Food: What is Food?

[Explor­ing Life] Most of what we buy in a gro­cery store is not food. Man­u­fac­tured, processed, or mod­i­fied prod­ucts are not real food, they are food imi­ta­tions or edi­ble food-like sub­stances. Food imi­ta­tions might begin in nature but are then mod­i­fied through the addi­tion of addi­tives in man­u­fac­tur­ing and pro­cess­ing facil­i­ties before becom­ing avail­able to the gen­eral pub­lic. The appli­ca­tion of sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy on our food sup­ply has served to dete­ri­o­rate the qual­ity of the food we eat, exposes us to toxic addi­tives that impair our health and well being, increases psy­cho­log­i­cal ten­sion and anx­i­ety asso­ci­ated with eat­ing, and con­fuses our under­stand­ing of what food really is.

What is Food?

Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food[1] invites us to ques­tion our basic assump­tions about food. The first and most crit­i­cal step in ques­tion­ing our basic assump­tions about food is to place the def­i­n­i­tion of food under review. In other words, we are asked renew our curios­ity and inter­est in iden­ti­fy­ing the essence of food in order to under­stand what we should eat and what we should avoid.

But I con­tend that most of what we’re con­sum­ing today is no longer, strictly speak­ing, food at all, and how we’re con­sum­ing it — in the car, in front of the TV, and, increas­ingly alone — is not really eat­ing, at least not in the sense that civ­i­liza­tion has long under­stood the term. (Pol­lan, 2008)

The premise of Pollan’s mes­sage is to “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” (Pol­lan, 2008) Advis­ing a per­son to “eat food” may first appear to be sim­plis­tic. If we are not eat­ing food then what are we really eat­ing? Food is its pure form and edi­ble food-like sub­stances need to be dis­tin­guished from one another. Our con­fu­sion about food orig­i­nates in a vast cul­tural expanse of sci­en­tific reduc­tion, mis­di­rected gov­ern­ment poli­cies, man­u­fac­tur­ing processes, and mar­ket­ing tech­niques that have manip­u­lated our assump­tions about food. Food has become hostage to need­less con­fu­sion and complexity.

In its nor­mal state food is both whole and fresh food, or food that has not been processed or mod­i­fied. If the envi­ron­ment in which our food grows, whether it be plant of ani­mal, is toxic then our food is a direct exten­sion of that tox­i­c­ity. If our food is toxic then so is our mind, body and spirit. The act of eat­ing is an unavoid­able act of com­mu­nion with the envi­ron­ment. If we alter the nat­ural envi­ron­ment with pol­lu­tion, fer­til­iz­ers, hor­mones and other toxic addi­tives, then it is only obvi­ous that we are lit­er­ally ingest­ing con­t­a­m­i­nants into our body.

Food: An Unavoid­able Con­nec­tion with the Environment

In its most basic sense, the emer­gence of organic food is a recog­ni­tion that we are inti­mately and unavoid­ably con­nected to the envi­ron­ment. If we put fer­til­iz­ers and pes­ti­cides on plants and then eat those plants it is obvi­ous that we are also eat­ing chem­i­cals. Sim­i­larly, if we feed ani­mals growth hor­mones and antibi­otics and eat those ani­mals we are also eat­ing chem­i­cals. To trust sci­ence to define so-called “safe” lev­els of these chem­i­cals in our food sup­ply is both mis­guided and inept. The sci­ence of food is a nar­ra­tive of trial and error.

The word organic gen­er­ally refers to some­thing that is related to or derived from liv­ing mat­ter. The term organic food is a sub­trac­tive cor­rec­tion, that is to say, it iden­ti­fies a class of food that is free or makes lim­ited use of fer­til­iz­ers, pes­ti­cides, genet­i­cally mod­i­fied organ­isms, hor­mones or antibi­otics. This makes sense since a return to nat­ural and whole food requires the reduc­tion or elim­i­na­tion of addi­tives and mod­i­fi­ca­tions. The adjec­tive organic is really a cul­tural admis­sion of our con­fu­sion about food. Organic food is really just food; any­thing that is not organic is really an edi­ble food-like sub­stance — or not food.

An impor­tant way to reduce our con­fu­sion is to sim­plify our under­stand­ing of the word food to mean a pure and unal­tered state. Food in its purest sense would there­fore not have long lists of ingre­di­ents, either in its cul­ti­va­tion or prepa­ra­tion. Think­ing about plants that have been grown in a back­yard gar­den with­out the aid of chem­i­cals is a sim­ple way to cap­ture this mean­ing. From this per­spec­tive we would not need to apply the adjec­tives “pure” or “whole” to qual­ify the nature of food; food is by default pure and whole mak­ing the use of adjec­tives redundant.

Nutri­tion­ism

Nutri­tional sci­ence is built upon the assump­tion that essen­tial nutri­ents essen­tial can be iden­ti­fied, iso­lated and, taken in the cor­rect amount, will pro­mote pos­i­tive health. Nutri­tion­ism is a sci­en­tific ide­ol­ogy that pro­motes a lim­ited way of under­stand­ing food and our bod­ies in terms of nutri­tional and chem­i­cal ele­ments. A nutri­tion­ist is the pro­fes­sional agent of this ide­ol­ogy and a new diet is the means to seek atten­tion. Left unex­am­ined, nutri­tional sci­ence and the result­ing con­fu­sion of dietary approaches may be prepar­ing the way for the emer­gence of a vast range of health prob­lems yet to be revealed.

