Stuff They Don't Want You To KnowFake Fruit, Preservation and Consequences: The Wide World of Produce Conspiracies
Modern civilization is far from perfect, but it's still pretty amazing how we can often order produce from around the world, right to our doors, even if it's out of season. How does this happen? What makes it possible to preserve fruit far past its natural time -- and are there hidden consequences involved? In tonight's episode, Ben, Matt and Noel explore the wide world of produce conspiracies.
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 iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noah.
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Paul, Mission Control decad. Most importantly, you are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. We were talking about this a little bit off air. What is your favorite fruit, gentlemen.
I like a raspberry.
It's a nice fresh raspberry fresh quotation fingers, I guess today, but I usually don't have too much trouble with getting a nice juicy raspberry. I also used to be really kind of freaked out by strawberries, but now I love them.
When they're when they're right.
Hmmm.
I'm not gonna explain what freaked me out. It's too too random.
Okay, strawberries. I'm changing mind from our discussion, by the way, because I forgot about a delicious, juicy, incredible black or red grape that is probably one of my favorites.
I don't f with grapes. I don't know.
With grapes, something about the pop. It's a texture for me. Yeah, it gets to me.
Naturally ripened grape.
The caviare of the vine, they call it. No one calls it that.
What's yours?
Oh gosh, well, I'm super basic, Matt. I'm glad you asked. Obviously. The pineapple, that's not basic at all. That's the fanciest of fruits. We'll get into it later.
Yeah.
Yeah, you know, for a lot of people, the idea of buying produce is I think for most people across the globe, the idea of buying produce, vegetable or fruit is a basic day to day thing. Here in the United States, it can be difficult to buy fresh food. Depending on where you live, finding fresh food can be darn near impossible, you know.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I live in kind of a bit of a food desert. But luckily I have a car and they are amazing grocery stores just you know, ten fifteen minutes away. But some gas stations and areas like that will have like the sad bowl of fruit, the kind of withered bananas. You know, you know it, you hate to see it, but some people that is you know the access they have.
Yeah, and every once in a while you'll get to go to that glorious mecha of partner swapping Trader Joe's and really get some good stuff.
M you go for your fresh produce.
That's where apples hang out upside down.
Maybe the.
Okay, that was a good one. That's a good joke. Also, tonight's episode is based on a conversation we had off air about something that went viral on TikTok, the idea that a peel is meant to somehow conspire against you when you buy produce.
We'll be right back.
Here are the facts. Okay, produce it's a big term, right, it's a big word. It means a lot of stuff, every kind of fruit, vegetable, grain, oat, you could imagine. Basically, if it's not an animal, then it's produce, right.
Yeah, if it's not an animal and it's not processed.
Important point, Matt. If if it's an orange by itself, it's produce. If it is a carton of orange juice, then it is no longer produce.
Right, even if it's in you know, like fresh squeezed, right, because it is processed. I mean, even just the active squeezing as a form of processing, even if it's not like that kind that comes from the dreaded concentrates.
What a great point, though, because if if produce is packaged, like the sad banana right in its own ziploc bag or whatever. If produce is packaged, it can still be produce. If the pineapple is cut and put a little plastic cup, it can still be pineapple. I think it's when the thing itself is messed with that means it's no longer produce. Would we say that's accurate.
That's my understanding.
Yeah, I think so. But it's hard to get into also because if you think about something, I'm going to say the brand name like Quaker oats, right that you get in the large container, those are oats. Those are mostly unprocessed test but they have been They've gone through lots of processes. I guess no, they are processed.
I'm wrong, Okay, But Matt, I see what you're thinking on that, because it's a little confusing because to me, if it was a freshly squeezed orange juice, then to me, that would it's like not processed in a way that involves other substances. It's just you know, taking the essence of a thing and like turning it into a different like consistency. It's like mashing a potato, it's still a potato.
Well, it's so complicated because there's so many different types of processed orange juicing you can do. Right, we did that whole episode we talked about. I think it is simply orange, the one that completely breaks down the orange and all of it into all of its constituent parts and then recombines them magically in a way that makes the perfect orange juice.
I'm sorry, what does my simply orange do that? I don't like the sound of that.
Well, it's the problem is it's not simple.
It is just oranges.
It's just not simple.
Yeah, It's kind of like how the Quaker oats guy gets younger every ten years. Have you noticed that he used to be old as hell? Now he's like a waiter in Los Angeles? It's nuts.
Is this like the fly type situation where they put the orange into like a giant, weird portal machine and it just like breaks it apart into its atoms and puts it back together. God forbid a fly or some other creature should get into the simply orange juicing the machine simply fly.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So the US has an ongoing problematic love affair with hyper sweetened, heavily processed food. But the US is still a global player in produce, and it imports a ton of stuff. A lot of it comes from Mexico, Peru, Chile, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and those same countries also send a lot of vegetables to the United States. So the idea is, if it's not an animal, if it's not heavily processed, if it is fruit or veg it is produce.
