Monthly Archives: March 2022
Downsizing Our Economy Could Prevent Future Pandemics
Globalization is the increasing interconnectedness of the countries, cultures, and people of the world. We are so interconnected at this point that it is hard to find out where certain thoughts and practices come from. Our economies are dependent on one another like a Jenga tower, so that if one experiences a shift most others need to adapt. International companies can suck money out of millions of people in several countries for the richest few to take home. Cultures can interact and teach each other amazing things.
Don’t get me wrong; there are so many benefits of globalization that we can feel every day. Lower consumer prices, exposure to different cultures, and access to the newest, coolest technologies around the world. However, there are negatives as well, including modern Western imperialism, international political conflict, exploitation of external labour and tax havens by international corporations, the cloudy origins of climate changing emissions, and the spread of diseases and viruses on an immense scale.
I have read some articles recently about how the COVID-19 pandemic originated and was spread by our food systems, and the WHO bulletin “Pandemic prevention and unsustainable animal-based consumption” says this specifically relates to the consumption of animal products by humans. However, in the Future Perfect Podcast episode, “How to prevent a factory farmed pandemic,” one of the guests on the show, epidemiologist Martha Nelson, brings up the ways that pigs are moved around the US which increases risks of disease transmission between pigs and then into the human population. This made me think more about the ways that animal movements, including our own human movements, as well as our relationships with each other and other animals, are at the root of disease and virus transmission.
Animals have always held a place in human interactions. From the European use of livestock to supply humans with food to the Native American interactions with dogs, we have almost always had some form of interaction with animals. As these interactions grew in number of animals, frequency, and physical closeness, the possibilities of transmission from animals to humans grew. The same thing happened when humans began building larger civilizations that had people living closer together and interacting closely more often. When we add in the more recent movement patterns of people and animals around the world, we can see how the spread of disease becomes a larger scale issue.
Many scholars say that if we want to help the planet and our own health, we need to stop eating animal products or at least dramatically decrease our consumption of them. While I agree that it isn’t good for humans to have a diet heavy in meat, I think that the practice of eating meat is not necessarily the cause of disease transmission or climate change. I think that when we look not at the fact that we interact with animals, and instead look at how we interact with animals and each other, as well as the scale at which we perform these interactions, we can begin to see the real origins. The cause of disease is not that people eat meat; the cause of disease is the interactions with animals and people that occur before and during the production of the food, as well as the movement patterns during which these interactions happen. The cause of climate change is not animals existing; instead, the cause of climate change is the tremendous scale at which we, as humans, do most things nowadays without an equally large balancing method for these practices. This is not only regarding food consumption. It also has to do with transportation, production of material goods, movement of people and animals, and waste.
If life is not lived in balance of good and bad, the scales tip so that things change. If we produce too much heat trapping gas in too short a time, we are bound to get hotter until we give nature the time to heal. If you produce no heat trapping gas, however, you’re going to get pretty cold. In the past, we lived more in the healthy balancing range of nature. We had smaller civilizations, we had natural population checks, and we didn’t overconsume. I think that instead of completely abolishing capitalism, and ceasing to eat animal products altogether, and going back to separatist social policies, we can find a solution in between the extremes that allows people to continue interacting with one another while helping the planet recover from past and present damage. I think that we could downsize the economy to focus on small businesses and communities instead of focusing on the individual or the global picture. Farms could go back to ethical, small, non-factory operations and supply for those who want the products in that area. We can provide more jobs that are better in quality when we have a greater variety of smaller businesses that are not operating at a global scale out of greed. We can maintain our progressive social state without dramatically changing our economic systems.
Capitalism itself isn’t bad, and animal products are not bad in themselves. It is the scale that things have grown to with the human population that I think is a bit of an issue. Any big change to a system is bound to have undesirable effects, so why don’t we limit these impacts by starting with small changes? In the future, if those changes don’t work, then you can go make more. Sometimes by saying “This doesn’t work, so let’s just do the opposite”, we could end up in a worse situation or overshooting our needs. If we had an economy based on small businesses, what would you be able to do better without fear of being gobbled up by a dominant corporation? The possibilities are limitless, which means that with more businesses, we have more ideas, motivation, and innovation to get us to sustainability and balance.
Until next time, keep thinking outside the box, and keep reading in between!
Power Relations in the Distribution of Knowledge
A common idea held by upper class and educated people is that the issue with the world is that so many people are uneducated. However, I don’t see many sophisticated, rich people paying for or giving away educational resources. Nor do I see post-secondaries allowing people without university emails and passwords giving away access to academic articles that they say are extremely influential and helpful for thinking about life. I also don’t see people who are wishing for equal distribution of everything giving their thoughts and resources to everyone. If the real issue with the world is that so many people are uneducated, why don’t the people who think this use their power and superior stance to stop it? I think there may be a few reasons.
