9: Developing A Taste For Health
Throughout most of history, the trouble with food is that there was not enough of it. But in the modern world, particularly in industrialized nations, sufficiency of and access to food is no longer the issue that is at the top of the agenda. Instead, we are focused on problems of overconsumption or inappropriate consumption: obesity, diabetes, coronary disease, and other health conditions related to diet are far more widespread a problem than malnutrition or starvation.
In the west, the recent surge in consumption of convenience foods, both in the home and in restaurants, has been at the forefront of public consternation, raising the questions regarding the amount and quality of food and the consequences of consumption to human health.
Health awareness
While diet has only recently come into vogue, food-related health concerns are not new. In ancient Greece, Hippocrates considered the properties of food (wet, dry, hot, and cold) and suggested different types of food should be avoided (meats, fats, sugars, and alcohol) to avoid a premature death. Religious doctrines commonly carry dietary restrictions, particularly regarding the preparation and consumption of meat.
(EN: It's also been observed that even in eras prior to medical discovery, dietary guidance based on religious or superstations grounds often can be related to observation and experience - the foods that caused illness at times were conserved to be bad or unwholesome - such that while the rationale is absent or specious, the conclusions are often in line with those of modern science.)
In the present-day culture, food has shifted from becoming a relatively unimportant necessity to a source of greater attention, particularly in relation to health. The old saw of "you are what you eat" is superficially related to the conflict between pleasure and nutrition - though even that dichotomy is cultural, as one's perspective on pleasure itself may be positive (pleasure guides us to health) or negative (pleasure is misleading and dangerous).
There is also a persisting confusion about human health. The perception of being "healthy" has changed, beginning around the 1979s, from the working-class standards of having the endurance and stamina to perform physically demanding work for a lengthy period of time to a more superficial concern with the physical appearance of the body.
Political overtones, such as the paranoia regarding all things business and industrial, also figure into the modern perception of diet. It is proffered by some that there is a global food conspiracy in which evil corporations seek to promote an unhealthy lifestyle and create a physical addiction to their products to enslave the public, beginning in childhood. There is also the less absurd notion that addresses the cost-cutting side of business, in using questionable techniques such as hormones and antibiotics, genetic modification, preservative, and remanufacturing of waste to produce food in greater quantity and lower cost to the detriment of its nutritional value.
There is also the sense that the lifestyles have significantly changed to a more urban and sedentary daily routine, such that the nutritional choices of the more physically active generations of the past are no longer appropriate to the present day, and the "modern" diet needs to be redefined.
A loose note: "you are what you eat" also considers food to be a method of disclosing personal identity - but this is given little consideration here as the author's concern is the health consequences of food choices.
What we eat, and how we eat it
Humans are omnivores, which means there is great flexibility in their diet, though in ages past the options for consumption were more rigidly restrained by the availability of foods by virtue of climate, geography, and other factors.
In modern societies, it is generally recognized that not all foods are equally desirable and some can be detrimental to health. This may manifest itself in a desire to change one's diet (if it is believed that past beliefs about food are incorrect) or in a desire to return to a diet imagined to be characteristic of a previous time (if it is believed that the new choices are the cause of harm). As such the "distrust and hesitation" may be focused on the newer options or the older standards - and on a societal level it has become malaise about food in general.
It's also noted that nutrition is something of a novelty in the scientific and medical communities, and as with many novelties it is ascribed the most radical and outlandish properties (consider what the "scientific" community of a century or so ago believed about cocaine, electricity, ether, and the like).
In present-day science, where a logical analysis of causation has largely given way to happenstance statistical correlation, the consumption of food has been linked to an array of diseases and conditions - that patients who consume "too much" sugar seem to develop diabetes and those who consume "too much" salt seem to develop heart disease and those who consume any amount of anything seem to develop cancer. The public meanwhile reacts to each "discovery" of a statistical correlation with panic and shifts their behavior erratically to each news story.
Counter trends
Historically, there was a close relationship between health and taste. As far back as 1825, Brillat-Savarin suggested that taste and smell could distinguish comestible food from that which is non-comestible or rotten and by seeking pleasure man could avoid the unhealthy. However, it's also suggested that modern processing and artificial flavoring have largely undermined man's natural mechanisms to guard his health.
