May 27, 2025 • 67 mins
Whether rich or poor, young or old, everyone on the planet has to eat. Government institutions monitor the safety, cleanliness and consistency of our favorite foods, but as with any global industry, there are more than a few skeletons in the collective closet of the food and beverage business. Join Ben and Matt as they dive down the gastronomic rabbit hole of food conspiracies in tonight's Classic episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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
(00:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
I would also say that this may also be an
episode that you don't want to be nauching while while
listening to just.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
You know, results may vary whatever your thing is.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
All right, we tricked you a little, folks. This is
not super appetizing, Yeah, not at all.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Remember when people were putting their groceries in the garage
for like a cool down period.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Yes, exactly so, without further ado, let's roll the tape.
We'd love to hear your.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt
Noel is on jury duty.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
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,
(02:31):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
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,
(03:24):
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,
(03:45):
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.
(04:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
Oh like Frank, Frank, Yeah, Frank, that Frank I never know.
I have never known his last name.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
Well, he has been We've just compromised him.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
I just yeah, Frank is the best shout out to you, Frank,
Did you.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
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
(04:52):
one way or another.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
You know, I've still never tried mountain dew. Am I
missing out? It has an interesting history. I've just never
tried it.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
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
(06:29):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
The non water world, I think, is what it would
be called.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
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
(07:10):
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,
(07:31):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
So, to be fair, that number is going up and
down constantly.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
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,
(08:51):
you know, all the Old Testament stuff.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
In less, wide scale nuclear warfare.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
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
(09:18):
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?
Speaker 3 (09:29):
Largest one for me was on a grill for about
twenty five something like that.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
I'm probably around the same. And to be clear, that
was a cooperative thing, you know.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
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?
Speaker 3 (10:06):
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,
(10:31):
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
(10:52):
would call them like starches, kind of these foods that
will fill us up.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
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
(11:22):
we have also as a species, spent a lot of
time genetically modifying these before the concept of genetic modification existed.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
Right, Yeah, that's the old by hand genetically.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
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
(11:58):
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,
(12:19):
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
(12:41):
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
(13:01):
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
(13:23):
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
(13:48):
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,
(14:11):
it's shark fin, you know, things like that.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
Thank goodness for that. We always make this joke thank
goodness for that Legal Seafood.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
Yes, ah, we we've talked about that, but yeah, what
a what a weird name.
Speaker 3 (14:28):
Yeah, it's a brand, everybody. That's not a concept, it's
a brand.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
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,
(14:57):
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,
(15:18):
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
(15:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
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
(16:27):
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
(16:48):
burns down? You know?
Speaker 3 (16:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
It changed you, it really did as a person inside
and out. Yeah, yes, mostly inside.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
Yeah, all that oil and flame retardant again.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
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
(17:45):
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
(18:07):
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.
Speaker 3 (18:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
All the grain.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
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
(18:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
So not only the fresh water that is.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
Quickly becoming they're problematic finding enough fresh water for all
of humanity.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Nestley about it, they're really yeah, they're really torn up
about it.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
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
(20:02):
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,
(20:28):
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,
(20:51):
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
(21:11):
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
(21:35):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
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
(22:14):
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
(22:36):
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
(22:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
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
(23:32):
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
(23:54):
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
(24:18):
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
(24:41):
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
(25:03):
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
(25:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Some foods that are.
Speaker 3 (26:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
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
(26:39):
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
(27:01):
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,
(27:23):
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?
Speaker 3 (27:34):
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,
(27:54):
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
(28:16):
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,
(28:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
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
(29:17):
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
(29:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (29:49):
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,
(30:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
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
(30:46):
clear cut as we would hope.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
Even incentives to make sure this kind of thing doesn't
happen usually monetary, but those funds perhaps find their ways
into other hands.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
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.
(31:23):
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,
(31:45):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
Oh yeah, but that's okay. You don't need chocolate.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
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,
(32:30):
but it's not as bad.
Speaker 3 (32:31):
That's right, it's not as bad. And you're definitely not
going to get any trans fats in there.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
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.
(32:58):
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
(33:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (33:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
It's not like a lost situation. They're not on an
island waiting fighting the black smoke or something.
Speaker 3 (33:58):
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
(34:22):
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
(34:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
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.
(35:15):
You can you can find it here. But but yeah,
palm oil is has a direct connection to this.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
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.
