'They’re rationing tomatoes. We’re told it’s about supply chains, bad weather and the price of heating, but right now, in terms of the messaging, I suspect it’s more about pushing the word – rationing

'The problem is not with the tomatoes they’re rationing. The problem is the surplus of lies they keep selling. Stop buying them!' Neil Oliver

PUBLISHED Saturday 25 February 2023 - 18:49

They’re rationing tomatoes in the supermarkets. We’re told it’s about supply chains, bad weather and the price of heating, but right now, in terms of the messaging, I suspect it’s more about pushing the word – rationing. Less about any believable shortage of food and more about getting us used to hearing the word.

No doubt, if experience is anything to go by, the rest will come later. My money says the rationing app for our smartphones is already sitting on a hard drive somewhere, ready when we are.

For now, it’s more of a familiar process of psychological manipulation. Get us acquainted with the general idea of food scarcity so that we’re well-primed when the planned reality is unrolled.

We were given the same treatment with words like “lockdown” and “pandemic”, “mandate” and “denier”. Nudge, nudge. Rationing is a word from our parents’ and grandparents’ generation, a bit like “War in Europe” and “Fascist” and now they’re back in fashion once more. Rationing, I ask you, while the landfills swell with fresh food dumped every day.

The manipulation is invariably about an iron hand in a velvet glove, softly, softly catchy monkey. Much of the messaging in the MSM is, and has been for years, redolent of World War II and the fabled Blitz Spirit, “We’re all in it together”, “making do”, “mustn’t grumble”, “doing our bit”, “standing up for democracy”, “defending the free world”, “sacrifice”, “keep calm and carry on”. Someone somewhere must think our heads zip up the back.

Since I’ve mentioned the “D” word, which is democracy, why not pause for a moment to consider whether any of us has had a chance to vote, voting being that part of democracy we’re invited to think matters most, on any of this.

Do you remember ever voting to give the government the power to lock us in our homes, to shut our children’s schools, our pubs and restaurants, shops and businesses, to tell us whom we could visit or have in our homes, whether we could go for a walk, travel within our own country, far less beyond these shores? Do you remember voting to empower employers to mandate medical procedures for their staff?

And while we’re on the subject of propaganda, who thought to convince us it was ok to demonise and exclude healthy fellow citizens on the grounds they might be carrying an invisible disease?

If you don’t remember whether or not you were invited to get involved in a conversation or a debate about all of this, perhaps it’s because you were, quite understandably, distracted most of the time by the bombardment of state-sanctioned messaging by politicians and the MSM.

Or maybe you were just afraid of the guaranteed ridicule or losing your job.

It’s not just us here in the UK either. I wonder how many US citizens ask themselves when they voted to have their government send well over 100 billion dollars to Ukraine at a time of critical hardship for millions of Americans unable to afford food or heating.

Rather than ask questions, or, in the case of the tax-paying citizens of East Palestine, Ohio, liberally dusted as they are with fallout from a vinyl chloride mushroom cloud ignited with the go-ahead of their own elected officials after a train derailment, perhaps querying why their predicament is not the stuff of a national emergency while fish die in their rivers and their pet and animals die in the fields, they are apparently expected to be reassured by the sight of Joe Biden posing for photos thousands of miles away in Ukraine, while air raid sirens provide sound effects and President Zelensky turns out once more in his freshly laundered combats.

So many times over the past few years, I have thought to myself: “Who do these people think they are”, all of them, once elected to office, herding us towards World War, taking away our natural freedoms? Who do these people think they are that feel empowered to disregard our liberty, our very existence as independent individuals, and spend their time posturing and politicking? Fiddling while Rome burns.

Who do these people think they are blatantly creating and then ignoring hardship, enacting policies to wreck livelihoods, economies and the wellbeing of millions and then standing by while real people suffer the consequences of their vainglorious, self-serving nonsense disguised by propaganda shaped only to distract? And by God do they need to distract us.

Let’s stop for a moment and think what the reality of the situation is – the undeniable reality – which is that we already have the potential for more than enough food, energy and everything else, courtesy of existing technology, and therefore any alleged shortages in the West are only fraudulent fiction.

I said at the top we were being familiarised with rationing and making do. There’s a glaring paradox in all this. At the same time as being nudged into thinking we must do without we are simultaneously drowning in surplus of every sort.

We have centuries of affordable energy under our feet and yet we are bullied into a false reality in which fewer and fewer people can afford to heat their homes or put fuel in their cars and vans. Every year we bulldoze billions of pounds worth of food into landfills while now being told to do without erstwhile familiar foodstuffs.

