Rock Conner > Recent Status Updates

...the strangely imperceptible attrition of people's control over what they eat, with the eater becoming the consumer of mass-produced food rather than the controller and cook of it, the manifold forces that work to hold consumption in channels predictable enough to maintain food-industry profits, the paradoxical narrowing of individual choice...in the guise of increasing convenience, ease, and"freedom"...

To the extent we can define things for others ...(w)e affect their self-definition by motivating their consumption...their very personalities; who and what they think they are. Tobacco, sugar, and tea were the first objects within capitalism that conveyed with their use the complex idea that one could BECOME different by CONSUMING differently.

...the hypothesis offered here is that sugar and other drug foods, by provisioning, sating -- and, indeed, drugging -- farm and factory workers, sharply reduced the overall cost of creating and reproducing the metropolitan proletariat.

Most of us, most of the time, act within plays the lines of which were written long ago...which require recognition, not intervention...not to deny individuality or the human capacity to add, transform, and reject meanings...the webs of signification that we as individuals spin are exceedingly small and fine...for the most part they reside within other webs of immense scale, surpassing single lives in time and space.