(35:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
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,
(36:23):
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
(36:45):
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,
(37:08):
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
(37:30):
several instances per year of a new specific tale popping
up within them.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
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
(37:57):
or enacting something particular.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
Zill and the forestation.
Speaker 3 (38:01):
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
(38:22):
can also look at fad diets like which.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
Breadth or arianism, yeah, oh yeah, where.
Speaker 3 (38:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
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
(39:04):
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
(39:28):
for sure.
Speaker 3 (39:28):
And don't even worry about the pesticides and herbicides that
all that stuff's great.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
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
(39:56):
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.
(40:17):
Afrid Deasi at gum. Now, before we started researching this episode,
I had never heard of this.
Speaker 3 (40:24):
I like the idea.
Speaker 1 (40:26):
I'm sure there's some kind of.
Speaker 3 (40:28):
Just in the concepts like an aphrodisi at gum.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
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,
(40:55):
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
(41:17):
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
(41:40):
thousand and nine article from BBC.
Speaker 3 (41:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
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.
(42:27):
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,
(42:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (43:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
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
(43:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (44:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (44:14):
Pretty good, right, I enjoy.
Speaker 3 (44:16):
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
(44:39):
that are just occurring.
Speaker 1 (44:41):
They never stop.
Speaker 3 (44:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
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.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:24):
Meat, extra legs, more meat.
Speaker 3 (45:28):
Can you imagine a chicken that is just the meat?
Speaker 1 (45:33):
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.
Speaker 3 (45:46):
It, it sounds out there.
Speaker 1 (45:49):
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
(46:09):
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
(46:32):
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
(46:54):
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.
Speaker 5 (47:02):
You're tilted a little slight eyebrow for because what that
means essentially is that I am paying a tax to
not have slaw.
Speaker 1 (47:14):
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,
(47:34):
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
(47:56):
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
(48:16):
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,
(48:41):
the questions, how do they taste?
Speaker 3 (48:44):
How does a six legged chicken taste?
Speaker 1 (48:47):
No? No, because no one's ever caught one. I'm sorry, I.
Speaker 3 (48:52):
Was just pausing for laughter.
Speaker 1 (48:53):
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
(49:18):
their name to KFC because what they were using could
not legally nor ethically be called chicken.
Speaker 3 (49:24):
Oh so now it's just KFC the thing. There's no
chicken involved.
Speaker 1 (49:28):
It was going to be legal fried.
Speaker 3 (49:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (49:48):
Uh you, I'll get there. I'll get there. Keep going,
you give me a second, worries. Here we go.
Speaker 3 (49:57):
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
(50:20):
for quality, which includes no artificial hormones or steroids, a
federal regulation.
Speaker 1 (50:26):
Favored out of context. Quote, there may i ask you
to do a Colonel Sanders esque voice.
Speaker 3 (50:33):
Oh sure, No mutated chickens are involved in making our
delicious fried chicken.
Speaker 1 (50:41):
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
(51:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (51:18):
Right, sure, just growing meat like that essentially, but that
may be the future.
Speaker 1 (51:23):
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
(51:45):
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
(52:06):
otherwise rage through them. So it's still not pretty, but
they do have brains.
Speaker 3 (52:13):
Yeah, let's move away from meat. Let's let's get something
that's maybe meat adjacent. Would that be okay?
Speaker 1 (52:19):
Yeah? About Uh you like fondue, Oh.
Speaker 3 (52:23):
My gosh, fondue. We used to have an amazing fondue
place in Atlanta, the Melting Pot. No, it was on
a pirate ship.
Speaker 1 (52:31):
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
(52:53):
what we could reasonably call big Cheese.
Speaker 3 (52:56):
The Big Cheese was responsible.
Speaker 1 (52:58):
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
(53:19):
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
(53:41):
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
(54:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (54:09):
Yeah, sauces are great. And if your sauce is mostly cheese,
I mean, come on.
Speaker 1 (54:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (54:33):
I mean some Caeso. Caso was just fondue in a
different vessel.
Speaker 1 (54:37):
Right, Yeah, man, Yeah, I have no shame about the
ungodly unclean amount of cheese.
Speaker 3 (54:45):
Me too.
Speaker 1 (54:46):
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.
