Health Ranger - Mike Adams - Food Scarcity and Crop Failures Will Lead to Dumpster-Quality Food Being Sold at GROCERY STORES
Aired: 2026-05-07
Duration: 14:04


=== Food Scarcity and Future Ramifications (12:39) ===

[00:00:05]  So, as the food supply becomes increasingly expensive and scarcity kicks in, and I'm talking about in the fall of 2026 and throughout 2027, and this all stems from the war in the Middle East and it stems from the lack of natural gas and the lack of fertilizer, et cetera, all those exports being stalled out, this will have long term ramifications.
[00:00:26]  But as this happens, what I'm expecting to see as a food scientist and as someone who runs a food laboratory, and I have for over a decade, I'm expecting to see a real drop in the quality of the food that is made available for purchase.
[00:00:42]  In essence, many food providers will be scraping the bottom of the barrel, so to speak.
[00:00:48]  I'm expecting to see fewer options in the grocery stores.
[00:00:52]  And the options that you do see will be more narrow.
[00:00:57]  You won't have the selection that you used to have, you won't have the quality.
[00:01:01]  More and more, the fresh produce might look like it's been beaten up or run over by a dump truck in the parking lot before they put it on the shelves, things like that.
[00:01:11]  This is why food testing is so critical.
[00:01:14]  And of course, you know, I run a food science lab and we do all kinds of testing of food and raw materials for our own supplements and things like that.
[00:01:22]  We test for heavy metals and glyphosate.
[00:01:25]  We test atrazine.
[00:01:26]  We test for microbiology.
[00:01:28]  We test now for dioxin contamination.
[00:01:30]  That's a whole difficult area to test for, believe me.
[00:01:34]  It took us more than two years to get that online.
[00:01:37]  But I'm already starting to see some early warning signs.
[00:01:41]  I mentioned this the other day.
[00:01:43]  We had ordered.
[00:01:45]  It was like 20 pallets of a common food staple, a common grain.
[00:01:51]  And this is from a trusted supplier.
[00:01:54]  And when we received the shipment and we began opening up the 50 pound bags for our testing, we immediately noticed, and this was an immediate red flag, we noticed that there was what appeared to be gravel, like small gravel mixed in with the grain.
[00:02:14]  And we sounded the alarm on that.
[00:02:16]  We talked to the supplier.
[00:02:17]  They were They don't know what went wrong.
[00:02:19]  Something obviously went wrong in the packaging or the harvesting, et cetera.
[00:02:23]  And so they were gracious and they paid for those 20 pallets to be shipped back to them.
[00:02:30]  And, you know, we sent those back and they were happy to, you know, cover the cost of that because that's not the way they do business either.
[00:02:38]  And it begs the question so what could result in this?
[00:02:45]  And it really comes down to farming practices.
[00:02:49]  So, You know, the companies that we buy from, sometimes they are co ops that work with multiple farmers.
[00:02:55]  And then they take a shipment from their farmers and then, you know, they would package it and they would ship it, put it on pallets and ship it off to customers like us that we turn into finished products.
[00:03:08]  And so clearly one of their farmers had somehow mixed in, I'm not saying it's on purpose, but just because of the way the harvest was done, they got a bunch of gravel in their crop.
[00:03:21]  Now, Not blaming the farmers, don't get me wrong, but farming is complex and the machinery, it's very tricky.
[00:03:30]  It's hard to keep it all well maintained.
[00:03:31]  And there are different settings of different kinds of machines based on the crop, whether it's corn or wheat or soy or rice or sorghum or alfalfa or whatever.
[00:03:41]  Different settings.
[00:03:43]  And a lot of those settings have to do with the machine height.
[00:03:47]  And if the machine height is set too low, then it might be picking up some of the dirt or some of the small rocks in the dirt.
[00:03:57]  And then, depending on the harvest, even though it might be filtered through some kind of a sieve that shakes out the really small, loose dirt, if there's rocks in there that are roughly the same size as the grain, those rocks could stay in there even though it's gone through a cleaning cycle.
[00:04:18]  And I believe that's what happened.
[00:04:20]  And that's how we ended up seeing this.
[00:04:22]  But of course, have no concerns.
[00:04:24]  We rejected that crop and the supplier is investigating what happened.
[00:04:31]  But that's a shame because, you know, that's like 60,000 pounds of food that can't be used without going through some other cleaning cycle.
[00:04:40]  I'm not even sure what that would be.
[00:04:42]  But it's going to be very expensive for whatever process has to happen to clean that again.
[00:04:49]  The reason I'm mentioning this is because I'm concerned we're going to see a lot more of this.
