Cică “Herbalife te ajuta sa slabesti eliminand
cauzele care au dus la ingrasare” (http://www.program-de-slabit.ro/?pk_campaign=google&pk_kwd=ph&gclid=CMPXkpD838cCFRQTGwod6YUDTw).
Cauzele ar fi identificate în “obiceiurile alimentare defectuoase”. În mod
curios, printre promotorii produselor Herbalife se numără şi cuplul Neamţu (vezi https://prezi.com/llr5xsurxxdk/poti-si-tu/
precum şi la https://www.facebook.com/AdinaIoanaPlesa).
Ce este curios aici este că dl Neamţu ar trebui să ştie mai bine care sunt adevăratele
cauze ale obezităţii occidentale şi în ce măsură economia neoliberală pe care o
susţine este adevăratul vinovat al acestei maladii moderne, după cum se poate
vedea din fragmentele pe care le-am citat mai jos. Cu toate acestea, preferă
să-i ţină pe oameni la fel de departe de adevăratele cauze ale îmbolnăvirii şi
prin urmare, de adevăratele surse ale însănătoşirii lor.
*
The
dream that the age-old “food problem” had been largely solved for most
Americans was sustained by the tremendous postwar increases in the productivity
of American farmers, made possible by cheap fossil fuel (the key ingredient in
both chemical fertilizers and pesticides) and changes in agricultural policies.
Asked by President Nixon to try to drive down the cost of food after it had
spiked in the early 1970s, Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz shifted the
historical focus of federal farm policy from supporting prices for farmers to
boosting yields of a small handful of commodity crops (corn and soy especially)
at any cost. The administration’s cheap food policy worked almost too well:
crop prices fell, forcing farmers to produce still more simply to break even.
This led to a deep depression in the farm belt in the 1980s followed by a
brutal wave of consolidation. Most importantly, the price of food came down, or
at least the price of the kinds of foods that could be made from corn and soy:
processed foods and sweetened beverages and feedlot meat. (Prices for fresh
produce have increased since the 1980s.) Washington had succeeded in eliminating food as a political
issue—an objective dear to most governments at least since the time of the
French Revolution.
But
although cheap food is good politics, it turns out there are significant
costs—to the environment, to public health, to the public purse, even to the
culture—and as these became impossible to ignore in recent years, food has come
back into view. Beginning in the late 1980s, a series of food safety scandals
opened people’s eyes to the way their food was being produced, each one drawing
the curtain back a little further on a food system that had changed beyond
recognition. When BSE, or mad cow disease, surfaced in England in 1986,
Americans learned that cattle, which are herbivores, were routinely being fed
the flesh of other cattle; the practice helped keep meat cheap but at the risk
of a hideous brain-wasting disease.
The
1993 deaths of four children in Washington State who had eaten hamburgers from Jack in the Box were
traced to meat contaminated with E.coli 0157:H7, a mutant strain of the
common intestinal bacteria first identified in feedlot cattle in 1982. Since
then, repeated outbreaks of food-borne illness linked to new
antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria (campylobacter, salmonella, MRSA) have
turned a bright light on the shortsighted practice of routinely administering
antibiotics to food animals, not to treat disease but simply to speed their
growth and allow them to withstand the filthy and stressful conditions in which
they live. In the wake of these food safety scandals, the conversation about
food politics that briefly flourished in the 1970s was picked up again in a
series of books, articles, and movies about the consequences of industrial food
production.Beginning in 2001 with the publication of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food
Nation, a surprise best-seller, and, the following year, Marion Nestle’s Food
Politics, the food journalism of the last decade has succeeded in making
clear and telling connections between the methods of industrial food
production, agricultural policy, food-borne illness, childhood obesity, the
decline of the family meal as an institution, and, notably, the decline of
family income beginning in the 1970s.
