I don't make a habit of posting links, but I think the following articles are worth passing along. We really are what we eat, and if we have a greater sense of what goes into the foods we eat - a connection more than a grocery store receipt - maybe we can shift the balance away from the hate side of the love/hate relationship we Americans have with food.
On Urban Farms, A Sense of Place "We connect to a place through the food we eat and eventually through what eats us. Eating (also defecating, dying, and decomposing) confirms that we are a part of a biological system, that we are community members in an ecosystem. But in the city we obscure this story. Food seems to come from nowhere (and shit and corpses disappear to nowhere, eerily, almost magically). We lose the opportunity to realize that we are someplace. "
Disease Driven Earnings: Is it Time for a New Prescription for Generation Rx? "...while Kraft, Coca Cola, and WalMart formulate their products differently for children overseas (with reduced fat, salt, and synthetic ingredient content), our National School Lunch Program continues to be a dumping ground for the remnants of the agrichemical corporations."
The whole food/natural food/local food movement is important and laudatory, but it's also like swimming upstream against a downstream torrent. Two-thirds of Americans are fat (one-third morbidly obese), with no sign of this trend changing. There's lots of excuses--hormones, poor food supply, genetics, etc.--but the sad fact is that most of these people are just slovenly and undisciplined.
ReplyDeleteWe seem to be evolving into two species: one -third of us exercise, eat healthfully, and keep a good weight. The rest, well--just go to a Walmart or an Outback, and you'll see. Another sad part of this is that these bad habits become habitual and are passed on--it's a form of cultural evolution. It's probably also a form of biological evolution, as fat people pass along whatever biological dispositions they have. And, I bet, fat people out-reproduce skinny people, so these fat predispositions are reinforced. It's negative evolution, which has been occurring since the invention of agriculture, and is now being accelerated, with disastrous consequence.