Who is protecting the real interest of the consumer?

It wasn’t many years ago that food production was an art. Whether it was vegetables or meat, you always knew where your produce came from. In todays world, food is mass produced, filled with antibiotics that increases our resistance which means that if we get sick conventional strength antibiotics won’t cut it with a vague idea of where the creature or vegetable we are now sinking our teeth into came from. It is the same story with soda’s, although some specialist shops still carry reasonably priced soda’s which are made with real cane sugar as opposed to corn syrup, which has taken place in much of the food consumption today and allegedly is a massive contributor to obesity in the western world.

In short: production has gone from quality to quantity, from focus on the consumer experience to focus on increased profits, and from focus on sustainable production to maximising efficiency. All the expense of the people, who must now accept that eating healthy food is much more expensive than eating the unhealthy mass-produce.

I would argue that the people of a country has two fronts of ‘protection’, first line is the politicians who put in place legislation to protect us from businesses abusing their increasing power, a task at which they have tremendously failed at due to lobbying and global corporations pressuring the legislators together with a lack of ethical interest. The second line of defence is the media who takes pride in (watching over) the actions and legislations that politicians take and the wrongdoings of big business.

While we as consumers are demanding lower prices, is it ethical to demand this on the cost of unsustai-


nability and increased health problems with half the country being obese, and where does the responsibilities lie? With the media, the politicians, or the public?

The result of the lacking interest is especially evident when thinking about the horse meat scandal and that much of the population either don’t know how to live healthy, or simply just haven’t got the income to do so.

Who has the primary responsibility
	The Public
	The Media
	The Politicians
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The Media Sharks

The amount of times I have disagreed with the media opinion can’t even be counted. I hate the way their stories lean into the same opinion as their sponsors.

Recently there has been a lot of press on Romanians and Bulgarians immigrating to the UK.  I was shocked to see the daring of some media sources in strongly fighting against this just to change their mind halfway through 2013.

Taking the Guardian as an example they started off in January 2013 with a huge anti-Romanians and Bulgarians campaign. They launched a challenge to their audience to come up with the worst things that characterise England and create visuals that would then be used in the 2 eastern European countries. I was shocked to see how the English could lower themselves to talk badly about their own country just to achieve such goals. You’d think they’d have more respect then that.

These were the products of the challenge.

                             

           


                       

      

Just thinking about the fact that these are opinions of English people about their own culture and country makes me wonder what happened to the great English reputation about its people being loyal to the queen and country.

But getting back to the subject of media hypocrisy, after the summer 2013 it started being clear that the impending so called ‘invasion’ could not be stopped so suddenly the Guardian has changed its opinion and started supporting it.  The articles now reveal the fact that the fear of immigrants comes from myths and tales about mafia and kidnappings etc. They reinforce the idea that a society should not be generalised as bad just because of the few bad people. Every country has them and it should not be discriminated because of it.  

The sad part is that the media still have a high influence over people and their mentality and it will continue on manipulating the public unless we do something about it.  So, what are we going to do about it?