Don't tell me what to eat!

People in general don't like to be told what to do. Also concerning the food that's on our plate, we'll decide about that ourselves. We need no government regulations or animal rights or vegetarian groups preaching to us about what to eat, and what not, how much of it, how we should prepare it. We'll make up our own minds about all that, thank you very much.

This free choice, however, is an illusion, and probably nowhere more so than in the domain of food "choices". What most people eat is very heavily determined by agriculture and economy, culture and tradition, what our parents ate, and by what commercial interests want us to eat.

As an illustration of this, check out the graphic from the counting animals website. The chart represents the US advertising budgets of different food cooperations, compared to those of animal interest groups. It would be interesting to compare this also with government budgets for healthy eating.