrong turn a long time ago.