[Editor’s note: The following article contains an edited distillation of the hour long message delivered by the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan as Part 37 of his 58-week Lecture Series “The Time and What Must Be Done.”]
In the 3rd Chapter, the 26th verse of the Holy Qur’an, Allah is telling Muhammad to say: “O Allah, Owner of the Kingdom, Thou givest the kingdom to whom Thou pleasest, and takest away the kingdom from whom Thou pleasest, and Thou exaltest whom Thou pleasest and abasest whom Thou pleasest.
In Thine hand is the good. Surely, Thou art Possessor of power over all things.” So to believe in God and to follow God’s Guidance and Admonition is the real doing of good!
In the Book of Genesis, Chapter 1, verse 28, it reads: “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and [over] every creeping thing that crawleth upon the earth.”
›So looking again at the abuse by those who are the stewards of the Earth and its animals and resources: Well, you were given time to rule, but God knew what you were going to do. And that’s why the angels said to Allah (Surah 2, verse 30):
“What will you place in the earth as a ruler but that which will create mischief and cause the shedding of blood?”—and by so doing, the present rulers have violated their stewardship over a creation that they had nothing to do with its creation.
This is Allah (God’s) creation, and you violated it by your misuse and abuse of His Creation.
How our food is denatured through added hormones, unnatural chemical ripening
In his monumental book How to Eat to Live, Book 2, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad talks about “the denaturing of food”; and he tells us that when we go to the health food store to buy pills, the pills are not satisfactory to give you the nutrients that have been taken from the food.
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad writes on Page 93, in Chapter 25, “Food Robbed of Natural
Vitamins”: “When the vitamins and proteins are chemically taken out of natural foods, it makes the food less valuable. The chemicals used to take out vitamins and proteins from their natural place in food and the chemicals used to keep and preserve the vitamins and proteins make it not too safe for us to eat vitamins and proteins in pills and liquid form. It is a pity that the good food is robbed for the sake of a commercial dollar.”
On Pages 107-108, in Chapter 29, “Swine Eats Anything,” he writes: “America’s markets are loaded with swine, and loaded with vegetables and fruits which are preserved and made to look beautiful by having poisonous chemicals poured upon them.
There are thousands, and hundreds of thousands of herds of cattle and sheep and there are hundreds of thousands of fowls. Yet, Americans decorate their tables with the divinely -prohibited flesh—the swine—and represent themselves as being the true Christian followers of Jesus.”
Well, in Chapter 47, “Doctor Falls Victim of Same Sickness,” on Page 158, he writes: “IF THE MEDICAL DOCTORS and the theologian teachers and scientists of chemicals, are indulging and are not successful in expanding their own lives in what they are offering to us to eat and drink, then why should we follow their way of life?
The chemical doctors go to the earth to get chemicals to heal themselves and us. These chemicals soon will destroy both [them and us]. [Our] bodies were not made to be supported by chemicals for health and longevity. The fact is the body of man was not to be drugged. …” And they are turning down, now, much of their medication, which is absolutely poison and detrimental to us.
It is prophesied in the Holy Qur’an that when The God of Truth, Freedom, Justice and Equality comes, He will force this evil world to confess its evil. And this, they are now doing. So there are forces, now, pushing the small farmer out, causing the small farmers to lose their farms so that these farms can be eaten up by the larger corporate farmers.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration approve techniques that are being developed to fatten the sheep and the cows faster. Hormones are injected into them, going against the natural way, to fatten them to get them to market faster; the coloring and other additives added to the food is denaturing the food!
And because of the distances that food now has to travel to come to the marketplace, chemical preservatives are added to keep the food from rotting, rather than the family farmer, who lived at the outskirts of the city; and could bring their produce fresh directly to the city so we have it fresh, today.
You, the farmer, the worker, pick it “today,” it’s in the market tomorrow; and, it’s brought up by the people in “the next few days”: So we did not have to use chemicals to preserve or to help the ripening process by pulling it from the vine before it is ripe;
Or taking it from the ground before it is ripe. So all of these techniques to produce more money is also producing more disease in food that lacks nutritional value. Our food is being denatured.
In 2009, a Times magazine health segment writer, M.J. Stephey, asked the question, “Eating Your Veggies: Not As Good For You?” He reports on a Journal of Horticultural Science, February 2009 report on “Declining Fruit and Vegetable Nutrient Composition: What is the Evidence?”]; he writes:
“According to Donald R. Davis, a former research associate with the Biochemical Institute at the University of Texas, Austin. Mr. Davis claims the average vegetable found in today’s supermarket is anywhere from 5% to 40% or more lower in minerals (including magnesium, iron, calcium and zinc) than those harvested just 50 years ago.”
When you compare the loss of land, the death of the industry of farming and the small farmer, and then you look at the value of the food that was produced by the small farmer and the value of the food that is being produced by the large corporate-owned farmers, you will find the disparity is what we are suffering from. So the pharmaceutical companies are getting rich to produce chemistry to overturn the effect of the chemical value of foods.
In other words: The natural function of your body is continued by the natural producing of food and drink. But when you alter the food, then that begins the altering of the function of the organs of your body, producing disease. So that these pharmaceutical companies, now, are getting wealthy;
Because when you get sick you go to the doctor, he sends you to the pharmacy; and the pharmacy, now, is drugging you and charging us all kinds of money to keep us alive. But what quality of life do we have?