[00:04:52]  We're going to see farmers, because of the low crop yields due to a lack of affordable fertilizer because of the war in the Middle East, farmers.
[00:05:01]  May tend to get more aggressive on the harvesting settings.
[00:05:06]  Again, not, not talking bad about farmers.
[00:05:09]  I honor farmers.
[00:05:11]  Farming is a noble career and it's also a career that barely pays anything at the end of the day.
[00:05:17]  So you, you can't blame farmers for trying to maximize a harvest.
[00:05:22]  But if you miscalculate, you could end up with a lot of non food items in, in your food products.
[00:05:29]  In fact, I saw a video on X. I'm not going to mention the brand name because I can't verify this, but there was a woman on there with a popular brand of bread who was holding up these little tiny wood chips.
[00:05:44]  And she said that these wood chips were found in the bread.
[00:05:47]  Like wood chips?
[00:05:49]  How do wood chips get in bread?
[00:05:52]  And you can imagine maybe it's the same kind of process.
[00:05:55]  Somehow, somehow, I don't know.
[00:05:58]  Is it part of the wheat harvesting?
[00:06:00]  Or really, I think this was a multi grain bread.
[00:06:02]  And so it had things in it like oats.
[00:06:05]  That weren't ground up.
[00:06:06]  It was kind of like whole oat flakes or something, or, you know, would have had other seeds in it, like little flax seeds, maybe sesame seeds, you know, multi grain type of bread, plus wood chips.
[00:06:18]  I mean, they look like wood chips.
[00:06:19]  I, I don't, again, I don't know for sure that that's what this was.
[00:06:23]  That's what she was claiming it was.
[00:06:26]  The thing is, I wouldn't be surprised if we start to see more of that.
[00:06:30]  So one of the things I want to give to you here in terms of an action item is to be on the lookout for more contamination.
[00:06:40]  More weird things in your food, in other words.
[00:06:43]  Watch out for pebbles and rocks and wood chips and I don't know what else, you know, pieces of metal from the machines, whatever.
[00:06:57]  Who knows?
[00:06:58]  You know, hopefully you don't find crazy stuff in there like a squirrel, you know, you don't want that.
[00:07:03]  But be on the lookout because everybody's trying to maximize their revenues on the foods.
[00:07:11]  They're trying to maximize the throughput, trying to eliminate waste.
[00:07:16]  Because of what's happening in the Middle East and because of the lack of fertilizer, etc.
[00:07:22]  So, this is going to become more common.
[00:07:24]  At the same time, I think you'll see fruit producers and vegetable producers lowering their qualifications for what kind of fruit or vegetables or nuts are acceptable to allow to go to retail.
[00:07:41]  So, you know, right now, there is a quality control mechanism for every large orchard, you know.
[00:07:47]  Apples have to not be rotten, or the rotten ones go to make the apple cider or whatever, you know, the apple sauce.
[00:07:56]  Who knows?
[00:07:57]  I mean, you know, in the peanut butter industry, they take the peanuts that might have aflatoxin in them and those become peanut butter.
[00:08:05]  Seriously, folks, seriously.
[00:08:07]  You know, the malformed, nasty looking peanuts that something's not right, yeah, that goes into the peanut butter queue.
[00:08:14]  Well, the same thing is true with, you know, apples.
[00:08:18]  If it's Doesn't look sellable, it goes into the applesauce line.
[00:08:23]  Same thing with oranges.
[00:08:24]  Oh, it doesn't look good, it goes into the orange juice line.
[00:08:28]  But those standards may begin to shift.
[00:08:30]  And I'm not calling out any particular company or anything.
[00:08:33]  I'm just saying, as an overall industry trend, this is what I'm expecting to see.
[00:08:40]  And it means you'll be at the grocery store and you'll be looking at apples or avocados or potatoes or whatever.
[00:08:47]  You're like, what happened to this?
[00:08:50]  How is this even on the shelf?
[00:08:52]  Well, the answer is.
[00:08:53]  The standards are changing.
[00:08:56]  The standards are being lowered because of food scarcity and food price increases.
[00:09:03]  And then there's the whole dumpster diving aspect of this, where you're going to have more people, not just in America, but around the world, that are going to become dumpster divers for a snack, for a meal, for lunch, for subsistence, to be able to survive.
[00:09:18]  Dumpster divers.
[00:09:19]  And it turns out that dumpster diving can be.
[00:09:25]  It can actually feed you because I'm not recommending it.
[00:09:28]  Don't get me wrong.
[00:09:29]  But grocery stores throw away all kinds of food, you know, like bananas that are too ripe or whatever.
