Today you hear so many people comparing themselves to the masses, the masses being the separate culture group whose decisions and essentially whose lives are controlled by mass media and advertising. I believe comparing our habits to those of the collective is an old habit, probably predating massive societies like what we have experienced since even the days of kingdoms and conquests. But does the word average really compute anymore? Can we truly be satisfied with living our lives a certain way and setting our metaphysical boundaries at what the “masses” set theirs at?
I believe that there are a few things that we compare ourselves to the masses on. Most people would argue that we are many, but for the purpose of this article, I want to narrow my focus. One of those things would be nutrition, which also contains vanity, especially in a day when our lives are largely based on comparative analysis of the environmental cues and contexts that build a personality, and therefore a person.
Nutrition is definitely a fundamental concept that is crucial to all living things. When we grow a plant, we want water with the correct ph and we want it contaminant free. We choose to feed that plant with a certain ratio of nutrients and micronutrients in order to make it the most functionally efficient and productive plant it can be. We select our soil and meticulously prepare the grow area to allow for maximum potential. If you raise horses you don’t let them roam and eat what they want, you monitor the condition of the hay you feed them to make sure you’re not feeding them diseased grass. And it all seems so simple in that context; every other creature and lifeform on the planet is forced to find the most nutritional source of food or die. But not humans.
No, humans have found a way to make massive stores of food. We can make enough food to last years, and just process it to the point where it will keep for a really long time, and this is a huge step up from eras long gone. Before processed food and refrigerators, food didn’t keep very well at all, and no matter what you had available, it was always a risk to count on foodstores. But we saw where we were deficient, and we rose up, as humans have a knack for doing. Now we can make hot pockets that can sit in your freezer for months and cheese that can stay in the fridge for even longer. Now the race of humans no longer has to worry about long term food stores, that is, if you have the money to eat in the first place, and for the first 50 years of that im sure it seemed like a blessing and a miracle from above. But now we have reached another plateau.
Now we have this overprocessed nutritionless glop that is flavored to taste like whatever the manufacturers want it to. Sure, it’s food, but what is food anyway? Isnt food supposed to nourish us and promote an active healthy lifestyle as well as support and increase healthy cognitive function? Well if that is what food is, then we are a race that survives on eating “nothing.” Our food no longer contains vital nutrients that once nourished us to be great scholars, thinkers, and general human beings. Once we ate chicken, yes the same chicken we eat now, but what does that chicken these days eat? Now those chickens eat corn that hs been processed so that it can be stored for longer periods of time and transported across the country and sometimes internationally. And the same goes for all the livestock, as the food sources for most of our creatures is now becoming just as processed and massproduced as our food. So our livestock that we feed off of, that we buy pieces of at our local grocery stores, is not receiving the full spectrum of nutrients that we as a race have survived and thrived off of for thousands of years, therefore we are no longer receiving those vital nutrients.
And what’s the damage? I mean we are all still here aren’t we? Still doing roughly the same as ever it seems, although history is most often turned around to be taught by and for the context of our current times. Well my main point is that the “masses” feed off this nutritionless food, so saying you are just eating what everyone else eats no longer suffices as a reason for not adjusting your lifestyle. Even if you’re eating better than average, it still means nothing as the bar for average has been lowered extremely and across the board for all human beings in a postmodern society. Compare it to kids jumping over a bar that is a foot off the ground. You might be able to jump better than everyone else who is trying to jump over it, but all that means is you’re doing better than the lowest class. This fits into my smartest dumbass theory which states that humans operate in many different groups, operating under many different dynamics, but in many groups there is someone that is smarter than everyone else in the group, even if it is just seemingly so. This person may not actually know what he is talking about, but in the group of people who know much less than he does, he seems like an intelligent person. If you are the smartest dumbass long enough, people will start making comments like, “Hes an intelligent guy” without any proper qualification to the statement. But I digress.
We have grown our society to a point where we think we have figured it all out, or at least figured enough out to think that we no longer have to worry about things like what we put in our body, because supposedly someone, somewhere, smarter than myself as an individual, has taken the proper steps to insure that as long as it isn’t junk food whatever I eat will have enough nutritional value to let me excel at being a human being. But the food we have now is just mass produced garbage with flavor enhancers and we need to stop using comparative analyses of mass society to govern our daily seemingly arbitrary decisions.
We have reached a plateau where it’s time for us as a race to step up once again. We once rose up to find a great way to make food stay good for longer, and we have had many ancillary victories because of that as well. As a race we have succeeded in keeping food fresh, but now we have to divert our attention to keeping food healthy. Sure we found out how to save food for long periods of time, but at what cost? Now is the time for another great transition into realizing the full nutritional content of our food products instead of relying on the news and diet fads to educate us instead.
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