Ultra Patchwork Food: California AB 2244 Is An Expensive Anti-Science Mess

California AB 2244 is now law and marketing executives at Organic food companies are preparing to buy new mansions. Because the law says if a grocery store carries an “ultraprocessed” food item they are now required to both buy and place on shelves an alternative that is Non-Ultraprocessed Certified. 

Just like when President Clinton forced his Department of Agriculture to create a USDA Organic seal, the seals for California Non-Ultraprocessed Certified foods will be sold by companies whose entire existence comes from selling stickers. It’s a goldmine – if you are connected enough inside the Democratic party that they give you that Golden Ticket.

Wealthy progressive elites and their new allies inside the Make America Healthy Again fringe of the Republican party are declaring a victory.

But this is a big loss for California poor people who’ve already suffered 100 percent higher electricity costs due to state government mandating alternatives to energy. Because food won’t be any healthier, it will only be more expensive. 

How we got here

A decade ago, when Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was speaking for the Democratic party rather than the Republican one, he was against modern medicine but also modern food and energy. For the organic industry and their wealthy progressive elites, his name and people like Andrew Wakefield were pure gold. 

Organic Consumers Association Sponsors Anti-Vaccine Meeting With Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Their goal was to get warning labels on their competition – what they called GMOs, but they used that as an umbrella term for any genetic engineering they didn’t exempt for themselves when President Clinton forced his Department of Agriculture to create a government panel staffed by organic industry marketing people who’d declare what was “USDA Certified Organic.”(1)

If you hate science and want it banned, the place you go if you want to tell someone else is ‘showing leadership’ is California. California is the state that tried to ban golf and Happy Meals. They hate science so much they refuse to do it. Their Proposition 65 referendum, which mystifies tourists by putting “Known the to the state of California to cause cancer” warnings on everything in Walmart, including the steel and concrete in the walls of Walmart, turned all of their beliefs about products over to France’s International Agency for Research on Cancer.(2)

So when activists wanted to get GMOs banned, they conscripted the same lawyer who wrote Prop 65 and got rich suing companies over mistakes on their labels. 

But their lack of science was their undoing. They quickly discovered that there are only a handful of GMO foods. Sure, Non-GMO Project sells 80,000 stickers certifying they are “Non-GMO”, but they are for products that don’t have a GMO version anyway. Like rock salt. Salt is not an Organism, there is nothing to Genetically Modify, but it still pays a fee to carry a Non-GMO label, because California is run by wealthy progressives, and they want labels.

Their initiative failed, both in Congress, where they got 53 Democrats to insist they needed a warning label (plus two Republicans, but from New York and California, so they’d be Democrats in any other state), because lacking enough GMOs to worry about, they decided to focus on “processed” foods. They got Attorney James Wheaton, the wealthy lawyer behind Prop 65 – that ‘everything causes cancer so put a warning label on it or I sue’ – to draft their California Right to Know Genetically Modified Food Act. Except it covered everything that any large company might produce.

Like the AB 2244 Non-Ultraprocessed Certified food standard does after being passed.

It took 14 years, but anti-science activists did it. They finally got foods their clients don’t produce to have de facto warning labels.

All of the Republicans hadn’t been Gerrymandered out of the state (or fled) then so the nonpartisan science community and the food industry noted that bread is processed food, even if you use organic-certified and more toxic copper sulfate to kills the weeds in the wheat field. Everything is “processed.” And voters didn’t pass it.

But activists are in a war of extinction against science so from its ashes the modern “ultra-processed food” movement was born. 

Activists don’t care about your health, they are in a war of extinction against science

With lawyers like Environmental Working Group and Center for Science in the Public Interest plus organic industry front groups like US Right To Know, “ultraprocessed” mullahs took their pseudoscience beliefs mainstream. They dutifully trotted out Brazilian epidemiologist Dr. Carlos Monteiro, who’d previously been dismissed as a food faddist cult leader by anyone not working for the United Nations, and said his “Nova” food classification system was somehow science. “Nova” just means ‘new’ in Portugeuse and there was nothing new in it. But they liked that the worst classification was “Ultra-Processed Food.”  He deftly avoided the failure of the “processed” food agenda by claiming his Group 1 was instead “minimally processed.” 

Whatever that is supposed to mean.

So we got the Obama administration creating food waste by forcing school children to endure meals no one wanted. We got a war on Trans Fats – which had only become popular because progressives had declared saturated fats such as butter, lard, basically any animal product, the cause of heart disease – again, using epidemiological correlation, not science –  and special taxes on soda. Because Democratic cities believed poor people were stupid and being duped by Evil Big Food.

If that reads like some in the Republican party of today, you are correct. A giant chunk of the Make American Health Again movement are Democratic party fifth columnists under a new banner – because they are in a war of extinction against science. The party does not matter, they will flip anywhere their leaders, like Attorney Kennedy and Dr. Oz, go.

Newsom hates Trump so why is he helping MAGA?

It may seem odd that California Governor Gavin Newsom, who openly hates President Trump, just signed AB 2244 when it that does just what the Trump administration wants.

