What we eat has changed more in the last 40 years than in the previous 40,000. The survival of the current food system depends upon widespread ignorance of how it really operates.
Interpretation
Food production and consumption have drastically changed recently, often without people's awareness of the underlying systems.
Eric Schlosser's quote highlights the rapid transformation of our food system over the past few decades compared to historical trends. This shift has led to a lack of understanding among the public about how food is produced and processed, which is crucial for making informed decisions about what we eat and advocating for a more sustainable food system.
In practice
During a seminar on sustainable agriculture, this quote can be used to emphasize the importance of understanding our food systems.
Marijuana gives rise to insanity -- not in its users but in the policies directed against it. A nation that sentences the possessor of a single joint to life imprisonment without parole but sets a murderer free after perhaps six years is in the grips of a deep psychosis.
The executives who run the fast food industry are not bad men. They are businessmen. They will sell free-range, organic, grass-fed hamburgers if you demand it. They will sell whatever sells at a profit.
Fast food is popular because it's convenient, it's cheap, and it tastes good. But the real cost of eating fast food never appears on the menu.
Contaminated water is not a problem limited to Flint. Think of New Jersey, where school fountains were found to contain unsafe levels of lead. Or the EPA's 33,000 superfund sites, which are highly-polluted areas that require long-term clean-up operations. The problem is so large that it feels insurmountable.
Economists (and others) who are satisfied with nature-free equations develop a dangerous hubris about the potency of our species
The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.
Mycologists are few and far between. We are under-funded, poorly represented in the context of other sciences - ironic, as the very foundation of our ecosystems are directly dependent upon fungi, which ultimately create the foundation of soils.
[T]here are depths of thousands of miles which are hidden from our inquiry. The only tidings we have from those unfathomable regions are by means of volcanoes, those burning mountains that seem to discharge their materials from the lowest abysses of the earth.
Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.
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