Like so many ide­olo­gies, nutri­tion­ism hinges on a form of dual­ism, so that at all times there must be an evil nutri­ent for adher­ents to exco­ri­ate and a sav­ior nutri­ent for them to sanc­tify… nutri­tion­ism sup­plies the ulti­mate jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for pro­cess­ing food by imply­ing that a judi­cious appli­ca­tion of food sci­ence, fake foods can be made even more nutri­tious than the real thing. (Pol­lan, 2008)

The notion that a nutri­tional ele­ment in a food source can be extracted, man­u­fac­tured as a sup­ple­ment, and ingested as a means to increase over­all health if fun­da­men­tally flawed. Nutri­ents within food exist in dynamic rela­tion­ship with other nutri­ents; they do not func­tion in iso­la­tion from one another. To remove a nutri­ent from its nat­ural con­text is to den­i­grate its over­all inter­ac­tive value within a uni­fied sys­tem. The notion that nutri­ents can be clas­si­fied into good or bad, essen­tial or nonessen­tial, can only lead to errors in think­ing that slowly reveal them­selves in health prob­lems over time. Once revealed, how­ever, nutri­tional sci­ence is often quick to replace it with the new “dis­cov­ery” of the day while quickly sweep­ing the old per­spec­tive out of awareness.

The Psy­chol­ogy of Food

The ques­tion of what to eat and what not to eat has become deeply mired in a bog of con­fu­sion orig­i­nat­ing in nutri­tion­ism, jour­nal­ism, food pro­duc­tion, and com­mer­cial mar­ket­ing. Con­fu­sion, when inter­nal­ized to an intense degree, can reveal itself in the form of psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­or­ders. Anorexia ner­vosa is a hor­rific dis­ease that simul­ta­ne­ously affects body, mind and spirit result­ing in dis­torted per­cep­tions of body image cou­pled with a deeply placed fear of gain­ing weight. It is a class of dis­ease that is com­monly referred to as an “eat­ing disorder.”

Psy­chol­o­gists are now exam­in­ing the emer­gence of a new eat­ing dis­or­der called orthorexia ner­vosa, which refers to suf­fer­ing from an unhealthy obses­sion with healthy eat­ing. The word “anorexia” refers to “with­out appetite; “orthorexia” refers to “cor­rect appetite.” Both con­di­tions result is severe mal­nu­tri­tion and poten­tially death by starvation.

The estab­lish­ment of a deeply felt sense of fear and anx­i­ety is an all too com­mon the basis for mar­ket­ing and adver­tis­ing. By estab­lish­ing a fear in the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion and oppor­tu­nity to mar­ket a “solu­tion” appears. If a prod­uct “promises” relief or a “solu­tion” to our fear is asso­ci­ated with “cred­i­ble” sources then the poten­tial for prof­itabil­ity emerges. The illu­sion of mar­ket­ing is the promise of some­thing bet­ter; the real­ity of mar­ket­ing is the cre­ation of vic­tims in the form of consumers.

Sum­mary

This arti­cle has focused on iden­ti­fy­ing the basic prob­lems sur­round­ing our under­stand­ing of food. Four essen­tial issues emerge:

1. con­fu­sion between food and edi­ble food-like substances;
2. a sci­en­tific ten­dency to take nutri­ents out of their nat­ural con­text and pro­mote “good” over “bad” nutrients;
3. the inabil­ity to fully appre­ci­ate the unavoid­able con­nec­tions between the earth and what we do to it, our food sup­ply, and our health; and
4. the emer­gence of psy­cho­log­i­cal fears and anx­i­eties about food that pro­vide oppor­tu­ni­ties for com­mer­cial profiteering.

One pos­si­ble approach is to explore ways to coun­ter­act these influ­ences. For exam­ple we might adopt the fol­low­ing four goals as a means to over­come our confusion:

1. Sim­pli­fy­ing Food: The most impor­tant step is to sim­plify our under­stand­ing of what food is and what it is not. Unless we have a clear aware­ness of the dif­fer­ences between food in its nat­ural state and edi­ble food-like sub­stances that mas­quer­ade as food then our thought processes remain ill-equipped to rise above the confusion;
2. Organic Food: The notion of organic food is really an issue of cer­ti­fi­ca­tion stan­dards, that is, an orga­ni­za­tion or asso­ci­a­tion eval­u­ates food pro­duc­tive and grants or refuses cer­ti­fi­ca­tion as organic. Under­stand­ing the focus and imple­men­ta­tion of these stan­dards is crit­i­cal to plac­ing our trust in them.
3. Nutri­tion: Nutri­ents taken out of their nat­ural con­text and inter­ac­tion is mis­guided. Nutri­tion­ism tends to pro­mote a “nutri­ent of the day” men­tal­ity and there­fore per­pet­ual cycles of out with the old nutri­ents and in with the new. Dietary con­sid­er­a­tions can­not be iso­lated from lifestyle and cul­tural con­sid­er­a­tions. It may be that his­to­ri­ans and anthro­pol­o­gists have more value to offer than bio­log­i­cal or chem­i­cal science.
4. The Body and Mind of Food: Our ori­en­ta­tion to food has both a phys­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal impact on our well being. Mind and body are inte­grated sys­tems as cap­tured in the term body­mind. Chem­i­cals, addi­tives and GMO’s simul­ta­ne­ously affect our phys­i­cal and men­tal health. Food is about both the body and the mind.

Future arti­cles will explore ways the aver­age indi­vid­ual can over­come the sense­less con­fu­sion and com­plex­ity sur­round­ing what we eat.

Foot­notes

1. Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food pro­vides an excel­lent overview of the key issues sur­round­ing food. Fur­ther infor­ma­tion can be accessed at his web­site.