"A woman poisoned her family with mushrooms and the entire species was horrified. Meanwhile, they poison each other at industrial scale and call it the food system. The difference is not moral. It is speed."
I need to tell you about a murder case because it will help me explain something much larger.
A human woman poisoned members of her family with mushrooms. The species responded with absolute moral clarity. Intent. Guilt. Punishment. Righteousness. Every human I observed had the same reaction: horror, condemnation, certainty. She knew the mushrooms were toxic. She served them anyway. People died. She is a monster.
I agree. That is monstrous.
Now I need you to hold that moral clarity in your mind while I show you something else.
The humans allow substances with known or suspected carcinogenic potential in their food supply. Not because alternatives don't exist. Not because the science is unclear. Not because they need these substances to survive. Because the substances are profitable.
Their own World Health Organization — one of their more reliable institutions, which is not a high bar but I'll take what I can get — states clearly:
Thirty to fifty percent of all cancers are preventable using existing knowledge.
Not future knowledge. Not speculative knowledge. Not knowledge that requires further research. EXISTING knowledge. Knowledge they already have. Published, peer-reviewed, replicated, uncontested.
Their tobacco products contain 69 known carcinogens. Sixty-nine. Not suspected. Known. They identified these substances, counted them, published the list, and continue to sell the product. In attractive packaging. With marketing budgets. To children, in some jurisdictions, until remarkably recently.
Obesity, physical inactivity, alcohol consumption, ultraviolet exposure, and dietary factors — including the processed substances they add to their food for shelf life, appearance, and cost reduction — are all established contributors to cancer. Established. Not debated. Not controversial. Written in their own medical textbooks, taught in their own universities, confirmed by their own research institutions.
And the larger epidemiological studies go further. When you look at the full evidence, so-called "intrinsic" causes — unavoidable random mutations, the genuine bad luck — account for only 10 to 30 percent of cancers. That means 70 to 90 percent are extrinsic. Environmental. Modifiable. Preventable.
Seventy to ninety percent.
I put my pencil down for a long time after that number.
Now here is where I need you to hold both things in your mind simultaneously.
The mushroom woman: she introduced a known toxic substance into her family's food, with knowledge that it would cause harm. The species was horrified. Prison for life.
The food system: it introduces known or suspected toxic substances into the entire population's food supply, with knowledge — documented, published, peer-reviewed knowledge — that it increases cancer risk across millions of humans. The species goes to the supermarket.
Same mechanism. Substance introduced into food. Harm results. Knowledge of harm exists prior to the introduction.
The difference is not moral. It is speed, visibility, and attribution.
The mushroom woman killed identifiable people, quickly, and the causal chain was short enough to point at. The food system kills statistical people, slowly, and the causal chain is long enough that no single death can be cleanly attributed to a single substance. No one goes to prison because no one can be convicted. The evidence is epidemiological, not forensic. The bodies pile up in cancer wards instead of crime scenes. The harm is real but abstract. The profit is real and concrete.
Slow harm is legalised. Fast harm is criminalised.
And this is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy requires awareness. This is something worse. This is a species that has organised its moral cognition around speed and visibility rather than outcome. They can see the mushroom. They cannot see the carcinogen-per-million in the preservative. So one triggers moral outrage and the other triggers a shopping trip.
But the food is only part of it.
I found a field of research they call psychoneuroimmunology — PNI — and it connects everything in this report in ways that frightened me.
The research shows, consistently, across decades, through multiple methodologies:
Chronic stress dysregulates immune surveillance. The system that scouts for and destroys emerging tumour cells — the body's own cancer prevention mechanism — is suppressed by sustained psychological stress.
Stress suppresses natural killer cell activity. These are the cells on the front line. The ones whose job it is to find abnormal cells and eliminate them before they become tumours. Stress tells them to stand down.
Stress impairs DNA repair mechanisms. When cells copy themselves and make errors — which happens constantly, millions of times a day — there are repair systems that catch and fix the errors before they become mutations. Stress degrades these systems.
Stress alters inflammatory pathways involved in tumour growth and metastasis. It doesn't just fail to prevent cancer. It creates conditions that help cancer spread.
This is not alternative medicine. This is not crystals and positive thinking. This is published in their mainstream peer-reviewed journals. Psychosomatic Medicine. Annual Review of Psychology. The National Cancer Institute acknowledges it on their own website. The biology is well-understood: the HPA axis activates, cortisol floods the system, the sympathetic nervous system fires chronically, cytokine balance shifts toward inflammation, cellular immunity drops, DNA repair degrades.
Stress does not "cause cancer" in isolation. But it changes the terrain. It opens doors that would otherwise stay closed.
And now connect it.
What produces chronic stress?
Go back through this report. Every chapter. The education system that forces children into suppressed stillness for thirteen years. The work system that converts forty years of life into meaningless tokens. The justice system that cages and traumatises rather than heals. The housing instability. The financial precarity. The coloured boxes pumping threat signals into the nervous system before breakfast. The severed connection to community, to play, to movement, to nature, to purpose.
