You may remember Hannibal Lecter, aka “Hannibal the Cannibal”—a renowned carnivore who truly enjoyed what he ate, eating, as he called it, “the terminally rude.” Because of that trait, Lecter has been called “the Robin Hood of killers.”
Lecter, of course, is a fictional figure, first appearing in the novel “Red Dragon,” and then a few years later, playing the lead character in the movie “The Silence of the Lambs.”
Lecter, who has been described as intellectually brilliant, cultured and sophisticated, with refined tastes in art, music, and cuisine, thrived on his ultra-carnivorous diet. He’s one of the lucky ones, as that kind of diet—carnivorous, not cannabilistic—lies at the root of most of America’s ills.
And when I say ills, I mean it in both the literal and figurative sense.
The U.S. spends the most money of any country on healthcare expenditures—twice that of any other country: Four trillion dollars was what was spent in 2021, and that number is projected to be $4.5 trillion in 2022. The amount spent equates to almost 20 percent of GDP.
For that money, the U.S. gets the world’s worst health outcomes—70 percent of Americans have at least one chronic disease. At the root of that malaise is the poor quality of the American diet.
Along with leading the pack in healthcare expenditures and worst health outcomes, the U.S. leads the world in animal food consumption: the average American eats 264 pounds of animal food a year.
And it’s not just the inordinate amount of meat that is causing Americans to be in such poor health. It’s also the junk, sugar, high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, preservatives, additives, food colorings, and other chemical concoctions that keeps the American health industry such a growth industry.
Of course, growth is good for the economy, as it fuels the GDP, which is the metric that tells everyone how well the economy is doing. But it’s bad for personal, collective, and planetary health.
GDP growth in the healthcare industry—which propels the national GDP—is necessitated by an endless stream of sick people, of which there is no shortage in the U.S. In the healthcare industry, growth is achieved by emphasizing sick care, not wellness—it’s not a conspiracy to keep people sick, it’s just the prevailing paradigm rooted in the economic model. The entire paradigm is designed to keep the customers coming in endlessly—and with it, the profits.
In tandem with the healthcare system’s addiction to profits is its partner in crime, the food industry—primarily the large food concerns. How can people even be guided towards wellness when the food system—the growing, production, manufacturing, distributing, and marketing of what you eat—is also addicted to economic growth, all the while negating the public good?
While self-responsibility to eat a healthy diet is paramount—and I’m talking about a plant-based, whole foods approach to eating—that factor in and of itself doesn’t let the food companies off the hook.
Food companies do everything within their power to addict Americans to the worst foods possible: Through the inordinate amounts of chemicals put into the foods that are grown and the animals slaughtered; to the concoctions they create—what Michael Pollan calls “edible, food-like substances”; to the power they have in setting food policy; to the propaganda they push through marketing: all told, American consumers have little chance against this onslaught.
It’s not rocket science to put all this together—crappy healthcare system, crappy food, and addiction to economic growth—to see that this toxic brew has created a ticking time bomb that has ravaged a sick and vulnerable American population, poisoned on the altar of GDP, all in the name of endless growth and profits.
This can’t go on, or else the U.S. and other nations, along with the environment, will be ravaged when the ticking time bomb goes off.
And the time bomb has gone off. Its explosion lies at the root of both COVID and climate change.
We can no longer afford the silence of the yams. They must insist that they, and not the “edible, food-like substances” that Michael Pollan talks about, be eaten.
In the heated, and at times angry, debate since the pandemic began over masking up and vaccinations, one thing has been overlooked: We need to address how COVID came to be—or else we will continue to experience pandemics.
And intertwined with continual pandemics is what we are doing to the planet.
Climate change experts point to the next decade as pivotal to the survival of the planet. As glaciers melt and rain forests are destroyed, more extreme weather patterns are taking hold and causing havoc around the globe. Climate change scientists say we are on track to see temperatures rise on the planet by two to four degrees Celsius by the year 2100.
If the planet does heat to that level, it will lead to all kinds of mutant virus strains. And this is how climate change and the public health are intertwined.
