Now, more than ever, the news is full of health scares and epidemics caused in no small part by the quantity-over-quality approach to food production, and it’s happening all over the world. China might be the foremost violator of health standards, but our country is just as at fault, feeding our citizens with food that is inherently unhealthy for us.
Many of us have already been beating the drums against eating factory-farmed and genetically tweaked foods, but the majority would rather cover their ears and keep consuming the more accessible, bigger, allegedly more flavorful stuff that lines our grocery shelves.
The result? Obesity, diseases, and infirmities of all sorts manifesting in us. Worse, our children just as badly affected. Why do we do this to ourselves? With all the knowledge and tools for research and application available, shouldn’t we take charge of our health and start eating and living well? There are three big culprits to this dysfunctional behavior.
Laziness
While technological innovations and conveniences have made many formerly difficult and time-consuming activities of our daily lives much, much easier to do, the result is that we have allowed inertia to hold us still, inevitably letting machines and other people make all the decisions for us. This is not what we invented these things for; it is supposed to be so that our time and resources would be freed so that we could pursue greater things and solving other problems and challenges. Instead, we just got plain lazy.
The solution to this is to simply make good use of the freed up time and resources to attain our humanistic goals. Applying it to this situation, why not consider purchasing cheap, arable land (still plenty of that in our country, last I checked), grabbing a few basic but omni-useful farming equipment from online auction and sales sites like Rock&Dirt, and actually learn to farm and grow your own food? You already have access to ready credit, powerful machines, and land; why are you wasting it on things you don’t really need, and skimping on things you need to stay healthy?
Apathy
A lot of us just don’t give a hoot. We’d rather go about our own way and not be concerned for anyone else but ourselves. Ironically, it is this lack of empathy that is actually destroying and degrading the lot of us. We are a social species; no amount of technology that we can muster at the present moment can change that.
We have to open our eyes to the fact that your survival and happiness is equally dependent on others as it is on your own will. If all people would realize this, we wouldn’t we be sacrificing each other’s welfare for the sake of us getting ahead. We would help one another for the simple fact that we are all that we have in this spinning sphere of rock in the middle of mostly empty space. Starting giving a damn and get your hands dirty with the good soil of the earth!
The True Evil
It is not some kind of incorporeal, shadowy presence that invades men’s hearts and makes them do bad things. It is in us all, the potential to be an avaricious, uncaring, and inhumane creature. It is also within us to choose otherwise and become good and caring stewards of this planet and everything within it.
If we are to keep our mortal bodies healthy and our mortal lives happy and productive, we must choose to do good. It may sound simple, but as you can see, it is one of the most difficult challenges we have to wrestle with from our birth until the final hour.