Convenience means decline
Discomfort means growth.
A recent article by
man focused on the poor quality of food in the United States, and the sterling efforts by some to improve it.
America’s food has been the subject of ridicule for years. A wealthy country selling poison to the masses. With plenty of empty land to farm Americans should enjoy an unending supply of cheap healthy food. Instead it leads the world in lifestyle-related illness including obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular-related ailments.
All Western nations are heading in this direction. We are getting fatter, slower and sicker.
People have noticed, and something has to be done.
Much finger pointing
There has been considerable speculation recently about the role of low-level inflammation caused by modern substitutes for traditional foodstuffs.
We have witnessed significant changes to our diet in just a few generations. We now consume seed oils in huge quantities despite them being largely absent in ancestral diets. Are they to blame?
What about processed foods like microwave dinners and Frankenstein concoctions no one ate until recently? Even store-bought sandwiches count as processed given the adulteration of their ingredients.
Maybe it is the antibiotics and growth hormones administered to livestock?
Is it too much fat in our diets, or too much sugar? Or is it both?
We know there has been a war on meat and animal fats for fifty years. Has it helped? Are health outcomes better in low fat people? How do we explain the health of the Keto and Carnivore diet fans? They seem to be thriving while Vegans lose their teeth.
Then there is the tinkering, the ingredients and the path from farm to plate. We now know more than ever about the murky goings on in Big Food and Big Farming. It is unpleasant to read. Lots of bribery and other shenanigans.
All roads lead to the food industry itself, how it operates and where it fails. The lobbying, the money, the manipulations. Most famously Robert Kennedy has brought it to the attention of millions.
The solution seems obvious.
Regulate them harder
Many propose big changes to how we regulate the food supply.
We must clamp down on producers. We should introduce better regulations and improve the policing of them. We need harsher fines for transgressions; no more slaps on wrists, they must feel serious financial pain.
All this and more sounds entirely plausible and would be popular with a wide range of the electorate. Who doesn’t want a clean food supply? Who wants lifestyle diseases? Surely regulation is the key?
Alas history teaches us it doesn’t work. Most regulatory agencies eventually come under the control of the industries they are intended to monitor. We then experience a catastrophic amplification effect; we retain the belief something is properly supervised while at the same time it is being quietly hijacked.
This is arguably why we now face issues with food, healthcare and pharmaceuticals despite all of them being supervised by government agencies.
Past campaigns against animal products, saturated fats and raw milk, happily eaten by our ancestors, were all prosecuted under the supervision of powerful regulators, giving the public a mistaken impression of moral and scientific rectitude.
More recent research has largely discredited these campaigns, as have nonstandard sources of information that lie outside the remit of regulators.
Regulation is not the answer and never is because the power placed in the hands of supervisors can be usurped.
There has only ever been one solution to lifestyle issues.
Do it yourself
Temptation is not new. It can feel new because today’s indulgences are novel and recent.
We enjoy cinematic television watched on giant wall screens most can afford. Social media is ubiquitous in our lives, with instant notifications and likes triggering dopamine loops to keep us hooked. Then there is the promise of full-spectrum immersive experiences just around the corner, from movies to porn we will be lost in a world of pleasure and abandon. All these shiny technologies are constantly evolving to capture our attention ever more comprehensively as time marches on.
Temptation, the existence of attractive things we must avoid or control, is part of human existence.
It is something to learn about through life, something we must attempt to master. Every major religion or philosophy warns about the evils of temptation and its deleterious effect on the quality of life.
But they also remind us we as individuals ultimately decide whether to succumb. We decide the food we buy and eat. We decide our level of movement and exercise. We decide our own lifestyle.
And like our entertainment consumption our lifestyles are becoming lazier and less healthy.
I cannot be alone in noticing the rise of overweight young men and women. People in their late teens and twenties and already fat or well on their way to it. An unhealthy rotundity that is the result of lifestyle choices they are already being harmed by.
Like the rest of us they are doing it to themselves. They are jumping in and out of cars and not walking or cycling. They go home and eat processed microwave dinners with chemicals and preservatives because it is quicker and easier than preparing a proper meal.
Worse, growing numbers seem to be getting food delivered by couriers. Where I live is a constant flurry of young foreign men delivering everything from groceries to fresh hot coffee. Most are on bikes, which means they are likely within walking distance.1
Their addiction is not bad food it is convenience. That is what is killing them.
Ease, comfort, sloth. Call it what you like.
When we see the pictures from the 1950s and 60s the thin people we observe walked more and many had manual jobs. By today’s standards they had less convenience in their lives. Fewer people had cars. Processed food was rare, so women cooked meals. They worked in offices or factories they physically travelled to.
Today we drive everywhere and work from our dining rooms. We drive to out-of-town supermarkets and walk at most a few hundred yards. We even jump into cars to get to the gym.
Food comes pre-made, so we just sling it into an oven with no idea what is in it. We eat on the go with special food designed to not require a knife or fork. We often have absolutely no idea what is in the food we eat because someone else has prepared it for us.
These are all lifestyle choices we make.
Is modern life an improvement on what we had before?
The choice is ours
We should not tolerate blatant propaganda or efforts to undermine health. We should challenge lies and manipulations from captured regulators. The fightback has begun and will have an effect.
But each individual must battle alone. This is about education first and foremost, then summoning the discipline to eat healthy.
We must recognize we are the architects of our own demise. Most can eat cleaner, but it takes effort.
This is a crucial step for the overweight and the unhealthy to reclaim a sense of agency modern society is keen to destroy.
It may be depressing to look at our fat weak diseased bodies and accept full responsibility, but it is ultimately liberating.
