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Mmmm…Grated Parmesan Cheese With Wood Pulp. Anyone?

The last time I checked, wood cellulose was not considered to be a source of dietary fiber.

Fans of grated parmesan cheese rise up and unite! Boffins in a lab found up to 20% wood pulp in one brand of grated parmesan cheese. I guess this is what passes for “the free market”, especially after Donald Trump did his best to emaciate the FDA. Time Magazine gives us the stats here:

Bloomberg ran experiments on store-bought grated cheese to test for wood pulp content in a lab and found that many cheeses have cellulose, which is made from wood pulp. Essential Everyday 100% Grated Parmesan Cheese, from Jewel-Osco, contained 8.8 percent cellulose. Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s Great Value 100% Grated Parmesan Cheese had 7.8 percent cellulose. Whole Foods 365 brand didn’t list cellulose as an ingredient, and tested at 0.3 percent. Kraft had 3.8 percent cellulose.

WTF? My kids love Kraft Parmesan Cheese. Another article says that the owner of one company that makes grated parmesan cheese, with wood pulp for flavor, has been indicted for fraud. Bloomberg ran an article on this back as 2017 back in the good ol’ days when Trump was president, and that’s just when they got caught. Who knows how long this has been going on? The more recent news just tells us that the urge to include wood pulp in grated cheese is not abating with manufacturers.

I feel like I’m watching the real-life version of the movie, Brewster’s Millions. I can feel the CEO’s thought process at work. “I’ll just insert a few percent of wood pulp in the mix and thanks to the economics of scale, Bam! I can pay for my summer house on the coast of Spain just like the boys at Comcast! Who knows, I might even send my kids through college on wood pulp alone. All I need is a great lawyer to keep me out of jail until I can retire...”

All of this in search of happeeeenesss. If I could just have 2 or 3 more million a year, I’d be happy. If I could just have that $2.5 million house on Coto De Caza with my buds at the country club, I’d be happy. If I could just have another McLaren while my other, almost totaled McLaren is in the shop, I’d be happy. If I could just have $1 billion, I’d be happy. Oh, wait. One trophy wife isn’t enough. There are 635 billionaires in the United States. What’s one more? With that kind of money, I can get out of any jam.

I’m not so sure that happiness is a sense that my fate is separated from yours. I’m not so sure that happiness is having so much money at the tender age of 35 that I’ll never have to work again. I’m really not so sure that making millions in the stock market during a pandemic is the path to happiness. And I’ve figured out that even if I get everything that I ever wanted, I might still decide not to be happy.

I know, I talk about happiness a lot. But I see the insanity of constantly pursuing something outside of myself to be happy, especially if that thing means telling other people little white lies about the food products I just happen to manufacture for sale. I also see the insanity of what happens to the mind when the mind can apprehend enormous wealth with very little effort.

I mean, I’m still thinking about the fact that a billionaire is not 25,000 times smarter, better, more efficient than the next guy or woman on the assembly line I did the math. Someone earning $19 an hour will earn $1 billion in 25,000 years. That’s not economics. That’s luck. A billionaire will be hard-pressed to admit luck. I never hear Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or even Donald Trump talk about luck. To them, it’s all hard work, baby. But if it were all hard work…

Intelligence? Talent? No, the ultra-rich got to where they are through luck and brutality. If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.

That was George Monbiot writing about The Self Attribution Fallacy here. How much skill does it take to put some wood pulp in grated cheese that we all eat, and still not get sent up the river? It takes a village…of lawyers, very highly paid lawyers, that’s how much skill. I guess I should not be surprised to think that some people call this “capitalism”.

Caveat emptor? No. Respondeat Superior. “Let the master answer.”

Write on.