Besides
drawing women into the work force, falling wages made fast food both cheap to
produce and a welcome, if not indispensable, option for pinched and harried
families. The picture of the food economy Schlosser painted resembles an
upside-down version of the social compact sometimes referred to as “Fordism”:
instead of paying workers well enough to allow them to buy things like cars, as
Henry Ford proposed to do, companies like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s pay their
workers so poorly that they can afford only
the cheap, low-quality food these companies sell, creating a kind of
nonvirtuous circle driving down both wages and the quality of food. The advent
of fast food (and cheap food in general) has, in effect, subsidized the decline
of family incomes in America.
Cheap
food has become an indispensable pillar of the modern economy. But it is no
longer an invisible or uncontested one. One of the most interesting social
movements to emerge in the last few years is the “food movement,” or perhaps I
should say “movements,” since it is unified as yet by little more than the
recognition that industrial food production is in need of reform because its
social/environmental/public health/animal welfare/gastronomic costs are too
high.
But
perhaps the food movement’s strongest claim on public attention today is the
fact that the American diet of highly processed food laced with added fats and
sugars is responsible for the epidemic of chronic diseases that threatens to
bankrupt the health care system. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that
fully three quarters of US health care spending goes to treat chronic diseases,
most of which are preventable and linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, type 2
diabetes, and at least a third of all cancers. The health care crisis probably
cannot be addressed without addressing the catastrophe of the American diet,
and that diet is the direct (even if unintended) result of the way that our
agriculture and food industries have been organized.
(Michael Pollan, "The Food Movement, Rising", The New York Review Of Books, June 10, 2010, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jun/10/food-movement-rising/)
*
După ce îl îngraşă cu forţa pe om, neoliberalismul
îl slăbeşte tot în mod artificial. Nu-l repune în relaţie cu natura, cu mediul,
cu acea realitatea care îi poate reda echilibrul, ci îi reformulează/reformează relaţia sa
cu piaţa, îl transformă pe om dintr-un tip de consumator în alt tip de
consumator, de la consumatorul de hamburgeri la consumatorul de pliculeţe şi
shake-uri „naturale”. În loc să reformeze piaţa, neoconservatorul refomează omul, dându-i aparent un rol nou. Pentru că, în realitate, omul nou al neoconservatorului este doar un consumator nou. În esenţă, el rămâne şi trebuie să rămână, pentru a fi "mântuit", un consumator. În felul acesta, piaţa, adică biserica neoliberală, este
salvată: banii continuă să sprijine industria nutriţionistă, care prosperă în
relaţie şi cu contribuţia necesară a industriei de junk-food. Te poţi îngrăşa,
după cum poţi şi slăbi, doar în mod corporatist. Şi cel ce mănâncă pentru Piaţă mănâncă, căci mulţumeşte Pieţei; şi cel
ce nu mănâncă pentru Piaţă nu mănâncă, şi mulţumeşte Pieţei. Mercatus sive
Deus.
Probabil că doar în România este posibil să fii de
partea marilor corporaţii, să susţii că piaţa liberă reprezintă ordinea
naturală şi cu toate acestea să fii considerat conservator. Dacă asemenea
comportamente sunt văzute ca semne de normalitate, atunci nu pot decât să
prefer o stângă democrată precum cea practicată de actualul cuplu prezidenţial
american, care a demonstrat o surprinzătoare consecvenţă în privinţa regândirii
politicii agricole americane (chiar dacă „while
the administration may be sympathetic to elements of the food movement’s
agenda, it isn’t about to take on agribusiness, at least not directly, at least
until it senses at its back a much larger constituency for reform”):
Michelle
Obama’s recent foray into food politics, beginning with the organic garden she
planted on the White House lawn last spring, suggests that the administration
has made these connections. Her new “Let’s Move” campaign to combat childhood
obesity might at first blush seem fairly anodyne, but in announcing the
initiative in February, and in a surprisingly tough speech to the Grocery
Manufacturers Association in March, the First Lady has effectively shifted the
conversation about diet from the industry’s preferred ground of “personal
responsibility” and exercise to a frank discussion of the way food is produced
and marketed. “We need you not just to tweak around the edges,” she told the
assembled food makers, “but to entirely rethink the products that you’re
offering, the information that you provide about these products, and how you
market those products to our children.”
