Consider two of the "ten most emailed" articles from yesterday's NY Times (registration required):
* A eight-year-old Scarsdale tot who obsesses over outrageously expensive fashionable jeans
* A nine-year-old African boy who spends his days breaking up rocks that his mother sells for pennies to a cement contractor
New York Times photos: boy in Zambia, girl in Westchester County.
How can we, as Americans, put up with this kind of disparity? The only explanation I can come up with is mind control: they're putting something in the food and drink that keeps us from shrieking with moral outrage.
Roman emperors kept the plebes happy with bread & circuses. Marie-Antoinette told the peasants to eat cake. America's industrial food complex feeds us amalgamated, irradiated bar-coded fecal spam.
Well, Rome fell to the barbarians and the French aristocracy went to the guillotine, but we've become so sedated by all that high-fructose corn syrup that we're too fat and happy to rise up in anger.
Wake up, guys! Somebody has to tell Merkins to stop drinking the sweet, deadly Koolaid!
But who? Should it be up us, to the floggers? (New word, short for food bloggers.) Are we the only ones paying attention, or does our vision stop at the edge of the plate? Are we too numbed by nebbiolo and sated by soufflés?
My manifesto: Floggers of the world, unite! We've got nothing to lose but our food chains. Let's stop playing "Rhapsody in Blue Cheese" and switch to something fierce: "Food, Glorious Food!" perhaps. More suggestions, please!
"How can we, as Americans, put up with this kind of disparity? The only explanation I can come up with is mind control: they're putting something in the food and drink that keeps us from shrieking with moral outrage."
Ron, there is no question about the disparities in this world. Fortunately we were born into relative luxury as compared in your example. But, remember, not all USA citizens live in Westchester county. Also, due to the USA government, US citizens at least have a platform to build from (mandatory public education) and fall back on (medicare and social security).
Unfortunately we are not equipped financially, as a society, to solve the world's problem. Due to our knight in shining armor we now have the opportunity to try to survive in a world that thinks poorly of us and evidences no respect for our money, our politics and our athletes, among other things. (And for good reason.)
The example in your illustration is but a single example of a world-wide problem. (We have poverty in this country as well.) I'm worried that our leader(s) is/are ignoring history and that we are being led into a scenario similar to the end of the Roman empire. Slowly but gradually.
As to your comment on food quality. I'm sure you read the NYT magazine article about the trend towards organic foods being led by Wal Mart. Already there is legislation in place nationally (U.S. congress) that is taking away the full values of organic food by using artifical input into the growing of same. Wal Mart will try to drive down the price of organic food causing the growers who want to sell on a massive scale to cut back somewhere in the process in order to sell to a giant buyer.
As you know the last two generations are bigger physically than their predecessors, why? Could it be the additives to the food we eat? Of course. It is also predicted that these people will not experience the longevity now achieved by our nonegenarians because of the artificial contents of the food they have been raised on.
Rhetorical question: Why is cancer in the USA so prevelant?
Keep writing your articles. I like your photos as well. Good job!
You're right about the Roman empire, Dave, and the Barbarians (or whatever we call them this time around) are already at the gates.
Wal-Mart, Whole Foods and the Feds have already co-opted the "organic" movement, rendering the term itself meaningless except for the mindless (Michael Pollan calls it the Organic-Industrial complex). What's next? Bio-Diesel from yet more subsidized corn to fuel "Organic" Hummers?
It is NEBBIOLO - with 2 b's.
A good one can lull me into all kinds of false sense of security.
I am a cancer survivor.
On my way now to the Lake City Farmer's Market to stock up on as much First Person goodies as I can carry.