Speaker 3 (55:07):
I literally was just daydreaming about Queso being right here
between us and a whole bunch of chips.
Speaker 1 (55:13):
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.
Speaker 3 (55:35):
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.
Speaker 1 (55:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (56:03):
It is that when there were outbreaks occurring at Chipotle's
all over the place.
Speaker 1 (56:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (56:18):
Oh yes, salmonella, norovirus m yum, yum yum.
Speaker 1 (56:22):
But that E.
Speaker 3 (56:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (56:31):
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
(56:55):
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
(57:15):
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
(57:36):
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
(57:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (58:09):
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
(58:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (58:40):
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
(59:04):
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,
(59:26):
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?
Speaker 3 (59:40):
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
(01:00:02):
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
(01:00:23):
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?
Speaker 1 (01:00:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:00:52):
But but Starbucks literally needs zero advertising bind.
Speaker 1 (01:00:55):
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
(01:01:20):
think that's the most likely occurrence here.
Speaker 3 (01:01:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:01:47):
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
(01:02:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:02:28):
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
(01:02:48):
global climate change?
Speaker 1 (01:02:49):
Oh right, yeah, And I've.
Speaker 3 (01:02:51):
Not done the research like we would do for one
of these episodes.
Speaker 1 (01:02:55):
On that topic.
Speaker 3 (01:02:56):
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?
Speaker 1 (01:03:07):
M h.
Speaker 3 (01:03:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:03:17):
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
(01:03:39):
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.
(01:04:00):
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
(01:04:24):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:04:44):
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
(01:05:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:05:12):
I don't know what it is.
Speaker 3 (01:05:14):
I'm at least trained to eat in a certain way.
I'm trying to fight it.
Speaker 1 (01:05:19):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:05:36):
Ah okay, you know, and.
Speaker 1 (01:05:40):
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
(01:06:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:06:08):
You to the handle Conspiracy Stuff where we exist on
Facebook X and YouTube on Instagram and TikTok or Conspiracy
Stuff Show.
Speaker 3 (01:06:15):
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Give yourself a cool nickname and let us know if
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If you got more to say than can fit in
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Speaker 1 (01:06:33):
We are the entities to read every single piece of
correspondence we receive. Be aware, yet not afraid. Sometimes the
void writes back conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (01:07:03):
Stuff they Don't want you to know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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
(00:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
I would also say that this may also be an
episode that you don't want to be nauching while while
listening to just.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
You know, results may vary whatever your thing is.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
All right, we tricked you a little, folks. This is
not super appetizing, Yeah, not at all.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Remember when people were putting their groceries in the garage
for like a cool down period.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Yes, exactly so, without further ado, let's roll the tape.
We'd love to hear your.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt
Noel is on jury duty.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
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,
(02:31):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
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,
(03:24):
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,
(03:45):
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.
(04:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
Oh like Frank, Frank, Yeah, Frank, that Frank I never know.
I have never known his last name.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
Well, he has been We've just compromised him.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
I just yeah, Frank is the best shout out to you, Frank,
Did you.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
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
(04:52):
one way or another.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
You know, I've still never tried mountain dew. Am I
missing out? It has an interesting history. I've just never
tried it.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
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
(06:29):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
The non water world, I think, is what it would
be called.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
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
(07:10):
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,
(07:31):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
So, to be fair, that number is going up and
down constantly.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
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,
(08:51):
you know, all the Old Testament stuff.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
In less, wide scale nuclear warfare.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
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
(09:18):
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?
Speaker 3 (09:29):
Largest one for me was on a grill for about
twenty five something like that.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
I'm probably around the same. And to be clear, that
was a cooperative thing, you know.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
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?
Speaker 3 (10:06):
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,
(10:31):
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
(10:52):
would call them like starches, kind of these foods that
will fill us up.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
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
(11:22):
we have also as a species, spent a lot of
time genetically modifying these before the concept of genetic modification existed.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
Right, Yeah, that's the old by hand genetically.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
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
(11:58):
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,
(12:19):
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
(12:41):
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
(13:01):
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
(13:23):
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
(13:48):
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,
(14:11):
it's shark fin, you know, things like that.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
Thank goodness for that. We always make this joke thank
goodness for that Legal Seafood.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
Yes, ah, we we've talked about that, but yeah, what
a what a weird name.
