As I look back through the past week’s posts here at the FFB, I wonder what the world’s coming to? Specifically, the Food World? While really important issues like the coming Food Sustainability Crisis and and Climate Change and so on get relegated to the Scientific and Industry News feeds, stuff like Cannabis-Infused Shrimp Chips hogs the consumer headlines…
Giant Boulder trumps Food Sustainability Crisis in our headlines…
It really makes you wonder where our collective heads are at, these days. And it’s not only food news. Take these snippets from the general news feed:
- Woman Dies After Sticking Head Out Of Moving Train Window
- Two Men Thrown Out Of MLB Game For Hanging ‘TRUMP Won’ Banner
- Dead Man Shows Up Alive A Week After His Funeral;
- Giant Boulder Found Under Street To Get New Home in Park
- 100 Monkeys Rescued In Thai Smuggling Bust
Get the picture?
Now, let’s look at some this past week’s ‘top’ food headlines:
- Popeye’s Opens New Front In Chicken Sandwich War
- Burger King To Open Meat-Free Restaurant In Germany
- Innovative Patties Give A New Meaning To ‘Grilled Cheese’
- Weed-Infused Shrimp Chips Are The Answer To Your Munchies
- South Korean Cinema Sells Cement Bags Full Of Popcorn
So, I have to ask, what’s happening to our collective ‘news sense’?
Blame the media glut
Part of the blame has to be placed on the universal media glut which wasn’t created by the Internet, but has been amplified tremendously by its influence on our lives. Wherever we go, whomever we’re with, whatever we’re trying to do, we’re inundated with uncontrolled avalanches of information folks who want us to think it’s important call ‘news’. The advent of the smart phone has made things orders of magnitude worse, making it impossible to escape trash ‘news’ and meaningless personal communications unless you find yourself in a ‘no-service’ zone.
South Korean Cinema Sells Cement Bags Full of Popcorn. Is this really news?
They’re now marketing smart phones for pre-schoolers, albeit meant to be used in limited ways, but designed to get the little tykes into the ‘phone habit’ even before they know enough about the world to decide whether they want to play the game or not. Or, more realistically, to what extent they want to play the smart phone game. You can’t even take advantage of most Fast Food resto deals anymore unless you can order by app.
Are we terminally jaded?
The result is, most of us in the developed world have had our cognitive senses blunted by the unceasing bombardment of junk news, and our ability to appreciate real news has been diminished to the point that the important stuff fails to register; falls below out attention threshold. We live in a world where ‘news’ has to be really, starkly, absurd to rate a few seconds of our precious time.
This week, I ask you to devote at least a portion of your Sunday morning musing on what we could achieve together if we all spent more time thinking about the really important issues of our time – like climate change, what it’s doing to our food supply, what we’ll all be relegated eating in another 30 or 40 years, and whether our accustomed standard of living can survive the tests it’s currently facing.
I try…
I try to put the important issues front and centre when I have the opportunity. I try to put them in meaningful frames of reference, relating them to you and your daily lives, my faithful followers. And I hope folks don’t just pass over my posts on food sustainability and climate change and so on as boring and unimportant. Because no amount of Giant Boulders or Weed-infused Shrimp Chips will ever come close to equalling them in their ultimate importance to you and your families!
~ Maggie J.