Monday, August 30, 2010

Accomodation


Sorry about the long hiatus in posting to this blog. Lots of stuff has been going on since the last post, which is not a good excuse but that's all I can say.

The title of this post is accomodation. What do I mean by that? It's the way we behave when we want to have certain circumstances that we need but can not get easily. An example is the usage of clothes, blankets, houses, heaters, air conditioners, fires, and all other appliances that make our living environment habitable. Naturally we humans thrive when we live in the tropical parts of the world. We feel comfortable in a very narrow range of temperatures. Most people are too hot when the ambient temperature is above about 85 degrees (F) and too cold when it is below about 65 degrees (F). In fact even this narrow range is expanded as we usually wear clothes when it is 65 degrees, if we did not we would feel cold at about 70 degrees or lower.

This is what I mean by accomodation. We accomodate ourselves by using something to change our environment. In the example above it is to make us feel like we are in the tropics all the time no matter where on the planet we actually are.

When people do not eat enough sweet fruit, like most of the people on the planet, they crave sweets. In fact they crave sweets so much that they accomodate the cravings by using artificial fruits such as sugar, sweeteners (natural and artificial), honey, dried fruit, etc. Go into any grocery store, health foods store, farmer's market, co-op or even corner store and what do you see? Stacks and stacks of shelves full of sugar and sweeteners. Sugar sweetened cereals, artificially sweetened cereals, fruit juice sweetened cereals, sweetened breads, muffins, cakes, cookies, candies of every variety possible, candy bars, sweet chocolate, semi-sweet chocolate, sweetened dairy products like chocolate milk, strawberry flavored milk, bags of sugar, pots of honey, dried fruit, stevia, the list is nearly endless. Soda is another completely huge monster on it's own, I think about 40% of Americans' calories comes directly from soda.

If not for sweets I think the grocery stores would be out of business. I would guess that more than 75% of the net sales of all foods are from sweets and sweetened foods. The total sales of fresh fruits and sweet vegetables like beets, carrots, yams, etc. probably do not make up even 10% of the sales of sweetened foods.

This is what I call a big accomodation, we are totally frugavores and most everyone admits to having a sweet tooth but instead of having a bunch of ripe bananas they opt for the 64 ounces of soda. Then when someone mentions that humans' natural diet is ripe, raw fresh and juicy fruit all they get in return is an argument that we humans are meant to eat meat or some kind of protein argument. If Dr. Pepper was growing on trees then maybe they'd have a good case but I still have not seen a Dr. Pepper tree.