Unless you are being fed at gunpoint or have severely limited work options, there is always something you can do. It often begins with simple awareness of the choices we are making.
It requires accepting total responsibility for where you are. The food, the convenience, the ease, the loafing about instead of going outside, the general sloth and decline. That’s all you. Those are choices.
It can be tempting to blame shadowy forces in society for our ills. Lobbyists with deep pockets, corporate farming conglomerates chasing profit and Big Government conspiring with Big Pharma to make us sick. This is all the more attractive since some of it may be true.
But it is harder to accept we are making ourselves sick. We are addicted to something much worse than sugar or seed oils. We are addicted to comfort.
Convenience is death
Our enemy is convenience, not the food industry.
Many convenient foods are damaging to our health. These can be grouped using the broad term of “processed foods.”
The alternative then is unprocessed food. Cook it yourself.
This is inconvenient, but so is everything worthwhile.
More accurately, it is uncomfortable; it takes us outside our comfort zone, the only place where we learn anything.
We need to learn to cook or otherwise prepare food, to plan ahead. It takes effort.
And it is ultimately this we see lurking in the background of our declining health and our modern ailments; sloth.
We can’t quite be bothered ditching the microwave dinners or the delivered junk food. It is all too easy and all too modern.
For sure there are heartless people damaging our food supply to increase profit, but we are the ones feeding ourselves poison while healthier options exist.
Education and discipline solve virtually everything. In a world where our biggest threat was once famine it is a nice problem to have. We eat too much nice-tasting food that we specifically designed to appeal to our taste buds.
But it is a problem, and each of us must confront it alone. The solution is to never look beyond ourselves but to turn inward and discover the deep reservoir of strength and stamina inherited from our tough ancestors that all of us possess.
To turn away from modern convenience and embrace instead the harder, less glamorous aspects of life we are designed for. Understanding we typically thrive in hardship, not ease. Ask any old person about their life and it is invariably the hard times they remember, the difficult things they overcame. No one reminisces about lying on the couch watching TV or feeling ill because they ate ten inches of Pringles in one sitting.
If we learn to resist temptation we gain the whole world, and we create a life worth remembering.
In most cases it is that simple. Abstinence in its many forms is a life-changing attitude to adopt, and certainly a useful tool to include in our armoury. It solves many problems.
The lobbyists and poisoners can do nothing when we teach ourselves about good nutrition and what works for us as individuals. When we turn away from their nicely packaged junk and choose healthier options.
We are the architects of our demise, but we can also be the builders of our stronger, better future.
It all begins with choice and choosing better options. So choose.
Bring me Han Solo!
I once had a conversation in a coffee shop with the manager and she pointed to a bookcase they had just purchased standing near the front door. On the shelves were paper bags with receipts stapled to the outside to identify the orders.
Young delivery couriers on bikes would regularly appear and pick up the bags. She showed me one. A customer who lived about 300 yards from the coffee shop. Yet he was paying someone to pick up his order (a latte and carrot cake).
It was difficult to avoid the image of some slovenly pig lying on his couch, barely moving, reaching for his phone to order coffee and junk and getting it delivered. The image I had in my head was something like Jabba the Hutt lounging and watching entertainment, struggling to move unaided. Maybe this is where some are headed? It doesn’t seem like a healthy development.
Very timely. I am overweight, but also big boned, and broad shouldered as a 6’2” older woman, on thyroid medication, so not in a position to be too critical, but I have noticed how much heavier young people are getting. That sedentary workers in their late 30’s and 40’s, or women after bearing several children should carry extra weight is almost inevitable, but on a recent cruise I was shocked at how many fat young couples there were. It became a rare pleasure to see someone male or female who looked good in a bathing suit!
Speaking of bathing suits we live in a time when there is an incredible selection of tops and bottoms in women’s suits, longer skirted suits, youthful styles that don’t look like grandmoms’s but don’t show flab, a variety I would’ve loved when I was younger, but young women never seem to pick out the ones that would flatter them. The body positivity movement has a lot of aesthetic horrors to its credit. One sight I would love to unsee was a girl carrying perhaps 80-100 extra pounds wearing a suit with slashes across the midriff. This was a style that would not have looked good on a young Sophia Loren.
The DoorDash phenomena still stuns me. We sometimes stop for breakfast after early Mass on Sunday. The waiting area is filled with door dash drivers. Of all meals breakfast is easy to prepare and unpleasant to eat cold. The restaurant is somewhat pricey, so you are paying top dollar plus delivery for congealed eggs or cheap carbs. It is mind boggling. I have had the privilege of being a stay at home wife and mother for 42 years, which has meant almost all meals and baked goods prepared from scratch. This vanishing lifestyle has certainly made eating healthier more of a challenge but anyone can cook a couple eggs and a few slices of bacon…
It's all by design. A population that is fat and unhealthy is much easier to control than a society of fit and healthy individuals. By slowly poisoning the food supply, and us along with it, they have essentially neutered their biggest threat, those they seek to enslave. I absolutely do not understand how people can drink pop, eat bags of doritos, or, for fuck's sake, a goddamn 7/11 burrito and not realize that all they are doing is poisoning themselves. Yes, let's slurp down poisoned water along with a whole host of other chemicals and call that nutrition, then wonder why they are fat and cannot lose weight. Oh, but it tastes good so therefore who cares what it's doing to your body. It's hard living in this world sometimes when you're surrounded by people so absolutely sedated by chemicals, propaganda, and sheer stupidity that it's a wonder they can dress themselves without the government telling them that pants go on the legs and shirts go over the head.