[img]139|left|Jessica Gadsden||no_popup[/img] The definition of irony: About half the audience for a packed screening of “Food, Inc.,” this weekend, had a large tub of sunflower oil-popped popcorn, and thirty-two ounces of high fructose, corn syrup-infused carbonated water.
It’s scary what Americans will put in their mouths. My mother calls the aisles and aisles of “food” in supermarkets, “edible products.” It’s as apt a description as any.
Yesterday my writers’ group had their regular monthly meeting, followed by lunch. For the last few months, lunch has been at local pizza chain, Numero Uno. Despite each four-hour meeting and sharp pangs of hunger, I never eat there. Now, don’t get the wrong idea. I love to eat. I can chow down with the best of the foodies. Yet, for probably the zillionth time, the other writers asked me why I didn’t order more than a tap water with lemon. Didn’t I want any garlic bread, pizza or pasta? No, no, and mmmm, no.
Instead, I sit back quietly and watch women and men, who say they are concerned about their weight and health, consume vast amounts of refined carbohydrates, high fructose corn syrup-sweetened soda (or soda artificially sweetened by sucralose—and no, it isn’t really made from sugar, which is why they don’t advertise it that way anymore), pesticide-ridden vegetables, and meat of dubious origin. But hey, no one’s lunch totaled more than ten dollars, with tax. Food, or its reasonable facsimile, is one of America’s cheapest commodities.
Some Things Bad for You, Even in Moderation
Yes, I’ve heard the argument before (especially from the cake and cookie pushers in my last place of employment) – everything in moderation. Arsenic is not good for you in moderation, and neither are modern food products. Both will kill you slowly.
If I watched television, had cable, and flipped to Fox News, I imagine it would be filled with 24/7 “coverage” of President Obama’s supposed march to socialism. The reality, as I read the news is far different. Obama and the administration continue to persistently stomp their feet on the circular driveway of capitalism, capitalism and the commoditization of everything – money, fossil fuels, healthcare and—you guessed it—food.
We have commoditized everything, and the result is a society struggling with a failing economy, a failing healthcare system and a failing democracy.
There used to be a time when a bank or a savings and loan, rather, would accept the deposits of many in order to lend to a few with interest. Along with banking deregulation came the idea of selling loans as commodities – with the risks insured (or not) by companies like AIG and instruments like credit default swaps. With the risk theoretically spread among many investors, banks made more and riskier loans (earning more interest), and we are now living with the consequences.
The Retail Price is Too Low
Oil, a resource we know to be nonrenewable and finite, is sold as a commodity at ridiculously low prices, as if there is no end in sight. The commodity is further refined into gasoline, and plastic, and a zillion other uses to power and package the goods we buy.
Healthcare, something treated as a right in other industrialized countries, is also a commodity here. Insurance companies seek to profit off our good health, and refuse to deal with us when we’re sick. Pharmaceutical companies are happy to sell us drugs, preferably under patent (which, being of limited duration, incentivizes the creation of ever newer ones), even when less invasive or even homeopathic measures are available to achieve the same purpose.
Marketers can sell us anything. I am regularly amazed that in sunny Southern California people use clothes dryers when the sun is warm, free, and environmentally friendly.
Even our savings and retirement are wrapped in these commodities. Complain about rampant capitalism, and businesses push back by warning (and rightly so) that our futures are tied to increasing profits at any cost.
The commoditization of anything is an ugly business, but it’s at its worst with the very food we need for sustenance. Whole foods are separated into their non-nutritive and component parts, and put back together in unrecognizable and nutritionally vacant forms. A few agribusinesses have turned seeds into commodities by patenting them, and making seed saving by farmers illegal. They have also turned animals into commodities, with great heaping doses of animal cruelty sprinkled in. Chickens with breasts so large they can’t walk (boneless chicken breasts are now traded like any other stock, bond or animal part), hens starved to produce more eggs, billions of male chicks slaughtered, because they serve no purpose in the non-fertile egg industry.
The images of farm cruelty from last fall’s Prop. 2 and a long ago documentary never have left my mind – and I don’t even like birds.
How mammals are treated is too horrifying to detail. Instead, traders deal in pork bellies, and fast food chains revel in how many billions they have served, never mentioning how many billions they have slaughtered.
Perhaps none of this should be surprising given that we live in a country in whose very fabric was woven by the importation and sale of African slaves as commodities.
While capitalism got us into this mess, I don’t see how it can get us out. I’m not sure we can, want to, or need to sell more education, more debt, or more stuff to Americans. And I’m not sure we can afford it. Elevating profit over people will put the American people into an early grave. How much longer can we survive in smog-choked cities, subsisting on terrible food, with low wages?
What would be so bad about a single-payer public health system, public transportation, and locally grown food sold at realistic, cost-to-produce prices? Who doesn’t want a real social safety net instead of reliance on our ability to save in a world of volatile markets and runaway inflationary prices in certain sectors (like housing, education and health care). If the fundamental question comes down to profit or people, I choose people.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender-biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
