Hey, dude, what's your beef?

Nowadays we can manipulate our food sources so they render impeccable-looking fruit and vegetables and plump and juicy medicated animals. Yum. Color-coded dyes, unpronounceable ingredients, growth hormones and antibiotics. Unnaturally supersized, yet visually pleasing. So, what's happened to natural? Isn't it crazy that apples given chemicals and cultivated to be identical to each other and to taste of nothing in particular should be cheaper to buy than the apple that's grown naturally on a little mom and pop farm somewhere? What about beef ? Cows are fed dubious cocktails of growth hormones and expensive antibiotics yet their meat is cheaper to buy than the cow that has eaten only hay and whatever else it can scrounge from the farm fields. As a kid I freaked out when I found a worm in my apple. Now I'm freaked out because I don't find a worm in my perfect apple - unless I can spring for the extra expense to buy an apple that grew naturally. Nothing seems to escape the insidiuous reach of pharmaceutical and agricultural science. Antibiotics are in our foods, so what happens when our bodies are sick and we need antibiotics? A lot of them aren't efficient anymore, so new antibiotics are formulated. It seems to be a continuum. Designer drugs = designer prices - where does this end? Are we going to reach a stage where only the wealthy can be healthy? Let's take a few lessons from our ancestors, the caveman. Cavemen rock! The life of a caveman was a natural one, man and nature in concert with, and respectful of, one another. Man became hungry, looked for food, ate some and stored the rest for the lean months. Man remained lean. The cavemen were tough, resilient people, with a healthy respect for Mother Nature. More importantly, they were an intelligent people. Intelligence is about fulfilling needs which, in turn, creates resourcefulness. Resourceful people are ingenious, imaginative, capable and quick-witted. Living in a cave was a great improvement to living under the stars, at the mercy of Mother Nature’s whims. These cave dwellers struggled with inventing things they could use to fell trees, harness fire, clothe themselves, and feed their family. They had nothing to begin with, and discovered or invented a lot of known survival techniques that we take for granted today. It was they who first used most laws of physics, too. Modern man merely explained them and gave them fancy names. Cavemen lived in harsh conditions where “survival of the fittest” meant that if you couldn't catch your chow you didn't survive. If your neighbor’s club was bigger than yours, you’d be the one with massive head trauma, or dead. Body language and social graces were very important back then. A smile or a frown could be the deciding factor between peace and war. Modern man is made of the same stuff as our forefathers … still inventing - re-inventing and refining what nature gives to us so freely. Modern man is ingenious, which is very good, but when it comes to altering nature, this ingeniousness can often be a hindrance and not a help. Animals are being bred to mature at a much quicker pace, causing them to have thick layers of unnatural, unhealthy fat around their frames. Obesity and global warming are just two of the myriad problems afflicting our world today. Could the simple solution be a question of who eats whom? Do you think if we didn’t breed cows, chickens, lambs and pigs in such large numbers and with so much haste, that perhaps we wouldn’t have so many health and heat problems? English Cumberland sausage, the German Bratwurst, the South African Boerewors, the Spanish Chorizo, the Breakfast sausage, the Lunch sausage... the list goes on and on, and that's only one variation of a myriad of meat by-products. What happened to eating a simple diet? Imagine a world where animals roamed free, where cows were like lions or tigers – rare and exotic – to be admired, or hunted, depending upon your clan's needs, a world where humans and animals alike fed off the greens of the earth, the seasonal berries and legumes. Of course, we can't go back to cavemen days, but surely we can start to take responsibility for our planet? Thriving on human greed is what has brought us to a very sad statistic. About one quarter of the world's adults is overweight. Doesn't that frighten you? It does me. That's my beef.