Escape From the Food Trap

Abstract

Most of us are aware today that we consume a great deal of three simple ingredients everyday: salt, sugar, and fat. Recently Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Moss revealed in detail, how the major food companies allure us and maximize their profit by producing and marketing a variety of processed food in his book (Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, W. H. Allen, 2013). In the old days, but not so long ago, however, sugar and salt were quite expensive. That is why they are still alluring us. Industrialization changed our eating habits completely. The Industrial Revolution first occurred in the agricultural sector. It industrialized the self-sustaining agriculture and turned it into a profit-oriented entity, and thus wiped out our organic life. What mattered, then, was not to grow food for humans, but to get profit from the production of food. This trend has continued and now the agricultural industry is absorbed into the food industry to exploit us more effectively. As Moss shows in his research, the food industry became much more sophisticated in carrying out their objectives using scientific data. Nowadays eating is not for sustaining our life, but for getting sensational satisfaction like sex. We eat to get more satisfaction and you can get satisfaction very easily and cheaply by drinking bottles of sugar - added soda and bags of potato chips. The more we eat, the more we want to eat until we regurgitate. Can we really reverse this vicious circle? I would like to argue how we can get out of this modern trap of food and I want to point out that obesity is essentially an aesthetic issue.