Over the past few days I’ve been following the public bashing of Chef Pete Evans over his recent comments about Autism, Alzheimers, Dementia and the recommended Nutritional Guidelines (one of his comments can be found here).
Today I saw yet another disgraceful Facebook post, this time by Mamamia who had also just jumped onto the lynch-mob bandwagon to take a swipe at Evans.
Completely ignoring the fact that these appalling folk (Mamamia and A Current Affair head up this long shame list) are taking what Pete Evans has said both out of context or not actually said by him at ALL…. pushing that issue aside (that would require its own blog post entirely) I have noticed something very interesting in these attacks on Pete Evans.
Cast your mind back a few years… okay maybe a few hundred years… to the early-mid 1600’s. There was a fellow named Galileo, (a pretty switched on guy by all accounts) who loved looking up. Now while looking up, Gal (known this way to his friends I’m sure) noticed that the things he had been taught and told (you know, that the sun and all the stars revolved around God’s earth) just didn’t make sense with what he was seeing. He noticed that if he forgot everything he had been taught for a while, and just looked at what he was seeing, everything was different.
To cut a long story short, basically Gal came up with his theory that the earth actually revolved around our sun, not the other way around. Gal started telling everyone about this idea but not everyone was happy about his theory and Gal made some big enemies in the Roman Catholic Church. They hated the idea of someone telling their masses that everything doesn’t revolve around us. In the end, the RCC were so threatened by Gal, they had him arrested, tried and convicted of heresy. He was kept under house arrest for 9 years until his death.
Spoiler Alert : Gal was right!!!!
Now….. see the similarities here? Substitute Galileo with people like Pete Evans (or Dr Maryanne Demassi and the folk at Catalyst, or Gary Taubes, or Dr William Davis etc) , and substitute the Roman Catholic Church with big corporations (food companies, pharmaceutical companies, the entire weight loss industry etc), and substitute the arrest/trial/imprisonment with public media and social media ridicule, name calling and discrediting (it’s same thing these days isn’t it?)
See the similarities? The only difference is, back then the church had to do their own dirty work (the Roman Inquisition). Today, these large companies are able to flex their purse strings and get others to do the persecution for them (health, nutrition and dietitian organsations, commercial television, commercial publications etc).
Someone comes out with ideas that challenge the “norm” and these big companies instantly go into Profit Protection Mode because let’s face it… whether it is Paleo, LCHF, GAPS, Banting, and others, the common ground here is just eating real food, and there isn’t much profit or industry monopolisation to be had in fresh, healthy wholefoods is there?
So I say to Pete Evans and everyone else out there fighting the good fight, stick to your guns, keep pushing, and never give up. The momentum is slowly swinging our way (which is why big companies are reacting so viciously) and will only continue to build.