Consumerism: A social and economic order and ideology that encourages the acquisition of goods and services in ever-greater amounts.

that is powerful, I watched it on youtube and shared on facebook. I don't hunt and fish as much as I would like, but it does serve to remind my that something dies so that my family might live on.

It makes people identify as consumers- instead of people, they are economic units like the things being assembled on those conveyor belts. We're viewed as such- we view ourselves as that. Industries look for ways to predict consumption habits and consumer behavior patterns, and they don't necessarily do it passively when they come up with proactive ways to influence that behavior. We are a science project.


I like where Cloud Atlas logically takes consumerism to its more practical extreme in the future:

WARNING: there is a little nudity in this scene.

Isn't that a clip from Samsara?

Interesting movie but a bit long for something with no narration.

Industrial food production is always disconcerting to watch, and the context in which this film puts it certainly shifts the message to a rather one-sided one of guilt. But at the same time we have to acknowledge that seven billion people have to be fed somehow, that each of them would rather live comfortably, and that this simply isn't possible without industrial food production - which, by the way, is safer and cleaner than any food that mankind could eat collectively at any time before.

As much as one feels an instinctive horror to what is shown (particularly meat production) I fail to see what alternative is there, short of ordering people to adopt a vegetarian diet with meat only once per week, and there's simply no conceivable majority for such a societal design anywhere.

Almost every economy in the world derives most of its GDP from consumer spending.


I'd much rather live in a consumerist society than a society where artificial restrictions are put on individuals by the State.

My own diet had changed drastically after watching food shows and watching them make what is essentially garbage for consumption. Cheap chemicals, dyes, flavors, stabilizers, you name it. Then everything I read about food confirmed just how bad this stuff is.

The food industry is one of the most powerful lobbies there are, one that escapes the kinds of regulation slapped on tobacco and alcohol products, the products can be just as bad, if not worse over the long run. They're allowed all the benefits of false or deceptive marketing and advertising, selling garbage to make it sound like it's healthy or even something that it's not. The incidence of diabetes and obesity and cancer and food allergies, those are real things connected to our highly processed, high energy diets. Cheap for the industry to mass produce, cheap for the consumer, at least in the short term. Long run you may pay for it one way or another.

And yet, in the West, our food is safer than our ancestors enjoyed, even just a few generations ago.

I know what's in hot dogs and still eat them. I grew up working on various farms that raised animals for commercial processors. I still buy my meat from the grocery store.
It's not much of a life if you spend it worrying about all the things that could potentially kill you and seems like at least according to the fear mongers just about everything can potentially kill you.

Food can be safe- free from harmful microbes, safe from spoilage or free from something that would drop a horse immediately. That's what we mean by safe.

As far as healthy goes, which implies long term effects, that's a different matter.

Tell that to someone that gets cholera, dysentery, or any number of parasites and microbes that come from unsafe foods.

What would you rather eat - something that could kill you from dysentery within a week or something that could kill you from arterial hardening in fifty years?

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Now if we want to discuss the trend to put non-food items like cardboard into processed foods we'll quickly reach agreement, however. It's not particularly hazardous to one's health, but just plain wrong.

I think you've missed what I'm saying. I said that safe means you that you have food that is free from those things, but introduces other health implications over the long run. You're not even denying that- I see what you did there.

So, heart disease, diabetes (a first world problem) food allergies (which don't exist in some parts of the world, while true have other problems, don't have that), certain forms of cancer connected to diet, which again have low incidence to being non existent in some other parts of the world. You're not free from something, you're just pointing out something else that they have.


Do I want those things? No. But it's not incompatible to heat healthy and avoid that, either. You can still get a healthier diet and avoid those things. Just requires more effort.

The "more effort" bit is good and fine in a society that enjoys abundance in food supply and can afford to worry about the luxury problem of how to eat not only safely and enjoyably but also with long lifespan effects. We can even afford downright crazy campaigns like PETA's US-Mexican border advertisement (�If the border patrol doesn�t get you, the chicken and burgers will.� - IOW, stay in Mexico and enjoy the Mexican bean and corn diet with only a sprinkle of chicken now and then for your own good rather than coming to the US).

The problem is that there's currently seven, and soon to be nine billion people that need to be fed. Organic vegetable and meat from happy cattle grazing on green pastures is a production form that is already proven to yield insufficient harvests. So, I'm waiting for the proponents of this lifestyle what their recommendations are how we're supposed to tackle the issue. Sure, if only the planet had just three billion people, maybe it would be such a nicer place to be!

Not to mention that half of that population will be critically obese and require more food to sustain themselves than the other half.

This entire issue falls between two alternatives. Either individuals are allowed to make their own choices concerning food or we have coercive measures from the State to control the eating behavior of individuals.

You can regulate the corporations instead, a third alternative.

After all, if you can't buy a soda larger than 16oz, surely you can't possibly buy TWO!



The Jedi Master

I think you just made Bloomberg cry.

I'm quite aware of the arguments of all that. There's a certain phenomenon that poorer people in the US actually are well fed, but not necessarily eating healthy, since they can get fed on the cheap with cheap, less healthy food. Obesity and other health related problems tends to be more of a problem that correlates with poverty levels.

But then the problem is to merely make note of it and move on as if that's all there is to it. That's fine, except I go back to my original point- it might be cheap to feed some folks now, surely, but there is often a kind of accounting going on that gets paid for later down the road. Health problems might mean medical expenses, lost wages, people applying for disability and so on.

There is also education. To the extent that could actually work, there is another phenomenon that comes around that people often ignore or miss- we always point out government control of choice, but ignore the food industry's influence on government policies. How else does Coca Cola get its beverages in school lunch menus, cafeterias and vending machines?

The food lobby is the government, they aren't really that separate. Lawmakers come from these industries, they move in between them in their careers, or otherwise are heavily dependent upon them for revenue. This is why I point out the food lobby as being one of the most powerful. People often think of the defense industry as doing that, but in some ways, the food industry is much more vital and pervasive.

The long term health effects attributed to todays food I think has more to do with the lack of self control than anything else.
Eating too much organically grown food will still make you fat.