There are many problems in this world, but it seems that those problems are magnified both in terms of volume as well as with severity right here in the United States. No country has it right or is problem-free, of course. Nobody in this world has it all figured out. It would be the height of naivete, or possibly arrogance (or both) to believe that anyone does.
However, the United States has been going through some particularly pressing problems in recent decades. There are a number of reasons for this, not least of which is that Americans have been a bit pampered for too long with an elite status as the world’s leading superpower. For many years, the nation enjoyed the highest standard of living in the world, and it still enjoys a fairly high standard of living.
That prestigious status has been slipping noticeably, however. A number of other countries have passed the United States in terms of standard of living, including neighboring Canada, Australia, Japan, and numerous northern European nations. Furthermore, there are areas in which pretty much every other industrialized nation seems to have surpassed us. This seems true in healthcare, where we remain the only developed nation that fails to provide citizens with universal, affordable healthcare. We are also the only nation that seems to elect science-skeptical leaders with such an alarming degree of consistency. Not surprisingly, also, our education system has slipped considerably, so that in some subjects, we outright rank near the bottom among industrialized nations.
In addition, we here in the country many Americans proudly boast as the “land of the free” have more people behind prison bars than any other country in the world. That is what happens when you have a de facto “for profit” prison system, of course. The “for profit” label is also the reason why our healthcare system is the most expensive in the world, even though there are tens of millions of Americans who cannot afford healthcare, or are underinsured. Only a “for profit” healthcare system could have come up with the concept of “pre-existing conditions”, after all.
Indeed, the profit motive seems to be at the center of all sorts of other problems, as well, including our collective hostility towards science, the increasing levels of pollution (particularly under Trump), and why we have the most serious problem with obesity of any nation in the world.
Indeed, we seem to have all manner of health concerns. There are mental health issues, with levels of depression and anxiety that are through the roof. Cancer rates are alarmingly high, and often, it seems that we do not even know where our collective susceptibility to cancer is coming from. For me, it seems that there are so many potential possibilities, that it becomes difficult to narrow it down. Admittedly, this is highly unscientific, but it seems to me that some of these health problems, and particularly the high cancer rates, could be coming from any number of possible factors. There could certainly be natural factors, such as excessive exposure to the sun, although many people seem to make a point of lying in the sunshine in order to get good tans. Perhaps they assume that the sunscreen or other items that advertise as protection will actually work. Which brings me to beauty products, because many of these are not natural, and we do not know what these chemicals that we voluntarily put on our own bodies might actually be doing to us. Was it not true, at least some years ago, that hair dye for darker hair increased the possibility of cancer?
Also, it is not just these products that we often slather on ourselves, and on our skin. What about all of those pills that so many of us pop? Perhaps they are subscription pills from our doctors in our “for profit” healthcare system, or perhaps it is even those more regularly available medicinal items, including aspirin and such for our myriad aches and pains, which are causing far more problems than we even know about. Or perhaps it is more hidden. The wires and electricity within the walls of our own comfortable homes, maybe, or the proximity to electric towers, or possibly cell towers these days, may be a strong factor. Perhaps also those cell phones that we carry with us nowadays at all times could explain it in part, or other electronic devices that so many of us have come to rely on. Perhaps pollution plays a serious factor.
Yet, one area that many Americans in particular seem either not to think about, or not to dwell upon seriously, would be our food. Many Americans seem to get annoyed and/or offended when other nations (particularly but not exclusively European nations) reject American foods, such as beef, for having too many artificial additives that they deem a health threat. Still, the bottom line is that those nations are trying to protect their citizens, and are only too aware of how costly – both literally and figuratively - the health problems will be down the road. That is not so much a problem here in the United States, with our “for profit” healthcare system, where health problems seem almost like a desirable outcome to keep generating profits.
Perhaps that accounts for why we seem to accept so many additives in our foods. I mean, seriously! I consider myself a fairly well-educated, intellectually capable guy, for the most part. Not a genius, perhaps, but not dumb, and probably smarter than average. However, pronouncing some of the ingredients in commonly consumed foods is often beyond me. Now, instead of greater transparency for health awareness, our government, again most likely driven by the profit motive, has made it more difficult to find out what exactly is in the food that we consume. Perhaps that accounts for our problems with obesity, with cancer, and with other diseases.
How and when did all of this start? What are the roots of all of this? And when, exactly, did things really begin to get bad?
Recently, the New York Review of Books published a piece by author Michael Pollan (see link below). It in, Pollan describes how the very roots of this growing problem were actually attached to our idea of abundance as a virtue, during the salad days (not trying to be ironic with that expression) of this country's history in the post-war years through at least until the Kennedy assassination, the era that most Americans recognize as the Golden Age of Americana, and how this altered much more recently:
The very system that made possible the bounty of the American supermarket—its vaunted efficiency and ability to “pile it high and sell it cheap”—suddenly seems questionable, if not misguided. But the problems the novel coronavirus has revealed are not limited to the way we produce and distribute food. They also show up on our plates, since the diet on offer at the end of the industrial food chain is linked to precisely the types of chronic disease that render us more vulnerable to Covid-19.
