photo courtesy New York Times
This is another of those outtakes of the Capital One “What’s in Your Wallet?” slogan. Today it’s “What’s in Your Food Supply?” Just picture Samuel L. Jackson with those wide eyes confronting you!
Sometimes ideas will coagulate and sit in my brain over a period of days – and out spills something I can’t hold onto any longer. The amalgam of questions just bubbles up like a high-school Chemistry experiment gone awry:
Over the last week or so I have come upon several media items concerning the health, or lack thereof, of our food supply. My son happens to be taking a course in Environmental Ethics this semester and I have asked him if his class talks about any issues concerning the food supply in this Country. He said no – and so this got me to thinking about how we have run amuck so far and so fast…………
There is an interesting push-pull I wonder about in the world these days – I see it in 3 major areas. I define Push-Pull as the struggle to do the “right thing”, or lack thereof, in the absence of some “authority” to guide one there – how Corporations and individuals use the law and not their own moral compass to define the standards within which they do business. This, of course, is a broad generalization – one which I am perfectly happy to acknowledge, doesn’t apply to all.
We all know that the law does not always get it right and so, is it right to ignore the moral compass, or, perhaps more succinctly, is there a moral compass we can depend upon in business? It would seem that people push right up against the law and even break it when they think they can get away with it and patently ignore what is good for the consumer, or individual as a matter of course in our every day lives. This becomes the modus operandi of our world and we are existing within the parameters of the collateral outcomes…… Are we comfortable with this? Hmmm – here are the three areas where I happen to think about this happening often:
- Wall Street
- Medicine
- Food Supply
I will try to steer clear of the first two, because I try very hard to keep politics out of this blog – partly because politics often envelops me daily and I get a little crazy – and partly because I’d like to keep this blog on a somewhat focused and happy level. But, when it comes to Food Supply, I feel this is fair game here.
Last week, I watched an episode of Bill Maher where, he had as a guest, the author of The Meat Racket, Christian Leonard. He spoke about how we really don’t want to know how our meat supply is produced. Then I saw a post which directly correlated the use of the pesticide Roundup with the rise in Gluten-intolerance. Then I saw an article in the NYT about chicken-farming standards being raised in California and how all chickens will want to live in California. Then I read about the Yoga Mat” chemical, azodicarbonamide being added to bread, and about 50 other items in our grocery stores. Then I remembered a discussion I heard on CNBC after CVS announced they were no longer going to sell cigarettes and how this was a dumb idea because it would hurt their profits. Then, I got to thinking about the plight of the Bees…… “Really?” – to all of these things! I found myself more than a little agitated at the coagulation of these issues in my little brain…….
I happen to be a person who reads constantly about family farmers who make their own decisions to move to organic production – partly to educate myself and partly to ensure myself that there are indeed some individuals who are capable of doing the “right thing”. This, I try to put into context – while large corporate farmers continue to flood the soil and their plants with toxic pesticides in order to maximize production regardless of the consequences.
The EU has banned the use of many pesticides, the bee-killing ones and a lot of others, that we have not. The EU has banned the use of azodicarbonamide in their food supply and we have not. Why? Do we have to, should we, learn to stop ourselves every time we are about to put something in our mouths to consider what we are doing – from a health-safety perspective??? Must we back ourselves up through the grocery store back through the stages of production, and consider the safety with which each and every item was grown, cared for, handled in post-production, transport, and on and on? You get what I’m saying and the prospect of this is, yes, exhausting!
Last year I attempted to get on the phone with some people in Washington who could educate me about the class of pesticides, neo-nicotinoids – which are so heavily used here and which are a known threat to the bee population. That, I must say, was futile, and honestly made me so depressed I tried very hard to forget about it.