Yeah.
And the World Health Organization, you know them, they recommend people consume four hundred grams of fruits and vegetables every day. Four hundred grams. It's a lot of grams mm hm. And you know what we got. We've read ads for a company before that makes fruits and vegetables in pills, because it's so difficult for many of us to actually get that much of fruits and vegetables in our diet every day as we're going around. Maybe if you're on the go a lot and you're choosing deep fast food, which I am highly guilty of, not easy to get those those fresh vegetables and fruits into you. But there are companies out there that offer alternative ways to get that stuff into you, but often beats the real thing.
The real thing being fresh fruits and vegetables. I imagine, right one.
Would real once again in quotation fish.
Yeah, the Asian Pacific region dominates the fresh fruits market. That population imports the most fresh fruits. If you ask your non US friends, they will have some pretty not great opinions about fruit and veg in the United States. Like and we've seen it. If you travel to a different country, Noel, you can speak to this, Like in Spain.
The.
Typical raspberry or the typical strawberry, or just the typical asparagus is a little bit different from the kind of stuff you would eat in the United States.
Well, it's just everywhere they have these massive like city markets, you know, and it's so much more walkable and bustible and you know, public transportable city And then I imagine in the outskirts in Spain and around Europe, you know, it's almost even more prevalent in terms of being able to get access to fresh fruits and vegetables because there's such a you know, agrarian kind of you know, economy and agrarian sort of culture there. But here in America it's very spotty. It's very you know, kind of patchy, I guess would be a better word.
Well, we just.
Talked about how we didn't say this. By the way, only one in ten Americans actually get four hundred grams of fresh fruits and vegetables every day, So we're not we're already kind of not doing a great job getting the stuff in US, but we're also not doing a great job making the stuff. As we said, we import most of the fresh fruits and vegetables that we have in grocery stores, and really think about, how do I get a bunch of fresh strawberries grown and then shipped from another country to the United States through all of those avenues you on ships, on trains, maybe on boats, whatever you got to do to get at someplace, temperature controlling the thing the entire time, and then when it hits the store it's supposed to be fresh.
Dude.
I mean, I had a grocery car full of Costco stuff yesterday and had to go straight to an appointment and was literally worried that them sitting in the hot car for a couple hours was.
Going to be you know, bad news.
I mean, I just it boggles my mind how we depend on that level of infrastructure and like you know, it's the word logistics to get this stuff. God knows how many miles you know, from origin point to our fruit baskets, fruit boats.
That's awesome though, that you had that, You had those vegetables or those fruits in your car. You had a mobile greenhouse, you know what I mean. People used to kill each other to have that capability.
Yeah.
But I had a cucumber melt when I was in Ohio. It excited from the time somehow, like yeah, I think it was frozen or something. And when I picked it up at the little island grocery store that I was at, it feels great. I was like, oh, it's got some good tension in this cucuver, got it in the car, got it back to the house, put it in the fridge, walked away for a second, came back, went to cut it for my son, and the dang thing was melted. It was it became it became like gelatinous. Weird grossroth Man.
But like that's the thing too.
It's not sufficient to just freeze things, uh, to transport them those long distances, because that creates a different product, that creates a different consistency. And when you buy frozen berries or frozen vegetables, that's one type of thing, and you know what consistency you're gonna get. But the presumption when you're buying stuff that's in your you know, produce department in the grocery store, is that it hasn't been frozen.
Yeah, that's the idea.
Right.
In earlier evenings, people were only able to eat stuff that grew near them. This is nuts. No one ever thinks about it. We got all these stereotypes about Irish people and potatoes. Your Irish ancestors, if you go far enough back, they would have been thoroughly.
Baffled by the idea of a potato, the modern potato.
Yeah, they would have not known what was going on. You're Italian, Korean, or Chinese predecessors, depending on your lineage, They would have lost their minds if they saw a tomato. Italy is still dealing with that as a culture and as a cuisine. The idea of getting local and regional and global trade networks changed the interaction of humans with produce. I mean it's it's nuts. Check out the episode on the Colombian Exchange. Check out our our earlier episode on corn. Corn has a ridiculous history.
Yeah.
Man, once they started doing Freak on a leash and all over t RL, it was over for them.
Yeah. And then they made a podcast, did they? Yeah, acorns ridiculous history.
What I'll recall having a co host who is in the band corn or who is an anthropomorphized piece of corn.
Just no, geez, thanks, no in the oh, let's be really, you're in either of those things.
You're You're just well.
