Water privatization is a huge, horrific thing. It's been going on in South Africa for quite some time, and they have the cholera and the murders of citizens by private police forces to prove it. The results have been uniformly horrific. That fuckface knows it.
But LOL @ that artificial ingredient article:
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even though the Food and Drug Administration says GMOs are safe.
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Really? The FDA said that? That all GMOs are safe? Like, by their very nature or something? So if you genetically modify an organism, it is by definition safe? Cool.
But, see, that is no more stupid an interpretation than talking about people's 'unfounded fears' about artificial ingredients, or the commonly cited naturalistic fallacy.
The thing about artificial ingredients and new technologies is that they're often not sufficiently tested before they're unleashed on the population and the environment in big, sweeping waves. The reason that we know which 'natural' ingredients and foods are safe is, all too often, trial and error. They've been around for a long time, in naturally occurring quantities and contexts, and we've been able to observe their effects on large populations, in the world. We've seen what they do to the human body, and to human culture and the environment. And despite common misperceptions, we're still doing that. We're still waiting to see how things pan out for the most part. Howcome people are getting fatter? Why are honeybees dying out? What's with the weird earthquake patterns and strange pockets of disease and fishes all turning into lady fishes?
These aren't things that our regulatory agencies test for preemptively. These effects are often unpredictable. Because when you go around changing things on a large scale like that, shit happens, and it's not always the shit you might be looking for during the approval process.
And for that reason, people understandably will sometimes evaluate the usefulness of a particular innovation against its unknown potential to do harm. And maybe the benefits of having more brightly colored Taco Bell or cost savings of artificial flavorings are, in a lot of people's opinions, not really beneficial enough to merit embracing them.
It's not unreasonable or unfounded for consumers to say, "You know, no. This is not an innovation I think is valuable enough to be a guinea pig for. I will pay the premium for real black pepper, and my tacos do not need to be day glo colored."