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salvation in the continued growth of population and production. Nurtured in our frontier heritage as the shortsighted inhabitants of a bountiful, underpopulated country, this mental set (found in every economic text in our schools) has yet to grapple with the elementary fact that inWnite expansion is impossible on a Wnite planet. The implications of these old myths in the current setting are enormous. We now have the potential to destroy life on the planet, and in our rapacious plundering we are Xirting with some frightening probabilities that we will do just that. In a society in which death has lost its horror, with the slaughter of three wars under our belts and our streets full of mugging and indi¤erence, a group of people— mostly young—is beginning to stand up and say, “No.” We are beginning to say, simply , “We aªrm life—a life in harmony with Nature.” Thousands of campuses and communities all across America will be taking part in Earth Day. Each will focus its attention upon the degradation of its local environment . Each will try to develop a holistic strategy for improvement. Some local groups are going to be reasonably moderate; others will be much more militant. None has any illusions about turning America around in one day, or one week, or one year. But it’s a beginning. April 22 is a tool—something that can be used to focus the attention of a society on where we are heading. It’s a chance to start getting a handle on it all; a rejection of the silly idea that somehow bigger is better, and faster is better, world without limit, amen. This has never been true. It presumes inWnite resources, and it presumes a mastery by Man over Nature, and over Nature’s laws. Instead of seeking harmony, man has sought to subdue the whole world. The consequences of that are beginning to come home. And time is running out. That is what April 22 is all about. —Denis Hayes, a leading environmental activist, helped coordinate Earth Day. He is the president of the Bullitt Foundation. Fake Food Is the Future Jim Hightower september 1975 Most people think of food as something that farmers grow for people to eat. Not quite. The Wnal step in manufactured food is being taken, and it is both eaters and farmers who are being stepped on. Synthetic food is here. Having both the technological and economic power to redesign food, oligopolists are not hesitating to exercise it. “We might all be able to exist and Xourish on a diet of three adequately compounded pills a day,” wrote the head of Central Soya Company ’s chemurgy division in an article urging a shift to synthetic foods: “This is not an Hightower / Fake Food Is the Future 151 intriguing prospect for most people. And so it is practical to have the soy protein foods look like foods with which we are familiar.” Ah, at least he would allow us the “appearance ” of the real thing, though one detects a real inclination to sell us the pills. The new farm is the laboratory, and the American provider is a multinational, multiproduct food oligopoly. Milo Minderbinder, the amoral conglomerate builder of Catch-22, got stuck with bales of Egyptian cotton in one of his deals that went bad. To cut his losses, Minderbinder came up with the idea of coating bits of the cotton with chocolate and selling them as candy. We all laughed at this scene in Joseph Heller’s novel, but it forced us to the discomforting admission that big business certainly would sell chocolate-covered cotton if it could. They have, though with a little di¤erent twist. Instead of candy-coated cotton, such favorites as Baby Ruth and ButterWnger are cotton-coated candies. Standard Brands, the food conglomerate that now makes Baby Ruth and ButterWnger, does not use chocolate to coat its bars, but ladles on a synthetic substitute derived from cotton. At least Standard Brands is using a plant derivative. Peter Paul Mounds and Almond Joys now are coated with what is termed “an undisclosed brown substance,” and even the president of the company has confessed, “I’m not sure exactly what it is.” Counterfeit chocolate is being o¤ered by the candy makers because it is more proWtable to them, not because it is better tasting or more nutritious. “It’s a more lasting coating,” explained a candy oªcial to a Newsday reporter. “Nice gloss...

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