I do think I rap a little bit better than Jonathan Davis, but it's more of a than a rap, right, He's talent to man, he's down to man. In the modern evenings, developed countries have leveraged logistics to send all the stuff that you could not get in your neck of the global woods are the planet stuff that you simply would have read about, you know, for centuries before about what will we say the mid eighteen hundreds is when it really became popularized for the average person. Fruits, vegetables, grains across the planet. Now they're delivered directly to your door, even when they grow out of season. You can also make this stuff shelf stable, and you can only do it because there are some monopolies. There's a little bit of a corporatism involved. I think what we're saying is there is a hidden price to this convenience. What do we mean by hidden price? Well, I mean I guess it depends on who you ask.
As we've been talking about, the logistical magic trick that is the appearance of all of these perishable items from wherever might actually not just be a simple product of all of those moving parts combined.
It's the greatest, something greater than some of those parts.
It might actually be something that can't be explained by planes, trains, and automobiles and cargo ships and all of that good stuff. It gets us all of these products that we enjoy and or depend on. What if the methods that we're used to preserve all this stuff turned out to actually be an issue in and of itself, you know what.
If it was unsafe?
Well, yeah, because you're you're either in order to achieve the goal of how do I make this tomato more shelf stable for a longer period of time or this apple to survive longer on the shelf at my local food dealer. Well, I can either genetically modify the actual seed and the plant that you know, the tree that grows the apple, and I can change its traits if I want to. I can apply some kind of product, chemical thing to that apple once it's grown, to make sure the exterior of it is safe, right, because that if you're messing with genetics, that's the interior you're messing with. If you're spraying it with something that's the exterior, like a coding of some sort, like we're going to be talking about today, or it can get it can get even weirder. You can artificially do things to these plants to make them ready to go once they hit the shelves, but not ready to go when they're inside their transport vehicles.
What if there is a conspiracy afoot will pause for a word from our sponsors. Here's where it gets crazy. This is perfect. This is the claim that went viral on social media platforms. It grew like mint and that is a joke for everybody who has had to deal with mint in their garden. On TikTok, which is kind of the new version of old tabloids like National Enquirer or Weekly World News. They're the ones who published stories about bat Boy and so on, or like Elvis is alive, he lives in Minnesota and is very good at line dancing.
But now there's like a new bat Boy every five seconds. And it's not just the product of one, you know, weird publication concocting a bizarre story to sell papers. It's like this whole echo chamber and that just you know, it's like self perpetuates. It's bizarre. Sorry, we're not here to litigate TikTok and the internet today, but you're pointing that out then, I think that's really spot on, and it really made me kind of triggered me.
It made my brain twitch a little bit.
Yeah, why can't he just be a batperson?
You know, he stayed a boy forever. We would see when does he become When does he finally become a batman?
Batman.
The claims that we're seeing on TikTok center on the idea of preservation coding in general, the concept that substances applied to fruits will keep them edible. From as you were saying, Matt, the long travel from point A to point Z, and as we're recording this. On the evening of August twenty six, twenty twenty four, we see a lot of social media accounts claiming a specific company called a Peel get It are part of a grand conspiracy to absolutely screw over innocent fans of produce. It's your name, though, Yeah, can we spell it out?
S p e e L? I mean I got?
I guess is that it meant to be a pun like, Hey, we are Appealing as a company, but we also deal in things that have a peel. It's, to your point, been the more innocuous and maybe silly the name, perhaps sometimes the more nefarious the edens.
Okay, so how do we hear about this? Guess what? TikTok tck talk.
So it's news and fake news at the same time.
I don't understand there's an actual company that makes a thing. It's not called appeal appeals. The company they make what's the name of the thing they make?
Eddie peel eddie d p E E L.
Is that a play on Oedipus? Is there?
Some it's edible? But this the idea is real. This is a coating that is supposed to help protect the produce as it's either traveling to protect it from animals and other pests and things like that. It is like armor for your apples, baby, and it's real and it's a thing. The TikTok comes in where there are multiple creators making multiple videos that point to this specific company and this substance as being extremely dangerous for human health. And then they take it a step further and say, not only is it dangerous, it is being purposefully produced by somebody like the infamous Bill Gates that created Microsoft and now wants to kill everyone.
That monster.
Yeah, him and Melinda made a foundation just to ruin your day by doing things like eradicating malaria communicable disease.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I will say this.
I don't want to like sound like I'm being codd or something like that. I am inherently suspicious of all people with that degree of wealth.
So like, I.
Do think that maybe on the service what they're doing is like quote unquote good, but I also don't really know, and I have to have it as a healthy amount of skepticism for these types of things with this sort of front of ultimate magnanimity, you.
Know, I think that's a universal thing. You're not alone. I think most people should be that way. It's not a singular thing because you know, you see these billionaires and you think, when's the last time they saw a nickel? When's the last time they held a coin and thought, do I need this coin later?