Now, let’s say for a moment that the issue with the world is that resources, power, and knowledge are distributed unevenly among people, species, and countries. Many scholars say this is the problem and advocate for a “new” economic system of communism/socialism to solve this issue. They want to change the economy so things are not sold, they are distributed for “free” by a higher power (government) equally to everyone in the country. However, articles about this very concept aren’t distributed equally. Now, I understand the obvious reasons for this, which include materials costs and the authors right to gain money in exchange for their work; that does not mean that I cannot see the hypocrisy underlying this reality of unequal distribution of knowledge. These scholars want resources and power to be evenly distributed to everyone, which means they should want people to have equal access to their work (especially if they believe their work could make a huge difference in the world). Not to mention, if you cannot afford to spread free knowledge to everyone using the powers of the internet, how could we afford distributing tangible items throughout a country to everyone for free? It doesn’t make any sense…
Until we think of how the world runs. If we can find any substance in the phrase “knowledge is power,” and I believe we can, then we can understand why knowledge is something you need to pay for in so many cases. You need to pay to buy a book, take a class, earn a degree, learn about philosophy, learn how to grow plants, or how to parent. Once you have this knowledge, no one can take it away from you, and you will always perceive yourself as having a mental advantage over anyone who does not share the same knowledge base because of the value you place on that knowledge. Those with more knowledge that is considered relevant to life will have more power. We as a society value the people with abstract sorts of knowledge more than we value those with other kinds of knowledge, even if the sort of knowledge possessed by those who we value less is more relevant to or useful in the majority of people’s daily life. The issue of unequal power relations does not lie in the amount of knowledge one has, rather in the types of knowledge they have gained throughout their life and how much we value that type of knowledge.
Then, there is the fact that those who already have power get to decide what knowledge we deem powerful as a society. Celebrities who say that they like a certain brand make us want to gain experience with and knowledge about that company. Scientists and entrepreneurs who say that a certain type of technology is better than the rest give us the impression that this knowledge is better than knowledge about other less important forms of technology. Politicians who say that the economy is no longer beneficial to people with certain skills give us the impression that those people are less valuable members of society. So, if the powerful decide what types of knowledge are most powerful, they can ensure that they stay powerful until there is no longer any power in regular people.
A huge basis for feminist and anti-racist activism, as well as other forms of important activism, is the reality of the powerful remaining in power by deciding who gets to be powerful. They ensure their own power by making those without power believe them about what knowledge is useful and valued. In the case of communism or socialism, the amount of government intervention and control of the market and the actions of the people through laws and informal social control would make the government the one entity that has this concentration of power that is currently reserved for those with money and valued types of knowledge.
If we want to actually close the wealth and power gap, we can start by closing the knowledge and access to information gap. Why don’t we start with complete government transparency? Why don’t we start with eliminating the reservation of knowledge and power for the already rich and powerful? If you think this is unreasonable, why? Could it be that you just want yourself and people who share parts of your identity to be more powerful? Could it be that you have prejudices against people who don’t share your identity? Could it be that you think your power and knowledge are more important than someone else’s? Could it be that you, too, know that the government is not going to allow the public to access absolutely everything they do? Not everything is as it seems, and maybe we would be able to conceptualize the truth if we ALL had access to ALL the resources we wanted, from all perspectives.
Until next time, keep thinking outside the box, and keep reading in between!
Strict Moral Labels Can Affect our Children’s Relationships to Food: How to Help Them Through It
TW: mental health talk, EDs
Almost everyone was raised with the categories “good food” and “junk food.” We were also raised with food guides that strongly discouraged eating things like chips, cake, pop/soda, and candy. However, while these things are proven to be harmful to your physical health after a lot of time consuming them and only them, I want to talk about the more immediate effects on our mental health that are arguably more harmful in the long run that are caused by the moral labeling of different foods.
When we label things as “good” or “bad”, our goal is to either encourage the repetition of that behavior or discourage that behavior from happening at all. These binary attitudes toward human behaviors bind us to a certain course of action depending on the situations we find ourselves in. Unfortunately, we often learn as children that good behavior is good all the time, such as being polite, using our manners, and saying nice things. This then follows that the opposite is also true; bad behavior is reprimanded all the time, such as hitting, raising one’s voice in anger or frustration, or calling someone names. This labeling of behaviors in simple terms is good for the first steps of learning that a child takes, but can be harmful later on if they are not taught how to expand this labeling to be more complicated and shifting.
When parents teach young kids that hitting is bad, they usually understand after a while of being told not to do it that they just shouldn’t do it. This immediate effect is good; after all, we don’t want a person to grow up thinking that fighting random people for mild inconveniences is okay. But when we raise our kids to understand that “bad” things are those that you should never do, they begin to be affected later in life by what other people label as positive or negative.
