The illusion of choice.
Recently in class we have been discussing the illusion of “choice” as consumers when it comes to our food. The finger has been pointed only at big corporate agriculture and the process of our food between the farmer and the grocery store; how the middle men in between are controlling what is being produced below them in line, as well as what is being sold ahead of them in the chain. While I won’t deny that there is truth to the argument, I realized today in class when we watched a horrendous video similar to that above, that corporate agriculture is incredibly far from the only entity working to control our choice in the stores. My first reaction was literally, “What the hell?!” I was livid. Activists do this kind of garbage all the time. But the bigger issue is that these organizations who claim to have consumers’ best interest in mind obviously do not. Organizations such as Greenpeace, PETA, The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), just to name a few, are political activist groups that have their own agendas to push and only give the impression they are working to better our lives as consumers. While I’m on my soap box, out of any donation to HSUS, a whopping 0% goes to any animal shelter or local humane society in the United States. Talk about propaganda! Airing those commercials with famous people and cute dogs and cats, claiming they help them!
Off my soap box (as much as I can…) for now and back to the idea of choice for a moment. We claim as consumers we are limited in our choices of what we can eat, but aren’t these group’s limiting them even more? PETA and HSUS both are trying to end animal agriculture for good. Not make it better, not improve the system, but end it. Period. So not only will we have to choose corn in everything else we buy, we will then be forced to become vegetarians. Now that’s a lack of choice. It won’t ever happen, but I’ll amuse my nonmeat consuming peers for a moment and hypothetically go down that road just, just briefly. At that point, there could be no fingers pointed at corporate agriculture for the lack of choice. At that point, those groups will have become even more powerful than those companies and will control everything we eat even more so than any single group does now.
Snap, back to reality, as I bite into my American grown hamburger. I suppose my main point here is that we cannot overlook the goals of these groups when we discuss the “illusion of choice.” They each have different goals, but ultimately, they want to limit the options of food for consumption we have available to us. Let the consumers decide if they want to eat GM wheat. In the video clip, the Greenpeace member says that they were trying to get CSIRO to be upfront and honest about the research they are doing. How can they do research to give factual information to the public about GMO’s if their plots are destroyed? These groups complain about a lack of long term research and trials of these new technologies, but then turn around and destroy the research plots and stations. Am I the only one who sees the contradiction here? There’s no way to do research on these crops and calm the fears of consumers if these groups—who are “looking out for consumers”—run around and ruin the research in progress.
Choice, to some extent, may in fact be an illusion to consumers. But the idea that big bad corporate agriculture is the guilty party is a stretch. In fact, consumers need to look in the mirror when they complain about lack of choice. But that’s a-whole-nother can of worms to be opened later.
No comments:
Post a Comment