We’ve all read about the American consumer’s appetite for perfect produce and the claim that providers spray their crops partly because the public demands it. We all know about the need to grow enough food to feed the population of the world. I just wonder where the ethics is around all this. And, I wonder about the wisdom of relying upon a Federal bureaucracy to guide farming to the point where it intersects with a healthy food supply. You will notice I’m not getting into the subject of GMOs here – that’s a topic for another day. (See ruckus today on GMO Salmon).
Profit motive is a very interesting subject to consider – especially for all of you “ethicists” out there. “Helllllllloooooooo out there! Is anyone there?????? Yes, I know there are lots of people who do care about the well-being of our food supply – but do they get heard at the forums where change can be made and how do they overcome the hugely-funded lobbying efforts in Washington and elsewhere?
Profit-motive – hmmmm – is the foundation upon which the American economy is built. In our system we have brought in, in theory, a reasonable checks-and-balance system to keep the free profit motive from running amuck. That’s all well and good in a perfect-world-model. So, the question becomes, when the checks-and-balance system fails, or runs behind the curve by too much, what happens? Can we rely on individuals to do the right thing and, change the way they do business on their own, defining standards independently rather than relying upon an outside agency to monitor them?
The current trend in enacting “ag-gag” laws, which seems to be gaining steam in various areas of the country, prohibits “whistle-blowing” types from running around with their cell phone cameras and photographing the inhumane treatment of animals in factory farming settings. I suppose this could be considered a right to privacy issue for some? But, there is considerable challenge of the constitutionality of these laws and sooner or later we will see if they stand. The question becomes, though, if food producers feel the need to lobby for laws that outlaw the use of a camera to catch them treating animals inhumanely and other offenses, then why isn’t the law preventing this to begin with? Same thing applies to the use of known toxic substances in the farm community. The world relies on providing proof of toxicity and damage and then getting it through the Federal bureaucracy to ban chemicals so they can be removed from the food supply and kept from causing direct and longer-term collateral damage. Yikes – I don’t know about you, but this is scary to me. Problems is, generations of people and animals can be irreversibly damaged while we are waiting for the “efficiency” of this process to come into play. That we as a society must wait for the government to decide that what is happening to humans – in the form of cancers, thyroid issues, autism, ADD, ADHD, and a myriad of other medical phenomenon which have emerged while farmers are allowed to spray toxic chemicals all over our country is not a good modus operandi as far as I’m concerned. The new motto I play in my head is:
“As go the Bees, go the humans!”
Yes, we can wait for some element of rationality to rise to the top of policy-making while the bee population, and the human population continues to be stricken by virtue of wrong, or late policy. Or, we can open our eyes and try to beat back the power of corporate lobbies (UGH) to hopefully allow for the setting of policy in the Federal government on a timely basis. But, the real question, the one I think belongs in that Environmental Ethics class, is, why does profit motive overrun human morality in such a vast majority of instances? This troubling idea is what nags at me often and leads me to think that consequences of the loss of push-pull to get to a better if not best answer shows up in collateral damage phenomenon all over our society.
Well, that’s pretty serious stuff for this early in the am, isn’t it? And often when I think of these things, I wonder what or how I could possibly influence it – when there are massive organizations all over the place whose purpose is to do just that. But, then I think about the right to lobby in this country and how it is all based on profit motive and I get stopped in my tracks. Profit motive often causes a mental image of a free-wheeling, out of control freight train in one of those crazy terror movies.
Then, I try to convince myself that the country is made up of people who all have a conscience. Then I go off, as I did yesterday, and make a batch of Banana-Hazelnut Dirt Bombs – because I am so overwhelmed with my own powerlessness and the thought that people override their conscience all the time in pursuit of other “values”.
So, after I have riled myself and perhaps you as well, in considering all of these issues – those that many do work on in a positive sense, on a daily basis in this Country, I bid you to have a nice day! Perhaps a letter to our Congress-person is in order? If nothing else, it may soothe that ever-pressing need to feel like you did “something”…………
thank you to Cory Booker for posting this today
Notice the bottom left corner:
courtesy Brain Pickings