Eat more bloody grass

The industrial food system fills us up but leaves us empty — it's based on selective forgetting. But what we eat — how it's raised and how it gets to us — has consequences that can't be ignored any longer.

If you thought that excerpt was from a recent commentary in the context of COVID-19 infections at meatpacking plants, you are wrong.

That was from 2009!  August 20, 2009.

It never took a proverbial rocket scientist, nor an economist, to understand that food--especially animal protein--being this inexpensive is simply unnatural.  We always knew there were downsides to it, but we chose to ignore them all.  If we don't know about it, well, there is no problem, right?

Wrong.

I noted in another post, in 2013:

Here in the US, we are so easily separated from the messy process of a living animal being converted to the food that we purchase.  An overwhelming majority of the consumers are city slickers who are spared of the details.  A packet of boneless chicken is a product in the grocery store as much broccoli or toilet paper are!

Occasionally, consumers get all riled up, like when news broke that horse meat was found in frozen beef patties and IKEA's meatballs.  Otherwise, people don't seem to pause even for a second to wonder how it is possible for a Taco Bell burrito to cost more than an apple!

The low, low prices were made possible through an unholy combination: Low wages for workers, many of whom were undocumented; animals grown, fattened, and killed in most inhumane ways (as if there could ever be any humane way!); and extensive government subsidies.

COVID-19 is exposing them all.

Michael Pollan writes that "the pandemic is making the case not only for a different food system but for a radically different diet as well."  The food that we eat, industrially processed at so many levels, is literally killing us:

Unfortunately, a diet dominated by such foods (as well as lots of meat and little in the way of vegetables or fruit—the so-called Western diet) predisposes us to obesity and chronic diseases such as hypertension and type-2 diabetes. These “underlying conditions” happen to be among the strongest predictors that an individual infected with Covid-19 will end up in the hospital with a severe case of the disease; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have reported that 49 percent of the people hospitalized for Covid-19 had preexisting hypertension, 48 percent were obese, and 28 percent had diabetes.⁹

But, do not immediately blame consumers for their bad food choices.  Ask yourself, again, how it can be possible for a healthy food like an apple to cost more than an unhealthy food like a Taco Bell burrito.  The affluent are, on an average, healthier than the poor for a number of reasons.

Meanwhile, the low-income have also suddenly become unemployed.  It is an old and unfortunate story all over again!

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