Speaker 3 (14:28):
Yeah, it's a brand, everybody. That's not a concept, it's
a brand.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
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,
(14:57):
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,
(15:18):
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
(15:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
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
(16:27):
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
(16:48):
burns down? You know?
Speaker 3 (16:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
It changed you, it really did as a person inside
and out. Yeah, yes, mostly inside.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
Yeah, all that oil and flame retardant again.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
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
(17:45):
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
(18:07):
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.
Speaker 3 (18:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
All the grain.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
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
(18:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
So not only the fresh water that is.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
Quickly becoming they're problematic finding enough fresh water for all
of humanity.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Nestley about it, they're really yeah, they're really torn up
about it.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
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
(20:02):
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,
(20:28):
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,
(20:51):
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
(21:11):
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
(21:35):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
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
(22:14):
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
(22:36):
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
(22:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
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
(23:32):
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
(23:54):
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
(24:18):
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
(24:41):
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
(25:03):
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
(25:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Some foods that are.
Speaker 3 (26:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
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
(26:39):
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
(27:01):
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,
(27:23):
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?
Speaker 3 (27:34):
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,
(27:54):
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
(28:16):
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,
(28:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
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
(29:17):
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
(29:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (29:49):
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,
(30:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
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
(30:46):
clear cut as we would hope.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
Even incentives to make sure this kind of thing doesn't
happen usually monetary, but those funds perhaps find their ways
into other hands.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
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.
(31:23):
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,
(31:45):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
Oh yeah, but that's okay. You don't need chocolate.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
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,
(32:30):
but it's not as bad.
Speaker 3 (32:31):
That's right, it's not as bad. And you're definitely not
going to get any trans fats in there.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
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.
(32:58):
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
(33:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (33:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
It's not like a lost situation. They're not on an
island waiting fighting the black smoke or something.
Speaker 3 (33:58):
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
(34:22):
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
(34:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
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.
(35:15):
You can you can find it here. But but yeah,
palm oil is has a direct connection to this.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
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.
(35:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
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,
(36:23):
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
(36:45):
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,
(37:08):
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
(37:30):
several instances per year of a new specific tale popping
up within them.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
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
(37:57):
or enacting something particular.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
Zill and the forestation.
Speaker 3 (38:01):
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
(38:22):
can also look at fad diets like which.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
Breadth or arianism, yeah, oh yeah, where.
Speaker 3 (38:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
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
(39:04):
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
(39:28):
for sure.
Speaker 3 (39:28):
And don't even worry about the pesticides and herbicides that
all that stuff's great.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
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
(39:56):
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.
(40:17):
Afrid Deasi at gum. Now, before we started researching this episode,
I had never heard of this.
Speaker 3 (40:24):
I like the idea.
Speaker 1 (40:26):
I'm sure there's some kind of.
Speaker 3 (40:28):
Just in the concepts like an aphrodisi at gum.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
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,
(40:55):
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
(41:17):
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
(41:40):
thousand and nine article from BBC.
Speaker 3 (41:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
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.
(42:27):
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,
(42:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (43:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
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
(43:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (44:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (44:14):
Pretty good, right, I enjoy.
Speaker 3 (44:16):
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
(44:39):
that are just occurring.
Speaker 1 (44:41):
They never stop.
Speaker 3 (44:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
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.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:24):
Meat, extra legs, more meat.
Speaker 3 (45:28):
Can you imagine a chicken that is just the meat?
Speaker 1 (45:33):
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.
Speaker 3 (45:46):
It, it sounds out there.
Speaker 1 (45:49):
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
(46:09):
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
(46:32):
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
(46:54):
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.
Speaker 5 (47:02):
You're tilted a little slight eyebrow for because what that
means essentially is that I am paying a tax to
not have slaw.
Speaker 1 (47:14):
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,
(47:34):
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
(47:56):
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
(48:16):
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,
(48:41):
the questions, how do they taste?
Speaker 3 (48:44):
How does a six legged chicken taste?
Speaker 1 (48:47):
No? No, because no one's ever caught one. I'm sorry, I.
Speaker 3 (48:52):
Was just pausing for laughter.
Speaker 1 (48:53):
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
(49:18):
their name to KFC because what they were using could
not legally nor ethically be called chicken.
Speaker 3 (49:24):
Oh so now it's just KFC the thing. There's no
chicken involved.
