Dieting Makes You Fat by Geoffrey Cannon

Author:Geoffrey Cannon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780753518625
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

Our whole lives

Your wellbeing is good for your sake, and is helpful for your family, friends, colleagues and community. But if we want to believe that we are making any kind of a difference, what else are we doing with our lives? What are the models for wisely led lives that also take into account the circumstances and the aspirations of the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America, our place and purpose as humans here on the planet, and what we know now about climate change and the depletion of natural resources? We will do well to think more about where we are going, and why.

Now that I live in Latin America I see North America and Europe differently. Having spent most of my life in London, when I visit its centre now I enjoy what big cities offer – visionary discussions, exciting ideas, parks, books, concerts, theatre, art, architecture, and delicious meals, some based on great cuisines. Now also though I am more aware of the reasons why so many goods in the shops are so cheap. Overall, London’s ecological footprint, all the resources the city uses, is 120 times its own size, an area the size of Britain. This cannot continue for much longer. The financial systems that keep the materially rich nations afloat now seem like patched rubber rafts drifting on stormy seas.

If everybody in the world consumed like the average person in the USA, we would need four extra planets. The estimate for the UK is three extra planets. The Global Footprint Network, set up to calculate the impact of human consumption on the earth’s resources, calculates that the total ecological footprint of the human species worldwide exceeded the planet’s carrying capacity in the 1980s, and by the turn of the 21st century was around 20 per cent above that level. In 2007 the earth was calculated to have gone into ‘ecological debt’ on 6 October. Near the turn of the century the originators of the ecological footprint concept reckoned that: ‘To accommodate sustainably the anticipated increase in population and economic output of the next four decades, we would require six to twelve additional planets.’

Here is hoping that you have your own sense of how life on earth can be, in your lifetime and that of your grandchildren. I have a reason to think about this every day. As I complete this chapter my son Gabriel, who will be four years old when this book is first published, comes up the spiral stairs to my study, gives me the drawing he has just made, and presses a Smilemaker sticky red heart (yes, made in China) on to my hand. I want what I have written to make sense to him. Soon it will be his turn to make sense of being human.

You do not need to move from where you are right now to begin to fulfil yourself. This includes eating and drinking well, as part of acting and living right. Read and reflect, take a walk, and begin with yourself.

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