Eating It Anyway

The food industry pumps our meals with chemicals that are classified as actual poisons. Pesticides that cause cancer. Aspartame—marketed as NutraSweet—only got into the food supply because its manufacturer faked the safety studies. Bisphenol A in plastic bottles. They tested all this on animals. The animals developed cancer and died. We know this. We eat it anyway.

Marie-Monique Robin made a documentary about it, Unser täglich Gift—literally Our Daily Poison—and does the straightforward reporting that apparently counts as investigative work these days. She visits Orissa in India where people farm and eat their own food without industrial agriculture. Cancer there is rare. Obesity is basically unknown. Compare that to the West, where we’ve spent fifty years consuming engineered garbage, and somehow everyone acts surprised when disease rates climb.

Knowing that companies fake safety studies and hide data is one thing. That’s expected. The stranger part is that we have access to the actual information. You can read about it. You know that processed food is engineered to make you want more, that lobbying keeps labeling obscure, that normal snacks contain substances that shouldn’t exist in food. And most days I just eat the convenient option anyway.

I think about changing it sometimes. Buying glass bottles. Eating actual fruit. Cooking meals instead of outsourcing them. It wouldn’t be that complicated. But complicated isn’t really the issue. The issue is that knowing the poison and eating it anyway has become the default, like that’s just how it works now. Maybe that’s the actual trick—not the chemicals in the food, but convincing ourselves that knowing about them doesn’t change anything.