Dystopian Food Future

Today I found quite the steamy take on twitter that prompted me to write. This particular person made two incredibly hot takes that required an astounding lack of awareness to make, but this particular one wound up winning out of the two. The main tweet follows, emphasis mine:

"Conservatives will really sit there and tell you ‘well broccoli is only 50p but an oven pizza is £1 so poor people only eat unhealthily because they’re lazy’ as if it’s reasonable to expect people to eat plain vegetables and nothing else for dinner. It’s so dystopian."

There is a large discussion to be had about how it's actually very easy to buy and eat healthy food in the majority of circumstances. I wrote about eating healthy and food accessibility briefly in another post, but that's not the main focus. Of course, I take the normal issue with the failure of diseducated people to recognize how to eat food, but that last remark. That last part there, is simply amazing. Absolutely breathtaking, in the worst possible way. This person whines as expected that feeding yourself is too confusing and difficult to understand, but then surpasses all expectations of rationality by claiming that eating broccoli, over a frozen pizza, would be dystopian.

I realized from this post and from some recent musings that people do not know what dystopian means anymore. They see reasonable cause to dislike billionaires and large companies that try to get away with dumping sewage into fresh water supplies, or whatever cartoon villain levels things Evil CEO Man tries to do, and proceed to believe they live in 1984. It was, in fact, quite the somersault that left-leaning people made when, following Trump's election, they took the milquetoast conservative POV that we've been heading toward 1984 since 2006 and proclaimed that, now, this, this is it. Now we're in 1984, while we weren't before. The obvious disconnect is that people do not recognize that governments create and are directly responsible for dystopias, typically while trying to control every aspect of a person's life, as opposed to reducing government meddling in day to day life (but not necessarily fully removing it). Dystopias rarely happen because the government is doing too little. Government is not evil by design necessarily, but the vast majority of dystopian narratives require that the government is behaving maliciously.

Left-leaning dystopian-criers will point to poverty, needing to work to live, and genuine social issues like lack of health care and food deserts and claim we're heading toward dystopia (or are already there). These are actually reasonable concerns, but this has been the normal state of the world for all of human history - it is not dystopian. To call these things dystopian would demand that the average life for all humanity for all of time has been decisively dystopian all along. The availability of health care and food has only increased in modern times. We see here that they view the utopia/dystopia question as if there is no middle ground - either we die from illness and thus are in dystopia, or the government magically fixes all of society's problems and we live in utopia. There is an alternative, which is where we just live our normal boring lives with expected levels of naturally induced suffering and aren't characters in a young adult fiction of the year award novel.

 

What's wild is, like any terminology left to the wolves of lukewarm pseudo-philosophers who think themselves intellectual, the term "dystopian" has been overused and is now destined to die and fade away into nothingness. Just as everything imaginable is white supremacy, thus robbing the term of any valuable meaning, "anything I think is bad or mildly uncomfortable is dystopian" is now the colloquial usage.

This OP makes this absolutely mind boggling conclusion not only to insist that something that, more or less, "doesn't sit right" with her immediate feelings is dystopian, but it is much worse than that. As we now as a society have to accept that "literally" sometimes means "figuratively", the "dystopian" thing here is actually the good thing while the purported "good result" (frozen pizza for dinner instead of broccoli) is the actual dystopian thing. We, in fact, live in processed food hell, where the very thing that is possibly the absolute most important choice of our day to day lives - the food we eat - is essentially poison. The OP here believes eating broccoli instead of pizza for dinner would be dystopian because, and literally only because, she likes pizza, and it tastes good, and it is pleasant and indulging for her. These are the exact reasons that we live in a society plagued by illnesses that result almost exclusively from poor diet, because a poor diet is tasty and easily accessible.

The health and developmental risks of poor diet are intense. They are understated, or worse, flat out ignored as "politically incorrect", since obesity (which means you weigh too much) is directly related to an intense amount of health problems, both things like illness and physical disability. The point made by these people is an emotional plea, that by telling someone who is overweight that it is bad they are overweight, you are making them feel bad about themselves. I do not word it this way to understate it - truly it is unfortunate to feel like you are of less value, or that you have failed yourself. It hurts to view the results of decisions you have made as being directly responsible for your suffering. But it is immature and irresponsible to ignore the vast importance of these things for those reasons. Poor diet kills - and that's very serious, and startlingly true. If you are spared death, the life you lead is rife with other maladies that were entirely avoidable. To look upon the choice of fresh vegetables that make you strong and energized, providing valuable nutrients that are absolutely essential to allow you to live and function day to day, and be disgusted, is jaw dropping. Being able to afford real, nutrient-dense food absent of additives that we have only experienced in our diets for mere decades, the potential damage and far reaching consequences of which have yet to be fully discovered, and declare such an objectively valuable privilege and freedom of the modern world as "dystopian" is simply astounding.