I got. I would love it if Bill Gates like just rolled around with a couple of twenties in his pocket and just paid in cash for things whenever he could. That would just make me so happy.
Yeah. Yeah, he only eats McDonald's though. When you hear that, like he really loves McDonald's.
Oh dude, you know he's got like he rents.
It out and there's an entire fancy like Michigan Star restaurant for some event and had his people call out and bring him in McDonald's.
He didn't like, it's a thing.
Does Melinda know?
Imagine she fully supports him and all of this. It is funny though, considering what we're talking about, right, But I mean.
You didn't they get a divorce.
I am that's a difficult man to be, I imagine statistically.
Yes, I don't know the answer to that, but uh, we'll.
Have to look it up. I think we've got we've got some top man on it, Uh, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was was funny.
Had no idea. I had no idea.
Well, you're you're my top guy. You're on it, said, we had top guys on it. I'm the guy in the chair, so all right. So the Bill m Melinda Gates Foundation is a classic villain in a lot of this conspiracy folklore. And the concept here is that a peel through the technology Eddie Peel or the proprietary coding is somehow after you any one who is not a billionaire, and they're the implications like why why would these people do this? The implication is that eating this produce coded with this stuff will either lead to sterilization or increase your chances of cancer, decrease your intelligence, or it will make you addicted to consuming insert product here, which is these are heavy claims, right, have you guys encountered any of this? Like these claims? First off, have you encountered these claims? And then secondly, do you believe any of them?
First of all, I would say I encountered it for the first time on Instagram on reels and it was specifically talking about appeal, which then led me down the rabbit hole of trying to really understand what the heck it is because the coaching, because it was one of those videos that you'll see all over the place where there's an AI voice reading captions that are on the screen with some what seem like random imagery, sometimes maybe even stock imagery, and you're just trying to discern if any of it's true or real, and it's pretty disturbing. I would say the Gates Foundation thing does go back to the population control theories that touch a whole bunch of other hypotheses and theories that are out there about connecting docts that aren't necessarily there. But it's one of those things that feel it feels like it could be real just enough that it piques your interest, and I think that's one of the reasons that it got shared so many times, at least the particular one that I saw.
And not to make this about those AI generated stories, but aren't those, in a way just sort of the new version of those clickbait, little stubby kind of stories that were like a paragraph followed by fifteen ads and then another little paragraph, And they're usually about celebrity nonsense or some kind of sex tape or this kind of conspiracy, you know, spreading. But it's interesting because I've gotten the point where when I hear that voice and I think it's one of those.
I just am like, Nope, I just can't. It's it's bad news.
I love those voices. I sit through them because it's something where it's like, it's like the apple considered apple pong apples are from Cosaics song why did Jennifer Lopez divorce bin Off from? It's a bunch of weird stock images. You know, it's a it's a strange Rorshach test, And most of what we're seeing here vibes with as you were saying, Matt, the earlier accusations against the Gates Foundation. It returns to the idea that obscenely wealthy people are in some sort of cabul to engage with law scale population control, and the concept there also arrives at the idea of removing the ability to think right. Similar with or similar to, I should say, fluoride poisoning conspiracies. Yeah, and we know that there are provable aspects of this, such as the lead poisoning hypothesis. I don't think it was on purpose, but lead exposure plausibly led to jeez, plausibly created some crimes. It's scary stuff, you know, It's not coming from a clear blue sky. Maybe the most important thing to remember is that wealthy people are no more intelligent than the average person. That's the assumption of these conspiracies, the assignation of some sort of grand chess Master Kissinger level four D chess. It's just I don't know, man, Most people are the same everywhere you go.
I just think in general, it's yeah, to your point, then you're right. People are just a little more straightforward than that.
It's a weird thing because this does feel like a It's not an altruistic thing. Let's not pretend anything about that. This is a for profit company that is making a thing that is going to make lots and lots of money, and has been making lots of money since. By the way, I think twenty eighteen is around the first time I remember hearing about Appeal when it was associated with avocados and NBC was talking about it, and everybody was like, it wasn't even a big deal. Nobody knew, nobody really cared. It was just, oh, here's a way to preserve a couple of different types of produce a little bit longer with this coding. But in the end it feels like a good thing. It is a good thing. I think, I don't know.
I think Bill Gates is trying to kill everyone.
I think that's probably the most likely scenario.
By the way, did you guys did you hear? According to Vanity Fair and Melinda Gates his own words, well, the main reason she divorced Bill was because of his work with a guy who had an island. Ooh know what I'm talking about? She names names, She says, like, because one of the reasons, one of a myriad number of reasons that she divorced Bill is because of his work with Jeffrey Epstein.
