What we eat has changed more in the last 40 years than in the previous 40,000. The survival of the current food system depends upon widespread ignorance of how it really operates.
Interpretation
Food production and consumption have drastically changed recently, often without people's awareness of the underlying systems.
Eric Schlosser's quote highlights the rapid transformation of our food system over the past few decades compared to historical trends. This shift has led to a lack of understanding among the public about how food is produced and processed, which is crucial for making informed decisions about what we eat and advocating for a more sustainable food system.
In practice
During a seminar on sustainable agriculture, this quote can be used to emphasize the importance of understanding our food systems.
Marijuana gives rise to insanity -- not in its users but in the policies directed against it. A nation that sentences the possessor of a single joint to life imprisonment without parole but sets a murderer free after perhaps six years is in the grips of a deep psychosis.
The executives who run the fast food industry are not bad men. They are businessmen. They will sell free-range, organic, grass-fed hamburgers if you demand it. They will sell whatever sells at a profit.
Fast food is popular because it's convenient, it's cheap, and it tastes good. But the real cost of eating fast food never appears on the menu.
The idea of atomic energy is illusionary but it has taken so powerful a hold on the minds, that although I have preached against it for twenty-five years, there are still some who believe it to be realizable.
Evolution, thus, is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection. No longer is a fixed object transformed, as in transformational evolution, but an entirely new start is, so to speak, made in every generation.
True science discovers God in an ever-increasing degree — as though God were waiting behind every door opened by science.
When, as we must often do, we fear science, we really fear ourselves.
I like to think that Einstein would look at string theory’s journey and smile, enjoying the theory’s remarkable geometrical features while feeling kinship with fellow travelers on the long and winding road toward unification.
We will first understand how simple the universe is when we recognize how strange it is.
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