Recently, an article titled “In Defense of Downloading” by one Matthew Dusenbury found it’s way to my email inbox. The short essay features a curious moral circumvention of intellectual property rights, major record label’s shortcomings since the inception of our beloved Internet, and a dramatic betrayal of fan trust. The proposed course of action was indeed a scandalous one: download music illegally! As evidenced by this article’s very existence, our young technology laureate’s views are not what you would call congruent with my own.

The fundamentals of copyright seem to have taken a hiatus from the article’s first argument. Since downloading is exponentially cheaper than creating another physical product and doesn’t even remove an existing one from the shelf, says the original author, it shouldn’t constitute a breach of any moral or ethical code. Even his bread analogy can’t make this okay. If I owned the hypothetical bread-maker mentioned in the original article, and cloned a piece of bread that the grocer normally sells, the grocer would be losing me as a customer. The analogy breaks down further when we consider that the “grocer” legally owns the right to mechanically reproduce the loaf design, and publically perform his “bread”. (See what I did there?)

Digitally duplicating a song irrefutably infringes on the copyright owner’s (songwriters and sound recording owners) legal rights to “mechanically reproduce” the song or authorize someone to do so. As an aside, I’ll concede that a download doesn’t mean a lost sale in every case; the “try before you buy” mentality is very strong; an Industry Canada study even concluded that people engaged in P2P downloading buy more music. But it’s those “casual” music fans that fall outside the realm of that study that are the problem because they are the majority. Downloads from this segment of people do mean lost sales. It is a form of theft because it violates the music creator’s legal rights, and hampers their ability to earn artist and mechanical royalties. This loss is compounded if we’re talking about independent artists.

On to the second point about the livelihood of the music industry, and the accountant and executive greed: those bean counters with the jewel-lined pockets will not be ousted by the shrinking profit margins that result from downloading. Downloading can never be a protest against archaic industry jobs; it only forces record labels to be stingy and invest solely in sure things. As a result of this downloading-without-paying tomfoolery, the anatomy of a hit song has become unflinchingly rigid. “But the indies will rise up and save our dying industry!” you say? They won’t be able to do that without their acts earning money.

Finally, I’d like to rebut the argument that the fans have been betrayed. Fans should pay what the artists ask for a song. If an artist isn’t in a position where they set their own price for CD or digital sales, that’s a poor business decision on their part. Downloading without paying is no more of a sustainable solution to high prices than a few fans sporadically donating money to the band when they come through town. (How does the band afford to tour?)

In conclusion: yes, we need a new model that takes advantage of the wonderful powers of the interwebs, but it shouldn’t be one that shortchanges honest, hardworking songwriters and musicians.

There is not a single scientist or corporation that knows enough about how natural food works yet who could change, process, or recommend anything else without adversely affecting the health of society as a whole. Food Science is too new to test on humans and the food industry is battling government regulations while western culture battles western diseases. The fight of the former succeeds at the expense of the latter largely because of burgeoning nutritionism ideology.

The scientific studies and surveys that guide consumer’s hands at the grocery stores and restaurants are flawed at best. To understand how we got to this point, we’ll need to step back a little. During the years of World War Two, Americans’ hearts were in much better health than the following 20 years where they suffered a 50% increase in heart attacks. Food science’s explanation blamed the rationed intake of animal fats during war time, glossing over other important factors such as increased exercise as a result of the gasoline ration, or the rising trend of sugar as a replacement for fat instead of cutting overall calories. (Pollan 47) Indeed, a recent study by a group of Harvard scientists speaks both on their own, and the nutritionism community’s authority that the low-fat campaign we’ve seen for the last 30 years has been based on little scientific evidence and has been more than partly responsible for the poor health of America and other nations. (Hu et al.) And compounded on top of this rocky statistical and scientific foundation is the warning of the New England Journal of Medicine that “most of the decline in deaths from heart disease is due not to changes in lifestyle, such as diet, but to improvements in medical care.” (qtd. in Pollan 61) Food Science does not have the data, or the understanding yet, to steer decisions on food. Perhaps the most unfortunate consequence is in the form of Justus Von Liebig, the discoverer of both micro and macronutrients, and inventor of the fore-runners of baby formulas. He seemed to think that the nutrients he discovered – in isolated form – would provide everything that infants needed to grow strong and healthy. Unfortunately, many infants died as a result. (Pollan 21)

