Dear Sir,

I read with a sad heart that several big-name baby food companies had to respond to allegations that they knew there were high levels of cadmium, lead and mercury in their baby food products.

Parents who had believed that they had been feeding healthy food to their children discovered this sad truth, which leads to others.

We are inculcated from an early age to be “blind faith” consumers and promoters of the products of progress. We go to schools to learn how to get jobs, which will enable us to pay for those things that we need to survive. We do our jobs and spend our earnings on things we need and things we “believe we need” in order to fulfil our desire for status and meaning.

We somehow forget that these modern-day products and services all come with inherent costs — both positive and negative. In fact, the idea that we can free ourselves by amassing enough capital is as elusive as it is false since we are all deeply ensnared by modern capitalism’s general shift from humanist ideals to greater levels of manipulation and deception that affect every facet of our lives.

It has entrenched us in a culturally inclusive relationship such that even our “leisure” activities — such as sport, music, movies, art — which represent a means of expression or escape serve to distract us from an awareness of the level of victimisation we happen to fall into.

The essential point is that we end up with a mass of adults who have such a profound “blind faith” in this relationship that they are shocked by those developments that challenge the narrative of the “promises of progress”.

Unfortunately, those promises have been co-opted by breaches of trust that have become such a pervasive characteristic of modern-day business practices that it should not surprise us to discover our health or wellbeing was dismissed in the pursuit of profits.

Our “blind faith” shields us from the sad truth that modern capitalism, which is largely the domain of multibillion, multinational corporations, affects all of us and needs a paradigm shift towards humanistic, ethical and environmental ideals.

It should not take makeshift consumer groups or environmentalist groups — or whistle-blowers — to raise awareness of its victimisation. There needs to be solid checks in the form of independent “regulatory” bodies that serve to protect the people from “breaches of trust”.

The outcome would be to help force a shift in the existing capitalist model to prevent or severely limit its victimisation of the population. Having healthy food for babies is one of many high priorities.

ANTHONY CRICHLOW

Devonshire