Speaker 1 (49:28):
It was going to be legal fried.
Speaker 3 (49:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (49:48):
Uh you, I'll get there. I'll get there. Keep going,
you give me a second, worries. Here we go.
Speaker 3 (49:57):
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
(50:20):
for quality, which includes no artificial hormones or steroids, a
federal regulation.
Speaker 1 (50:26):
Favored out of context. Quote, there may i ask you
to do a Colonel Sanders esque voice.
Speaker 3 (50:33):
Oh sure, No mutated chickens are involved in making our
delicious fried chicken.
Speaker 1 (50:41):
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
(51:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (51:18):
Right, sure, just growing meat like that essentially, but that
may be the future.
Speaker 1 (51:23):
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
(51:45):
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
(52:06):
otherwise rage through them. So it's still not pretty, but
they do have brains.
Speaker 3 (52:13):
Yeah, let's move away from meat. Let's let's get something
that's maybe meat adjacent. Would that be okay?
Speaker 1 (52:19):
Yeah? About Uh you like fondue, Oh.
Speaker 3 (52:23):
My gosh, fondue. We used to have an amazing fondue
place in Atlanta, the Melting Pot. No, it was on
a pirate ship.
Speaker 1 (52:31):
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
(52:53):
what we could reasonably call big Cheese.
Speaker 3 (52:56):
The Big Cheese was responsible.
Speaker 1 (52:58):
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
(53:19):
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
(53:41):
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
(54:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (54:09):
Yeah, sauces are great. And if your sauce is mostly cheese,
I mean, come on.
Speaker 1 (54:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (54:33):
I mean some Caeso. Caso was just fondue in a
different vessel.
Speaker 1 (54:37):
Right, Yeah, man, Yeah, I have no shame about the
ungodly unclean amount of cheese.
Speaker 3 (54:45):
Me too.
Speaker 1 (54:46):
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.
Speaker 3 (55:07):
I literally was just daydreaming about Queso being right here
between us and a whole bunch of chips.
Speaker 1 (55:13):
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.
Speaker 3 (55:35):
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.
Speaker 1 (55:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (56:03):
It is that when there were outbreaks occurring at Chipotle's
all over the place.
Speaker 1 (56:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (56:18):
Oh yes, salmonella, norovirus m yum, yum yum.
Speaker 1 (56:22):
But that E.
Speaker 3 (56:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (56:31):
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
(56:55):
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
(57:15):
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
(57:36):
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
(57:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (58:09):
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
(58:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (58:40):
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
(59:04):
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,
(59:26):
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?
Speaker 3 (59:40):
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
(01:00:02):
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
(01:00:23):
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?
Speaker 1 (01:00:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:00:52):
But but Starbucks literally needs zero advertising bind.
Speaker 1 (01:00:55):
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
(01:01:20):
think that's the most likely occurrence here.
Speaker 3 (01:01:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:01:47):
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
(01:02:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:02:28):
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
(01:02:48):
global climate change?
Speaker 1 (01:02:49):
Oh right, yeah, And I've.
Speaker 3 (01:02:51):
Not done the research like we would do for one
of these episodes.
Speaker 1 (01:02:55):
On that topic.
Speaker 3 (01:02:56):
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?
Speaker 1 (01:03:07):
M h.
Speaker 3 (01:03:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:03:17):
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
(01:03:39):
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.
(01:04:00):
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
(01:04:24):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:04:44):
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
(01:05:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:05:12):
I don't know what it is.
Speaker 3 (01:05:14):
I'm at least trained to eat in a certain way.
I'm trying to fight it.
Speaker 1 (01:05:19):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:05:36):
Ah okay, you know, and.
Speaker 1 (01:05:40):
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
(01:06:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:06:08):
You to the handle Conspiracy Stuff where we exist on
Facebook X and YouTube on Instagram and TikTok or Conspiracy
Stuff Show.
Speaker 3 (01:06:15):
If you want to call us dial one eight three
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Give yourself a cool nickname and let us know if
we can use your name and message on the air.
If you got more to say than can fit in
that voicemail, why not instead send us a good old
fashioned email.
Speaker 1 (01:06:33):
We are the entities to read every single piece of
correspondence we receive. Be aware, yet not afraid. Sometimes the
void writes back conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (01:07:03):
Stuff they Don't want you to know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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