On Food:

Mmmmm a tasty topic to be sure, but while humanity has the capability to produce nutritious food for all peoples we are currently producing a whole lot of food-like products and some food as well. If you would like support for that assertion just go to a grocery store, most have an entire aisle devoted to soda (a drink that should require an id or a license or something….) Like most problems I think there are simple causes, and simple solutions as follows:

Man do I like fat, sugar and protein!  Sadly I really need very little of any of them to survive, not that that fact stops me from eating far more than I need to of them.  Our poor diets ( in the U.S. at least) is a one two punch of crap food being so tasty AND nutritious food being either expensive or time consuming.  The ease of getting a hamburger is equal to that of the ease of getting a salad, but taste will always be a factor in any equation describing why we eat what we eat, and in that regard the salad falls short, now if it were a comparison of a 20 min 30$ burger vs a 2 min 4$ salad I think consumers would lean towards healthier decisions, the market has shown no desire for movement in this direction so….

Government could probably do a good job here. I do not advocate government involvement for everything, but here is a nice place for states to play “laboratory of Democracy”. To clarify I’m talking about taxing the ever loving crap of food with additives, the end game being a HUGE change in the composition of our collective diet.  Now forcing people to eat their veggies is an intrusion on the personal lives of the governed, so I do not advocate it lightly I think it a necessity ( or at least a good idea) because:

1. Our current diet is un-healthy:  I’m not talking good cholesterol vs. bad here or making a case for diversified  intestinal bacteria. I’m talking about fillers, adding the chemical equivalent of newspaper to all kinds of stuff to make it cheaper ( or more profitable). I will omit GMO’s here (I simply lack the necessary understanding to say they are un-healthy) but

2. Meat is CRAZY energy intensive to produce: We eat a LOT of meat, Americans ave. about 8oz. per day (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/weekinreview/27bittman.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0) We require less than that a week, but more to the point it takes ton’s of energy to make that happen. With plant agriculture the sun provides the energy, we just have to move the finished product. To grow meet we then take that perfectly edible and life sustaining food and pump it into a cow, for years, just to kill the shit out of it and in the end we have… less life sustaining food.  To add on, demand is increasing every year, oh and cows are a big greenhouse gas producer as well (that article has them at 20%+ yearly total)

3. it’s morally the right thing to do.   I have covered this before, but: If you were cooking a meal for your family would you add in “filler” to make it seem like there was more food? Would you add chemicals that you knew were not healthy into the meal? Our food suppliers are doing this, everyday! If a single person were doing this I think anyone would put a stop to I right quick, but because we get our food from corporations not people it just keeps going on. That does not make it any less morally offensive though, food it what we run on, in a very real sense it is what we are. The idea that people (really lots of them) are profiting off producing and selling crap as food is reprehensible.

 

To close: if you live in the middle of nowhere like me, get acquainted with your local farm ( or start a garden or both^^) City dwellers good luck, good food is probably available, but it will most likily costs far more than the (far tasty-er) crap food.

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