It’s the food and, at the same time, it’s everything else. They are the ultra-processed ones, on whose health effects several studies now agree. It’s okay that it’s in the fridge – the fridge is where you see it best. It is precisely the invasion of this type of food that, according to The Lancet, promotes industry “for the sake of corporate profit.” Nothing new, they will say, but we already know what happens with the most obvious thing: which is usually taken for granted.
They are the ultra-elaborate ones, but there is also the rest: the way of life, the demanding productivity, the demands on oneself and the culture of competition. It’s the guilt of not showing up, of the lack of time and to see if one day I can do it and to see if one day we’ll see each other, and for one day nothing happens or I don’t feel like it today. Many times it’s like this: we say to ourselves I don’t feel like it so as not to tell ourselves that we can’t take it anymore, and what comes home is not us but what’s left of us.
It’s food, but not only. It’s capitalism on the clock. It’s the extracurricular activities and organizing the family, I can’t do much more and today they will have to be these pre-cooked because there is no other choice. It’s the fault of overtime and, of course, the prices: I wish we could have the best and freshest kind every day, but inflation gets everywhere. Or almost everyone: because they are also salaries and that to aspire to the biggest and most basic things, like a house, for example, it is necessary to save on the smallest things. It’s prices, of course, but the equation fails if when we talk about prices we don’t also talk about salaries. It will then also be the desire for profit.
It’s the food and, at the same time, it’s the lifestyle, so obvious and so widespread that it almost seems like the natural order of the world. So opposed to the Mediterranean diet which, of course, was not just a series of healthy ingredients, but a slow way of taking care of yourself. It was, in short, about the use of time and how we can live the life we want. If possible, without ultra-processing.
