‘We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented. It’s as simple as that.’
‘We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented. It’s as simple as that.’
When our kids were small, we avoided giving them sugary, fizzy drinks. Instead, we gave them healthy, vitamin C rich fruit juices. After all, fruit was good for you! Fruit is good for you. Good healthy stuff! Wholemeal bread? Marvellous! Brown rice? Super! Eggs? Deadly! Saturated fat? Lethal! Full fat dairy? It’ll kill you just by looking at it! But fruit and fruit juice was considered the best choice you could make, just ask the man from Del Monte. Well, it turns out that it is not quite that simple.
Our son in particular loved the stuff. We called him the Fruit Bat. He would go through a kilo of grapes as quickly as a plague of locusts, leaving just the woody vine stalks in the bowl as evidence he was ever there. He would reduce apples to just the pips before demolishing piles of satsumas and other juicy fruity offerings from the fruit bowl. Through the day he would sip orange juice and we thought, nee we were told, that it was all good. We were making really healthy choices for our children, cramming them full of essential vitamins and other nutrients. Well done to us, we were being good parents. Or were we?
The choices we made then were led by the advice that was generally available at the time. However, it came as a bit of a shock to us when number two child had to have several baby teeth removed by the dentist because they had become rotten. What? But he doesn’t eat sweets or drink sugary drinks, we wailed. How had this happened? How could we let this happen to our child? The culprit, it turned out according to the dentist, was all that fruit juice. The acid would erode the enamel and the sugar - and there is a lot of sugar in fruit juice - would feed plaque bacteria which would further increase the acid in his mouth. We were bad parents! But, as Christof, the autocratic, dictatorial director of the Truman Show said, ‘We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented. It’s as simple as that.’ And therein lies the rub.
In the film The Truman Show, the main character, Truman Burbank, played by Jim Carrey, lives in the small seaside town of Seahaven in America, a town, it turns out, entirely created for TV and cut off from the outside world. He’s always lived there. He was the first human to be legally adopted by a corporation, the corporation that produced the Truman show. Truman is the focus of a twenty four hour TV reality show, and he is totally unaware of it and he accepts the reality that is presented to him. He knows no other.
Unaware that his life is being thoroughly manipulated by the studio executives and viewed 24/7 by millions of viewers, Truman is ruthlessly exploited by the TV networks and companies seeking to sell their products by association with the programme. Product placement abounds, and as a viewer you get the feeling that something’s not quite right. There’s something odd about the whole setup; the town, the people, the relationships between everybody. As the story unfolds, through various subtle means, Truman begins to doubt this reality, he begins to question the existence he is leading and the seed of an idea that there may be something else, something beyond Seahaven is sown in his mind. The producers and executives do all they can to discourage Truman from leaving, after all, without Truman, there is no show. No show, no viewers. No viewers, no ratings. No ratings, no networks. No networks, no profits, and that, at the end of the day, is all the fat cat producers were interested in; profit! Truman was their Cash Cow.
In the same way that Truman was exploited for profit, his life choices controlled by those who were greedy for wealth above all else, with no concern for the consequences for Truman, so are we. In our case we are being played for mugs by the food industry who have been peddling cheap, processed foods laden with sugar for so long. In the same way as the studio executives hid the truth from Truman, the food companies have hidden the truth from us. They have known for years that sugar is addictive. They have known for years, just as the tobacco industry knew for years, that sugar is unhealthy, it causes a multitude of diseases and illnesses and that sugar is super addictive. Their profits depend upon our addiction. They know we’ll keep coming back for more. We are the food industry’s cash cows. But we don’t have to lie down and take it.
During a sailing trip with his father - or at least the actor who played his father - a storm blew up that washed Truman’s father overboard and he was drowned. The young boy was naturally traumatised and developed a debilitating fear of the sea. The studio staged all manner of elaborate hoaxes to keep Truman on the island; traffic jams, fake forest fires even pretend nuclear meltdowns. The only possible way to escape was by sea. However, afraid that one day Truman might develop a wanderlust, an urge to travel beyond Seahaven, they had engineered a lifelong fear of the waters around the Island into Truman, mainly by staging that awful, but ultimately false, seafaring disaster which resulted in his father’s death. They used other subtle, almost subliminal means to deter Truman and to increase his fear of the ocean. But when the urge to escape triumphs over his fear of the sea, Truman sets sail in a tiny dinghy. A huge first step. Christof throws everything at him, summoning up a hurricane, even capsizing the dinghy. Truman, determined not to return to his old life, ties himself to the mast and goes under with his boat. Despite it all, he survives and makes it to the edge of his known world. He climbs the stairs up the side of the huge dome that enclosed his world and exits via the door at the top into a whole new world. A whole new life.
Just like Christof did to Truman, the Sugar industry is throwing everything it has at us to keep us addicted to their products. Slick advertising makes their products so attractive, especially to children. Cuddly, fun characters stare out from the colourful, eye catching boxes of sugar laden breakfast cereals. They are brought to life in TV commercials aimed at impressionable young minds. We don’t stand a chance. We become victims of ‘Big Sugar’ from an early age. The fast food giants adopt the same strategies. Colourful characters, gaudy colours and even free toys - you have to get them all - lure our children into their restaurants, hooking them into their sugar filled, highly processed junk food. Tony the Tiger, you have a lot to answer for. Only this week three people have told me about their recent diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes. That’s down to the food industry and their tactics. Does broccoli have a fun, cuddly representative like the Honey Monster? Perhaps it is time that it did.
We can overcome our sugar addiction. It’s not easy, but it can be done. Just like Truman, we can free ourselves from the clutches of the manipulative, profit driven food industry that is controlling the truth and hiding the facts from us. The first step is the hardest. Get in the boat!
How went week 3?
So, did I stick to the plan? Yes! 800 calories per day. (there was a bit of wine though)
In other news.
This is rather old news by now, but all the same I thought I’d include it here. Made me think about whether he’d been invited or not.
Comments