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.
I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.
Medicine is not only a science; it is also an art. It does not consist of compounding pills and plasters; it deals with the very processes of life, which must be understood before they may be guided.
Trace Science, then, with Modesty thy guide,_x000D_ _x000D_ First strip off all her equipage of Pride,_x000D_ _x000D_ Deduct what is but Vanity or Dress,_x000D_ _x000D_ Or Learning's Luxury or idleness,_x000D_ _x000D_ Or tricks, to show the stretch of the human brain_x000D_ _x000D_ Mere curious pleasure or ingenious pain.
How long have we got? We have to stabilize emissions of carbon dioxide within a decade, or temperatures will warm by more than one degree... We don't have much time left.
Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
Economics is not an exact science. It's a combination of an art and elements of science. And that's almost the first and last lesson to be learned about economics: that in my judgment, we are not converging toward exactitude, but we're improving our data bases and our ways of reasoning about them.
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