We are once again in the midst of one of those Hollywood-generated phenomena. A bestselling book has been turned into an over-hyped movie that debuted to millions at theaters across the nation last weekend. The Hunger Games is the latest craze in American culture, and the mass media marketing machine is working overtime to generate hundreds of millions of dollars.

In addition, special interest and activist groups are also using The Hunger Games to draw attention to their causes and to make their case. From world hunger organizations to anti-hunting groups, everyone is jumping on the Hunger Games bandwagon.

Unfortunately, most are missing the real point of the story, and that the groundwork for a real Hunger Games is being laid today.

The Hunger Games is a novel written by Suzanne Collins, which was first published in 2008, is written in the voice of 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives in a post-apocalyptic world in the country of Panem where the countries of North America once existed.

The Capitol holds absolute power over the rest of the nation and the Hunger Games are an annual event in which one boy and one girl aged 12-18 from each of the 12 districts surrounding the Capitol are selected by lottery to compete in a televised battle in which only one person can survive.

Most of the focus of the of the media coverage and blog babblings has been on the violence, on the tragedy of having young people fight to the death, and angst over teaching young girls to hunt and shoot weapons.

A Google query about “Could Hunger Games happen here?” generated 250,000,000 responses.

The truly scary part of Hunger Games is not the violence, the lack of compassion, the totalitarian rule, but the fact that food is being used to control an entire nation.

In the world of the Hunger Games book, the central government controls the food distribution and by doing so keeps the rest of the society in line. This kind of governmental control is already being exerted in our society today.

Public schools can already dictate what students eat for lunch and even what they are allowed to bring from home. The government can and has limited the marketing and distribution of food items and food ingredients – not based on scientific safety concerns, but merely on the belief certain food are “bad” for certain groups to include in their diet.

Local government has banned the growing of fruits and vegetables in home gardens, and the raising of chickens has been outlawed in many communities.

It is not just government that is using food to control people. The news media has found that food scares boost ratings and change behavior. Last week, several major food retailers said they would stop selling meat with “pink slime” in it. This was the result of a groundless attack by one news organization.

ABC news aired 10 stories in two weeks on the use of “pink slime.” The meat, actually called “lean finely textured beef,” is made up of beef that is just harder to get at, so the meat isn’t lost. It’s treated to get rid of the fat and included with the rest of the ground beef. The USDA declares it healthy, but it is less expensive. As an added bonus, it is treated tiny amounts of ammonium hydroxide to make it safer to eat.

This is not the first time the news media has forced a perfectly safe food item off the shelves.

The radical food police are also active. A report surfaced last week that an anti-GMO group was going into supermarkets placing QR code stickers on food products. When scanned by shoppers’ Smartphones, they were taken to an anti-GMO website.

Hunger Games was written to appeal to a teenage audience and portrays youth defying the odds and finding love against the backdrop of an unbelievable futuristic world. Yet, the plot demonstrates just how powerful a weapon food can be.

The moral of the story is: those who control the food, control the nation. Thus we who produce the food, as well as those who consume it, had better be on guard against those who want to control it.

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of Farm World. Readers with questions or comments for Gary Truitt may write to him in care of this publication.