It is a well-known fact that school age adolescents are extremely affected by the actions and opinions of their closest peers. Starting out, children often echo the opinions of their parents. Different parents have different opinions. This causes discrepancies between what behaviors children deem appropriate at what times, meaning that children will either be influenced by the other kids who they like most or they will fall into groups that believe similar things as they do. Unfortunately, due to the dynamics of popularity in schools and children’s wish to be accepted by their peers, they usually start with the former and may continue changing in order to fulfill this goal.
Influence and interactions between people is how we learn how to carry out our roles in society. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing in itself. However, when we combine this fact with the tendency of children to learn things in extremes, we get the unfortunate result of potentially negative mental health impacts.
By teaching kids indirectly that bad things are always bad, often for the convenience of not having to tell them every situation in which certain “bad” things are okay, they learn to sort information into only two categories. Adults may get frustrated with children who see things as black or white, or truth or lie because we have been able to develop more than two categories to sort information into. Children may get upset with their parents because they have difficulty understanding what “maybe” means after years of only yes or no. As a result, when they get into school and the important people in life shift from family to friends, they are still too young to understand the “maybe” underlying what their friends are talking about.
Fast-forward to young teen years. They are now exposed to media, often only containing one perspective (read my previous article on how algorithms divide society), which they tend to cling onto for a long time and use to sort things into one of the “good” or “bad” categories. Children are taught about food, body image, and trends through the media more than they learn from teachers in school.
Friends see a new trend – good category. Friends or role models (including parents) go on a diet – pizza and chips are now in the bad category instead of the fun category. They don’t yet have the tools to understand that sometimes trends are bad or unkind, such as the lucid dreams trend, and don’t understand that things full-grown adults are doing to look like full-grown adults may not be good for kids. When we apply this to food and body image, this knowledge of how we learn puts mental health issues into perspective.
Eating disorders, self-esteem issues, and bullying stem from what we all teach our kids as a group of older role models. Children mimic behaviors that they see, and rarely have an easy time listening to what we say unless we also show them through our actions. This is how drugs, dieting, and general behaviors are learned and taken up by kids. While kids learn faster from actions instead of words, repeated words have just as much of an effect on them because of how our minds are wired. When we apply this to food and body image, we can see how spoken words, even when directed at other people, can have an effect on the eating habits and image children have of themselves. Bullying works this way. You get a bunch of little kids calling one kid fat or ugly, every day. The kid begins to sort “fat” into the bad category because so many other kids are projecting their view of it being bad, even when their image of obesity is a lie. If they are called fat, then they are bad, and must become “good”, which is often where the issue starts. They don’t understand that good foods aren’t good to have all the time, nor do they make one pure, and they don’t understand that “bad” foods aren’t always bad.
From the point our kids are born, we want them to grow up happy, strong, and accepted by their peers. We help them fit into society by teaching them the basics of behaviors that society likes and doesn’t like. When they grow up to go to school, their close ties to parents tend to grow a bit further away and their friends make up for that closeness. Unfortunately, this is where the problems start for the majority of kids. Their friends start preaching what their parents have told them, and the most dominant child usually projects this standard and these ideas onto the other kids in order for them all to “fit in.” When they combine moral teachings from parents with the information absorbed from the media, they begin to think that different things are either good or bad at a new level. They still have a difficult time figuring out different situations that make behaviors acceptable or not on their own, and begin to think in the same extremes about new things. These new things often include their bodies and food.
So, it isn’t the parents’ fault that their kid may have confidence issues, nor is it the fault of the child. It is simply a result of our relationships with our children and our kids’ relationships with other children. However, we can make sure that our relationship with our kids remains strong. Children cannot learn things that aren’t concrete on their own. They need help. So, I think that one way we can help prevent some negative impacts of life on our children’s mental health is to maintain that close relationship with your kids. Yes, your kids are still going to grow up a little and want to do different things, and they are going to get closer to their friends. You can still build that loving, caring, mutually-respecting relationship with them early on and keep it alive. Adapt to your child’s interests and support their natural curiosity. If they ask you a question, don’t put it off or say that they will learn when they are older because this shifts the responsibility for getting the answer onto them when you could just give it to them and ease their minds, thus lengthening the relationship ties between you. If you see them developing new habits, make sure that they are positive and don’t lead to unhealthy practices later on. Let them know and prove to them that they can depend on you when they want to instead of only when they’ve lost everything else, and be as good of a role model as you can. It may take some time and you may need to change how you deal with things, but it will help their mental health in the moment and build a brighter future for them. Who knows, maybe it will help your mental health as well. Relationships are about interdependence, so make sure that your relationship with your children is strong but still breathable so you can both flourish.
Strength comes from multiple muscles working together and supporting each other. Relationships are designed to be similar. Love your kids and they’ll love you back. Most importantly, even if things do turn out less than perfect, it isn’t too late to rebuild or patch up relationships to help them. Encouragement and support are key, and in return your child will begin to behave similarly as well so they may help you.
Until next time, keep thinking outside the box, and keep reading in between!