Where does the responsibility lie?

A recent post by a friend on Facebook has gotten me thinking. She posted a very interesting article about the nature of cellulose filler in food products. I was very surprised about how quickly several people re-posted it and were seemingly outraged by the content. I see this as problematic for several reasons.

First, consider the source. Where did this article come from? It was a blog on wordpress. Who is this woman who wrote it? Why do we instantaneously deem it as fact? Second, there are no references within the document to the statements the author is making, including saying that cellulose equals wood pulp, which is true is the sense that wood pulp contains cellulose, but not all cellulose is wood pulp. There is an unwritten assumption behind many of the statements in the article that are not defined or proven. Thirdly, where, and from who, is the author getting their information, and is it even valid? I could say that Kevin Neil, an ex FBI agent and military general, said that touchscreen technology has been in development since the UFO crash of 1947. That doesn't make it true.

Are we really that surprised to learn that cheap taco meat from Taco Bell is full of fillers? Did anyone who eats at Taco Bell think they were getting something that was good for them? The same applies for buying virtually anything that isn't a raw food from the grocery store. Of course it is processed, it comes in a box or a can, the very nature of that means it isn't going to be as good for you as growing it yourself. We delude ourselves into thinking that buying something that says organic or natural means it isn't processed, but most of it still is to some extent. We are all too ready to believe what the front of the box says, never read the label, then get angry when it turns out the front label didn't tell the whole story.

Marketing is bad, there is a lot of misrepresentation going on out there, but I believe the responsibility falls on us to make sure we know what we are putting in our bodies. We can't eat a lot of highly processed foods that clearly state the ingredients on the label then get angry that the filler wasn't something that was good for us. If you don't recognize what the ingredients are, then I think that's a pretty good clue that something was added, don't you? It would be great if food producers always tried to do what was best for the consumers and only made things that were super healthy. But, they don't. Why? Because it cost too much, to them and then to the consumer. Plus, people probably wouldn't buy it because it wouldn't taste as good to them as a bag of cheetos. I won't go into how in some ways we are backed into a corner and limited by the choices available and our income because that is a whole other concept outside the limits of my point, but I acknowledge there are some major issues there.

We need to be responsible consumers, both of food and media. Unfortunately we cannot always take things at face value. It would be wonderful if we could, but that is not the world we live in. Product marketing tries to make you buy before you think, media tries to make you react and believe without thinking. We always need to think first because the responsibility for the decisions we make falls on us, not on anyone else.