Michael Pollan once said “eat food. not too much. mostly plants.” – good advice it would seem. I would add to that maybe do not eat ingredients you cannot pronounce.
Toxic chemicals are on our plants, are in our food chain and are in our soil. Just this week Bayer agreed to pay out $7.5 billion to settle weedkiller cancer cases against them for not telling people Roundup potentially causes cancer, crucially they are not admitting liability or that Roundup causes cancer.
There, is a theory that the large food corporations, large agribusiness and the pharma industry are in cahoots, I would surmise that this is not too far from the actual truth. This intersection is characterized by shared financial interests, joint lobbying efforts, and, in some cases, overlapping ownership between food companies, nutrition groups, and pharmaceutical firms. It is also worth noting that Bayer have a very significant health care division.
There is little doubt that modern food is making us sick.
On one hand we have an industry that manufacturers calorie rich fake food, that is designed to be highly addictive. These ultra processed products make us sick. Then you have an industry that creates drugs that help manage the symptoms of the disease this artificial food creates. It would seem like the perfect business model, make people sick, profit off that, then profit again from treating the sickness.
Both business models are driven by greed (Altruism in the pharmaceutical and agribusiness died a long time ago), the mantra now is profit above all else.
I am not so naive to think that profit is not important (we have spent many years struggling to survive and I can tell you first hand this is no fun) of course profit is important, but if that is all that is important then we have a problem.
In fact, this single ideology is the root cause of the devastation of our planet and our health, and both are closely interwoven.
Just this week scientists were making peace with the fact that we are on track to have to accept 3C of global warming, this will essentially make our world unliveable. The basic underlying reason for this, greed.
Today our bodies must contend with toxic chemicals that have been sprayed on our food, and toxic chemicals being added to our processed food, we are sick and by all accounts getting sicker.
There may be one simple solution, and it goes back to Michael Pollan’s maxim “eat food, not too much, mainly plants”. Eat fresh food, grown without toxic chemicals. Eat more home cooked food. Eat ingredients you know and recognise (Or as one person said, ingredients your grandmother would recognise). If we do this most of the time or at least some of the time and put our money into our food, then we will have to pay out much less to the Pharma’s of the world.
With your support we are changing the food system, so thank you.
Kenneth
PS I would like to thank Jacinta Dalton from the Atlantic Technological University Galway City for the title inspiration here.