Viruses are not malicious; instead, they are intelligent, full of complexity, and full of information. Yes, they can be deadly, and yes, COVID has been a tragedy for over one million Americans and millions more around the world. Yet viruses have just one job: find a host and replicate.
The damage viruses do is predicated on the susceptibility of the host, and the susceptibility of the host is predicated on their immune system and whether the host has underlying health conditions.
Viruses don’t want to kill the host, because if the host dies, the virus dies. Yet, if the host has serious underlying health conditions, they aren’t capable of mobilizing the proper immune response to deal with the virus and lessen its blow.
And since viruses just want to replicate, the susceptible hosts create a plethora of opportunities for the strains to proliferate in a potentially endless loop.
And this is why the U.S., with five percent of the world’s population, has close to 20 percent of the world’s COVID deaths—because of how sick the U.S. population is.
This is the ticking time bomb that has detonated: poor health makes a person more susceptible to viruses in general and COVID in particular. And the effects of climate change are leading to the spreading of more mutant virus strains.
In addition, a 2019 United Nations report stated that up to one million plant and animal species face extinction, many within decades, because of human activities. The report stated that agricultural activities have had the largest impact on the extinction of ecosystems, and these agricultural activities pose as much a danger to life on Earth as climate change does.
The report further stated that 75 percent of land and 66 percent of ocean areas have been “significantly altered” by people, driven in large part by the production of food. Crop and livestock operations currently co-opt more than 33 percent of Earth’s land surface and 75 percent of its freshwater resources. In addition, agricultural practices are the largest contributors of greenhouse gases, accounting for roughly 25 percent of total emissions due to the use of fertilizers and the destruction of tropical forests to grow crops or raise livestock.
Of that 25 percent of greenhouse gas emissions due to agricultural practices, 18 percent comes from animal agriculture. This amount is more than the combined exhaust from all transportation. Also of note regarding climate change and animal agriculture, cows produce 150 billion gallons of methane a day, which is the same amount of emissions per day as the natural gas industry. Methane is 25 to 100 times more destructive than carbon dioxide on a 20 year time frame; methane also has a global warming potential 86 times that of carbon dioxide over a 20 year time frame.
Another aspect of altering land for agricultural purposes (and also for the building of housing developments) is that it causes, through deforestation, wildlife habitat destruction, which leads to encroachment of humans on natural habitats; this intrusion is increasingly forcing disease-carrying wild animals closer to humans and allowing new strains of infectious diseases to thrive.
Climate change and the modern (especially American) diet—high in animal food consumption, which is the leading cause of climate change—are threats not only to the well-being of the planet, but also to public health. The thriving of more infectious diseases means that after COVID-19, there might be COVID-23 or COVID-27 or COVID-31, or COVID ad infinitum.
All done in the name of GDP growth.
Hannibal Lecter might be happy to know of the inordinate amount of animal food eaten. But the planet isn’t.
There is a way out. Sustainable agricultural practices and changes in diet to a more plant-centric orientation are two changes that would have a major impact on the planet, along with beneficially impacting personal and public health.
Earth was not created for humans to plunder its resources; instead we are caretakers and caregivers. If we continue on the aberrant trajectory we are on, mother nature will see to it that there is karmic payback. COVID-19 is the first of these paybacks.
COVID-19 has been our test, our warning, and our catalyst for positive change. The yams may be quiet, but they cry for our future. They know the answer is inherent in the synergistic relationship between plants and humans, but they are aware of the ignorance that humans possess for this vital relationship.
For humans to become cognizant of this relationship, they will need to let go of the idea that GDP growth is most important; instead they will have to learn that collaboration is more important than competition, and that the public good and the Commons—the water, the land, the air, and all its resources—should be treated as treasures to be stewarded for all creation. If we want to truly and sincerely care for one another, and treat each other with compassion and kindness, then it is time we move away from actions that derive from self-interest, greed, and avarice—all the human traits that are drivers of GDP—and rediscover the power of social cohesion and benefiting the public good.
The yams may be silent, but if you close your eyes and stay quiet for a moment, you will hear them screaming at the highest decibel, warning us that we are our own worst enemy.