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27 April 2025
I saw this infographic earlier this year and couldn’t help but smirk:
Duh.
Isn’t it obvious?
We evolved to eat nuts, raw, unaltered, picked from a tree, without alteration. That’s how humans survived this long.
We only very much later figured out how to make fire and then had the ability to cook food - tough food, bloody food, carcinogenic food - burning it, killing pathogens, roasting it, literally sending it to hell before cutting it up with tools and then putting it in our mouths. We don’t even have the teeth, let alone the gut to deal with sinew, flesh, and muscle.
How long does it take to digest nuts? 2.5-3 hours.
How long does it take to digest meat? 2 days.
It’s laughable then, that we wonder why we’re so sick. Cancer is the new cold. Everyone knows someone or is someone who has cancer.
The World Cancer Research Fund says, “40% of cancer cases could be prevented by tackling risk factors relating to diet, nutrition and physical activity”.
But prevention is not so easy anymore.
In the last 100 years, food has changed dramatically. Studies comparing the same foods and the same brands show horrifying ingredient changes over time. (I know Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are probably not the best example when talking health foods but I liked the colours of this picture, so here.)
You get the point:
https://www.ingredientinspector.org/home/whats-in-reeses-peanut-butter-cups
Just do this - next time you buy a product - look at the length of the ingredient list. It’s been getting longer, and longer, and longer and more and more full of unpronounceable, multi-syllable chemical concoctions of processed, cancer-causing poisons.
You might say, but it used to be worse though!
True.
Early 1900s–1950s: Minimal regulation. Many artificial additives, preservatives (e.g., formaldehyde, borax), and synthetic colours were used without oversight.
1960s–1980s: Increasing regulations (e.g., FDA in the US, FSA in the UK) led to bans on harmful chemicals like cyclamate sweeteners and certain artificial dyes.
1990s–Present: A push for clean labels, with fewer artificial additives, preservatives, and synthetic ingredients. Many brands highlight "free from" labels (e.g., no MSG, no artificial colours).
But how about way before the industrial revolution and the Big Bang of marketing, advertising, and convenience foods?
Foods were plucked and eaten from where they grew. Most people had their own little subsistence plots. Communities shared foods and those that didn’t grow went to markets to buy produce from their neighbours. Conversations and laughter pealed through the air while happy farmers picked out their misshapen, many-coloured potatoes from wooden, earth-filled crates, coming home with soil under their nails and dust on their overalls.
You knew what went into your food because you made it. You determined what went into your bodies because you chose it. Meals, were often cooked together. Hours spent in big kitchens preparing wholesome dishes and scattering them with varieties of spices and pinches of love. Meals were also eaten together, at big dining tables. Homecooked goodness washed down with conversations of the day, questions about the weather, home made lemonades, and without screens distracting from in-person, face-to-face conversations.
So then we ask - in today’s day and age, are ‘free from’ labels really enough to cut it - when everything has been tampered with, pumped into, and altered in some way to make them bigger, more vibrant, aesthetically pleasing … I’d like to say tastier - but I can't. I’m sure most of us have never tasted a tomato before. A real tomato. Not the water-retaining, dyed red, perfectly rounded sack that we have in our supermarkets, served covered in plastic, resting on styrofoam, after being shipped around the world.
Our taste buds now are attuned to acid, salt, fat, and heat. The four elements of today’s culinary world. If you’ve gone to expensive restaurants, or watched any cooking show, you’ll see that they base everything in butter, keep burners on all day, season generously, and top most items off with a squeeze of lemon. Without these, food is bland. All its flavour sucked out through genetic modification, soil depletion, and inbreeding.
We’ve traded our sustenance, connection, and overall health for convenience because we live in a system that demands our time.
Who has the availability for three-hour stews, all-day-stirred pasta sauces, or slow-cooked dishes? Everything is opened from a plastic packet, dumped out from an aluminium can, or brought home wrapped in styrofoam. TV dinners, take-away containers, and ready-to-eat meals. This is our life now.
Yet, we wonder why we’re sick?
We’re fed toxins so we stay in hospitals. Our sub-par internal organs kept functioning by more synthetic chemicals and antibiotics that were never made to heal us.
Our food poisons us and our medicines keep us poisoned.
Ultimately, all we’re doing is spending hard earned money on a system that does not have our wellbeing in mind. We’re throwing away our lives and our health for time spent lining someone else’s pockets. We’re voluntarily stuffing our faces with things that are not good for us.
We are what we eat.
But our bodies are made of stardust.
Why don’t we demand better care for them?
The water in your body is just visiting.
It was a thunderstorm a week ago.
It will be the ocean soon enough.
Most of your cells come and go like morning dew.
We are more weather pattern than stone monument.
Sunlight on mist. Summer lightning.
Your choices outweigh your substance.
-Jarod K. Anderson
What I can offer, HERE.
💌 Let’s talk: change@theecochapter.com
In service of our planet,
💚 Marla Lise, Earthling at The Eco Chapter
And beans, although they need cooking