Nourishment: Exploring Food

[Exploring Life] Most of what we buy in a grocery store is not food. Manufactured, processed, or modified products are not food; they are edible food-like substances. GMO crops are not food; they are experimental transgenic food-like substances. Pesticide-laden (non-organic) crops are not food; they are toxic food-like substances. Hormone and antibiotic laden meat is not food, it is a chemically altered food-like substance. Food, it seems, has become an endangered experience.

Grocery stores have few, if any, meaningful standards for the products they sell to the public. In other words, a grocery store is in no way concerned with human health and well-being. The presence of health or organic foods does not offer any redeeming qualities since these products are immersed in a sea of imposters. Food is inexorably connected to our physical and mental well-being. Bad food makes us ill; good food promotes health. However, we have devalued food into mere commodity produced by a “food industry” that lacks any meaningful sense of accountability and responsibility. The marketing and advertising of degenerate food products is fundamentally an insult to our intelligence. A grocery store is far less a source of food than it is a system of carefully marketed contradictions and misguided priorities all exquisitely designed to produce a profit.

Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food passionately invites us to question our basic assumptions about the true nature of food. To do this we must learn to see through the veils of marketing and advertising designed to inspire our delusions. In other words, Pollen invites us to renew our curiosity and interest in identifying the essence of food in order to understand what we should eat and what we should avoid. In a sense, we need to embrace a new approach to food.

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 and strange. Pollen is asking us to challenge our basic assumptions about what food is. Food in contrast to edible food-like substances needs to be carefully distinguished from one another. Our current confusion about food originates in a vast cultural bog of scientific reduction, nutritionism, inept government policies, idiotic manufacturing processes, and nefarious marketing techniques that have manipulated our beliefs about food. The primary directive of any corporation is to make a profit while avoiding responsibility for its actions. Food has become a hostage to economy and assimilated by corporatism.

In its normal state food is both whole and fresh. Real food is largely unaltered by human intervention, except perhaps to cook it when required. If the environment in which our food grows is toxic then our food is a direct extension of that toxicity and is no longer a “real” source of food. When we ingest toxicity we make ourselves ill. 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 by poisoning the environment we are literally and directly poisoning ourselves. What we do to the environment, we do to ourselves.

The emergence of “organic” food is recognition that we are inexorably linked to the natural world. In reality, there is no real food that is not organic; the word “organic” is redundant if our intention is to refer to food in the purest sense of the word. There is a faction of science that wishes to convince us that there are “safe” levels of chemical toxicity. This brand of science is inept and misguided. The science of food is a continuing saga of trial and error. In an important sense, when we attach the adjective “organic” to food, we are really making a cultural admission of our confusion and ignorance about the food we produce that is not organic. “Organic food” is really just food; anything that is not organic is really an edible food-like substance – or not food. However, our beliefs and approach to food has become so degenerate that we now require use the adjective organic simply to reclaim the original meaning of food.

Genetically modified crops are not a source of food. The actual and/or long-term effects of GMOs on human health are unknown.

A GMO is “an organism that has been modified by the insertion of DNA by human intention. It is usually DNA which has been modified or ‘engineered’ to suit a particular purpose (recombinant DNA is the same thing). The DNA can be from a foreign organism, from the same organism or it may be a sequence synthesized in a laboratory.”
- Lynn M. Hartweek, Ph.D., Agronomy Department, University of Wisconsin, Madison, May 1997

Under the Canadian Organics Products Regulations that came into effect in 2009, GMOs (genetically modified organisms) are not permitted in an organic product displaying the Canada Organic logo. To display the logo a product must have a minimum organic content of 95% or greater; anything less than 95% organic content will not be permitted to display the logo. This means, however, that up to 5% of the food content can be non-organic.

Nutritionism is a ideology that presumes science can isolate, identify and classify, and evaluate the value of individual nutrients. These decisions are then used as a basis for determining the ideal amounts of vitamins, minerals, and other nutritional components, that should be in our daily diet or used to help improve a specific condition. Nutritionism is really the servant of food corporations and a tool to market the illusion of nutrition under the pleasant guise of reality.

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)

Nutrients within a natural food source exist in dynamic interconnection with one other; 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 as emerging 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. When science is linked to corporate goals, it is expert at offering solutions to problems that it created in the first place.

If you include fruits, vegetables and whole grains in your daily diet, and vary the food plants and animals you eat, you really don’t need to worry about nutrients… There isn’t much evidence that taking a daily supplement makes healthy people healthier, but if it makes you feel better, go for it.
- Marion Nestle in Which is better – food or nutrients?,

Nutritional science is closely linked to government policy and quickly brings to mind the notion of a food pyramid. The fundamental failure of government policy is its inability to be formulated in ways that are free from the influence of industry. The food pyramid is an inept tool in promoting knowledge about food and dietary choices. Michele Simon, a public health attorney in the U.S. writes:

The very name MyPyramid tells us the government is squarely placing all responsibility for eating right with you and me. Never mind those pesky government subsidies and tax breaks to big agribusiness and food manufacturers that make unhealthy food so cheap and ubiquitous…

Now that the pyramid has been completely hijacked by the food industry and promises to be as useless an educational tool as it ever was, it’s time to hang up the effort altogether. Just think of all the money government could save in addition to $2.5 million if it really wanted to improve America’s eating habits: no more paying for expensive PR firms, corporate welfare, high healthcare costs, or fitness bimbos. – MyPyramid Inc. by Michele Simon

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.” Orthorexia is an unhealthy obsession with eating correctly that is so sever we fail to eat enough. It has the same result as anorexia – severe malnutrition, starvation and eventually death. In a bitterly ironic twist, a gift that sustains and enhances life morphs into a physical and psychological source of pain and suffering.

If an individual habitually eats food that impairs the normal functions of the body, then that person promotes their own sickness and exposure to disease. If companies produce and distribute food that impair the natural functions of the body, then they too intentionally promote sickness and disease in the world. Our basic assumptions about what food is have been corrupted and manipulated by nutritional science, government agencies, and food corporations. We need to take control of what we eat. Four simple principles for healthy eating are:

1. Real – Eat food that is as close to its natural state as possible;
2. Clean – Eat free-roaming, grass-fed, antibiotic-hormone-pesticide free animal products;
3. Organic – Eat food that is non-GMO free of toxins;
4. Local – Eat foods that are locally produced as much as possible. They are the highest in nutritional value.

We must simplify our understanding of food. This process of simplification is really a process of elimination of all the ways in which we malign food. Unless we can distinguish between food in its natural state and edible food-like substances we remain victims of the food industry. Certainly educators need to inform our youth about the lies and deceptions surrounding food, and more importantly begin promoting a meaningful and integrative understanding of food. Consumers must punish food companies that produce food-like substances that are harmful by not buying their products. Governments must enforce significantly higher standards on food advertising. It is strange that we allow companies to market their products as if they were a kind of desired lifestyle, while not requiring them to reveal anything meaningful about the source of the food and how it has been manufactured. Food and those that “produce it” must submit to radical transparency.