Indeed, this role reversal of which result is the true dystopia is a bad omen. Blue check mark hot take manufacturers want to call the US health care system "dystopian" (it is bad, surely, we can agree) and praise government run health care like the NHS. The inability to afford treatment is not good, but it's a result of government interference. If government meddling, kowtowing to lobbyists,`    1 and insurance price fixing were removed from health care, prices would plummet overnight. The doctor will not charge a price no one can afford, as then he will have not make money. We already see this happening with glasses and dentistry, as insurance companies suddenly decided to stop covering such services as readily. Innovative people willing to take risks opened businesses that will take your glasses prescription and send you real, genuine, prescription level glasses for $20. Many dentists operate independent of insurance and will do typically thousand dollar surgeries for a few hundred. While harder to find, even some independent general practice doctor's offices have begun rejecting insurance entirely and only taking direct payments, which are lower than the prices the doctors accepting insurance are charging.

 

Socializing things is what paves the way for dystopia - under the NHS I have read news articles more than once where they have refused treatment of a child because a panel of complete strangers, bureaucrats in an office elsewhere, looked at the prospects for this child, and said it "was not in their best interest". Worse yet I have seen them disallow the parents from removing them from the NHS system and bringing them elsewhere for treatment. A man was arrested for lashing out because the NHS panel told him they would let his daughter die. People will still defend such practices, despite their entire and complete lack of humanity and respect of the rights of the parents, which is as wretched as the practice in the first place. The idea that some disconnected man with no stake in my child's life other than how much it will cost him could possibly have the right - and more chilling, society's support and goodwill - to declare life or death over my child is viscerally disgusting in a way that no language exists to express the extent of this callous and grotesque possibility. This is what is meant by a "death panel". 

 

The left will deny up and down that "death panels" are a thing - but it is simply a dramatic name for the very system that exists. A group of disconnected people working for the government decide who lives and who dies via deciding who is worthy of treatment. People's health is micromanaged through a system where the people making the decisions see only sets of numbers and operate through a desire to maintain equilibrium in their various numbers. This is what is meant by death panel - and it results from government interference in the health care system. I would rather die because I cannot afford it than because the government has forbidden me to live. That is the true dystopia. Here we see that the government is deciding people who have cancer are less worthy to keep alive than people who get coronavirus. This decision of who gets to live and die is far more insidious than dying simply because things didn't work out your way. 

 

I would far rather die from circumstance than because a government run group of important looking men in expensive dress several cities away decided that I was not important enough to treat. If I have the freedom to save myself and fail, I am not in a dystopia. If the government owns the rights to my life, that is dystopian. The word is dead and has lost its meaning and purpose, as we live in a backward hellscape where a large chunk of people genuinely believe they would somehow live in a better world if the government controlled more aspects of their life. If only the government could micromanage their life as a liability to utilize in the gain or loss of money and power, then things would be better. This is, of course, the main criticism of capitalists, though the most important aspect is maintaining the free will choice making capabilities of the peasant caste. I would rather live under the intentionally malicious profit-seeking free market capitalist than under the boot of the government that pretends to have my best interest in mind. At least do me the decency of being honest when you're trying to abuse me than to attempt to gaslight me into believing letting my child die was "in his best interest".

Death panels and processed food maladies is the new "good society" we are apparently trying to aim for. Indeed, it should be quite obvious on the surface that "broccoli" is the good thing while "frozen pizza" is the bad thing considering the price point. If being poor and disadvantaged results in the most filling food available being a pizza full of ingredients you can't pronounce, then surely you should see the issue. This point is lost on most, of course, since frozen pizza tastes good, you see, and is somehow luxurious, despite being cheap and practically not even real. The genuine, actual luxury is nutrient dense food like broccoli being made massively available to nearly everyone for incredibly cheap prices in just-as-good-as-fresh packaging in the form of a frozen one pound bag for less than a dollar. It's astonishing how precisely the opposite of dystopian the availability of vegetables via modern technologies is, and yet this person could manage a mindset where she looks upon readily available high-class nutrition food and declares it to be peasantry, for the unwashed and undignified. Incredible. Let them eat cake, I suppose.