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"Fed" By The Food Industry, "Healed" By The Health Industry
851 sats \ 6 comments \ @kr 19 Apr HealthAndFitness
I was reading some of Wendell Berry's writing lately (his book The Unsettling of America is particularly good), and stumbled upon this quote.
"People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are healed by the health industry, which pays no attention to food."
– Wendell Berry
He makes the point that by fragmenting our work in the pursuit of specialization and efficiency, we fail to see the whole picture and create these really wild distortions in our lives.
Instead of taking care of our bodies with nourishing food grown locally, we outsource all our food production to far-off multinational corporations that "specialize" in optimizing food (for yield and taste, not health), which causes many of our health problems, and then we outsource all our sicknesses to the pharmaceutical industry which "specializes" in curing sickness.
But because their incentives are to give us expensive, repetitive "cures" instead of identifying our food system as the root of the problem, we keep running in circles where the specialists who cause our problems are the same ones trying to fix them.
Said differently, the "cure" preserves the disease.
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45 sats \ 3 replies \ @Undisciplined 19 Apr
It’s really insidious, especially when you add in the layer of both industries lobbying for government protections against market disruption that might change things for the better.
I hadn’t thought about it in exactly these terms and it’s an interesting connection to market processes. Ultimately, though, specialization or no, everything answers to the consumer. We have to conclude that a whole lot of people are happy to trade their health for gorging on garbage.
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263 sats \ 2 replies \ @kr OP 19 Apr
For sure. If you get some time, I think you'll enjoy The Unsettling of America, it really made me stop and think.
One of Wendell's related points on specialization is about how we've degraded ourselves to the point that we identify solely as "consumers".
He says the home was once a place of both production and consumption, and the things we produced or repaired (food, clothing, furniture, etc...) gave us meaning and a sense of purpose.
Today we optimize for efficiency. We all have specialized jobs that separate us from our food production, our families, our communities, and our responsibilities.
  • We spend hours commuting to offices to meet with other specialized workers instead of working near the home (where most people worked pre-WW2)
  • We then hire specialized government nannies to watch our kids and specialized cleaners to clean our homes while we pursue our specialized work
  • After work we scroll through specialized (algorithmic) content, isolating us from our neighbors, families, and friends because TikTok seems more interesting than a trip to the local theatre or the park
We specialize in pursuit of measurable progress, but along the way we ignore all the non-measurable things that distort our lives in undesirable ways.
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79 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined 19 Apr
We use the term "home production" a lot at our house.
I've often encouraged dual-income friends, especially those with kids, to actually work out how much income they keep from the second job. By the time you add up all the taxes and additional expenses for food, cars, childcare, etc., it usually works out to less than minimum wage and it comes with the added loss of family connectedness and personal wellbeing. It's a bad deal, quite often.
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31 sats \ 0 replies \ @kr OP 19 Apr
We use the term "home production" a lot at our house.
Love it
By the time you add up all the taxes and additional expenses for food, cars, childcare, etc., it usually works out to less than minimum wage and it comes with the added loss of family connectedness and personal wellbeing. It's a bad deal, quite often.
Yeah the math rarely works out, and even then, there's a tendency for people to under-price the value of family and personal wellbeing because they're hard to quantify.
But when people reflect on their lives later on, overlooking those things are common regrets.
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16 sats \ 1 reply \ @zapsammy 19 Apr
to cure meat means to preserve it. cancer and infection surgeons are especially prone to thinking like this - they strive to remove the bad meat, preserve the good meat, and call it a cure. sometimes they literally blast the diseased flesh with argon beam...
FDA manages both the food and the drug industries, creating a profit scheme by playing both sides of this demonic consumption system. a successful bankster funds and controls both sides of the war on people, every time.
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26 sats \ 0 replies \ @kr OP 19 Apr
FDA manages both the food and the drug industries
Even though it's literally in the name, somehow this never really occurred to me. Really messed up.
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