Large corporations acting directly, and under the guise of farmer’s associations are also to blame for society’s poor understanding of what, and how much to eat. As Pollan recounts, It started in earnest when, in 1977, Senator McGovern and the Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs issued a set of guidelines[1] that, in keeping with scientific opinion of the times, advised Americans to eat less red meat and dairy. Those industries formed a “beef lobby” that was able to change the senator’s message in such a way that it demonized the fat, without specific mention of any one food, while at the same time calling for consumption of more low fat food. (23-25) The corporations further skew society’s perception of what is best to eat when genetically modified[2] foods are brought into the picture. Keeping in mind that most GM foods conform to food science’s idea of health, consider the confusion that a consumer is faced with when they are unable to differentiate a naturally grown apple with a GM apple. Here’s why that matters: As Kenner documented in Food Inc., Industrial farming corporations fought tooth and nail with government regulations to ensure that they would not have to label their GM foods as such. To see why this important, a statistic is in order: one would need to eat three GM apples from today, to get the same amount of nutritional value from an organic apple grown in 1940. (Pollan 135) It’s not possible to accept the American Food Guide’s advice on dairy, when, as Achbar notes in The Corporation it’s been funded by the Dairy Farmers of America. If that weren’t enough, both David S. Ludwig et al. and Marion Nestle have published studies that find “when industry funds nutrition research, the conclusions are more likely to produce findings favorable to that industry’s products.” (qtd. in Pollan 134) Woolf also shows us, during King Corn that no corn farmer is surviving off of the sale of their corn alone, and in fact many would go broke if it weren’t for the subsidies the government had been lobbied to give out by the cattle, chicken, and soda industries who all depend fiercely on the versatile corn crop to manufacture their products. Corporations whose opinions are clouded by their drive to profit, and cannot sincerely recommend consumers food that is genuinely good for them.

When Senator McGovern caved to the beef lobby, he allowed the ideology of nutritionism to come into it’s own. Throughout Twinkie, Deconstructed Ettlinger shows us the lengths that companies go to synthetically produce the vitamins that the FDA mandates be present in certain foods. Between this, and the relatively new psychological condition of orthorexia[3], one can see nutritionism rear it’s ugly head as people everywhere start to view food as simply vehicles for depositing nutrition into our bodies. Think again on Liebig’s baby formula – his isolation of simple nutrients misses the forest for all the trees, and the results are catastrophic. Rozin shows how our view that fat as a toxin is hazardous to our health and blurs our already weak understanding of nutrition. His study saw only 7 percent of the population choosing the correct answer when he asked what would be the most complete nourishment to survive on for a year.[4] (438-437)

To most effectively illustrate the negative effects of nutritionism, it helps to step out of the nutritionism paradigm that so much of food sciences and industries are dependant on, and examine the lifestyles of those living there, in both the past and the present. Pollan uses Nestle’s words to drive an important point home, saying that we often “take the nutrient out of context of the food, the food out of context of the diet, and the diet out of context of the lifestyle.” (62) Weston Price, in his exhaustive study of indigenous societies found that those who eat whole foods that exist naturally in their environment – be it the arctic, coastal, or mountain – have none of the diseases prevalent in western society today. They have no “heart disease, diabetes, cancer, obesity, stroke, malformed dental arches, or ulcers”. (qtd. in Pollan 86) This research is built upon by O’Dea who took 10 Aborigines[5] living a very westernized lifestyle (diseases and all) on a seven week retreat and had them eat only what they hunted, as their ancestors had done. This resulted in them all losing an average of 17.9 pounds, regaining a normal blood pressure level, and greatly improving, or eliminating most symptoms of type 2 diabetes. (596-603) Through these studies, one is able to see that the typical western diet (as a large component of the western lifestyle) is too far removed from any traditional, natural diet to provide the mutritional benefits that would otherwise keep society in good health.

In summation, food science is ill advised when it comes to society’s health, the corporations, and industrial farm owners are too concerned with profit to transparently advise what to eat for best health, and the two blend together to form the nutritionism ideology that has both parties further entrenched in the westernized way of eating that, as Woolf remarks on, will make this generation the first to have a shorter life span than [it’s] parents. If that isn’t food for thought, then society must be too full from eating so much junk.

[2] Hereafter referred to as “GM”

[3] An unhealthy obsession with healthy eating

[4] Hot Dogs and Milk Chocolate were the most complete forms of nourishment.

[5] Indigenous people of Australia

Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food. New York: Penguin Group USA, 2008. Print.

Ettlinger, Steve. Twinkie, Deconstructed. New York: Penguin Group USA, 2008. Print.

Woolf, Aaron, Dir. King Corn. Perf. Cheney, Ian, and Curtis Ellis. Balcony Releasing: 2007, Film.

Kenner, Robert, Dir. Food Inc.. Perf. Pollan, Michael, and Eric Schlosser. Magnolia Pictures: 2008, Film.

Achbar, Mark, Dir. The Corporation. Perf. Rifkin, Jeremy. Zeitgeist Films: 2003, Film.

Hu, Frank B., et al., “Types of Dietary Fat and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease: A Critical review.” Journal of the American College of Nutrition. 20.1 (2001): Print.

Rozin, Paul, et al. “Lay American Conceptions of Nutrition: Dose insensitivity, Categorical Thinking, Contagion, and the Monotonic Mind.” Health Psychology. 15.6 (1996) 438-47. Print.

O’Dea, Kerin. “Marked Improvement in Carbohydrate and Lipid Metabolism in Diabetic Australian Aborigines after Temporary Reversion to Traditional Lifestyle.” Diabetes. 33 (1984): 596-603. Print.