The disgraced ideology of the food industry

We have seen recently the collapse of the financial world, due to lack of regulation and the unfettered pursuit of profit at all costs by sectional interests. Our food is also suffering under this same ideology. The further the consumer becomes separated from the primary producer (the farmer) the more we need strong state regulation, in the interests of the common good. But in the area of food, as much as high finance, there is the problem that our weakened, corrupted democracies, are 'sold' off to the highest bidders, the political donors and lobbyists. A fetishistic adulation of 'the free market' has been cleverly cultivated by those who will benefit from it, and those who should oppose it, seem to have been emasculated by the bright, slick, shiny glare of neo-con buccaneers, and watched from the sidelines as though unable to oppose this sexy, brash ideology, which seemed to slay criticism with a mere sneer or a bit of name-calling---the same techniques the Far Right used so successfully in the McCarthy era, and which were so eloquently deciphered by Arthur Miller in his Harvard lecture The Crucible in History. And again, in our times as before, as Yeats once decried, The best lack all conviction/And the worst are full of passionate intensity. In the area of food this ideology manifests as BSE, dioxins and hormones in meat and dairy, polluted water tables, chemical saturated fruit and vegetables and food that is causing an epidemic of obesity and diabetes which will hit us like a time bomb in the coming decades.




Blessings on your table!

The Intellectual Foodie

www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com