Sunday sermon

At knitting group last week, our budding novelist recounted her adventures in researching mega churches for her book. It was incongruent, to say the least, for her Unitarian self to be seated in the midst of impersonal showmanship and speed collecting and communion.

And so it was for me, as I found myself invited to a “health lecture,” which turned out to be a thinly disguised advertisement for a line of dietary supplements. They are sold under a multi-level marketing scheme, using sophisticated marketing tactics and a network of independent distributors. The high priestess’ slick PowerPoint presentation was a quasi-sermon designed to confuse and frighten people; her message of salvation was a sales pitch.

The basic message was this: there are bad things in your foods: try to avoid them, but since that’s so hard and you’ll probably fail, you can take this supplement to be safe. The baddies were the usual suspects, high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated fats, artificial sweeteners, unpronounceable additives. The good guys are the men in lab coats who tell us that fruits and vegetables are the best thing in the world for us. But, this being post-Reagan America, failure is an option: there’s just no way we can eat right. Just as we reach the depths of despair, though, she shares the Good News. The lecture sponsor’s bottle is projected on the screen, tucked in amongst beautifully styled and airbrushed produce. Here it is, she says, the only scientifically-backed answer: Our Product.

The complaint with mainstream medicine in this country has long been that it focuses on treating the symptoms rather than searching for and addressing the underlying cause(s). Even though the good doctor professed to have studied naturopathy (and the poor fellow who introduced her couldn’t pronounce it), her bedside manner was that of an MD. She presented the bulleted lists of additives that food giants can hide in our foods, mentioning in passing that labels were becoming more difficult to read, both in terms of labeling loopholes and shrinking font sizes (even as the population’s eyesight ages). But even though this clearly points a finger at a system that allows such wrongdoing, she does not encourage us to look deeper, say, to the political influence of the food manufacturing industry. Nope, her answer is not to fix the broken system, but to take a pill to cure us.

It’s a rare practitioner who will take the time and interest to follow up on a symptom that is not easily diagnosed. The nature of the dietary malaise that our society suffers from is complex to be sure, but the difficulty is compounded by the fact that it is vital to our survival and it affects our actions every day. It’s no big deal to leave our car in the garage for a day or two, but we can’t easily fast for the same period. Without a high level of commitment, it’s just not going to work. If she tells us to go home and throw out everything in the larder that contains the baddies, what will we eat for breakfast? Lucky for us, company sale reps for the supplement are present. No doubt, any supplement is an improvement over fast food, but what we are in dire need of is an understanding of the external forces at work, and what we can do to counter them. Yes, we need to look to the health of our individual bodies, but we cannot ignore the larger organism, called society. If we do not feed ourselves well, we will all suffer. The answer is not the easy to swallow (and profitable to sell) little bottles of pills, but opening our eyes to the big picture.

Our gut tells us that something just isn’t right about the whole thing. Our collective power as consumers carries far more political clout than we can imagine. If we educate ourselves about the food industry, we will realize that by buying our food as close to the source as possible, we will change the landscape for the better. Imagine if no one showed up at the mega-church, but instead gathered in small, interconnected groups to worship. Imagine if no one went to the supermarket, but instead met up with neighbors at the farmer’s market.