Judgments on Nutrition Can Be Common Sense

The things that I publish can be hard to take in and even harder to defend.  They require being open to an entirely different way of looking at our society and culture than that which is presented to us every minute of every day in the media and through our conversations with other people.  For people who are struggling to reconcile what they are told by the government and the mainstream media and the things that they hear and read on this blog and other similar places, there are two principles that I find useful to remember.

The first useful principle is this.  One need not have complete understanding of something in order to make sound judgments about it.  Broadly speaking, on any given topic, one need not know all the details, all the interrelationships, all the overlapping components, and so on, in order for that person to have a general, solid, and largely correct impression or understanding of how that thing works.  It is possible to see what a puzzle will look like before all pieces are in place.

 In the world of the politics of food, this means that one need not be aware of all forces that bear upon what foods are available to us and the information that we hear about food to make informed decisions about how the food system works.  One need not have a detailed understanding of how various financial incentives operate to determine what foods are on the store shelves and what are left off.  And one need not fully understand all of the intricate inter-relationships between the medical, agricultural, pharmaceutical, banking, and media industries.  Nevertheless, even with only a basic understanding of these these, one can recognize that, as they say, something smells bad.  That is, one can learn enough of the basic facts to gain a general awareness and to realize that the explanations that we receive about how our food system works somehow clash with common sense.

The second useful principle to remember is the following.  You don’t need to know how something works in order to understand how it doesn’t work.  In other words, when given a list of possible explanations for something, logic allows one to eliminate some possibilities before deciding which is the actual explanation.  In the world of the politics of food, it is possible to learn enough to understand that what we’re told about America’s food regulatory environment–that it exists for our safety–is a load of hogwash before learning the full reason why it really exists.

These two principles can give one confidence when faced with the barrage of so-called facts and arguments that mainstream culture presents to us about why our current health and food regulatory environment is “necessary for our protection.”  To be certain, the opposition is well prepared.  They have been preparing for decades, and they have infinite resources for “research” and “education” campaigns.  Holding a contradictory opinion in the face of this preparedness can be unnerving.

The point is that, even without an equally impressive stack of scientific journal articles and financial reports, one can reasonably and correctly maintain a conviction that things in the world of food and politics are not as we’re told.  One need not feel prepared to take on the diet dictocrats in a debate in order to have reason and well-founded arguments that such dictocrats are wrong.  The most important concepts to understand for such a conviction are the basics of how the US government operates, the basics of how most people respond to money, a realization of one’s place in nature, and an appreciation for the food traditions that sustained countless societies during man’s history.

With these ideas as ammunition, you can be invincible.

Image reproduced from Photo by Danilo Rizzuti, whose portfolio may be viewed here.

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