4 - I Blame the Food Corporations

Summary

“Look, if it’s not my genes, it must be the environment?” I overheard someone say this in a pub. Well, yes and no. One of the visible aspects of urban environments – and let’s face it, most of us are urban now – is food. Ever-present junk food, aisles of frozen pizza and snack foods in the supermarkets. In the United Kingdom, which built much of its colonial power on the triangle of relationships among industrialization, slavery and plantation production, sugar is historically a huge industry, and you can see sugar-based products in stores everywhere. It hurts people’s lives through dental decay, obesity, and type 2 diabetes. In the United States, perfectly edible maize is systematically turned into high-fructose corn syrup, a substance that is even more damaging to health than sugar.