Mrs.
Obama explicitly rejected the conventional argument that the food industry is
merely giving people the sugary, fatty, and salty foods they want, contending
that the industry “doesn’t just respond to people’s natural inclinations—it
also actually helps to shape them,” through the ways it creates products and
markets them.
So
far at least, Michelle Obama is the food movement’s most important ally in the
administration, but there are signs of interest elsewhere. Under Commissioner
Margaret Hamburg, the FDA has cracked down on deceptive food marketing and is
said to be weighing a ban on the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in factory
farming. Attorney General Eric Holder recently avowed the Justice Department’s
intention to pursue antitrust enforcement in agribusiness, one of the most
highly concentrated sectors in the economy. At his side was Agriculture
Secretary Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa, who has planted his own organic vegetable garden at
the department and launched a new “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” initiative
aimed at promoting local food systems as a way to both rebuild rural economies
and improve access to healthy food.
Though
Vilsack has so far left mostly undisturbed his department’s traditional
deference to industrial agriculture, the new tone in Washington and the
appointment of a handful of respected reformers (such as Tufts professor
Kathleen Merrigan as deputy secretary of agriculture) has elicited a somewhat
defensive, if not panicky, reaction from agribusiness. The Farm Bureau recently
urged its members to go on the offensive against “food activists,” and a trade
association representing pesticide makers called CropLife America wrote to Michelle
Obama suggesting that her organic garden had unfairly maligned chemical
agriculture and encouraging her to use “crop protection technologies”—i.e.,
pesticides.
The
First Lady’s response is not known; however, the President subsequently
rewarded CropLife by appointing one of its executives to a high-level trade
post. This and other industry-friendly appointments suggest that while the
administration may be sympathetic to elements of the food movement’s agenda, it
isn’t about to take on agribusiness, at least not directly, at least until it
senses at its back a much larger constituency for reform.
One
way to interpret Michelle Obama’s deepening involvement in food issues is as an
effort to build such a constituency, and in this she may well succeed. It’s a mistake
to underestimate what a determined First Lady can accomplish. Lady Bird
Johnson’s “highway beautification” campaign also seemed benign, but in the end
it helped raise public consciousness about “the environment” (as it would soon
come to be known) and put an end to the public’s tolerance for littering. And
while Michelle Obama has explicitly limited her efforts to exhortation (“we
can’t solve this problem by passing a bunch of laws in Washington,” she told
the Grocery Manufacturers, no doubt much to their relief), her work is already
creating a climate in which just such a “bunch of laws” might flourish: a
handful of state legislatures, including California’s, are seriously
considering levying new taxes on sugar in soft drinks, proposals considered hopelessly
extreme less than a year ago.
The
political ground is shifting, and the passage of health care reform may
accelerate that movement. The bill itself contains a few provisions long
promoted by the food movement (like calorie labeling on fast food menus), but
more important could be the new political tendencies it sets in motion. If
health insurers can no longer keep people with chronic diseases out of their
patient pools, it stands to reason that the companies will develop a keener
interest in preventing those diseases. They will then discover that they have a
large stake in things like soda taxes and in precisely which kinds of calories
the farm bill is subsidizing. As the insurance industry and the government take
on more responsibility for the cost of treating expensive and largely
preventable problems like obesity and type 2 diabetes, pressure for reform of
the food system, and the American diet, can be expected to increase.
It makes sense that food and farming
should become a locus of attention for Americans disenchanted with consumer
capitalism. Food is the place in daily life where corporatization can be most
vividly felt: think about the homogenization of taste and experience
represented by fast food. By the same token, food offers us one of the
shortest, most appealing paths out of the corporate labyrinth, and into the
sheer diversity of local flavors, varieties, and characters on offer at the
farmers’ market.
