Guest post by Krysten from Krysten’s Kitchen.
You can’t even trust buying organic produce anymore, thanks to The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Katy Perry and Oprah. There’s a new label on your produce, and it’s anything but ap”peel”ing. Apeel is a “plant-based protection that helps the produce you love stay fresh for longer”… or, in other words, a chemical coating put on your produce which you can’t wash off so it doesn’t brown or decompose in a normal amount of time.
Exactly how old is that avocado?
Unfortunately, if you think by choosing organic you’re good to go… think again. On their website they state, “We have formulations that are OMRI Listed® for the growers and distributors of USDA Certified Organic produce.”
They say that it helps reduce plastic, which might be true, but what exactly is this coating made of? They state on their FAQs that there is only one ingredient, but then go on to say that it’s only composed of food-grade (multiple) ingredients made from “plant materials”.
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Apeel brags about its purified mono- and diglycerides, food ingredients that are found in a variety of foods. According to Dr. Josh Axe, mono- and diglycerides are “the go-to replacement for deadly trans fats and a food industry staple that helps keep oil and fat from separating. (Vani) Hari (The Food Babe) explains that this additive is a byproduct of oil processing, including partially hydrogenated canola and soybean oils. This additive is a byproduct of oil processing which contains artificial trans fat – a danger food ingredient known to cause coronary heart disease and linked to 50,000 fatal heart attacks a year.”
(Side note: The FDA finally determined that trans fats are no longer generally recognized as safe for food use in 2016 and yet mono- and diglycerides are the “the go-to replacement.” But they change the label from trans fats to mono- and diglycerides and then the FDA changes their tune. Interesting or predictable?)
If you’re thinking that you’ll just wash it off, well, I hate to break it you, but you can’t. In their FAQs they essentially say that you can try but won’t succeed. “You could likely remove some of Apeel with water and scrubbing, but it’s unlikely that you’d be able to remove all of it without damaging the fruit or vegetable. Apeel forms a barrier of edible material on the skin or peel, and it wouldn’t maintain the fruit’s natural freshness if it was easily removed.”
Lovely.
When asked if Apeel is a chemical, Jenny Du, the co-founder states, “Well, everything is in fact a chemical”… way to skirt the question there, Jenny! She goes on to say, “We’re all part of ‘star-stuff’… which are elements that surround us to form chemicals…” blah blah blah skirt skirt skirt.
But also, speaking of chemicals, if this mono- and diglycerides are plant derived, I’d like to know what plant they’re derived from AND what that plant was treated with. What chemicals, pesticides and more were used on that plant? They wont tell us because, remember, Jenny Du says that, “everything is a chemical.” (I wish you could see how many times I’ve rolled my eyes already while writing and researching this!)
Watch Jenny’s video below and more importantly check the comments section.
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“It’s safe,” says the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the World Health Organization (WHO) and Health Canada… so safe that it’s in products designed for even infants and the elderly, the world’s most sensitive people.
“Specifically, mono- and diglycerides can be found in products such as Similac Pro- Advance® Infant Formula and Ensure® Enlive® Advanced Therapeutic Nutrition.” Both contain corn oil, canola oil, sugar, corn syrup and nothing that I’d ever touch or deem healthy and safe for anyone of any age, especially the oldest and the youngest people in the world.
You may be seeing the Apeel sticker or label on your produce, but there are also other brands using this coating on their produce. Thankfully (PHEW!) some brands are bragging about it because it helps the produce last longer and they’re saving tons of plastic. I’d rather have the plastic than the crappy coating on my cucumbers, apples and lemons, thank you.
Exactly how old is that apple in your fridge? You’ll never know. As time goes on, produce loses nutritional value, but you won’t be able to tell how fresh it is because of the Apeel coating being used. This is misleading, dishonest and doing you a (nutritional) disservice.
Your avocado might look like it was picked yesterday from a nearby farm, but it could be 31 days old. Check out this photo below and see what an normal, real, not-messed-with-by-Apeel avocado would look like after 31 days and then look at what the “tainted” (treated with Apeel) avocado looks like.
It looks good right? Yes! But it’s modified! Produce loses 30% (conservatively) of it’s nutrients just 3 days after being harvested due to light, oxygen and heat.
You will find Apeel products in places like Costco, Trader Joe’s, Gelson’s, Ralphs, Sprouts, Vons, Walmart, Whole Foods, Kroger, Harps Foods, Wakefern brand stores including Price Right, Fairway Market, Target, Bristol Farms and more. Some of the produce companies using Apeel are Topline, Index Fresh, Calve, Del Monte, West Park, Horton Fruit Co, Del Ray Avocado, Natures Pride and more.
In our home, we are very intentional about the foods that we eat and use from foods to products. We avoid seed oils, artificial food coloring, high fructose corn syrup, fast food, refined sugars, bleached flours, fragrances, cheap made-in-China toys, AirPods, plastics, flame retardants, PFAs and the list go on and on and on… which will now include Apeel, aka, mono- and diglycerides.
Once again, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the same people who are buying up all the farmland in the country and trying to sell you on the idea of lab-grown meats saying, “I do think all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef,” are behind this and that means it’s a no from me, dawg.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.