It isn’t odd at all. When Science 2.0 and California state legislators like Dr. Richard Pan wanted California not to be the U.S. leader in vaccine denial, which it was due to progressives in coastal enclaves like Marin County, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkeley, etc., Lt. Governor Newsom stood with Kennedy and opposed us, claiming parental rights and bodily autonomy.(3) He said his children’s vaccines were staggered, suggesting like many progressives that he was concerned about a chemical cocktail created by Big Pharma.(4)

He now claims he is a regular guy who ate generic macaroni and cheese(5) as a child (his father was chief counsel for the Getty family and such close friends the Gettys bankrolled his wine store franchise after he graduated college) but that is only for his upcoming presidential campaign. At heart, he is still an anti-science Democrat and it will shock no one if Kennedy endorses him over a Republican like Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Because Sec. Rubio thinks Kennedy’s food beliefs are the same old Democratic nonsense of 2023.

Which is why Governor Newsom wants warning labels on “ultra-processed” foods despite their having no scientific validity and a Republican is cheering about it. 

He hates science more than he hates Trump. No food, not ultraprocessed nor “minimally” processed nor any other process, can causes diabetes. They are not addictive, KFC does not put an addictive chemical in it that makes you crave it fortnightly, there is nothing in ultraprocessed food that biologically our digestive system and mitochondria treat any differently than an organic onion.

In “So I Married An Ax-Murderer” Charlie’s father hilariously believed Kentucky Fried Chicken co-founder Colonel Sanders was part of a secret cabal to control everyone using his food. Now food frequency questionnaires take that as a given and use the food version of the Implicit Bias Test to tell you how addicted you are to “refined” sugar.

Because Kennedy flipped to the Republican party and many Republicans, like many Democrats, pivot when their elites do, they suddenly embraced the Science Is A Corporate Conspiracy narrative, which means Governor Newsom gets to claim he is signing a bipartisan effort For The People, when it is really to cater to wealthy anti-science donors that have always funded him.

Poor people always pay the price

The issue with patchwork legislation is that poor people will pay the price in California and then perhaps in other states. California citizens pay more for cars that provide no environmental benefit. Because California government mandates a special catalytic converter.(6) Californians pay more for gasoline because the state mandates a special formulation and has driven out refineries with the Evil Big Oil narrative, so this boutique formulation has to be imported at high cost. Millions of products are more expensive because the state requires a special Prop 65 designation.

Those are all regressive taxes on the poor. Ironic in a state that claims to be progressive.

This new law won’t reduce food choice in California. Food is a basic need so companies won’t flee the state the way home insurance, restaurant chains, and healthcare companies have, they will simply raise their prices. There just won’t be any benefit to anyone except the companies who have been handed what is essentially a state mandate and subsidy.

Grocery stores have no choice about being products if they buy a special label. Unless they want to lose money by not selling products people actually want.

It is California. When people from other states ask me what it is really like I reply, “All of the good things you hear are true. So are all the crazy things.”

Crazy, like mandating and subsidizing solar energy and electric cars and then, because the state controls electricity prices, forcing poor people to pay 100 more since 2015. Now they will have to pay more for products they do want, because grocers are being forced to purchase and stock items that will be eventually thrown out. Like those Obama school lunches a decade ago when his administration turned over child nutrition to progressive food nannies in his party. 

The problem will be that activists in other states will lobby politicians stating that California is ‘showing’ leadership, and they could end up like Vermont, where companies just stopped selling after their wacky government demanded warning labels on GMOs. The products that stayed were all far more expensive.

When activists are cheering that they have won another battle in their war against science, you need to be wary. Because you are the one paying reparations.

NOTES:

(1) So, GMOs, Genetically Modified Organisms, one patented technique that used a precision gene change to create a positive effect, made by an American company, were banned, but Mutagenesis, an older technique created by a European company that uses literal chemical and radiation baths to force random mutations and see which ones are beneficial, is certified Organic. As are dozens and dozens of synthetic ingredients for which there was no legacy substitute.

That is not about human health or the environment, it is using an allied president to harm your corporate competition.

(2) Which includes no scientists. It doesn’t even include any epidemiologists that are the best in their field, because they banned any epidemiologist who has ever consulted for a corporation. How good are you if no company has ever been willing to pay you? Yet they allow epidemiologists currently employed by environmental groups or on retainer with lawyers who are trying to sue over chemicals that IARC is reviewing. Read Dr. David Zaruk: Is Chris Portier The Andrew Wakefield Of Pesticides?

If someone has ever told you that eating a piece of sausage is the same as smoking a cigarette, that was due to IARC craziness. Hot tea, weedkillers, you name it and IARC has declared it is killing us all.

(3) Yet his administration dismissed both of those as Republican rhetoric when it came to minor children and trans medication and government policies.

(4) Progressives quickly got boutique pediatricians to give their child medical exemptions and when Dr. Richard Pan attempted to narrow that loophole, now Governor Newsom jumped on him with both feet – and got the entire Democratic party to pressure him.

Dr. Pan caved in to the pressure from inside his party and amended it so there would be plenty of ways for Democrats to keep their children away from medicine. Ironically, a few months later the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the Trump administration fast-tracked approval of a new vaccine, and those same wealthy Democrats bought their way to the front of the line to get it.

(5) And strangely, in classic Joe Biden fashion, told a black moderator that his low SAT scores meant he was ‘just like’ them.

(6) I drive so little that my 2011 car’s ‘brain’ has trouble getting enough data to be activated for the California emissions test. If I get pulled over by the police they will either give me a ticket or impound my car when it doesn’t have that smog test.

California literally penalizes drivers for not causing enough pollution to prove to their mandatory smog device that it isn’t causing too much pollution.