Put
another way, the food movement has set out to foster new forms of civil
society. But instead of proposing that space as a counterweight to an
overbearing state, as is usually the case, the food movement poses it against
the dominance of corporations and their tendency to insinuate themselves into
any aspect of our lives from which they can profit. As Wendell Berry writes,
the corporations
will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and
(just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert
it, prechewed, into your mouth is only because they have found no profitable
way to do so.
The
corporatization of something as basic and intimate as eating is, for many of us
today, a good place to draw the line.
(Michael Pollan, "The Food Movement, Rising", The New York Review Of Books, June 10, 2010, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jun/10/food-movement-rising/ Sublinierile îmi aparţin. Vezi şi https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-first-lady-a-grocery-manufacturers-association-conference).
*
Contribuţia meritorie a Primei Doamne a fost
salutată de Michael Pollan într-un alt text care a devenit ulterior Introducerea
la cartea lui Wendell Berry, Bringing it
to the Table: On Farming and Food (Counterpoint, 2009):
Wendell Berry’s Wisdom
By Michael Pollan (The
Nation, September 2, 2009
A
few days after Michelle Obama broke ground on an organic vegetable garden on
the South Lawn of the White House in March, the business section of the Sunday
New York Times published a cover story bearing the headline Is a Food
Revolution Now in Season? The article, written by the paper’s agriculture
reporter, said that “after being largely ignored for years by Washington, advocates of organic and locally grown food have
found a receptive ear in the White House.”
Certainly
these are heady days for people who have been working to reform the way
Americans grow food and feed themselves–the “food movement,” as it is now often
called. Markets for alternative kinds of food–local and organic and
pastured–are thriving, farmers’ markets are popping up like mushrooms and for
the first time in many years the number of farms tallied in the Department of
Agriculture’s census has gone up rather than down. The new secretary of
agriculture has dedicated his department to “sustainability” and holds meetings
with the sorts of farmers and activists who not many years ago stood outside
the limestone walls of the USDA holding signs of protest and snarling traffic
with their tractors. Cheap words, you might say; and it is true that, so far at
least, there have been more words than deeds–but some of those words are
astonishing. Like these: shortly before his election, Barack Obama told a
reporter for Time that “our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil”;
he went on to connect the dots between the sprawling monocultures of industrial
agriculture and, on the one side, the energy crisis and, on the other, the
healthcare crisis.
Americans
today are having a national conversation about food and agriculture that would
have been impossible to imagine even a few short years ago. To many Americans
it must sound like a brand-new conversation, with its bracing talk about the
high price of cheap food, or the links between soil and health, or the
impossibility of a society eating well and being in good health unless it also
farms well.
But
the national conversation unfolding around the subject of food and farming
really began in the 1970s, with the work of writers like Wendell Berry, Frances
Moore Lappé, Barry Commoner and Joan Gussow. All four of these writers are
supreme dot-connectors, deeply skeptical of reductive science and far ahead not
only in their grasp of the science of ecology but in their ability to think
ecologically: to draw lines of connection between a hamburger and the price of
oil, or between the vibrancy of life in the soil and the health of the plants,
animals and people eating from that soil.
I
would argue that the conversation got under way in earnest in 1971, when Berry published an article in The Last Whole Earth Catalogue
introducing Americans to the work of Sir Albert Howard, the British agronomist
whose thinking had deeply influenced Berry’s own since he first came upon it in 1964. Indeed,
much of Berry’s thinking about agriculture can be read as an extended elaboration
of Howard’s master idea that farming should model itself on natural systems
like forests and prairies, and that scientists, farmers and medical researchers
need to reconceive “the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man
as one great subject.” No single quotation appears more often in Berry’s writing than that one, and with good reason: it is
manifestly true (as even the most reductive scientists are coming to recognize)
and, as a guide to thinking through so many of our problems, it is inexhaustible.
