America, Conformity, Obesity and Death Journal

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Lottery

One could make a connection between The Lottery and Fed Up. Fed Up is about the sugar industry, and the lobbying that goes on to ensure that the interests of the sugar growers are taken care of. We know that sugar growers receive trade protections, which have increased the price of sugar. When some companies substitute high fructose corn syrup, those companies also engage in extensive lobbying. Fast and processed food companies are in this system as well. The interesting thing is that when it comes to food, people choose what they eat. They do not have to eat sugar-laden junk food; this is just an American tendency. It is actually the tendency of a lot of wealthy countries, but Fed Up is partially about the way that regulators ignore and suppress efforts to regulate unnecessary sugars and other junk foods in our diet.

Where The Lottery comparison can be used is that the townspeople in the story are Americans. They are engaging in a destructive behavior, and they do not know why. They are making a sacrifice of out of their members, but there is not necessarily any point to it. The sacrifice is done because that is tradition. This occurs while more enlightened towns in the area have dispensed with the tradition. The sacrifice can be seen as the negative health effects of the unhealthy eating habits. While the analogy is not perfect -- it is unclear who actually benefits in the Lottery while there are clear beneficiaries in Fed Up -- the idea is fairly simple. We all know people are going to die early as the result of this overeating, but everybody is mostly just resigned to it. When it is our turn, when we find out that we are the one who will get sick, we reject the idea, yet before we got sick we were an active participant in the society and were perfectly willing to go along with it.

So part of the lesson can be seen as a call to stand against the norms of society when they are wrong; or at the very least to accept your fate gracefully when it comes to you.

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But mostly, that when something is wrong you may want to stand up and rise against it in order to prevent yourself from becoming a victim in the future. Not standing up for society as a whole means that you are not standing up for yourself. Moreover, nobody will help you when it is your turn. So the lesson of the lottery when applied to the modern political system is that we have to do more to stand up for ourselves. We can make the individual choice not to eat junk food -- just as the people in the Lottery town could just move to a different town -- but we should not just limit our response to individual choice. We should instead view ourselves as active participants in society, and work to build the society that we want.

There are differences of course. Because there are specific beneficiaries in agribusiness, they have solidified their power….....

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