Yeah from earlier, Yeah, jeff from earlier.
Yeah, and that's from March of twenty twenty two.
I had not heard that, Matt.
That's wild pretty recent. The foundation continues, though, because we have to realize at that financial threshold, the institution acquires a life of its own right, so such that a Bill and Melinda could pass away and a Bill and Melinda Foundation could theoretically soldier on. After intense research, the three of us could find no actionable intelligence indicating that appeal was part of a grand scheme to poison, sterilize, or dumb people down via preservation methods, just like the eradication of communicable disease. It appears that the Foundation itself was it was donating to things right, It wasn't necessarily leading research. What most likely happened is someone went into a boardroom and pitched an idea and someone said yes, right, and the Foundation therefore assigned some money to it. But we like a face on our villains. We like someone that we can look at when we have a problem. It's weird because I love that you were pointing out, Matt, how we had the appeal technology as a civilization back in what did you say twenty eighteen?
Twenty eighteen is when I first read about it. I think maybe it's been around for longer than that. But James Rogers is the guy's name who created appeal and then it got backed by at least you know, the Gates money, and that was a while ago.
And it is an iteration on a theme. We're going to pause for a word from our sponsors, and then when we come back, we're going to learn some weirder stuff about fruit preservation, produce preservation, that goes far, far far before Bill Gates ever clicked a mouse clicked at a window. What is our best? Bill Gates stroke.
Looked out, O wind, there we go.
We've returned. Here's the truth. People have been coating produce with artificial protective layers for like a thousand years minimum.
Yeah, let's look at apples as a great example. In twenty seventeen, a piece in The Atlantic by Julia Phillips pointed out that apples that you pick right from a tree are you know, dirty. I mean, anything that grows out of the ground's gonna gross out of dirt. It's gonna and you have a little dirt on it. They are often scarred, pock marked. They're out there in the nature. There might be worms, there might be you know, animals taking a little bite or whatever. Most plants are able to house organisms when they're left to their own devices in the wild, you know. But also like for the most part of the animals that are eating these things, or if they're growing wild, they're not exactly the same as like the American consumer in terms of like their expectation of perfection.
Very true, there's also something to think about here with apples. If an apple falls from the tree on which it was grown and then hits the ground. Yes, it could be dirty. Yes, you might not even use that in the you know, the bushels of apples that you're collecting. But when do you pick the apple? When is the apple fresh and ready and ripe to be picked and then sold. That is a whole other question we're going to get into here, because when if you pick it at the right time, it is almost ripe enough to be on the shelf.
But the right time, yeah.
Just don't ripe enough to make it on those trips.
Right.
So again, you want to use something like this technology like appeal to keep the apple safe and long enough and worm free until you can get it right at there at time and then send it off.
It's sort of like taking a steak off of the grill before it's done cooking, because it's going to continue cooking. It's like timing is everything. And I saw a really interesting interview with Neil de grass Tyson or he was speaking to Anthony Bourdain who posed this notion to you know, to the grass Tyson that seemed to kind of blow his mind, which usually it's the other way around in terms of minds being blown. But Bourdain said that food in general and throughout history, it's it's all about getting it at the perfect.
Level of decay. Yeah, like everything is decaying.
And then like when you find the quote, even the word ripe is often used to refer to like corpses, because it is a measure of level of decay.
Yeah, it's ethylene concentration. If you think about a banana, the reason why the color change on the outside, it is this cool little signal to let the user of said banana to know when it's time. Same to do with the squishiness of that banana. It's time to eat this thing now. But it's not really for that. That's the that's the banana naturally decaying and let you know, letting loose some of these chemicals that break down the substances. That's why it smells good. That's why it tastes good.
It's the advertisement to the rest of the natural world. Eat me, come here, Yes, let's me spread my seeds, yes, and poop the seeds.
Suctive, It's true.
It's true. Also, unless we slutshame produce here. There there is also there is also a fascinating thing with ethylene that will get into later. We need to understand there is a reason that certain fruits in particular will accelerate the ripening process, or the entropy. That's what we're dancing around, the entropy of other pieces of the natural world. Folks try to preserve this. By folks, I mean humans. The first US patent for coating fruits with wax. It dates back to nineteen twenty two in the United States. It's a mixture of your old school paraffin, wax and kerosene. It's made by a guy named Ernest Brogden, and absolutely no one thought it was weird that it was spraying fruit with kerosene. They were like, right on, man, now I can have apples a little later. No, I can have some pears that are not immediately going bad.
Well, that's the thing too.
If you buy stuff like that fruit and vegetables from your local farmers market or from like a farm stand or whatever, and you're not used to doing that, they're gonna go bad in a day or so. You know they're gonna go bad in just a couple of days. And that might be surprising to some people who are used to only buying fruits and vegetables from like a giant conglomo you know, groceries.