That same year, 1971, Lappé published Diet for a Small Planet, which linked
modern meat production (and in particular the feeding of grain to cattle) to
the problems of world hunger and the environment. Later in the decade, Commoner
implicated industrial agriculture in the energy crisis, showing us just how
much oil we were eating when we ate from the industrial food chain; and Gussow
explained to her nutritionist colleagues that the problem of dietary health
could not be understood without reference to the problem of agriculture.
Looking
back on this remarkably fertile body of work, which told us all we needed to
know about the true cost of cheap food and the value of good farming, is to
register two pangs of regret, one personal, the other more political: first,
that as a young writer coming to these subjects a couple of decades later, I
was rather less original than I had thought; and second, that as a society we
failed to heed a warning that might have averted or at least mitigated the terrible
predicament in which we now find ourselves.
For
what would we give today to have back the “environmental crisis” that Berry wrote about so prophetically in the 1970s, a time
still innocent of the problem of climate change? Or to have back the comparatively
manageable public health problems of that period, before obesity and type 2
diabetes became “epidemic” (Most experts date the obesity epidemic to the early
1980s.)
But
history will show that we failed to take up the invitation to begin thinking
ecologically. As soon as oil prices subsided and Jimmy Carter was rusticated to
Plains, Georgia (along with his cardigan, thermostat and solar
panels), we went back to business–and agribusiness–as usual. In the mid-1980s
Ronald Reagan removed Carter’s solar panels from the roof of the White House,
and the issues that the early wave of ecologically conscious food writers had
raised were pushed to the margins of national politics and culture.
[Notă: Articolul continuă cu modul în
care W.B. l-a influenţat pe Pollan, dar despre această relaţie Pollan vorbeşte
mai detaliat şi mai ales instructiv în ce priveşte impasul în care poate ajunge
o pasiune autentică pentru natură de genul naturalismului practicat de Emerson
sau Thoreau în acest interviu: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/04/the-wendell-berry-sentence-that-inspired-michael-pollans-food-obsession/275209/
].
*
Ce
vreau să semnalez aici este constanţa
preocupării lui Barack Obama pentru natură şi mediu, deci despre interesul şi
măsurile concrete luate pentru protejarea naturii şi omului dependent de
această natură de un lider al cărui stângism este reclamat de conservatorii noştri
plutocraţi care ne slăbesc discernământul cu praf(uri) în ochi:
Visiting
an isolated fishing village on a grey, overcast day, the president was full of
admiration for the whole operation: He pronounced salmon jerky "really
good," tried unsuccessfully to scare up a knife so he could attempt to
filet a fish and carefully inspected smokehouse drying racks.
The
president's visit to the fishing operation came with a serious goal of
promoting the importance of environmental protection.
"If
you've eaten wild salmon, it's likely to have come from here," Obama told
reporters. "It's part of the reason why it's so critical that we make sure
that we protect this incredible natural resource, not just for the people whose
livelihood depends on it, but for the entire country."
Obama
also stopped at a grocery store, saying he wanted to call attention to how the
difficulty of getting goods to Alaska causes high prices.
"You're
looking at prices that are double, in some cases, or even higher for basic
necessities like milk," he said. A half-gallon of milk at the N&N
Market cost $8.99 and a large bag of Doritos went for $7.99. Obama said his
administration is exploring ways to address the situation.
Dillingham,
which sits on an inlet off the Bering
Sea, is the fishing hub for Bristol Bay, a world-renowned salmon fishery. Obama's visit to the town of fewer
than 3,000 people briefly placed him at the center of a roiling conflict
between fishermen and developers who want to build a gold-and-copper mine
called Pebble Mine.
Although
the company seeking to build the mine hasn't yet submitted any formal proposal,
Obama's Environmental Protection Agency has taken the unusual step of
pre-emptively blocking it out of concern it could harm the salmon population.
That action triggered a lawsuit against the EPA.
Fishermen
have banded together with locals and environmental groups in warning the mine
would produce more than 10 billion tons of mining waste.
