Every day, I have the choice on what to consume. Should I go for the healthy salad from the dining hall or the processed meat on a hoagie from the deli down town? More often than not, I choose the faster, easier, and most times less expensive choice. I am definitely very educated on the subject of what foods are healthy, what foods contain healthy components, and what foods I absolutely should not eat, but I still cannot seem to keep myself away from the especially bad foods. I think that part of this social norm is our generation’s access to high-fat, high-sugar, high-salt foods as well as our ideas about instant gratification. Of course the foods that contain the worst ingredients taste the best, and my peers, as well as myself, can’t help ourselves when we are tempted to reach for a bag of chips instead of a bag of carrots.

I think a lot of this can connect to the issues of obesity as well as the problems with industrial farms. To begin with, because of all the reasons that I have listed above, more and more people across the world are classified as obese or overweight. This creates an issue because unhealthy people means more money spent on health and wellness rather than education, or funding new ideas or research. Secondly, the bad-for-you foods are generally mass-produced in huge industrial farms or processed in similar facilities. As the short video, The Meatrix, showed, these Agribusinesses are wiping out smaller, healthier farms. The huge corporations are hurting our planet in many ways. First, they are destroying the environment through pollution. Secondly, they are harming the human population by pumping us full of unknown chemicals as well as processed foods. Last, they are helping to deteriorate the local economies of many places globally. I think that the social norms should be changed so that it is easier and more desirable to eat in a healthy, sustainable way.