Yeah, most fruits do this on their own. They manufacture or generate their own protective covering. It's a it's a talcum esque powder made of fat crystals. That's why, like to our earlier example, when you're picking apples from your proverbial tree, they look all pock marked and scarred and a little bit dusty. Even if you can't find a source of dust, they're generating that covering. It's similar to how chicken eggs need to be refrigerated in, as you said, a conglomcose store if you purchase them from there. But if you purchased chicken eggs from a guy who just grows chickens, you don't have to refrigerate them.
Yeah, and they're better, Boy, are they better? Like I'm sorry not to be that guy, but they do taste different. They've got a different color. There's just a vibe to them that feels much better. And I, you know, I do my best to buy the nicer eggs, I guess from the grocery store or the brown kind of quote unquote cage free ones. But we even know that those situations are not what they seem. You know, the notion of cage free. It's sort of like loaded like it actually means sure, they're not like in like sharing a single cage with like hundreds of chickens. But they're also not just like roaming the wild, you know, hills, like foraging on grain or whatever.
Let's also put out here, we're talking about this kerosene wax mixture that was applied to the exterior of fruits to theoretically preserve them a little bit longer there, and they make their own essentially protective coating. Many fruits do, and vegetables many of them even have a protective coating like a peel or you know, an exoskeleton of sorts, like a banana, like an avocado like something like that. But that isn't always sufficient to prevent oxidation. And again, some of those natural Again, I keep using ethylene concentrations because one of the things I looked at, I think Pharmisen one of the things they talked about ethylene a lot. And as you said, Ben, we're going to talk about ethylene gas in a second, because that stuff is dangerous in my opinion. But the oh, where was I going? Matt you were going somewhere. We were going to talk about. One of the other big problems that we've had with produce is humanity's attempts to prevent pests from eating all that fruit. We're talking about stuff that's on the outsides of the fruit, something like an orange. Well, you spray some of that stuff down with pesticides, at least historically humans, and a lot of that stuff is so dangerous and bad for us, even though we have to trust the FDA is saying the concentrations are whatever it is, that's safe for us. It's fine, sure, sure, but there are substances, dangerous substances that have been sprayed on our produce for decades. And I would say, gentlemen, we grew up eating a lot of that pest aside on our fruits and bench oh.
Yeah, look how we turned out. Not great?
Ah, we're doing all right.
Joke.
Also, we grew up in the time where the FDA's rationale was something like, spray whatever you want on the surface of the produce. It has a peal. You just peel off the orange. Yeah, peel you know.
Or you're gonna wash it. Duh, it'll be fine.
Yeah, what are they gonna do use lemons? S Are they fancy?
This is America? Oh I love lemons. Do you guys have like a hardcore policy on washing your produce? Yes?
I wash it every every goal piece, even if it says we washed it three times.
You're good smart. It was just interested in your a stance on this.
I use water when I wash it.
Ooh that's a hot take.
That wait way to hire as you're plumbing, jesezu.
This so the concept of a peel the company, right, not the concept of a peel on a piece of produce, the brand a peel as a threat. It went viral on social media for a couple of reasons, and one of the primary reasons is the visibility of the sticker, which is actually EPI peel. That's the sticker people were looking at. And it's kind of similar to how folks would allege that Nabisco was some sort of flagship of a Freemason based Illuminati cabal because of the little stamp on the Oreo cookies or the you.
Know, there's kind of a seal. Yeah, yeah, I've never really examined it very closely. Is it nefarious?
And it's it's it's literally a thing you would stamp on a cookie to make it distinctive.
But the idea is uh. The The argument here is that one could, if one has the right perspective, immediately identify conspiracy. The problem is, real conspiracies don't advertise themselves. Real conspiracies don't have a big symbol that says, hey, look at me, I'm doing evil things. Real conspiracies hide themselves, just like the monopolization of food. Shout out to Dole, Shout out to Nestle, Shout out to kelen Nova right, shout out to those guys who buy Kelenova recently.
Oh it was now that was your story from Strange News?
Was Mars Mars?
Yes, yes, shout a little family outfit than Mars Corporation.
Yeah, mom and pop.
Well, let's go ahead and quickly say exactly what appeal is. And I think we can use cucumbers, even though it's not the best example because appeal has mostly been used so far, at least in places like Tescos on different types of oranges like mandarins and avocados specifically. But in the United States, they ran tests with this substance, this coating on cucumbers, and guys have you ever bought a hothouse cucumber that is wrapped in a really tight plastic wrapping.
Yeah, it's illegal for you to ask me that.
It's like shrink crap.
