What do a burger and a cigarette have in common? Nothing for the lighthearted. The World Health Organization now says that processed meats cause cancer. They aren’t “correlated” or “related” to cancer — they can cause it.
This release sent ripples throughout the American psyche, yet the food industry has remained largely unquestioned. Farmer injustice, poor living conditions for livestock and now this. It seems like nothing is new. Issues like these are reiterated over and over again, and nothing comes of them because it doesn’t directly affect our lives.
But this does. Yes, there are a multitude of things nowadays that can cause cancer, but this one is easily solvable. Ignoring science and facts for convenience’s sake should not be justified in any capacity. This logic is similar to thinking there is a lot of smoke that we inhale in our lifetimes, so smoking a cigarette will not make a difference.
A common misconception is that small actions in our daily lives are just a drop in the bucket of a larger, systemic issue. This argument is used when addressing institutional racism, inequality in schools or, in this case, human health.
If our daily, insignificant actions do not affect the world around us, then there wouldn’t be high levels of obesity in this country. We wouldn’t have unequal pay in the workforce. We wouldn’t have the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a conglomeration of waste from littered beaches that makes up an island in the middle of the Pacific.
Small actions, when isolated, might only have small impacts. But nothing is isolated, and accumulation creates the larger impacts we see in our world. To take from a piece of graffiti from the Berlin Wall, “Many small people who in many small places do many small things that can alter the face of the world.”
Even if cutting out processed meat, or meat altogether, is clearly beneficial to health, most people might still choose not to do this. Many people see this diet as a larger protein sacrifice than what it actually is.
Protein consumption is a concept that is emphasized in American culture, and because of it Americans tend to eat twice the daily amount of protein they need. And there are negative health effects from this, such as kidney disease and osteoporosis.
So in reality, this emphasis on getting in your daily protein can cause more harm than good. Being a vegetarian or “chooseatarian” can bring healthier options to a lot of people, yet it is rarely encouraged.
