<B>By Deepa BHOOKHUN</B>

Goodness! What is safe to eat nowadays? One of life?s greatest pleasures ? salted peanuts ? has now been cruelly taken away from us because evil people are adding poison to them! I?m personally less upset about the white rabbit sweets and the milk because I don?t have a sweet tooth and I don?t like particularly the taste of milk but let?s not be too selfish, shall we?

I wonder about those people ? whether in China, Mauritius or elsewhere ? who have absolutely no qualms about adding stuff they know is hazardous to people?s health and selling the food items, all the while pretending that the food is fit for consumption. How do they live with themselves?

How do they wake up every morning and look at themselves in the mirror?

All this for what? MONEY.

I wonder if they ever stop and think that somewhere a child or an adult is being taken ill because they have eaten poison?

Well let this be a lesson to us all, greedy slobs that we are ? at the end of the day, we are as much to blame as those criminals. After all they are only responding to our needs.

We are prepared to eat and drink almost anything nowadays just to satisfy our greed.

How many of you read the labels when you go grocery shopping? How many of you care whether genetically modified organisms (GMO) have been added to your food?

How many of you know how wrong it is? How many of you care?

But no, we?re happy to eat GMO vegetables, genetically modified fish (mutants I like to call them), drink milk that rightly belong to calves, and eat any other dead meat and we don?t ever question the source as long as our taste buds have been satisfied.

And then, true to our hypocrite selves, we express outrage when we hear that a horse has been savagely killed by a couple of dimwits. They?re barbarous, we say, they should be punished. I agree. But what about the other barbarous criminals that we happily subsidize when we buy the meat of the animals they have killed?

What difference is there between a savagely killed horse and a savagely killed cow, pig, sheep or chicken? If it takes a video clip to make the killings of all animals more real to you and if it would help you be less of a hypocrite, please log on to www.peta.org. There are a few video clips on there that might put some things in perspective.

Anyway.

Maybe poisoning our food is the solution that has been found to the food crisis. Can?t produce more food so let?s kill a few people and we?ll have less of them to feed.

I must apologize for my morbid sense of humour but I cannot help but feel that whatever is happening is the result of our own recklessness, our meanness, our greed and our selfishness.

But this still doesn?t solve my problem ? what about my salted peanuts?!