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When addressing the sustainability of American dietary trends, it is crucial to understand the main drivers of those trends in order to implement effective solutions to an issue that impacts a wide variety of stakeholders. Unfortunately for humans, our brains were designed to help us survive in an environment that no longer exists. In other words, the same instincts that prevent many of us from taking any unnecessary risks that our brains erroneously perceive as potentially fatal threats like starting a business, cold calling, or public speaking, are the same instincts that drive our biologically irresistible urge to consume foods containing high levels of salt, sugar, and fat.
Humans used to live as hunters and gatherers, so discovering sources of food that provided our bodies with those three vital nutrients was a relatively rare occurrence. This meant that the impulse to consume as much of those foods as possible was a critical element of survival. However, given that the human brain has remained unchanged from an evolutionary standpoint for a significantly vast amount of time, our biological compulsion to consume as much salt, sugar, and fat as possible has become completely obsolete and truthfully debilitating in a society that has developed the capacity to produce absurdly large amounts of unnaturally preserved food that contains extremely high levels of those three nutrients. To make things worse, those foods are not only easily accessible, they also often represent the most cost-effective means of feeding a family. Thus, the fast food and snack companies that have caused the majority of our world’s obesity problems are collecting billions of dollars in profits by satisfying all of our biological impulses for incredibly low prices.
Clearly, our economic system has failed us in this regard because it has financially incentivized firms to prey on our most inherent weaknesses, while completely ignoring the devastating impact that those firms’ products have had on our society and especially on those of us who are not financially stable enough to afford healthier food. Therefore, in order to solve this issue, we must first recognize why our brains function the way they do and then create financial incentives for firms to produce affordable, healthy, and sustainably-sourced food. Perhaps the amount of money saved by drastically reducing the amount of insulin medication and coronary bypass operations needed in this country could be redirected to firms who are pioneering the efforts to supply us with sustainable and nutritious food.
Regardless, making the transition from eating factory-farmed meat and preservative-laced food and drinks three times a day to eating raw produce that is sustainably farmed and distributed will take a massively concentrated effort from frankly everyone who has the ability to influence the food industry in any way whatsoever. In other words, if American consumers can develop more self-awareness and overcome the limitations of their primitive brains, hopefully firms will shift their marketing, sourcing, production, and distribution processes to match the evolving palates and demands of their consumers. However, this will require a massive shift in the collective consciousness in regards to dietary habits, which may unfortunately represent an initiative too taxing for the average American citizen.
As it stands today, American diets primarily rely on products produced by industrial agriculture, which has caused the erosion of our country’s topsoil, used the vast majority of our world’s fresh water, poisoned the earth with pesticides, and transformed the meat industry into an inhumane abomination. Industrial agriculture has been easily recognized as unsustainable for decades, so the question is certainly no longer whether our current farming system is sustainable, but rather is how are we going to develop one that is.
– Noe Hinojosa III