The story begins early in the Reagan administration, when the Justice Department rewrote the rules of antitrust enforcement: if a proposed merger promised to lead to greater marketplace “efficiency”—the watchword—and wouldn’t harm the consumer, i.e., didn’t raise prices, it would be approved. (It’s worth noting that the word “consumer” appears nowhere in the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, passed in 1890. The law sought to protect producers—including farmers—and our politics from undue concentrations of corporate power.)1 The new policy, which subsequent administrations have left in place, propelled a wave of mergers and acquisitions in the food industry. As the industry has grown steadily more concentrated since the 1980s, it has also grown much more specialized, with a tiny number of large corporations dominating each link in the supply chain. One chicken farmer interviewed recently in Washington Monthly, who sells millions of eggs into the liquified egg market, destined for omelets in school cafeterias, lacks the grading equipment and packaging (not to mention the contacts or contracts) to sell his eggs in the retail marketplace.2 That chicken farmer had no choice but to euthanize thousands of hens at a time when eggs are in short supply in many supermarkets.
Indeed, the food that we collectively consume in this country is problematic. We hear many people condemning the choices that far too many Americans opt for, from sweets and junk food to all of those fast food chains that seem to dominate the culinary options in most American towns from coast to coast. It is only when we hear about something that sounds so horrific that there is any kind of a backlash against it. This was the case when McDonald’s was discovered to use what it referred to as “pink slime” in burgers. Clearly, the idea of excessive and unnatural sounding processing of these meat products alarmed almost everyone who heard about it.
Still, it seems to me that there is not enough serious thinking about the impact that our choices regarding the food that we consume have on us. It should be pointed out that I am not only talking about individuals who opt to eat fast food and/or junk food regularly, and create their own personal health problems, which clearly can escalate quickly the older we get. No, the problems also are with us as Americans, collectively. After all, we elect these representatives who made more transparency with the ingredients within our food labels far more difficult. That clearly does not serve the public interest, and is yet another classic example of putting profits before people, which seems to be the root cause of almost all of our problems here in this country, and in more ways than one (in terms of both the politicians and the food industry that they are, pardon the pun, catering to).
As with so many of our problems here in the United States, it seems that the roots of this problem begin (and stubbornly persist) because of that excessive pride and sense of being exceptional, of somehow being exempt from the rules that govern over (and thus limit) the rest of the world.
The aforementioned Pollan piece which examines the problems with the American food industry (and it is an industry). It is a fascinating – and frankly, alarming – revelation of the multiple levels of problems that our collective choice to create what we now know as the American food industry has caused us. That includes problems that we are all aware of these days, including the sicknesses, perhaps most visibly the obesity issue. But there are other health issues that stem from it, and not just with humans. Also, Pollan warns that there may be some impending food shortages that may prove comparable to the system of Communism in the Soviet-bloc countries that we specifically designed our economic system to best in every way.
Yes, we are facing an impending food crisis in this country. Typically, it has everything to do with a system that once seemed a blessing, producing an abundance of food at affordable prices, but which seemingly spun out of control and became a monster. Pollan calls this the "industrial food complex", a term that calls to mind Eisenhower's dire warnings of a "military industrial complex" that had grown so much as to become a monstrous threat to the country. Here is Pollan, once again explaining a little more on how and why everything went bad with our processed food production:
It’s long been understood that an industrial food system built upon a foundation of commodity crops like corn and soybeans leads to a diet dominated by meat and highly processed food. Most of what we grow in this country is not food exactly, but rather feed for animals and the building blocks from which fast food, snacks, soda, and all the other wonders of food processing, such as high-fructose corn syrup, are manufactured. While some sectors of agriculture are struggling during the pandemic, we can expect the corn and soybean crop to escape more or less unscathed. That’s because it takes remarkably little labor—typically a single farmer on a tractor, working alone—to plant and harvest thousands of acres of these crops. So processed foods should be the last kind to disappear from supermarket shelves.
Unfortunately, a diet dominated by such foods (as well as lots of meat and little in the way of vegetables or fruit—the so-called Western diet) predisposes us to obesity and chronic diseases such as hypertension and type-2 diabetes. These “underlying conditions” happen to be among the strongest predictors that an individual infected with Covid-19 will end up in the hospital with a severe case of the disease; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have reported that 49 percent of the people hospitalized for Covid-19 had preexisting hypertension, 48 percent were obese, and 28 percent had diabetes.
I urge you to click on the link and read Pollan's piece. It is not a comfortable read, but it is an important one, and perhaps even a necessary one. Truly an eye-opener, even though it is alarming and, frankly, depressing, as it illustrates why we Americans, specifically, are facing yet another impending crisis, largely based on our choices, political and otherwise, without having given much thought (if indeed any) to the possible long-term consequences of these actions. And it is the reason why so many things seem to be going so wrong in this country, and all at once.
Please take a look at it, because it is an important read. Below is the link:
The Sickness in Our Food Supply by Michael Pollan, June 11, 2020 ISSUE:
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