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Here is a question I think most people have probably asked themselves over the years: is everything bad for you? We hear and read constant reports about cancer causing elements in food and, if you pay attention, it seems these reports cover just about everything. The processing and marketing of food is an open conspiracy against all of us, against the potential for better health. Even buying things that are obviously “good” for you, like apples, doesn’t mean you are getting something that is unaltered and fully beneficial.
Growing up, I always heard that bread was “the staff of life”. Now we know that refined grains are not so good. I read recently that bakers can call their bread “multi-grained” even when they have a lot of refined grain in them. What’s a person to do?
Most people, I suspect, just say to heck with it. I am hungry and I want this, so I will eat it. In lower economic areas, the grocery stores push foods and deserts with highly concentrated sugars and large tubs of soft drinks with high fructose corn syrup derived sugars. The mom going to the store thinks she is doing her kids a favor by buying a huge tub of Coke or Pepsi. They all like it. I can drink some, too.
Why does it cost more, by volume, to buy Coke in smaller sizes? Why, until recently, did the 12 oz. can of Coke (that’s still a lot) disappear from the store shelves most places? Why does Coke sell tiny cans of Coke, but then charge more for them than buying a six pack of 16 oz. sodas? Why did the “serving size” of soft drinks grow from 8 oz. to 16 then to 20 oz?
None of this is accidental. It is all strategy and marketing. One former executive of Pepsi, who also said he has regrets about his role in this, said the goal at Pepsi was to get Americans to drink more Pepsi, on average, than cow’s milk. The executives would be very pleased when they got news that they were close to that level of consumption.
If you drink more soda, you will want more soda. You will become accustomed to having it, or the caffeine it contains, and you will keep buying it, again and again, making the soda companies richer and your life shorter, in all likelihood. Combined with other bad habits, or other foods subject to clever marketing, the road to disease is paved and ready for access.
On top of this, we have to deal with our socially trained patterns of eating. We are conditioned from birth to like certain foods and, because of that training, we want them. The Mediterranean diet is widely believed to be one of the best in the world for preventing heart disease and cancer, but we don’t live there, do we? We live in the land of hamburgers, McDonald’s and chemical sprays on everything, with GMO foods creeping into the food chain with or without our knowledge.
Why are farmers allowed to routinely shoot their chickens and cows with antibiotics, even when those animals are not sick? What is the indirect result of this exposure to all of us? No one knows or, if they do, they haven’t made it widely known.
One recent report indicated that fully 50% of cancers in our society are preventable because the are induced by what we eat and what we are exposed to in our daily lives. That’s a lot of cancer. If hundreds of thousands of people were dying in terrorist attacks, what would we do and be willing to spend? 100 trillion dollars? We went into two wars, turned our airports into electronic strip search locations and decided that everyone who travels in America is a potential suspect, all because 3,000 were killed on 9-11, 2001. As horrible as those deaths and that day were, might this be an overreaction, just a bit?
I don’t have the answer to the food problem. I do know that I am alert and unhappy with the way we are being marketed to death by an agricultural and food processing industry, combined with clever marketing at grocery stores. I am looking for answers. There is no way for me to turn back the pages and eat more carefully over the years that have already passed, but just finding some better answers would be satisfying.
One of my answers has been to never watch television commercials. Well, not never, never. When they get very clever and creative and they become part of the story on SuperBowl day, I want to watch. I also will go back to watch a commercial about something that interests me when I am using the DVR. Ever since college days, however, I have turned off commercials, either by muting the sound, changing channels, reading, looking away or, since the DVR came along, skipping them by watching a program, like the news, a few minutes after it starts or at a later time. (Of course, you could skip commercials in the VHS tape days, but it took longer and more effort.)
The one overriding message of commercials is “here is what Americans are supposed to be”, this is the way you are supposed to live, buy this, eat this, do this. They don’t sell a product, they sell a product as part of a myth about how you are supposed to be and live, a dreamy lifestyle in which you submit to the common mythologies. I don’t want to be conditioned to a broad, forced understanding of who and what I am. As a child, I submitted myself to the tube, but when I grew up and grew aware, I turned away, even while I was working daily in television news.
As a society, we are capable of doing better. But, we have to be aware that from farm policies set by the government, through the industrialized processes used by corporate mega-farming through to processing and selling in stores, we are the target of a massive marketing effort and much of what we see on store shelves is over processed, under nutritious and really bad. We are now getting entire food store chains, like Whole Foods, based on the idea of something more healthful (at much higher prices, of course.) My one answer for myself is that when I see something better, a different path, to take it at every opportunity. I am learning and changing and I expect to change more, not because I think it would save me from disease, but because I want to de-market myself from industrialized food as much as possible.
Doug Terry, 2.6.14
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