We do much the same with clothes made in sweatshops and worn once before discarding into those same landfills. We upgrade our phones and other tech and put last year’s offering in the bin, disregarding the lithium and cobalt and the rest of the precious metals mined by child slaves out of sight and out of mind. We will soon be ordered to junk our gas boilers and our petrol and diesel cars. Our governments siphon our taxes into subsidies for wind turbines and solar panels that will themselves be yet more toxic landfill in 20 years’ time.

It's not just about consumables that we can touch. Every moment of every day we are deluged with information as well, data, and so-called news, but made increasingly incapable of discerning how much, if any of it, is worth knowing in the first place. So much chaff in which to hide the wheat. We are drowning in words but struggling desperately to find so much as a sentence worth reading.

Instead of being educated at school, learning objectively and meaningfully about our shared history, heritage and culture, about how to understand the world and contributing to its betterment, our children are too often indoctrinated with propaganda, drilled with ideologies predicated upon obsession not with the content of people’s characters but with the colour of their skins and the nature of their sexual preferences real or imagined.

A television series that has been the work of hundreds, if not thousands of people spread over a year or more – an effort that was once the stuff of a shared experience keeping us engaged and talking together as communities for months on end – is binge-watched in a single night.

In every way imaginable our dopamine receptors – especially those of our children – are being bludgeoned into numbness.

An eight-year-old boy with a smartphone and an internet connection can help himself, in a week, to more naked women in more positions and predicaments than Genghis Khan saw in a lifetime of murderous conquest.

Sickening surplus and overload all around and, yet, here we are, rationing food in our supermarkets? Pardon my French, but What the Hell?

Rationing tomatoes is just a symptom of how corrupted and bent out of shape our food industry has become at the mercy of greedy corporations committed only to profit for the few at the expense of the health of the many. Let me stress, not one jot of this is the fault of farmers – those out there in a government-made maze of regulations and obstacles to the job of producing healthy food for healthy populations.

EU regulations make it legal to label as “milk” the white liquid obtained from processing almonds and oats. There are to be ground-up crickets in the bread and hundreds of other food products besides.

Industrially processed vegetables are labelled chicken, fish and mince. They make oil from sunflowers and rape seeds, process away its rancid, toxic nature, and sell it in food, and as salad dressing and as an ingredient in soap powder for getting stubborn stains out of clothes. It’s in baby food as well.

Tomatoes aren’t in season in the UK in February, as you might have noticed. Why should they be? Why aren’t we concentrating our attention on what food is in season, and local, and good for us, and teaching people how to cook it?

I travel a fair part of the length of this country every week between my home in Scotland and this studio in London. Aside from the odd moment or two of built-up area, the vast majority of the landscape is green fields. Why aren’t we making the most of the fertile land with which we are blessed instead of lofty talk of handing a third of it back to the beavers?

If food is at a premium, reaching a point where rationing might be required, why are we paying farmers to get out of the business altogether and sell off their hand to transnational corporations for God alone knows what purpose? Why are planes and ships burning fuel to transport avocados for thousands of miles around the world from places where the mass cultivation of the product causes catastrophic damage to local water supply?

What do you think is the answer to these questions? Are our leaders so inexperienced, so clueless about the practicalities of the world that they just don’t know how to run the country for the benefit of the people they’re supposed to serve?

Or are they knowingly in the service not of the people they are elected to represent but of transnational corporations, the markets and the Bank for International Settlements? Which of the two options do you think it might be?

Or is it simpler and more depressing still? Have our leaders, in fact, simply persuaded themselves that distraction is the only game they need to play?

Are we simply to be fed a diet of propaganda and downright lies about health, food, the climate, war, biology, and race … until we are so unwell, confused, exhausted and anxious we won’t notice when they pick the last penny out of our pockets and lock us down in a digital ghetto watched round the clock by cameras and listening devices we pay through the nose to carry in our own pockets? And they’re rationing tomatoes.

Here’s the thing: the world has been run off the rails. No wonder it’s all about distraction – because distraction is all they have. Greed and unrestrained power have brought us to the only destination that was ever in view. Which is right here, right now.

They won’t fix the mess because the mess suits them. I don’t have all the answers – but I do know the solution starts with ignoring any more of their nonsense. The problem is not with the tomatoes they’re rationing. The problem is the surplus of lies they keep selling. Stop buying them.