Conscious Evolution TV

Dining in a vegetarian desert

BY NOELLE ALKHAWAJA | FEBRUARY 17, 2015 5:00 AM

Despite attempts to offer a variety of options at the dining halls, vegetarian students may find themselves at a disadvantage, both health-wise and financially.

I could not survive just eating vegetarian options that were on the menu, University of Iowa senior and vegetarian Chance Lacina said. It seemed like it was just spaghetti or cheese pizza every day.

In the last year, University Housing and Dining has tried to find new menu items and dishes to serve to students.

I would say that we are always looking for different things to serve, said Jill Irvin, the director of University Dining. Its very possible that we have added some vegetarian menu items for this past academic year.

Some options arent openly available and have to be requested at the counter, such as veggie burgers.

According to a 2012 Gallup Poll, around 5 percent of people identify as vegetarian in the United States.

However, dining officials find it challenging to put out menu items with appeal, Irvin said.

The issue at hand, she said, is the difficulty for directors and kitchen staff to prepare healthy, yet tasty, foods in a way that also appeals to students.

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Dining in a vegetarian desert

Organic food is a scam, a friend of mine argued while slurping down his GMO, mass-produced, cheap-junk adult beverage while slouching at the bar one evening. I got to thinking; could there be some validity to my inebriated friends comment? How could food made without known-to-be-toxic ingredients be bad?

General Mills Inc. has experienced a major shift in its market recently thanks to people like you and me who make informed choices about our eating behavior. Profits are slipping for this mega-giant frankenfood corporation. The Wall Street Journal reported that Kellogg Co. and Kraft foods are following suit with poor sales.

Before you crank up the jam-band music in celebration, pay attention to next issue. New Chapter is a company that made some of the best quality whole food supplements available. It offered some great education along with its line of supplements. Like General Mills, New Chapter is going through some changes. It has just been bought by Procter & Gamble.

If you cant beat em, buy em! How else can you control market share? This is just competition 101. Do you really think that the heads of these uber-successful corporations are going to let a few health-food nuts affect profits? No way. They have bills to pay too. Should they lay off thousands of workers just so a few hippies can eat healthier hemp seed granola?

The folks at General Mills are no dummies either. They need to compete with P&G for market share. They have shareholders to answer to, just like every one of these publicly traded companies that run everything. They just bought Annies Inc. to the tune of $820 million. This was a great, small company that made organic foods found at your local grocery mega corporation store. Do you think that corporate brass will change some of the practices of these smaller companies? Do you think that this will affect the quality of these products?

If big companies notice they are losing market share to a smaller company on any item, they have a few strategies to fix the problem. They can buy the company and bury it. They can just bury it with legal slander or great marketing without buying it. They will buy the company for the brand name and force the company to change the quality to make it profitable for the new owner. Big companies will force distributors not to carry competing products. Its just another day in big business.

A New Chapter co-founder was delighted to appeal to General Mills, and labeled it as a dream come true, according to Mike Adams, the Health Ranger and editor of NaturalNews.com.

So selling out a $100 million company to the absolute enemy is OK if its for enough money? This is only after youve made $100 million ripping on the very giant food corporations to which you are selling out. I wish somebody would pay me millions to give up; even a couple grand would suffice. I am not above bribery and/or extortion. We all like to think that we would not sell out. Its easy to sit here and criticize, but at least Ill admit that I would do it too.

The point is that if you think that you can trust organic food producers, think again. If you want something done right, do it yourself. You can control the quality of your food if you really want to its just easier to open a box of organic mac and cheese and talk yourself into feeling good about it. Its not organic thats the scam, my friend, its the delivery mechanism thats the problem.

We can blame everyone else for everything, but what are we actually doing about it? Not much at all, regretfully. The only way to beat super-intelligent, highly trained, extremely greedy, ego-driven, corporate entrepreneur types that run the worlds economic system is to drop out.

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Wells column: Corporations are taking over your 'health' food