Food supplies, critical to every nation, every country and every leader of every country. Here in America we manipulate food at every level. We tax it. We use it to buy votes, and to enslave a voting population and it often determines the outcome of the main election every four years, if not all the elections since the 1770's. The current administration has used food bribe folks, for votes.
Food also needs to be recognized as the key to healthcare, both good and bad. The current American diet is the root cause of enumerable laws, including Obamacare. What if we were to demand change(s) in the items we ate in order to live longer and have lower health costs. Smoking is a choice, eating is not. However, can the EPA alone control our health, can a draconian healthcare law, can we decide to change our habits on our own, or do we need the government to do it for us?
Carol used to post a recipe now and then on American Politics, and it may time to try that here. One recipe I like is cheap and healthy. There are five main ingredients, corn, peas, tomatoes, black beans and kidney beans, all low sodium and all around a dollar a can, cooked in chopped garlic and basil.
I get six meals out of the mix, simmered for 20 minutes in a large skillet, cost, a buck a meal. So all of know we should eat right, does the government have the right to force us to? From what I see the time may have come to do so. We control or try to what are kids eat in school lunch rooms, via legislation, what about at the macro level' the adults. What should we model the diet after the "Mediterranean" diet perhaps? Clearly the "southern" diet is a killer.. Japanese diet, Indian, French (probably not).
Would we have needed Obamacare if we had keep to the diet were raised on ( I'm sixty, grew up on simple meals, no fast food) just think about when the changes came about, think TV adds, McDonalds, fast food, heck there are fast found chains popping up now that claim to be "healthy" but.... Will it get down to legislation, I say that slope is more than slippery, it's ice.
Please reply to this and tell me if you want a new blog I could start dealing only with food and the politics of food, just look at the Middle East and Africa and now Europe!
NO! Government has NO place in my refrigerator!
ReplyDeleteIMO vegetarian diet is not healthy and anyone raising children on a vegetarian diet is guilty of abuse... yet it is there right. That is how I feel - cut and dry - will not discuss it.
I will not argue the pros and cons of a vegetarian diet. If one is a vegetarian then great but I do not want to hear that their way IS the way. I will respect their right to live and feed their family the way they see fit and defend their RIGHT to do so. I do ask that they extend that RIGHT to me.
My concern is that money will grease the palms of lawmakers to allow foods that are genetically flawed will get into our food systems. The flaws will only show up after several years of being available and by then the damage will have been done.
DeleteI also do not favor a veg. Diet a well rounded diet is best, although I avoid red meat.
ReplyDeleteHow do you feel about the Monsanto protection act Congress just passed.
ReplyDeleteCheck out the nutritional value of GMO corn versus the stuff that was around when our grandparents were.
http://www.infowars.com/analysis-finds-monsantos-gm-corn-nutritionally-dead-highly-toxic-2/
Here are the real scientific studies: http://monsantoblog.com/2013/04/16/nutrition-and-gm-corn-one-of-these-tables-is-not-like-the-other/
DeleteWe need to fight genetic engineered foods period! Food in this country needs to be the focus of our government to make sure our nation does not suffer a mass death event based on a genetic flaw discovered to late, as with smoking. Obviously I would seem to be not a candidate for government intervention, however my kids need to be protected.
DeleteTwinsdad,
ReplyDeleteI found it surprising that you floated up the notion of government intervention in our diet. I agree that the typical American eating habits are horrible, but Big Brother stays out.
Jean
Jean, I, as you know, am not a government intervention advocate, however if we had banned smoking, how many lives could have been saved, how much money would not have fallen out of the economy if the healthcare costs weren't used to fight lung cancers? Would it have been better to pay smokers to quit? Are the new e-cigs going to kill folks? Food kills. Food is what Obamacare is all about, and the way we create "engineered" food what will happen to that down the road.
DeleteFood is a weapon of mass destruction and needs to be treated as such!
Let us clear up a fallacy.. they are sucking the money in NOT to find a cure but to expand early detection. Why do you ask, because they are the ones poisoning us. Cigarettes are not healthy but they are NOT the boogeyman they have been made out to be. While everyone is focusing on cigarettes they continue to do whatever they want to...
DeleteThe number one cause of lung cancer is not healthy? Who would have known?
DeleteThanks Jean, that should be obvious to everyone.
ReplyDeleteAs I said elsewhere TD, there are things we agree on, and this is one of them. Mostly. Ayn Rand said, "Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong"
ReplyDeleteYou are aware of your contradiction here, so I wont' belabor it too much. You don't want gov intervention in general, but when it comes to having safe food for your kids, you want the government to shut down the ability of big agra to give us unhealthy food. That said, I will give you credit for making a very clever escape clause to say that if we use the government to block unhealthy food, it's not a good thing, but if people ultimately get healthier we would not get support for things like Obama care. Therefore even though regulation is evil, it would, in this case, save us from a greater evil.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.............
DeleteLet's be honest, all of our food is genetically modified by years of selective breeding. Corn, Zia Mays, is a small weed that has a tiny spike with a few unedible seeds, but, that is the ancestor of all todays corn. The same can be said of all our crops. The genetic modifications were done the old fashioned way and took hundreds of years. Now, using gene splicing we can do it more efficiently, producing crops with desirable features, like improved nutrition. What's wrong with that? Don't worry guys, carrots can't be communists.
ReplyDelete"Now, using gene splicing we can do it more efficiently, producing crops with desirable features, like improved nutrition."
DeleteI get your point Mick, and I don't dispute the possibility it implies. Once the profit motive of big agra is "spliced in", however, we also get many unsavory things. Plants that are genetically modified to give no seeds for the future or that are modified to withstand the roundup pesticide but nothing else start to make farmers dependent on big agra. While the road to hell is paved with good intentions, as gotta points out above, it is managed by ruthless assholes whose only aim in life is to shake everyone down as much as possible. We don't farm anymore, we plant and spray chemicals that are designed to work with genetically modified seeds. It's a racket.