Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [84]
Let’s imagine the possibilities of what might happen from here. Fast-forward another twenty-five years. Baby Jonathan is now completing a degree in public health, graduating with honors with the class of 2035. In 2050 Jonathan is appointed to a presidential commission to develop new government recommendations on diet. Jonathan has no idea where the knowledge originated, but, as a vegan, he grew up knowing that he couldn’t rely on U.S. government recommendations for diet because of the undue influence of factory farm corporations.
Sadly, the present structure of agribusiness still makes some of the most unhealthy food the most profitable to produce, exerting a corrupting influence on industry. Jonathan is hardly the most important person in shaping the presidential commission’s recommendations (or the tenth most), but he does spearhead a successful effort to ensure that the next group of medical experts who will develop new government guidelines will be free of industry influence. It seems like a small thing, but looking back historians argue that the government guidelines produced in 2050 were the first to be viewed as scientifically credible by nutritional experts. The guidelines certainly made the health benefits of a plant-based diet clear to anyone who paid attention and, in the ensuing years, the percentage of people in the nation who went meatless hit a critical mass. The Western diet that had prevailed at the turn of the twenty-first century was soon regarded as a lesson in how food systems can go wrong.
Time travel being impossible, I’m sure you’ve surmised that Jack isn’t a real person like the others whose stories I’ve told in this book, but everything I’ve said about his story is true of more than one person I have known. And what couldn’t be more real is the enormous influence we have on how other people eat—influences that can work in unexpected ways. Think about how your favorite foods became your favorite foods. Did you just find them on your own through vigorous taste-testing of whatever food you happen to see? Or were you introduced to the foods by other people?
What’s also true about this story is that seeing a dramatic change in how a nation eats in one person’s lifetime is eminently possible. This is a point that the food and farming advocacy group Farm Forward suggests we should keep in the forefront of our minds. “It is easy to forget,” they point out,
that over the last seventy years animal agriculture has changed more than in the last seven thousand. For example, 99.9 percent of the chickens we eat today are from breeds that were non-existent until the 1940s. And Americans today eat more than a hundred times as many chickens as we did in the 1930s. The sobering animal welfare, ecological, and public health problems these statistics point to are well known, but any historically-minded person will also see in them proof of how much and how fast dietary patterns can change. This generation will shape the future of food. The only question is whether we will raise our voice to shape a better future or let other voices—agribusiness, pharmaceutical companies, meat-industry lobbyists—rise out of our silence. The question is what kind of future we are shaping.
If dietary change seems hard, it’s good to remember this history. As Farm Forward lays out, in modern times changing diets are the rule rather than the exception. And all of us can raise our voices about the shape of the future simply by changing how we raise our forks.
You can’t know how your choices will ripple out into the world,