Don't Blame The Supermarkets

I was a smoker for about ten years.  I quit cold turkey in my mid 20’s and it has been one of the best things I have ever done.  It was hard, damn hard, but now I knew I could conquer anything if I really set my mind to it. It was fortunate for me that cigarette advertising was banned during this time.  Health warning labels were on cigarette packets and graphic TV ads constantly showed the terrible health risks from smoking.

I wonder if I would have been successful in a time when smoking was encouraged.

We can look at the advertisement above, shake our heads and perhaps chuckle at the ignorance of our past.

But how different are things now?

I find today’s junk food to be yesterday’s smoking.

Celebrities push soft drinks on their fans while actors come together to portray families who now have more time to love each other thanks to their convenient fast food choices.  We are constantly surrounded by these suggestive messages and in our ever-connected world of technology, there is no escaping it.

Should companies be banned from making these commercials? Do fines need to be issued?  Perhaps we should sue something to make it stop.  Yeah, that will show them.

Wrong - regulatory bodies have been doing this for a long time now and it doesn’t foster the true change we so desperately need.

Here’s my $0.02 AUD on the matter.  Don’t blame the supermarkets.  Don’t blame the advertising.  Don’t blame anything or anyone.  Blame is a game of self-sabotage that stops our opportunity for personal growth.

‘It’s the supermarkets fault we eat bad food.’

‘I blame advertising … they trick you into eating food that’s bad.’

So what can we do instead?

One of my personal heroes, John Seymour wrote, ‘I will do, what one can do.’

It's tremendously grounding, especially when considering the worlds problems and I truly believe global change will come from an individual focus of personal change.  In regards to food - grow a vegetable, any vegetable, from seed to plate.  Even if you only did it once, it will give you an entirely new perspective on food production.

It wont be easy - it will take effort and planning and if you find it hard, it probably means you're on the right track!  That may sound strange.  Normal expectation is for things to get easier when moving in the right direction, but I found this is not always the case.  Why? Because healthy clean food that’s good for you IS hard work and worth every reward.

Imagine shedding enough convenience to relearn the food-knowledge of our elders.  Celebrity endorsements, TV commercials, billboards, etc, would then hold little power over us.  Just like an old smoking advertisement, we can shake our heads, but this time chuckle they still think us so ignorant.