Whenever I'm buying cucumbers for like my son and I, I will buy that specific type of cucumber. It doesn't matter where it's from. I look for the one that's basically plastic wrapped, and I don't think twice about it. I go, oh, that one's got to be fresh, super fresh. It's wrapped in plastic, and I chop it all up, send it all the way with my son to school, and I consume a bunch of it myself. Well, this appeal is just a coating. It would be a plasticless coating, which sounds good to my ears that you spray onto that cucumber, And it's made up of mono and diglycerides, which are those same fatty acids that create the natural coatings that most fruits and vegetables have. Yeah, so theoretically appeal is just a little extra natural coating, but it is manufactured vegetable fruit based mono and diglycerides.
That's true. It also brings us to another part of the conversation. It is dangerously tempting to see a sticker on a thing, whether that be an apple, a cucumber, a banana and avocado, and immediately assume, Hey, I saw the sticker. I am included in this conspiracy. I am somehow read on. But to be clear, there are produce production conspiracies at play. They're not the kind of things you see advertised with a sticker. We have to talk about ethylene gas, the chemical name C two H four. It's a naturally occurring thing. It's what ripens fruit, what encourages uh to Anthony Bourdain's earlier point, the entropy.
Yeah, but you can also use ethylene gas in a Uh, you can introduce ethylene gas to produce in an environment. Oh wow, Hey that's my son. Hey hey, he's behind me. He's excited.
Uh.
We're talking about fruits and vegetables. Writer, how much do you like those cucumbers we get, I won't wish if you salted, and how like good? They feel like they're like perfect? Thank you buddy. He left me hanging, no high five.
That's okay, legend, absolute legend.
So the ethylene gas is something you can do artificially. You can introduce that to Let's say you've got a truckload of I don't know, what's something, guys, bananas.
Sham my truck of bananas. What am I gonna do?
Well, you put it into you dropped that giant container or whatever, all those containers of bananas into a room. Then you release ethylene gas, and what that will do is artificially ripe in those bananas. But guess what, guys, ethylene gas doesn't penetrate all the way into the center of that delicious banana. What it does is it makes the exterior nice and ripe, to make it look like the bananas ready to eat, even though the inside says, oh, guys, i'd need another like five to seven days.
Well, you know, one.
Thing I noticed I was looking into some of this stuff was reports of people saying that they don't think fruit smells anyway anymore. And I think that is directly as a result because Matt, you had mentioned the ethylene that was naturally produced and the ripeness and the entropy and all that. That's where the smell comes from, That's where the taste comes from. If these things are being like artificiently ripe and somewhat, which totally makes sense. They would feel and react and smell and tastes differently, have a different texture.
It's not cool.
Well, it is different. I appreciate the point you're making there. Know about the smell versus the I guess, the mass market smell versus the farmer's market smell. That's something a lot of people in the US can differentiate from.
Well, yeah, because the ethylene is the thing that makes it right. Well, we just talked about like that smell comes directly from the breakdown, and if the inside being broke down down.
Then it's going to get a smell.
Yeah, it's fixing the outside of the house without repairing the interior. That's what's happening. And we see Also this is pro tip by the way, a fellow conspiracy realist, this is why you can accelerate the ripening of another fruit by sticking it in a paper bag with a banana. Tomatoes also exhibit a lot of eminy, I should say a lot of ethlenes. So you can put a tomato, buy something, and it will ripe in more quickly. If you have bananas that seem to be going bad at a cartoonish rate, you might have some tomatoes, buy them. Just check on that part. It's true, it's a pro tip. But scientists have known about this mechanism for more than I guess, technically in the West more than a century, but I would say more than several thousand years because people figure this out pretty quickly. The produce industry has leveraged this in fascinating problematic ways. We always say it here in English, one bad apple. It turns out the one over ripe apple emitting a lot of this gas.
That's what spoils the bunch.
That's what that's what's happening. There is science behind it.
Love that did not know. I was today years old.
I didn't know the banana trick either, Ben, But that's this is all good info. But man, I we talk a lot too about, like you know, artificially engineered seeds and things like that, and this just feels like an extension of that, you know, and like you know, the idea is it's not in the best interest of these big corporations for the fruit and the vegetables to be in their most natural state, because their priorities are more in how long can we hold onto these before we have to cut our losses.
Now that's a big deal. I always think about that when I go into a grocery store.
I'm like, how is this giant pile of avocados not just rotting?
You know?
And sometimes they are, And I wonder what the spoilage rate for things like that are. And they're obviously people crunching numbers that are trying to increase those stats in their to their benefit.
Because I want to bring up one other way that fruit can be artificially ripened. So say you you ship some stuff from Ecuador, it gets to the United States, gets to a shipping facility, and it's not ripe yet, it's not ready to go out. Another way to do it is to use calcium carbide, which it produces essentially a similar gas, not the same type of gas. I think it's called acetylene gas. It's kind of like ethylene gas, but not quite the same. And what goes in welding torches, Yes, yes, crash the job, but use of it for this process has been banned at least in the United States and in several other countries, but not in some uh. And it does the same exact thing where you get that exterior ripening, but the interior just isn't ready yet.
