Shaping up a public mind set about better food

Allowing that we, the paying public, are the problem that gives power to Big Foodie, how do we now get on an even footing to fight back? The middle men, the main ones, that is, are the supermarkets and in no way is it in their immediate interest to undermine the manufacture and presentation of pricey alternatives to basic foods that they sell. They almost certainly would not allow warnings to be attached to the shelves holding such products nor offer cheaper and healthier alternatives.

The governments are weak and will give into pressure to avoid widespread public warnings.

Education of the public is the answer - but allowing the media are dependent on advertising revenue they will be reticent in taking part so where to we go from there.

NGO’s (non-government organisations,) and non- profit organisations could be a start.

Assistance from Crowdfunding ( the practice of funding a project or venture by raising monetary contributions from a large number of people and is a form of crowd-sourcing and of alternative finance.) could underwrite advertising and media exposure.

But how to shape up the project so it captures the public imagination! The spectrum of foods being involved is gigantic, the responsible companies so wealthy and the likelihood of litigation so high that a foolproof algorithm is necessary.

Big ships take a lot of turning!!

Please let me know your ideas.

Food for thought

Perhaps one of the reasons Big Foodie and it's mostly unhealthy products have such a penetration into the food market is that the public itself allows it. How has this come about?

I think, as always, of the convenience factor. Decades ago the housewife stayed at home, looked after the kids and spent good deal of time organising the purchase and the husbanding of food in and into the household. The cultural finesse that she would have had handed down from her mother would express itself as a continuance uninterrupted and inviolate.

In the twentieth and now twenty first centuries across the world women are supplementing their husbands income by working full or part time and are therefore not in the house to offer time to that cultural culinary finesse that they once did.

Big Foodie has hopped on the bandwagon and with money, mass production, a packaging revolution and intense marketing practices filled the food shops with a spectrum of items aimed at a minimum of preparation to seduce the now time deprived housewife.

Big Foodie is making billions from goods that cost next to nothing. The first high price the public is paying is, at the counter, a lot more money. The second price is that they are paying for a stale product,  the cost of seductive and mostly non-recyclable packaging, and the highest price of all for a product that is almost universally unhealthy containing a range of preservatives with documented risks to cardiovascular and other body systems.

What is needed is for the public, male and female, to be made aware both of risk of Big Foodie products and how easy it is, with a minimum of inconvenience, to make something at home that is better and cheaper.

The conglomerates that constitute Big Foodie must be stopped.

There is a breathtaking ruthlessness by the major food manufacturers to impose much of their rubbish on their paying public. For example Kellogg's appear to have no conscience producing breakfast cereals for kids with chocolate incorporated in them with the concomitant sugar in them as well. In a world where diabetes, obesity is rife and kids are suffering from dental caries in droves this company patently is showing that its share of the breakfast cereal  market should not suffer. This is rank and overt capitalist greed and shows a complete lack of conscience. In the face of well published evidence for the health risks they show they don't care. Many other major cereal brands follow suit and do, if not precisely, something else to enhance acceptance of their product. Quaker make an oat breakfast wherein the oats are treated to become a seemingly more acceptable product through a treatment that makes them a runny slurry when hot milk is added. Their treatment of the oats has reduced the roughage effect of normal rolled oats for the advertised impression of something creamy and hot for breakfast totally denying their customers of a healthy alternative.
For this they charge a ridiculous extra cost and make so much money they can pay an astronaut to push their product on prime time TV.

A solution might be to legislate labeling on all such products a cheaper and healthier alternative in easily readable print so it cannot be missed just as the health warnings now exist on cigarette packets.