Another deserving gentleman to Thank: Michael Pollan. Thank you Michael for telling the truth about the food we eat. Your latest N.Y. Times piece deals with the paradox of Americans watching cooking shows, but not cooking. We sit for hours on end watching someone else create dishes and meals, then go out to eat, or order-in “take out.” You tell us how cooking is integral to our humanness. How cooking our food allowed our brains to expand, allowed our human communities to develop. How our lack of cooking is hurting us terribly.
I grew up watching Hungarian women cook and bake, bake and cook daily. And sing, or talk, or hum while doing so. Cooking was life, daily life, what had to be done and it was done with love.
Cooking allows a deep transfer of love to what we eat. It is cementing a relationship with the person cooking for herself, or for many; and cementing a relationship with food. She learns to know food intimately. She becomes an expert on the ripeness of a peach or a melon, the freshness of greens, the melding of flavors and textures. Her creation, her love is consumed by herself, or many. There is love in her food. It can be tasted. Nothing will ever take the place of home cooked food. Industry can never replace her love. A woman always cooked for herself or others.
Pollan’s latest N.Y. Times article again alerts the reader to the fact that the food we daily consume creates obesity, and disease. And how Big Pharma profits from our suffering. We are eating food industry prepared food because we’re not cooking our own. We eat corporate prepared food which has become too salty, sugary, fatty, and much too refined. David Kessler in his new book: The End of Overeating has done the research to prove that the trifecta of fat, salt, and sugar leads to overeating. We overeat food which is designed to create taste bliss (of one sort), and with many more calories than we need, our overeating creates obesity.
How strange that we live in a world structured to support our continued weight gain and poor health, thus enslavement to a broken medical system. A vicious cycle consisting of poor diet, no routine physical activity, overeating, gastro-intestinal discomfort and disease, slow but steady weight gain, back and joint pain, continued lack of physical activity because of the increase in pain, more weight gain, high blood pressure, elevated lipids, elevated blood sugar, increasing inflammation which exacerbates the effect of the elevated blood pressure, lipids, and blood sugars, not to mention the increased joint pain; then finally full blown diabetes, heart disease, or stroke.
Ask any medical person and they will tell you that two primary factors leading to our current “chronic” diseases are diet and lack of physical activity. These “lifestyle” factors which physicians and nurses are at a loss to solve. If only people would lose weight, exercise more…..they wouldn’t need this or that medication, medical intervention.
If only…..
Sadly, not only does our population suffer from our “constructed/industry taste” food, our factory farm animals and planet suffer as well. Robert Kenner’s film: Food Inc. (see my previous blog entry) details the terrible destruction caused by thousands of animals housed in barbaric conditions. Cattle which used to roam large areas, depositing waste here and there, now deposit waste only in one place. Tons of it. To pollute water bodies, land, air, create green house gases.
Anyone watching TV sees the Big Pharma ads for the “cures” we’re to use to “fix” our “lifestyle” problems. Viagra, Cialis, Lipitor, Rolaids, Tums, Pepcid, Tagamet, Phillips Colon Health, Activia, Gas-X, Pepto Bismol, Tylenol and the host of pain relief pills, diabetes supplies, lipid lowering, and the up and coming Alzheimer’s “prevention” pills.
Ah, there’s a pill to fix all our ills. And create Big Pharma profit; at our expense. Of course Big Pharma doesn’t teach us how to PREVENT our pain and problems. There is no money in prevention.
The system is constructed to have us and our medical teams view disease, know disease, use pills to treat disease. Our TV ads daily tell us about disease, and the disease like symptoms these pills create (the “warning symptoms” whispered in the background of the ad). We hear about diseases daily that we may never have known exist.
But not once do the ads tell us about how to PREVENT these medication requiring diseases.
Sigh.
Our medical system does not know how to create health. Our medical personnel certainly do not create it in themselves. They are overworked, over stressed, exhausted, stretched thin, eating poorly, eating alot of sugar (go to any nurses station in any hospital in the U.S. and you will find candy, candy, candy, candy), not exercising regularly, doing many things at once most of the time. These are the people who do not keep themselves healthy. They do not “do” their own health.
If this group of dedicated, hard working, loving people who daily see the diseases produced by the poor diet, lack of physical activity and very highly stressed lives that they themselves lead; if this group of medical professionals cannot themselves stay healthy, then God help the common masses.
Can’t we see the paradox, the ridiculousness of a “health care” system which doesn’t care for health?
If the millions of medical professionals truly cared for health, wouldn’t we have already begun the deconstruction of a food industry system which fails us. Which produces the very diseases which health care must care for. And we over pay for.
Nothing will change until the food production, food delivery system changes. Presently bad food is too cheap, too convenient, too ubiquitious and food which creates health is too expensive, hard to find, and not readily available.
As long as there is profit in not caring about the end result of industry food production, not caring about the obesity, the diabetes, high blood pressure, inflammation, back & joint pain, erectile dysfunction, gastro-intestinal distress and disorder, lack of muscle mass, arthritis, lack of movement, heart disease, cancer and tremendous fatigue that most Americans suffer, then nothing will change.
As long as the food industry can continue to make good profit on polluting and creating disease, nothing will change. We won’t have health reform until we have food reform.
We delude ourselves thinking that somehow we “got” diabetes, or heart disease, or erectile dysfunction, or whatever name we give to the end result of our food industry scourge. This disease “happened” to us.
If we cannot claim, cannot “own” our responsibility for our health, then certainly we cannot hold our food system responsible.
Certainly not.
