A jar of honey with lemon rinds at the store looked pretty wonderful to me but my friend balked. He took a look at the ingredients and found corn syrup, which he said is not egregious. It’s just a thickener. But he said no to the product based on its preservatives and chemicals designed to give it a long shelf life.
I was astounded. This product seemed perfectly fine to me. Just put a teaspoon in your tea and you have instant medicine, surely a path to making you healthier.
He responded: Why not just mix honey and lemon juice and maybe some rinds too? Make your own product.
Of course he is right. It’s an extra step but hardly a big deal in the scheme of things. Then I had to do a personal inventory. Why was I drawn to this jar? It’s because it offered the possibility of an experience with a lid. I don’t usually mix honey and lemon and put it in tea but if the product were sitting right there on the shelf to add with one spoon, I might more likely do it.
Here is the secret to American food consumption, why we are buying prepackaged experiences that get us from here to there with maximum convenience. Trillions of dollars have been made through this one insight. This is what the American consumer wants, the best at the most minimal expense of time and energy.
This attitude has created vast trouble for us in ways that are now overwhelmingly obvious. We’ve all seen the data on obesity, heart disease, and other forms of chronic illness. We spent years freaking out about an infectious disease while developing substance abuse, putting on weight, hiding inside, and generally letting health utterly collapse—all in the name of “public health!”
We wake up from that long nightmare only to find that the perpetrators of the fiasco were not being entirely truthful with the public. More details come out daily concerning deep institutional corruption and conflicts of interest at the highest levels of government, corporations, and once-trusted academies and nonprofit groups.
We don’t entirely know with scientific precision what is causing all this. Marty Makary, Jay Bhattacharya, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., along with many others, describe the problem as a toxic soup of exposure. From what? From chemical fertilizers and pesticides, processed foods, an overabundance of insufficiently tested vaccines and other pharmaceutical products, and a public that is insufficiently incredulous toward anything for sale or anything pushed by a qualified expert.
So the question becomes, what else is there out there that needs fundamental reexamination? Who can I trust? Where can I find the truth beneath the lies? If the best of the best officials in government, combined with the biggest corporations and top universities, have failed us, where else can we turn?
This realization seems to have made a dent in a foundational American civic doctrine concerning consumer culture. It’s been our biggest contribution to global culture, and yet now we find that we cannot necessarily even trust the products on the shelves or that which is approved by the agencies.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio summed it up in a cabinet meeting last week. He said that ever since he started listening to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., he is afraid to eat anything!
I get that sense entirely, and you probably do too. I went for years as a hyper-enthusiast of the plentitude of food instantly available to everyone at low prices, taking great pride in how this country had conquered one of history’s great struggles of getting enough to eat. Now it is no longer an issue.
But it turns out that this seemingly great triumph—scripted from policies banged out in the early 1970s that emphasized maximum quantities of everything—was our downfall. The solution created the problem. The cure made a new disease.
It’s the same with the pharmaceutical products of which Americans have long been proud. Depressed? Take a pill. Trouble sleeping? Take a pill? Can’t concentrate? Take a pill. Getting fat? Here is a med for you. All human problems can surely be solved by the magic of science and marketing.
This attitude has betrayed us foundationally. Now we find ourselves rethinking all things, and thus finding our way back to truths our grandparents knew but we forgot. We have every interest in doing so because we only live this one life. This is precisely why the Make America Healthy Again agenda has developed such powerful cultural resonance.
Among the most downloaded apps today is one called Yuka. It permits you to scan the barcode of any product at the store and examine its ingredients. Crucially, and based on MAHA principles, it tells you whether it is something you should eat. The standards come down to artificial ingredients, chemical preservatives, petroleum products, and so on.
The closer to nature the product is, the more likely it is to earn a green light. If it is loaded up with chemical additives, it gets a red light. The colors are highly conspicuous on the app. The app also lets you send a quick email to the producer or post about it on social media.
Food makers are now being flooded with such communications. Consumer satisfaction is the lifeblood of these companies, and they crave any and all signs of consumer preferences. As a result, this app and others like it are introducing huge headaches to companies that have never faced this level of pushback before.
The Wall Street Journal reports that many companies are scrambling now to get the artificial dyes out of their food and otherwise change recipes in ways that do not include chemical additives. They are doing this before government agencies have forced a change, which is a great thing.
The power of the consumer over his own life and choices is a point that has gained tremendous cultural appeal in recent years. We can spend or decline to spend in ways that make a difference. We don’t buy from companies that don’t share our values and we will buy from those who do.
As much as capitalism as a system is put down today by virtually everyone, this is the core of the capitalist ethos at work here. Under this system, and contrary to the name, it is not capital that rules but the consumer who is in charge of determining what is produced and to whom it is distributed. For people to rediscover this power is the best means by which the market as an institution is fixed.
We might eventually see MAHA goals achieved not through government diktat but by the enlightenment of the consuming public together with technology that gives us more and better information. This is the way forward. It is a better path than following the advice of the experts who have failed us.
