An apple a day:
If you were to substitute a variety such as Monty’s Surprise in place of a ’supermarket’ commercial variety, you would receive 3.4 times the amount of phenolics in the skin and 5.9 times the amount in the flesh. Hence one Monty’s Surprise apple a day would be comparable to eating at least four modern apples.cryptogon 15.Dec.07
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The paranoid assumption is it's intentional, the leaching away of health and healthiness from what were natural organic traditional food sources, but I think it's viral, an infection. The way infection starts from small basically harmless things that get critical mass and become pathogenic.
Letting the greed-driven desperate get their hands on the wheel, even for a moment, meant they in turn would come to drive us all. Religions that elevate the weak and ill at the expense of the strong and healthy play their part. As do eugenic campaigns that rise from the middle of the already compromised, taking their templates from the extrapolated self. Always someone benefits from the way things are, and this is what's missing from most analyses of what's wrong now. There are always those whose lives are bettered by the way things are, no matter what's happening. The undertaker goes to the bank each day of the plague etc. etc. In this case the myopic substitution of apples that look more inviting, that look healthier than the older smaller blemished traditional ones has made profits for those who put profit ahead of all else. And by now we're centuries and generations into letting myopic greed-driven assholes make the rules of how things are.
That's who's setting our unwritten policies about the apples in the store. Bigger, emptier, brighter, emptier, sweeter, emptier.
But they're blind. Selfishly myopic, they can't see where they're going, where we're all headed - making decisions and plans from only the immediate, based only on immediate benefit.
Letting those kinds of people drive has gradually made those kinds of people normal, as conditions are shifted in their favor, and health advocates - people who advocate health - are made freakish and marginal. Even though most everybody normal wants to be healthy, especially when things start slipping.
It happens slowly, with no clear bright line that marks where healthy living becomes unhealthy living, or where the direction of human progress shifts from traditional sane direction to rationalized immediate gratification and insanity - "gimme that" and hang the future. Kids grow up thinking it's "natural" to breathe exhaust every time they go outside, thinking there are no birds to begin with, thinking all kinds of weird shit that comes straight out of their empty experience, which is coming straight out of a steadily disintegrating womb, the world the environment, that's being broken down by the unhealthy minds that now own and run it.
Letting expediency call the shots, letting cowardice justify its actions and its existence, means that eventually cowardice will be justifying the death of all of us, because how else could things have gone?
Settling out years ago from a psychedelicly creative evening and a metamorphic visionary all-night, floating down into a morning of humble calm and sensibility, I cooked and ate some organic oatmeal from the health food store and my body said very clearly that it was a life-confirming thing to do. Said it whole-system, said it to me and to the world. It was an undeniable conversation, a small thing in the larger context but sometimes it does get so bad we have to remind ourselves those voices are real.
Those voices, which we all have naturally, are what resonate when we read stories like this. We know raising pigs to live nightmare lives in gigantic swine prisons has to be unhealthy for the family that eats the meat taken from them. But the greed-blind men and women who now drive us forward drown that voice out with the dominating noise of their scams and seductions. So that it's only in from the margins by necessity, and faintly, these reminders come:
We don't have to live like this, and it's toxic, poisonous and fatal; we don't have to and it's bad.
So why keep on doing it?
Because those desperate men and women are the subset of the population that can't survive in a healthy environment. Or can't survive as dominant, have to take a back seat, have to get humble.
Sort of like how modern transportation, while it has just about set the whole world on fire and looks to pretty near doomed us all, has at the same time made it possible for a paraplegic to get from New York City to Washington D.C. just about as easily and swiftly as a champion marathon runner. A man with no legs can ride from Atlanta GA to Miami FLA just as fast as anyone else.
This leveling has exacted a price we all now pay. The cause isn't the disabled, it's the greed, the putting of the self above what's far more important than the self.
