You Can't Stop a Revolution with an Ad Campaign

According to today's New York Times, the British government is running into trouble with a new ad campaign aimed at promoting weight loss. Junk food companies trying to get in on the action want to use the campaign's logo. TV stations continue to run ads for foods high in sugar, fat, and sodium, undermining the government's anti-obesity message. Things aren't going smoothly for these well-intentioned government fat-fighters.

Many contemporary social critics blame our collective weight loss issues on modern developments such as the invention of high fructose corn syrup and government subsidies encouraging the mass production of cheap, low quality food. At the risk of grossly oversimplifying an extremely complex issue, I'd argue that the root of the problem actually goes back several hundred years, to the time of the Industrial Revolution.

Ironically the Industrial Revolution first caught on in Britain, home of the faltering anti-obesity campaign. As eighteenth-century businesses developed the tools and infrastructure they needed to mass produce consumer products, government policies such as the Enclosure Acts made it difficult for independent agriculturalists to keep living off of their land. Forced to move to the cities, these displaced farmers became workers in the country's emerging industrial economy. They became wage earners instead of self-sufficient homesteaders.

The same government which had forced them off their land softened the blow by encouraging mass-production of all kinds of foods that had previously been available only to the wealthy. Aggressive colonial policies secured cheap supplies of sugar and tea. The same Enclosure Acts which had been the death knell of small scale farming ensured a steady supply of meat, which most eighteenth-century Englishmen had previously enjoyed only on special occasions.

These events set the stage for the past two and a half centuries of unfortunate eating habits, which American culture has inherited from our British ancestor. Food has become a consumer commodity, a reward for an unrewarding day's work.

You can't change this kind of history with an ad campaign. We won't start eating well until we start living well and doing meaningful work.