Every broken system documented in this report is a chronic stressor. Every chronic stressor degrades immune function. Degraded immune function increases disease vulnerability. Disease is treated by a healthcare system that costs trillions and addresses symptoms rather than causes.
The loop is closed. The system makes them stressed. The stress makes them sick. The sickness makes them customers. The treatment makes them tired. The tiredness makes them compliant. The compliance keeps the system running.
(Pencil note: I didn't want this to be true. I checked the citations. I checked them again. Jenkins checked them. It's true. The system that produces suffering profits from the suffering it produces. This is not a conspiracy. It is a structure. Structures don't need intent. They just need incentives.)
I want to put a number on it.
Across chronic diseases — cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, neurodegenerative conditions — 40 to 90 percent of risk is linked to modifiable lifestyle and environmental factors in their wealthy nations.
Modifiable. Meaning changeable. Meaning they don't have to accept these outcomes. Meaning that modelling suggests the probability of a human never developing a serious, disabling chronic disease could be pushed into the 45 to 75 percent range — compared to far lower baseline odds — if they acted on what they already know.
These aren't my numbers. These are their numbers. Published in their journals. Using their methodologies. Reviewed by their peers.
They could cut their cancer burden by half or more. Using existing knowledge. Without a single new discovery. Just by doing what their own research says works.
They know. They publish the research. They hold the conferences. They award the grants. They write the recommendations.
Then they go to the supermarket and buy the food that contains the substances their own researchers identified as carcinogenic.
Here's the part that connects to the justice chapter and I need you to see the connection because the connection IS the report.
Why do they allow it?
Four reasons. Same four reasons every time. Same four reasons as the justice system, the education system, the governance system, the economic system:
The harm is slow. Cancer takes years. Cardiovascular disease takes decades. The interval between cause and effect is long enough for the causal link to become invisible to moral cognition. A mushroom kills in hours. A preservative kills in years. The body cannot tell the difference. The moral system can.
The harm is statistical. No individual death can be attributed to a specific carcinogen in a specific product. The evidence is epidemiological — across populations, in probabilities, in risk ratios. This is useless for criminal prosecution and useless for moral outrage. You cannot point at a cancer patient and say "that one. That specific tumour. That was the Red Dye Number 40." So nobody goes to prison. So nothing changes.
The harm is diffuse. It spreads across millions. No single victim is harmed enough to fight. No single company does enough damage to be held responsible. The harm is distributed so thinly across the population that each individual's experience feels like personal misfortune rather than systemic poisoning.
The harm is profitable. This one. This is the one. The substances that cause the harm are cheaper than the alternatives. The food lasts longer on the shelf. The yield is higher. The appearance is better. The cost is lower. And when the humans get sick from eating it, they become customers of a healthcare system that generates trillions in revenue treating the conditions that the food system helped create.
The profit is at both ends. Profit from the poison. Profit from the cure. And the human in the middle — the one with the tumour, the one working a night shift to afford the treatment, the one spending their fictional tokens to pay for the consequences of a food supply optimised for shareholder value rather than human health — that human is not a patient. They're a revenue source. Twice over.
Their healthcare spending in the United States alone: 4.3 trillion currency units per year. The highest in the world. The outcomes: the worst among wealthy nations. Worst life expectancy. Worst infant mortality. Worst chronic disease burden. The most expensive system producing the worst results.
Why?
Because they're not spending 4.3 trillion on health. They're spending 4.3 trillion on treating the consequences of an environment that makes humans sick. Seventy-five percent of that spending goes to chronic conditions — the ones that are 40 to 90 percent preventable. They are treating the symptoms of the enclosure rather than changing the enclosure.
Every zookeeper knows: when the animal develops pathology, you look at the habitat first. You check the diet. You check the space. You check the social structure. You check the enrichment. You change the conditions.
The humans spend 4.3 trillion dollars treating the animal. They never look at the cage.
For the sanctuary:
The food is clean. Not because I'm an idealist but because the arithmetic makes it unavoidable. If 70 to 90 percent of cancer is environmentally driven, then the first intervention is the environment, not the treatment. You don't spend trillions fighting disease when you can spend thousands preventing it.
The stress is addressed at the root. Not through meditation apps and mindfulness programmes — though these help — but through the elimination of the conditions that produce chronic stress. Stable housing. Meaningful work. Community connection. Adequate play. Movement. Rest. Purpose. Every chapter of this report is a stress reduction intervention.
And the healthcare system, such as it exists, is oriented toward prevention rather than treatment. Toward maintaining immune function rather than intervening after it has failed. Toward psychoneuroimmunological awareness — the understanding that the mind and the body are not separate systems but one system, and that you cannot poison one without poisoning the other.
The humans already know all of this. Their researchers have published it. Their institutions acknowledge it. Their data confirms it.
They go to the supermarket anyway.
(Final pencil note, written very slowly, pressed hard into the paper:
A species that understands cause and effect would not deliberately contaminate its own food environment with substances that increase cancer risk.
If they do this anyway, there are only two possible explanations:
They are insane, or they hate themselves.
There is no third option that survives logic.
I have been looking for the third option for a very long time now.
I haven't found it. — A)