Re: Is It An American Thing?

Gregory Morrow wrote:
aem wrote:

There is no doubt in my mind that Americans have a very strong
inclination to want to believe in ideas about self-help and control and
rewarding 'virtue.' Certainly we are overwhelmed by health claims for
any number of (mutually exclusive) eating schemes. What I am curious
about is whether this is just an American thing? I'd like to hear from
rfc posters around the world. Do people where you live assume, as
Americans do, that there must a connection between diet and health? Is
the diet marketing industry as powerful as it is here in America?


It's part of the American ethos that one can tame the environment around
them, this has been one of the driving forces behind American
"civilization". Are you hot in summer? Then invent air conditioning! Tame
the Prairies? Have a John Deere invent a plow! Don't want cancer? BAN
smoking! Want to erase space and time? Then invent the telegraph or the
telephone or dig the Panama Canal or cross the Atlantic non - stop by flying
machine. Win a war? Start up a draft, have factories produce Liberty
ships, tanks, and B - 17 bombers like Detroit pours out automobiles,
initiate a Manhattan Project, and we'll lick those sneeky Japs and Krauts
in NO time at all. Sell consumer goods to folx in far - flung rural areas?
No problemo, start up a Sears Roebuck or a Montgomery Ward's mail order
house...

It's the same with diet, Americans think that changing one's "environment",
(in this case diet) can make one healthier, wealthier, and more attractive.
Except in this case little factors like genetics and the eventuality of
death often take precedent - some things are only controllable to an extent
:-|

[And don't forget that with all this stuff there is also the "profit" angle,
that's always been *another* driving force of US "civilization"...]

We do strive occasionally to tame our excesses, thus to reinvent ourselves as what we want to be. We have the problem, though, that not only do we have excess but we have excess excess. The utter excessiveness of our excesses is incomprehensible, but when we do manage to get our heads around it we tend to snap into one of two extremes of action. We either adopt the frame of mind that allows Donald Trump and the Gastineau Girls to see their behavior as both perfectly defensible AND entertaining, or we jump into guilt mode and contemplate selling off our pricey gadgets and widgets and scaling down our consumption and retiring to a life of penurious self-sufficiency. In neither case do we truly have epiphany, though. We might gain some insight, but we don't really change. We can't, you see. This is the United States, where the streets are paved with gold and each man, woman and child can become whoever they want to be, and we must live up to that. Bounty is our birthright. You others can get your own milk and honey, take your hands off mine thanks very much!
.

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