A SLOW POISON SERVED DAILY_ BY PROFESSOR DOSUNMU

We do not set out each morning in search of poison. We wake, we work, we wander through the routines of survival, trusting that the food before us will nourish rather than gnaw at our lives. Yet in the silent corridors of commerce and the shadowy shortcuts of survival economics, toxins lie in wait like landmines beneath our daily bread. One does not intend to ingest danger; danger is ingeniously inserted into the menu.

What appears wholesome is often hollowed by hidden harm. Eggs arrive polished but plastic in pedigree. Rice gleams with an unnatural gloss. Bananas and plantains blush yellow not by patient ripening but by carbide’s coercion. Garri bites sharply on the tongue, not from purity but from lime and chemical tampering. Meat softens in the pot, not from careful cooking, but from the clandestine companionship of crushed analgesics.

The marketplace, once a theatre of freshness and fragrance, has become a laboratory of lethal improvisations. Fruits are rinsed with sullied water, their skins shining while their safety is suspect. Chemicals hasten ripening; pesticides linger beneath the peel; preservatives creep into beans like uninvited tenants. Sniper and cement, meant for pests and construction, trespass into kitchens and stomachs alike. What should sustain life becomes a slow rehearsal for illness.

Even the sanctum of healing is not spared. Pharmacies, expected to guard health, sometimes dispense deception. Counterfeit drugs parade in convincing packaging, their promise polished and their potency questionable. The patient swallows hope but receives harm.

This is not merely a public health concern; it is a moral crisis, a civic calamity, a collective compromise. When profit prevails over protection, when convenience conquers conscience, when regulation retreats and greed advances, society becomes complicit in a quiet catastrophe. We are not dying dramatically; we are dying delicately, incrementally, installment by installment.

Shall this impunity continue without interruption? Shall survival remain a gamble played at the dining table? Shall nourishment become negotiation?

Perhaps the next time we meet, the familiar greeting will require revision. Beyond “How are you?” will come a deeper inquiry: Are you well from what you eat? Are you safe from what sustains you? Are you still wholly yourself beneath the layers of what you consume?

For in an age where food may deceive and medicine may masquerade, health is no longer assumed, it must be defended, demanded, and deliberately safeguarded.

© PROFESSOR SIMEON DOSUNMU 

@Social Seer, 2026

- Nigeria