Clear and Absent Danger
by Jeroen van der HulstHave a look at the abundance of variety in products available at the supermarket. An increasing number of products have healthier or better counterparts of themselves available right alongside them. Maybe next to the normal butter there is a stick of low-cholesterol butter wrapped in a more matte paper with natural colors in its design. The green of grass and eggshell white. Colors that are reminiscent of the cow standing in the field but also of the dietitian teaching us about health. Next to your favorite beer there can be a bottle of its 0,0% relative, devoid of its substance. The label looking fresh but the shape of the bottle reminding us that it is still beer, kind of. Around the corner you can find a selection of breakfast cereals, each one better for your digestion system than its neighbor.
The options that one is supposed to weigh are that of craving the pleasure of the unhealthy opposed to the responsibility to live a healthy life. The shelves in the supermarket illustrate this contradiction. As the product variation has expanded over decades the agenda is clear in trying to deter people from damaging substances in order to promote the consumption of a long list of health products. Sugar-free soft drinks, beer without alcohol, low fat potato chips, ecologically sourced meat and vegetables, all-bran cereal, caffeine-free coffee, green teas, whole wheat bread, vegetarian meat replacements, low cholesterol butter, free-range eggs, spelt croissants, low-fat muffins, pre cut fruit, exciting juice mixes and smoothies, low-fat cheese, skimmed milk, Himalaya salt – a list that symbolizes the merging of nutrition and business, and the eventual struggle between health and hedonism. To start exploring this theme in terms of its key signifiers, the products, it is important to begin at the beginning, the story of the Kellogg Company, of Kellogg’s Cornflakes. The brothers W.K. Kellogg’s and physician Dr John H. Kellogg accidentally stumbled on a way to flake wheat berry while trying to make granola. John H. was not interested in making a business out of his product but simply to improve his own diet and that of his patients. W.K. Kellogg, the business-savvy brother, saw his opportunity and bought the rights to sell the product exclusively. A breakfast revolution started there. The newly founded Kellogg Company invested heavily in advertising and quickly became market leader of breakfast cereals by using its ‘health’ aspect in the way it approached its customers. Health has now become one of the most prevalent themes advertisers use on consumers. In 1923 the company became the first in the food industry to hire a dietitian. Their in-house dietitian Mary Barber initiated a program that was meant to map out ‘proper diets’ and the foods they entailed. Here we can see an early movement of the public being shown a better way to construct their diets as told by the company selling the healthy solution. The Kellogg Company made ‘improving diet’ a factor for the consumer when buying food. Old habits had to be critically re-thought. Kellogg’s stood at the cradle of what would become a food industry that increasingly had to adapt their products to criticism from the medical or scientific arena about unhealthy or damaging substances. Fat was linked to heart disease and replaced with sugar. This allowed sugary products to be marketed as “low-fat” or “fat-free.” Sugar was eventually attributed with a link to tooth-decay and diabetes, and replaced by aspartame. Now soft drinks could have a “diet” or “sugar-free” label. Then aspartame, which was already a questionable substance, got connected to an array of health issues. The next step for the food industry was to simply market “additive-free.” Myths are broken and replaced with other myths.
