Tuesday 27 August 2013

Food glorious food.

Of course its more expensive to eat healthily than to eat rubbish. Anyone who has to do any sort of budgeting would know this. 

Also lets think of the advantages of eating healthily. You feel fitter, stronger, are more productive, happier. Why on earth would the current capitalist system want to encourage that? There are so many advantages to keeping the poor depressed, miserable and lacking the energy to fight.

Cooking food from the raw ingredients rather than pre-made tins, jars and microwave meals containing who knows what, is also time expensive. A family on a low income working all the hours sent on pitiful wages that have to be subsidised by the state, also lack the time to cook. They don't have 30 minutes and quiet frankly I have never cooked a 30 minute recipe in 30 minutes.

The parents who wonder home to a cleaner cleaned house, who's kids have been picked up from school by the paid for childcare arrangements,  rather than having to juggle favors between friends, have time to cook with ingredients most people have never heard of, picked in some far off countries by other people's children. 

Fresh fruit and veg is incredibly expensive it is much cheaper to fill your shopping basket with crisps. The farmers are all struggling though so who is getting all that money? But also could I be so bold as to suggest that if fruit and veg where properly affordable the rich wouldn't eat it? 

The state of meat we eat makes me want to cry. What we do to animals and what we put in our own bodies doesn't bear thinking about. Good sustaining meat is really really not cheap or affordable or available in your local supermarket.

Another observation I am sure I am not the only one who has made, is that a large number of people have become incredibly anxious about what they eat. This has lead me to the conclusion that there is a difference between healthy eating and eating healthily. Collective food anxiety has been fueled I would dare to say deliberately by those with a vested interest in selling gym membership, dieting foods, and an entire industry directed at making us 'healthy'. The actual aim of all these industries  obviously is to make money so keeping you in a state of constant paranoia about what you put in your mouth is good business for them. People who eat healthily are very few and far between.

A critique of what we eat and who eats what is desperately desperately needed. But focusing the blame or 'not being judgmental' questions at the "choices" of individuals is not going to take us very far forward. We need to ask questions of the structures people find themselves in, the choices they find themselves facing with regard to what they eat. 

Lets ask these sort of questions http://www.sustainweb.org/childrensfoodcampaign/our_campaigns/