Modern Culture and Wellbeing – lessons from a pandemic

Veritas author Catherine Conlon shares with us, lessons from a pandemic based on her new book.

Dr Catherine Conlon is Director of Health and Nutrition at Safefood, the all-island organisation that provides advice in food safety, healthy eating and food hygiene for consumers. 

 

A timely and thought-provoking book, it considers what can be done at a personal, national and global level to meet the challenges that confront us in a rapidly changing, unstable and unpredictable world.

 

Click here to buy the book

 

https://www.veritasbooksonline.com/modern-culture-and-well-being-towards-a-sustainabl-9781847309082-42971/

 

Modern Culture and Wellbeing – lessons from a pandemic.

Since the beginning of the year the world has been turned on its head. The COVID 19 pandemic has travelled across the globe and impacted on all of our lives in a way that would have been unthinkable before all of this started. 

The lessons we learn from this crisis will inform the next crisis – the global climate and biodiversity crisis that is already well underway, building its destructive potential globally.

‘Modern Culture and Wellbeing – Towards a Sustainable Future’ (Veritas, 2020) looks at aspects of modern culture that influence health and wellbeing in Ireland. 

Despite good things about modern culture such as improved life expectancy, less poverty and lessening social constraints; other things are not so good. Mental health, especially among young people, is tested by a culture that rewards consumerism. Overweight and obesity is now normal, aggravated by a food environment that makes the unhealthy choice full of fat, sugar and calories, the cheapest and most convenient option. Addiction is also aggravated by a culture that propagates long working hours, testing commutes and the exorbitant cost of housing and childcare. 

All of this is surmounted by growing problems of climate change and biodiversity collapse; fuelled by a culture that demands ever increasing productivity and profit, with little consideration for ethical working conditions or respect for the environment.

‘Modern culture and Wellbeing – Towards a Sustainable Future;’ considers how, in coping with the COVID 19 pandemic and emerging crises around climate and biodiversity, we have the opportunity to rediscover basic values of humanity and lay the foundations for safer, healthier, fairer and sustainable life on this planet. 

 

Catherine Conlon 

August 2020