The result has been a kind of food Fordism. We are fed a production-line diet that is homogenised and bolted together from standard commodity parts. The parts, many of them created out of American agricultural surpluses, are largely controlled by an oligopoly of US-based trading and processing companies - Cargill, ADM, Bunge - that are little known in the UK. All three companies are now expanding in China and heavily involved in spreading the western industrialised diet, with its unsustainable dependence on fossil fuels and extravagant use of grains. As the Chinese move up this processed-food chain, the diet-related diseases that have afflicted us in the west are growing there too.

Between 1995 and 2005, $165bn of American taxpayers' money was used to support US agricultural commodities. Soya, corn, rice, wheat and cotton accounted for 90% of that money. Sugar was also heavily subsidised. The real beneficiaries of this system of government support have not been US farmers, who have gone out of business in their thousands, but the mainly US-based trading giants. For subsidies have allowed them to export grains at less than the cost of production, making it impossible for other countries to compete, while bringing the money from added-value markets back home. In this they mirror the patterns of trade established between previous empires and their colonies.

As well as buying and selling agricultural commodities, these four global companies control refining and crushing plants and turn those cheap, subsidised commodities into a myriad other ingredients, from starches to syrups to fats to animal feed. They also play the markets, and have vastly complicated corporate structures that enable them to shift transactions and profits from subsidiary to subsidiary.

Henry Kissinger put it this way: "Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control people." This is essentially true and what we're seeing here is the true face of the globalist totalitarian empire. People whine when they see pictures of past dictatorships; how should we react when we realize that most of the food production in the world is controlled by a handful of ruthless and manipulative oligarchs, under the disguise of peace and democracy? People, sooner or later we have to admit to ourselves that we've been duped big time. There is no equality, justice and peace waiting for us. We've been sold to exploiters who use us labour. In their eyes, we're simply robots who perform tasks to make them rich. I ask you all to think this over: Is this really freedom?