For a long time I naively believed government and large companies were ethically bound to protect me, the consumer, but experience and the resulting rapidly increasing cynicism, lead me to now think otherwise.
There are just so many scandals; the recent horsemeat as beef for one. The real problem wasn’t so much that horsemeat was being used as that the meat was not traceable and therefore no-one could know what was in the meat or whether it was fit for human consumption.
This struck home here in France because only a year or two before, (I think that’s the correct timescale – time dilates a bit these days!), it was discovered that meat labelled unfit for human consumption was exported to another country where it had been processed, supplied with false origin documents and then sold back to France as food for human consumption. The result was an outbreak of Listeria – I was one of the people who suffered and it was not pleasant. I can only say that my consumption of raw milk and unpasteurised cheeses over my lifetime probably helped me a lot. I have undoubtedly ingested a mild dose of the bacteria over time and would have a slight immunity.
Mega companies are just there to make as much money as they can out of you, the consumer, and as long as you don’t die straight away from using or eating their product they will uses as cheap an ingredient, or labour or processes for that matter, as they can to maximise their profits.
The governments, who you would think are there to protect you, are made up of politicians who are only elected to that office on a very short term. They have no interest in the long term in so far as it effects you the consumer. Added to that, a lot of them are looking to their futures; when they are voted out they will need another job and a nice place on the board of a mega company will do very nicely thank you!
In a similar vein to the food companies are the drugs companies. There are lots of ethical arguments as to whether life-saving drugs should be rationed out depending on your income and ability to pay but I’m not going into that here. I’m more interested in the contrived market of cosmetics and non-essential drugs.
I watched a really interesting programme lately – ‘The men who made us spend’, BBC 2/Open University, where they highlighted the companies ‘dilemma’. If the product they produce cures you, you no longer have a need for it and therefore don’t buy it. So what they needed was something that all of us can get but doesn’t need curing and we can be persuaded to repeatedly purchase an over-the-counter treatment.
Indigestion or heartburn fall nicely into this category; it’s something we are very likely to get sometime, we all eat on the run and in this time of overconsumption we frequently over-indulge and our bodies complain. Enter the treatment, we can now continue with our destructive over-consumption and mask the warning signs given out by our bodies. Added to that, I read somewhere, but sadly can’t remember where, that frequent and regular uses of these anti-acid compounds causes the stomach to over produce acid as it vainly tries to return the acid balance in the stomach to what nature intended. This over production causes more heartburn so we take evermore anti-acid product and the pharmaceutical companies show even higher profits ad infinitum.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to return to a world where a small scratch is likely to turn septic and kill you, (although with our overuse of antibiotics we may be closer to that than we would like to think), but I do really resent being looked at as an object to be milked of money just to fill the wallets of a few others especially as their ‘benign’ treatments can turn out to be anything but that.
Case in point being Radium. After it was discovered by Marie Curie, it was hailed as a cure all and put into everything; the effects of radiation poising not becoming clear until much later. Closer to me is the use of aluminium salts in deodorant/antiperspirants.
I grew up at the time these were placed on the market. The fear of Body Odour (BO) was then instilled in us – OK it’s not pleasant to be near someone with BO – but also the fear of sweating, a perfectly natural process which is essential to our health. Riding to the rescue came the pharmaceutical companies with their perfectly safe product containing high levels of aluminium salts. Now, 40 years down the line these ‘safe’ products are linked to the increase in dementia. Short term they cause no problem but it’s not in a company’s interest to do long term studies. They want instant profits.
So these days I’m sadly far more cynical about what I’m marketed and look at more ways of controlling what I eat or apply to myself.
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