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.
When you're in a spacecraft, you need to know what things you can touch and what things you shouldn't touch!
I think the question is, are there women and have there been women who want to do science and could be doing great science, but they never really got the opportunity?
Science, my lad, has been built upon many errors; but they are errors which it was good to fall into, for they led to the truth.
Science is basically an inoculation against charlatans.
I am mindful that scientific achievement is rooted in the past, is cultivated to full stature by many contemporaries and flourishes only in favorable environment. No individual is alone responsible for a single stepping stone along the path of progress, and where the path is smooth progress is most rapid. In my own work this has been particularly true.
We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made.
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