And it's important that we we mentioned this because so much goes into the stuff that you run into in your grocery store, folks. Perhaps one of the most dangerous conspiracies is this. There is a concerted effort afoot to make sure that you ignore the human cost of growing these things, of bringing them to you across the planet out of season in season. There is no proving conspiracy on the behalf of appeal or epipeal to sterilize people. There's no conspiracy to make you dumber other than the conspiracy that already existed, which is to make you ignore the human cost of these violent ends.
Here here, And I think we maybe didn't mention one of the more I don't know easily dismissable. I think one could argue TikTok conspiracy theories here. The actual like, this is a piece of fruit that is fully made of some sort of polymer, and people, you know, there are videos of people like saying, look, I found this plastic piece of fruit in my order from the grocery store. Though I don't know, maybe it happens, maybe some slip in. I don't think there's a concerted effort for this, But what do you guys.
Think, What does it taste like?
The rubber? There are allegations that bananas, watermelons, a bunch of other types of fruits show up, people cut into them and show on these you know, TikTok or Instagram videos whatever it is cutting into the thing, and it does look like the meat of the watermelon is made of something else, or it is watermelon like and it's the right color, but it's not the right texture. And I would pause it that these artificial ripening techniques are one of the reasons that we are seeing an uptick in that kind of thing where that banana is not ready to eat for like a week or two. It wasn't ready to even be picked off of the banana plant yet, but the company needed to get that shipment out or else there's not going to be enough stuff on the store shelves.
Well, I say this is a perfect example of that.
This is the truth behind on the surface is just this easily clickable conspiracy theory, the idea that the fruit manufacturers are replacing the fruit.
With fake fruit.
That you know, it's much deeper and more specific than that, and rooted in the manufacturing process. But I don't think that dole are shipping out prop bananas.
No, why would they. They'll just buy another country or overthrow a government.
One other minor angle when it comes to that specific conspiracy theory isn't really related, but I think we should at least mention it here. And that is the fact that produce shipments coming in to the United States, so produce that the United States is importing are more and more being used by cartels and other organizations to ship narcotics.
Speaking of watermelons, yeah.
Well yeah, well, watermelons, green beans, celery squash, holapanio paste, sugar, bananas. Really literally think of a shipment of produce, and there have been narcotics in vast quantities sent over in shipments of this, sometimes packaged separately, sometimes in the vats of jalapeno paste, like we're talking bricks of methamphetamine, and you know, giant bags of fentanyl or cocaine that has been made to look like watermelons, like fake paper watermelons.
It's comical looking. I'm looking at the pictures right now. They look like they're paper maches.
Do you guys want to know one that didn't make the news. Yeah, flower bulbs. There's a there's a huge, huge trade for flowers. The floral industry in the United States gets a lot of stuff from South and Central America. So wow, the you could bust, Well, you could if you were a villain, move things via flower bulb shipments because it was supposed to be fresh, meaning they get some expedited chipping. A couple of people got caught.
Wow.
Well, I'll give you an example from Atlanta from August thirteenth of this year, twenty twenty four, there was a huge shipment of celery that was going to a place called what is it Atlanta State Farmers Market in Forestworth Park.
Yeah, and you mentioned this on Strange News.
Oh perfect. It was methamphetamine and it was packaged with the celery just kind of in there, but it was separated a little bit. The weird one came when I think it was right around that same time, August twenty second, twenty twenty four, there was a story about that the watermelons that were packaged that were fake watermelons that had a bunch of drugs in them, alongside regular watermelons that were meant to go to the store. Now, in both of those cases. Unfortunately, the real fruits had to get thrown away because they were potentially contaminated right by whoever was packaging those drugs. But I don't think I don't think this would explain fake looking tasting or fake textured fruit. I don't think so, unless there are like fake bananas that came through with a shipment along with the real bananas, and the fake ones were used to hide the drug shipment that went past you know, customs or something, and then somehow accidentally one of those a couple of crates of fake bananas got in with the real ones. But I don't think that happened.
Aren't they like customs stickers like on those fake watermelons, or there's like tape wrapped around them?
Is that real? Or is that? Like? Man, is that fake too? Like?
I obviously made it pretty far through the the you know, the whole inspection process.
Oh yeah, let's do it this way. Have you ever eaten a banana only to find that it was methamphetamine? If so, write to us Illumination Global Unlimited, Brought to you by your friends at stuff they don't want you to know. We hope you enjoyed this episode. We can't wait to hear your thoughts. We try to be easy to find online.
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