05.15.08
Corrupt food system
Via marxmail: Alternet
OR: Can you talk about how the individualizing of obesity and health
problems is problematic?
RP: The first edition of the Atkins diet had a long tirade against the sugar
industry. Atkins was saying that we’re being poisoned by the sugar industry
– they’re putting sugar in everything. But then Atkins makes the turn that is
very common in America: It’s a problem of the industry, it’s an economic
problem, it’s a political problem, and the solution has to be individual. The
solution is not to confront the sugar industry, not to legislate, not to use
government to change that, but to exercise an almost Puritan control over the
will as a way of getting out of a situation that has everything to do with
politics.
That’s why the diet industry is so very big. It is a particularly American
solution to the problems of obesity. Why is it that 20 percent of fast food
meals now are eaten in cars? This is a figure that you get from Michael Pollan’s
work. He bemoans the fact. But when I explain to people outside America that
20 percent of fast food meals are eaten in cars, they are blown away. It’s
inconceivable to them. They wonder whether it’s because Americans like their
cars so much.
Here, we understand that this isn’t some preference for the dashboard; it’s
because Americans work much harder than any other industrialized country to be
able to have health care, to have the promise of a pension. In particular if
you’re from a working family, your income has been dropping in real time
since the 1980s. Chances are you live far away from where you work because you
can’t afford to buy land or buy a house there. So you spend a long time
commuting and if you’re in a community where people are of a lower income, you’ll
find less access to fresh fruits and vegetables, less access to green space.
Is it any wonder that so many meals are eaten in cars? Is it any wonder that
across the industrialized world, we’re seeing levels of obesity in communities
of poorer people going up so fast?
full article — _http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/85395_
(http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/85395)
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is
violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” Arthur
Schopenhauer (1788-1860)