Personal Choice and Global Consequence

We tend to justify our refussal to transform ourselves on the grounds that it is "our choice", and nobody's business but our own. As long as we're happy, nothing else matters. If we want to eat junk and get sick, that's our choice. We are well informed of the detrimental effects to our health, well aware of the price we pay, and are willing to pay that price. At least, this is what we tell ourselves and others. And we hate to be told differently.

In fact, we are mistaken on two counts.

Firstly, the choice to eat unhealthy foods, like the choice to snort cocaine, is never entirely conscious and informed, but a product of self-delusion and lack of awareness concerning the pleasures of a healthier lifestyle. For one thing, when rich foods are removed from the diet, our taste for lighter, more natural foods returns with great force; hot-house tomatos, then, provide the same pleasure which was formerly reserved for cheesy pizzas and chocolate cakes. The warm sun and cool breeze on our skin, the grass under our feet, the scent of flowers, etc., all provide a radiantly healthy person with sensual pleasures with which no buttery treat may compare. Aside from these fleeting joys, the simple, overall sense of well-being which permeates the healthy life more than compensates for the brief comforts of rich foods; foods which we thought to take refuge in, without reflecting that the stress we were seeking to alleviate was largely a result of consuming toxins found in those very foods.

Secondly, the personal choice which we feel so entitled to, undoubtedly has ramifications which effect others, including the exploitation of less-fortuneate people around the world and, ultimately, the destruction of the planet. Yes, even our most personal choices, like decisions about what goes on our dinner plates, reverberate on a global scale, resulting in consequences which we would very much like to ignore and disown.

The vote we cast by filling out a ballot on election day is far less powerful than the votes we cast by the dollars we spend every single day.

When we buy conventionally grown produce and heavily processed foods loaded with pesticides, additives, and preservatives, we vote for corporate monsters like Monsanto. This gives more power to the people who are already using their clout to conceal the amount of toxins in their products and the extent to which those toxins are responsible for the epidemics of disease throughout the world. It helps deplete the soil of mineral content, so that foods are increasingly devoid of benefits. It helps destroy the lives and livelihoods of family farmers throughout the world. It ensures that healthy foods become increasingly expensive and scarce. Likewise, the purchase of factory-farmed meat, besides providing animals with absolutely torturous lives, is the leading cause of environmental collapse, according to numerous independent researchers; like Michael Pollan in his documentary "Food, Inc." and Jonathan Safran Foer in his book "Eating Animals".

When we purchase pharmaceutical drugs to treat the conditions resulting from poor diet, we further empower the pharmaceutical industry, which, in collaboration with the FDA, is working to influence law-makers in an effort to exercise fascist control over the medicines and treatments available to us. The result is that these corporations are able to exist above the law. If and when they are held accountable for gross misconduct, often involving the deaths of thousands of unsuspecting patients, they are in a position to settle out of court, -- to buy their way out of trouble. Such settlements are figured into their cold-blooded calculations, and never really effect the bottom line.

Clearly, our "personal choices" are both more and less personal than we would like to admit. They are more personal, in the sense that they have a direct relation to the most fundamental questions of personal ethics and integrity. They are less personal, in the sense that they have far-reaching consequences upon others, and not simply on ourselves. With such considerations in mind, let us ask ourselves, once more, how conscious these choices are, whose business they are, and how entitled we are to make them.