A Valentine for Democracy

If you want to protect people’s rights, support good news organizations.

Cropped version of Paul Cézanne's "The Artist’s Father, “Reading ‘L’Événement’, “1866. National Galley of Art. Image in public domain.

I’d like to think most adults in the United States know something about what’s in their food and who produced it.

We go to grocery stores where many of us will read the labels on any packaged food we buy. Some of us like to wander in farmers markets, asking the vendors questions. We have our criteria for choosing which restaurants to visit, often looking to reviews by previous patrons and reading menus online.

Author photo, Little Italy Mercato, San Diego. 2017.

Imagine that you just happened across a mystery meal, a plate of food left someplace by some unknown person.

How many of you would pick up that plate and eat from it? How many people who were not starving would do that?

Let’s agree that very few people would pick up food from an unknown source and put it into their mouth.

Yet people are constantly reading stuff posted on the Internet without understanding who wrote it and why it’s there. There’s a flood of clickbait and babble that competes with valuable information for our attention.