Given the execrable year that we have all just lived through, is it too much to request in 2021 for governments collectively to get out of the pantry?
You need to look no further than the recent debacle surrounding the health star rating system, which alarmingly rated Diet Coke as healthier than fresh juice.
Well, our friends at the World Economic Forum - who are best known for the annual bloated Davos summit - have got a plan for us all.
'The Great Reset' was announced in June this year to great fanfare, as a new initiative to purportedly guide decision makers on the path to a more resilient, sustainable world beyond COVID-19.
'The Great Reset' is, among other things, a blueprint to up-end the global food and ag industries and the human diet. The designers of the plan claim it will reduce food scarcity, hunger and disease, and even mitigate climate change.
Naomi Klein coined the term 'shock doctrine', which is particularly apt here, to describe the many ways that elites try to harness deep disasters to push through policies that further enrich the already wealthy and restrict democratic liberties.
WEF has partnered with an organization called EAT Forum which, according to Frédéric Leroy (food science & biotechnology professor at University of Brussels), interacts closely with some of the biggest plant-based meat companies, with the aim of replacing wholesome nutritious foods with genetically modified lab creations.
EAT developed what it refers to as 'the planetary health diet,' which the WEF champions as the 'sustainable dietary solution of the future.'
But according to Leroy, it's a diet that is supposed to replace everything else. 'The diet aims to cut the meat and dairy intake of the global population by as much as 90 per cent in some cases and replaces it with lab-made foods, cereals and oil,' he said.
Make no mistake - the 'Great Reset' is not a carbon crusade - it is an opportunistic cash grab.
While lambasting the clean, natural products that we produce, WEF is attempting to re-align the conversation and our dinner plates to be comprised of ultra-processed, multi-component foods that could generate massive profits for their makers.
The 'Great Reset' is the ol' bait n' switch writ large - use the cover of the pandemic to promise everything will be better (because the WEF clearly know better than us), more equitable and more sustainable, all the while trying to fundamentally change our eating habits to highly processed industrial 'biomatter' - something that barely resembles what we know to be food.
How would you like your biomatter? With an extra side of dreck? Food for thought indeed.
- Trent Thorne, agribusiness lawyer
