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This omission of any mention of industrialisation could be rationalised
in several ways:-
- perhaps all the 'insiders' know about this industrialisation,
and they are keeping it a secret
- perhaps they forgot to mention it
- perhaps this is 'just the way people think' - they don't want
to think about where their food comes from and what it is.
- They are not interested in the sources of their food, and this
includes the Government Ministers when they go to the supermarket
to buy their food like ordinary people.
I suspect that point 3 may closest to the truth. Everyone really
knows that food production is industrialised, but they prefer not
to think about it. They prefer to imagine that the adverts using
images of happy rural scenes are true. The products look nice on
the supermarket shelves, they are for sale at a reasonable price,
they taste OK, and it's impossible to tell the difference anyway.
So the dispositive has another deep fault line:-
while
the discourse is all sweetness, light and cooperation, and shows
all is going well
the 'knowledge
contained in the physical objects', that is, knowledge about the
food on sale, is almost entirely ignored,
and this is replaced by a 'fantasy knowledge' provided by marketing
I am not suggesting that this is a deliberate secrecy by either
the government or by the food suppliers. I am suggesting that this
is what has developed throughout the whole system, and that consumers
generally choose cheap food that looks OK, and this is what the
supply chain provides for them. I think that the information about
the industrial sources of food is obvious to anyone who thinks about
it, but that everyone is happy with the system the way it is - there
is a collective amnesia.
The Government Aims and Objectives do not engage with the industrialisation
and globalisation of the food industry, and do not mention them,
and this seems to be a major psychological fissure (in society)
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