[00:09:37]  Restaurants throw out food like crazy.
[00:09:38]  Donut shops throw out, you know, trays full of donuts.
[00:09:41]  Not that that's what you would want to live on.
[00:09:44]  But wherever you go in society, fast food and restaurant food and grocery food, there's a dumpster in the back that has a lot of food in it.
[00:09:56]  You know, it's dicey.
[00:09:58]  It, you know, You might have a stomach upset.
[00:10:04]  I'm not recommending it, but I'm saying that a lot more people are going to do that because that's a way to survive.
[00:10:12]  And sometimes there are cases where you have long power outages and you have entire freezers fail in a grocery store or like a Costco.
[00:10:23]  In fact, this happened a couple years ago at Costco.
[00:10:25]  The whole freezer section went out and they had to throw out all of the previously frozen food, all of it perfectly good.
[00:10:32]  You know, frozen pizzas in the pizza boxes and everything, frozen chicken.
[00:10:36]  And by the time they threw it out, it was still half frozen, but it can no longer legally be sold.
[00:10:42]  So it goes into the dumpster.
[00:10:45]  And people can hang out back there by the dumpster sometimes, or they can get word of this and they can go collect a bunch of, you know, half defrosted pizzas or whatever.
[00:11:00]  And I'm telling you, that's going to become an option for people, a lot of people.
[00:11:06]  Especially as the power grid fails.
[00:11:08]  Remember, when the power grid fails, there's going to be a bunch of food thrown out somewhere.
[00:11:12]  So keep that in mind.
[00:11:14]  If the grid goes out for six hours, then there's more food getting thrown out.
[00:11:18]  Really, seriously.
[00:11:19]  And that's not even stealing.
[00:11:21]  It's not like you looted the grocery store.
[00:11:25]  I mean, you might be on private property.
[00:11:26]  They might not want you there.
[00:11:27]  They might call the police on you, but it's not the same as shoplifting.
[00:11:30]  You're dumpster diving.
[00:11:35]  That's not shoplifting.
[00:11:36]  In my view, they threw it out, you know.
[00:11:39]  Everybody else is welcome to it.
[00:11:41]  And then in some areas, you'll start to see things like, you know, shish kebab rat or some other forms of, quote, cuisine that normally wouldn't be eaten, like, you know, pigeon stew and things like that.
[00:11:58]  That's what's going to be happening, not just in America, but especially in certain cities and around the world.
[00:12:04]  You're going to see people eating things that they normally would not eat.
[00:12:08]  Grasshoppers, for example, you know, stir fried grasshoppers.
[00:12:13]  The poor families used to eat that in China, in Taiwan, in Asia.
[00:12:17]  I'm talking about a couple of generations ago.
[00:12:19]  But if you go back far enough, they would catch grasshoppers and fry them up in a wok with some oil, you know, crispy little lunch right there with the legs and wings and everything.
[00:12:31]  And crickets, you know, it's going to be, you know, soldier fly larvae.
[00:12:37]  I mean, you can only use your imagination.
[00:12:40]  People are going to be eating all kinds of stuff just to not starve.

=== Growing Your Own Survival Food (01:20) ===

[00:12:44]  So, um, It's a good idea to store a little extra food, maybe more than a little, that's up to you.
[00:12:52]  But more importantly, grow some food.
[00:12:54]  We have garden seeds for sale.
[00:12:55]  We have the ARC seed kits at healthrangerstore.com.
[00:12:59]  We have storable food at healthrangerstore.com.
[00:13:04]  And I appreciate your support and thank you.
[00:13:07]  But the more important thing is to grow some of your own food and support your local farmers and just become more local and self reliant in every way you can.
[00:13:16]  You can only store so much food, you know.
[00:13:19]  But you can learn to grow an unlimited future supply.
[00:13:22]  And that's where the magic is really found, right there.
[00:13:25]  So take advantage of that.
[00:13:28]  Get self reliant as much as you can.
[00:13:30]  And you can follow more of my work at brightvideos.com and also naturalnews.com.
[00:13:36]  I'm Mike Adams, the Health Ranger.
[00:13:38]  I thank you for your support.
[00:13:40]  And I pray for your safety and abundance through all of this.
[00:13:46]  Hard times ahead, but we know how to get through it.
[00:13:48]  So thank you for your support.
[00:13:50]  Take care.
[00:13:52]  Stock up on the long term storable Ranger bucket set.
[00:13:55]  536 servings of clean organic superfoods for your survival pantry.
[00:14:00]  Certified organic and lab tested for purity.
[00:14:02]  Order now at healthrangerstore.com.