Thursday, July 17, 2008

The Corruption of Words: Gays and Food

I recently read the book, In Defense of Food: An Eaters Manifesto, by Michael Pollan. In this book he describes a law in 1938 imposed by the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. This law required when we buy traditional foods that most of us recognize, such as bread, butter, milk and cheese we should get exactly that. " if a food resembles a standardized food, but does not comply with the standard, that food must be labeled an imitation". However in 1977 the food industry managed to get this law overturned, and fake foods were allowed to pass as the real thing. So bread, that completely isn't what bread used to be, is now considered well.. bread. This new bread has the nutrients leached out of it, and while it pleases the palate and is whiter than before, is nutritionally useless.

Anyhow as I was reading this I was thinking of the corruption of day to day words as it applies to us gay folk. Words that are comforting and provide structure to people like family, values, tradition and morality have been so corrupted, that like fake foods, the shell of the word exist but its meaning is corrupted. We have families and values and tradition and morals, but the right has succeeded to a great degree to deprive these words of their true meaning while still keeping them 'familiar'Corrupted familiar words don't repulse society quite the same way, had Focus on the Family been labeled Focus on Destroying Fags and Dyke's, I am sure society would be far more repulsed. Quite the same way that they would if wonderbread was labeled fake food.

Not only are we becoming nutritionally bankrupt thanks to corrupted words, we are becoming morally bankrupt too.

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