Susan's Scribblings the Blog

This past week, news was released about a chemical which is present in nearly all of us (four in five Americans) and is commonly used in grain fields. The ingredient is called chlormequat. The grain in question, oat plants, apparently tend to grow tall enough that they bend, and the harvesting equipment is not made to deal with this, so the chemical is applied to stunt the growth of the stem in height and makes it thicker instead, so it doesn’t bend and eases the harvesting process.

Since when do we alter the food instead of the tools we use on them?

Anyway, chlormequat has been found to cause altered growth in animal embryos and affects post-natal health as well. It’s known as the first plant growth retardant, having been discovered in the late 1950s. It is forbidden to be used on crops in the US, but it is permitted to appear in imported grains from other countries which do use it.

That way of thinking reminds me of the Cabbage Patch Kids craze in the 1980s; some Americans who had trouble finding one of the squeezable tyke figures simply went abroad to buy them, and that is exactly what our cereal suppliers have done. Some of the foods we have trusted for generations contain the building blocks of a chemical that can affect human fertility.

Two of the big cereals concerned are General Mills’ Cheerios and Quaker Oats (Quaker is owned by Pepsi). The issue affects both regular and organic versions of the nation’s most popular oatmeal. Oh, and Cheerios has appeared in past articles about using a type of coating for their little round oats which is considered shellac. A weed killer chemical was also found in them years ago.

Many of us embrace a healthy lifestyle and try to incorporate foods which are good for us. I have taken to eating steel cut oatmeal because it is considered the best choice. Steel cutting preserves the nutritional value of the product. After reading about this new chemical scare, I took a look online to find an alternative steel cut oat product certified to be chemical-free, and found none.

Before that, I ate Cheerios. Never look back, they tell us.

So it looks like our food suppliers are going to feed us whatever chemicals they want, and other than extreme limitations of what we eat (which seems useless), our choices are only as broad as what we will tolerate. I would think it would be better to figure out how to better harvest the plants the way they actually grow in nature, which means changing the harvesting tools.

Don’t poison the mouse; build a better mousetrap.

But who am I? Just one of the “hungry masses” cereal companies make money and profit from. I’m glad my fertile days are over, but I cringe now when I see a cereal ad and think of the future of people who think that grains are a harmless basic of existence. The field has been tainted, and the “amber waves of grain” may soon glow under black lights.

No wonder so many people have given up on breakfast.