Bruce Bisset: We're eating ourselves to death

Bruce Bisset. Photo / Warren Buckland

The trouble with life today is there is no time to pause and reflect; we're too driven to rush on to the next best thing to consider whether that thing will ultimately be good or bad for us - or indeed, whether the things we've already embraced are doing us harm.

In a world where everything we eat drink or otherwise consume must be constantly updated to an "all new improved" version to capture market share, we reach for artificial additives and specially-tailored proteins to make it so.

Is it any surprise, then, to find these altered products are killing rather than sustaining us?

Processed red meats are but the latest in a string of foodstuffs to be labelled carcinogenic, joining a long list that nominally includes most of the staples of our modern Western diet.

Our meals are suddenly turning round to bite us because they are packed full of preservatives, enhancers, emulsifiers, stabilisers, artificial flavours - on top of the diverse range of herbicides, pesticides, growth hormones, genetic modifications et al that anything that grows is stuffed with to ripen fast and be "fresher" and more visually appealing to shoppers. Perhaps the busy commuter classes do not have the time to be discerning; perhaps our palates have become degraded; perhaps the ever-upward food price spiral restrains us from making healthier choices. Perhaps we just don't care.

Whatever the reason, in essence most of us exist on an intake of neatly-packaged crap. With a few supplements on the side, to kid ourselves we're correcting whatever imbalance has been introduced by the diminished goodness in the bulk of our food.

Somehow we have come to believe this is "normal".

Just as we have come to believe that cancer is normal, since one in four people will die of it. About the same will die of heart disease. We never connect the dots, do we?

But cancer is an industrial disease. A century ago it barely registered as a cause of death. Now it is the major one. And for all the billions poured into research, and the fearful and fanciful treatments, and the expensive pharmaceuticals, no-one is addressing the obvious root cause: chemicals.

Every part of our environment is tainted with artificial - mostly toxic - chemical compounds. And for every "nasty", like DDT, that eventually gets withdrawn from the food-chain, 10 subtler killers take its place.

If you pour sand into an engine, it stops. The moving parts have no way to filter out the grit that will seize them. Just so, if you put foreign substances into a living body that has no adequate mechanism to fight them, once it is overdosed it too will stop - after doing its best to cast out or "outgrow" the toxic build-up.

And how does the medical fraternity address this? Why, with chemicals!

Errant nonsense. But to admit the truth is to be forced to admit our industrial lifestyle is inherently unsustainable - and that (so we are told by those grossing fat profits from our misery) is an even worse fate. So we continue to ingest a chemical cornucopia with nary a complaint - and die of the cancers that causes.

Meanwhile, not content with spraying glyphosate on everything, deluded apologists like Federated Farmers president William Rolleston praise the potential wonders of genetic modification, and deride Hawke's Bay for staying GE-Free and organic. The absurdity of the Feds' position doubtless escapes them. Like most, they seem unable to spot the connections.

That's the right of it.

-Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.