THE PRICE OF FREEDOM
From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded;
and from the one who has been entrusted with much,
much more will be asked. ~Luke 12:48 The Bible, NIV (1984)
TOO HIGH A PRICE
Life is messy and difficult, and we must try to deal with the messes and difficulties as best we can. There are often no easy solutions.
Big Tobacco and Big Food are siblings, producing the parents who gave birth to the twin phenoms of Joe Camel and Super-Size, perfecting ways to encourage Americans to smoke more cigarettes at increasingly, and alarmingly, earlier ages before moving on to food companies and the task of addicting even more Americans to an artificial diet of salt, sugar and fat. They have succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest imaginations, coming to their children’s defense of legislators who seek to thwart the ease of mankinf’s falling prey to the diabolical enterprises of chronic disease and early death.
Under the rallying cries of Freedom of Speech and the Sanctity of the Marketplace and Free Market Forces, and even They’re not Hurting Anyone Else so Let Us Make our Own Personal Choices, what we have, half a century later, is the first generation in history who will live a shorter lifetime than their parents. If this is progress, then deliver me to the third world.
But of course the developing world is not safe as the incidence of smoking rises and rates of Type II Diabetes creep into lands on every continent of the earth. I guess Antarctica provides the only haven, safe from the ‘modern’ ways to make money by endangering consumers’ lives.
The smoking baby in Southeast Asia probably has the world horrified as tobacco executives are, I am guessing, smiling to themselves with global satisfaction. They couldn’t have scripted a better advertisement for loweiring the age of one’s first cigarette, and here it seems to have happened all by itself. Truth, so often stranger than fiction, is the stuff of extraordinary news stories, and often the inspiration that signals to humans how low we’ve sunk.
WHERE DOES THAT LEAVE US?
Marion Nestle’s Food Politics blog today tells how, now that non-profits are falling all over themselves trying to gain funding for anti-obesity campaigns, funding for anti-cigarette smoking campaigns are shrinking. She sums up the issue thus:
Health should not be a zero-sum game. Anti-obesity advocates have much to learn from anti-smoking advocates. How about joining forces to improve the health of Americans?
Why am I telling you this? To give you a sense of the insidiousness of marketing that leads, by design and calculation, to addiction, be it through a delivery system of cigarettes or junk food. Cigarettes are a little easier to wrap one’s mind around; everyone knows when they are smoking. Kids begin smoking as an act of defiance and, before they realize it, are hooked because of the strong chemical additives which were, and until recently outlawed, designed to catch smokers in the jaws of addiction more quickly.
Big Food is the modern day drug dealer, operating legally and in full sight of the government and the public. They are the pirates who hijack people’s will power to resist addictions to salt, sugar and fat and they know exactly what they are doing. Just as they formulated cigarettes with powerful addicting chemicals and additives to make them taste less harsh, they now formulate foods with excessive salt, sugar and fat content for the express purpose of getting people to consume more food then they’ve ever eaten before.
Most Americans have almost half again as much caloric intake as is necessary to sustain a fit body and maintain a healthy weight. Wall street trades food commodities like they do everything else: with the goal of earning more profits this quarter than last quarter. So they have every interest in motivating us to eat more. And more. And still more.
They are the same companies who gave away cigarettes to kids in the 1960s before laws were enacted to prohibit such nefarious shenanigans. And their more recent agenda is to give away soda pop in school cafeterias at lunch time in exchange for vending rights in the hallways of public schools at all other times.
Well, people cannot eat more today than they did yesterday without suffering excessive consequences. Excess means a body weight gain. Simple cause and effect. And as people gain weight, precious few act on the importance of increasing bodily activity, even though people know this as well.
I don’t mean to say that people are without accountability. But we find ourselves in this sorry state of size and poor health because we haven’t paid attention to what we’ve been eating. People say that they didn’t know the the fast food meal of hamburger, fries and shake was unhealthy. As many people claim that they had to have known.
LET FREEDOM RING
The same bell that rings in celebration of American’s freedom of all sorts of choices – it could be argued that we have too many unhealthy yet legal choices but that’s another issue altogether – is the one that should serve as a wake-up chime, calling to attention the gross injustice being done to our health at the hand of those very freedoms. Some say that legislation isn’t the answer, that Americans should not be legislated into compliance, even to be healthy.
What is the alternative? It is all very well and good to say that all Americans need to eat better, but who is going to make them? Themselves? Fair enough. If people can find it within themselves to eat better and increase their chances of living a full life of vitality and fitness, that’s the absolute way to go.
But what of the others? Government no longer feels content to stand by and observe as its population grows by leaps and bounds to the horrific outcomes of the health we are now seeing. The problem isn’t fixing itself. People need help. The food industry is getting away with murder and needs to be reigned in. The canned and packaged food industries of Europe don’t have the artifice of mukhwa that American food corporations put into theirs.
Labeling is a good place to start. Label the ingredients, and tell me if the food inside includes any genetically modified organisms because I do not want to eat them, regardless of how safe anyone else thinks them. I think this is my right, to make that choice.
I want my canned tomatoes to contain nothing more than, as my brand of choice proclaims “Fresh, red, ripe tomatoes,” as I note every time I pick it off the grocery shelf. Neither salt nor sugar nor citric acid, nor anything else need go into the can with the tomatoes. The canning process is the preserving agent. Should the vibrant color fall off after a year on the shelf, then that is my fault for keeping it around for so long before using it. We don’t routinely shop for the fallout shelter and, when we do, then we can buy food products loaded with chemicals to preserve them into eternity. For today, let me eat just real food. Please.
