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smoking--well i share the vice but occupy myself endlessly with thinking up ways to quit.
i am fine with paying more for them because sooner or later maybe the price will cross some line and i'll stop because of it.
soda is a strange thing--i suspect that part of the drive to place warnings--which sounds like it will go nowhere, but no matter--is prompted by the number of soda machines that you now find in public schools--direct marketing to kids of sugar water that is both kinda nasty and not so great for you. personally, i would think the pressure would be better brought to bear on trying to make illegal the deals school systems can cut with soda companies to get machines placed. i can't imagine anyone thinks that soda is actually good for you in nutritional terms...but i also dont think that anyone who likes to drink soda does it because they imagine that to be the case in any event. so it seems a goofy strategy, apart from the recent emphasis on selling to kids in elementary, middle and high schools.
soda is just another processed food-like product. coca cola is in many ways the paradigmatic processed food-like product, both in itself and in the enormous impact coca cola has had in developing branding as a marketing concept.
i dont think very much in the way of processed food is actually good for anyone...what i know about it is that i lost alot of weight over the past few years and initially the only things i was cut out all processed foods and back on beer.
the nutritional information about such industrial food product delights as transfats are kind of unnerving...i sometimes wonder how stuff like that makes it into the food supply at all. i think the production and marketing of foods that are obviously bad for consumers is a simple function of substituting the idea that consumers are elements in an abstract market for the fact that consumers are human beings. looking at food production in terms of abstract markets meant that anything people would buy and that increased profit margins was just dandy. whatever you had to say about these products to spur demand was just dandy as well. if in general terms this kind of product functions to create health problems and shorten lifespans. well...that would be a cost of doing business--and in the end would not really matter as consumers constantly die and others constantly take their place--but branding is eternal.
spending 4-6 hours a day sitting in front of a television, particularly if you get to that spot by sitting in a car then sitting in an office then sitting in a car again, then sitting at a table then sitting on a sofa before retiring after a long day of sitting is probably worse for folk than any number of sodas. the combination of that and processed food is certainly not good--my experience is that, after a number of years living more or less that way, and falling into the ways in which that mode of living can feedback into itself, there was about 250 pounds more of me than there is now.
but then again i smoke, so there is nothing righteous in all this--simply what i know about directly.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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