Behavior follows the products. Thank You for Smoking (2005) follows Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart), a slick and handsome tobacco lobbyist who’s job it is to defend tobacco companies from being blamed for causing diseases such as lung cancer. He is challenged by William H. Macy’s character Senator Finistirre, a vehement opponent of cigarettes and thus of Naylor. Finistirre’s goal is to pass legislation, which makes it mandatory for every cigarette pack to carry a label with skull and crossbones, indicating it is poison. Smooth-talking Naylor’s reply to this is simple; first he accuses Finistirre’s state Vermont of promoting equally unhealthy behavior, as it is the state known for its cheese. Secondly he argues that people know the dangers of smoking, adults can choose for themselves on whether to start smoking, so why underline a fact that everybody is already aware of? Let’s look at Naylor’s argument of the freedom of choice. He implies the importance of hedonism, the search for pleasure in excess. Without giving a reason why one should smoke he simply leaves it up to personal choice, one does not need a scientifically justifiable reason to smoke. The romance of harmful substance use is precisely its dangerous substance. It means to enjoy a drink, a fatty meal, a cup of coffee, a drug, but knowing full well that your intake has to be moderate. Wine is a mocker, strong drink a brawler, and whoever is led astray by it is not wise
(Proverbs 20:1) It is not good to eat much honey, nor is it glorious to seek one's own glory (Proverbs 25:27) . In pre-secular society, up to the beginning 20th century, the intake of harmful substances such as alcohol, cigarettes or even opiates was a much more ambiguous act. There are two main issues regarding overindulgence in that era; firstly religion is a common denominator between classes. God's gaze is immune to class, moderation has to be practiced by whomever. The main goal of living a woeful life on earth is that living according to what the Bible says means to spend the eternal afterlife in Heaven. Fortunately, God is forgiving. Repent and thou shalt be saved. In the regrettable event that one misbehaves, one can ask for forgiveness in order to retain a place in Heaven.
The second issue of the time is lack of health-awareness. The lower classes’ alcohol abuse is condemned by the middle and upper classes for making them unfit for labor. This was the definition of 'health’, to be fit or unfit for labor. Smoking and eating fatty foods are not even on the scope of health as it does not debilitate someone from work. Life expectancy in Britain was around 47-50 years by 1900, herein lies a lack of self-awareness about health but also that there is no reason for it to begin with. A short life means to look forward to eternal afterlife.
Modernity has killed the need for a set of (Christian) principles and beliefs to exist. Enlightenment gave consciousness and awareness the opportunity to slowly seep into the world of the consumer. With the death of God in modernity we have come to terms with the fact that there is no eternal afterlife. Getting rid of that possibility has simultaneously gotten rid of the “innocent harm” that damaging substances used to have. Without an afterlife overindulgence means the end, but without God there is also no day of judgment. This paradox means that we’re now permitted to do everything, but we can’t afford to because this life is all we have. This is the void that Vattimo is talking about. Science hasn’t just given us the tools to be critical. It has obligated us to be critical. Science, like religion, has built up a narrative, which has to provide an answer to a fear of death. Where religion created life after death, science is supposed to help us live an eternity before death. The health-driven consumerism of today has an almost biblical obligation to living a healthy life. Without the presence of an after-life there can only be an extended life. The mortal sins of a secular consumer are over-consumption, over-production, pollution, poisoning the body, etc. The problem is that science does not forgive. Healthy living has to be followed letter for letter, because otherwise it does not work. A smoker buying a healthy smoothie does not redeem the tar in his or her lungs. My breakfast with free-range eggs does not redeem the cheap meat in the sausage next to them. Drinking 0,0% beer in the afternoon does not redeem the flow of 5,5% beer I drink on friday night. Overindulgence has always been harmful to health. However, it seems that when scientific evidence defines the damaging substance within the product, subsequently replacing it with something else, moderation becomes irrelevant. The ever growing list of healthy counterparts to damaging products illustrate a feeling of guilt towards consumer culture. Scientific-awareness is creating a new radical ‘forbidden fruit,’ the ultimate consumer item. The perfect combination of retaining the consumer’s sense of personal freedom, yet still capable of keeping the ‘health-gaze’ at ease, for now. It is marketed in the same way as their dangerous counterparts once were. A suave, handsome man out on his own, puffing away on the hood of his car. A beautiful young woman blowing vapor out of her full scarlet lips. Light as air. By just inhaling the nicotine without the rest, the e-cigarette or vaporette is pure addiction. Addiction to image, addiction to nicotine, addiction to redemption, equally as harmless as alcohol-free beer or decaffeinated coffee. If God is dead, maybe the consumer in me is still looking for His forgiveness in different places. |
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Pamphlet. Magazine - 2014 -