Unfortunately, when man is told to disregard the evidence of his own senses, he is susceptible to accepting all manner of foolishness. Consider the degree to which the entertainment media have become (and always have been) instigators of public opinion, not only in mischaracterizing research findings but also seizing on any incident that enables the to spread panic at any incident, such that the public is kept in a constant state of unfocused paranoia.
This is not to mention yet another layer of fear about the impact of food production on the environment - that not only are certain foods bad for the person that consumes it, but that their production is in some way damaging to the environment of a planetary scale, as virgin forests are hewn down for grazing and fields and the waste of agricultural production poisons the natural environment.
Another common adage is that "you can't fool all the people all of the time," and this is played out in distrust of the media and a trend among those who have gotten wise to their tricks to disregard any information provided, including that smidgeon of information that is valid and relevant.
Neither does it help in any regard that once-trusted institutions have also become flighty and unpredictable. The USDA and the Department of Health have likewise been reactive to media concerns, and have as a result lost credibility by issuing contradictory statements and changing their positions at a whim.
For the general public, food is a daily necessity and must be consumed, even in an atmosphere of inconsistent information about which foods are helpful or harmful. While some have become obsessive about their diet, others have grown tired of the clamor and are no longer willing to invest significant amounts of time in researching and planning changes to their diet based on the news of the day.
In all of this there is the typical focus on "the children" as cause for concern: that corporate marketing skews their perception, drives demands for fats, salts, and sugars, and instills in them a lifelong preference for food that is basically unhealthy. Where there remains a (dwindling) modicum of respect for adults to choose their own lifestyles, the notion that children belong to the society and their parents are negligent leads to the demand for legislation to enforce when advocacy fails to convince.
Prolonged turmoil leads to ennui and distrust, such that people are not so easily led to believe what others wish, but draw their own conclusions by evaluating what seems sensible, creating an assemblage of a number of values:
- The pleasure of consuming food
- The convenience of consuming food
- The health consequences of consuming food
- The impact of production on the environment
- The impact of production on the economy
But even among those who have become inured to panic mongering, there is a growing awareness of nutrition and a desire to consume better quality of food, such that there is an increased market demand for foods that are believed to be healthy.
As such, health concerns are one of the factors that guide a person to choose, but are no longer the chief concern for many, who consider these other factors to be of greater importance where information about "health" is inconsistent and unreliable.
Better taste for better health
In spite of all efforts to undermine it, taste remains the primary criteria for food choices. Individual likes/dislikes drive food preference in a vague manner that is only partially explained by innate and socially acquired factors. Some patterns have been observed, such as a preference to sweet tastes over bitter or the attraction toward or fear of new foods. While these patterns are most highly pronounced in children they often persist into adult life.
It is theorized that while cultures as a whole consume a broad array of foods, each culture falls into a pattern of "food monotony" as a result of habitual consumption. Where societies were more isolated, the food preferences tended to what was locally available and there was little intrusion of or exposure to anything else, accompanied by a species of bigotry that regards anything from outside the community as foreign and undesirable simply because it is outside of the dietary norm.
It is believed by some that tastes can be most easily influenced during formative childhood years rather than challenging the established preferences of adults, such that earlier familiarity with a wide variety of foods leads children to be more accepting of new foods later in life. This is sometimes practiced in school cafeterias, in which children are subjected to a variety of foods, though there is also the trend to cater to, rather than attempt to influence, children's preferences.
There is also evidence of culture's impact in food choice over time. The golden ages of society are often accompanied by a lavish way of eating, and during cultural recession there is a return to more ascetic approaches to consumption. This vacillates with the prosperity and openness of societies, from the Roman era to the present day.
In that sense, the author considers the present age: the periods of recession and expansion marked by the World Wars, the Great Depression, the postwar recovery, the mid-seventies recession, the boom era of the 1980s and 1990s, then the recession of the early twenty-first century. Each period of recession coincides with a retraction of dietary variety and an increase in self-denial, and each period of expansion with the return of choice and self-gratification.
(EN: This is interesting, but leads to an overemphasis on economic efficiency and the ability to afford to indulge oneself. My sense is that the current fascination with food an health is not purely economic, but is still geared toward efficiency of a different sort: people are not counting pennies, but calories, vitamins, fiber, antioxidants, and other measures of nutrition - any of which push taste aside to take the fore.)
It has been suggested that the globalization of ingredients has enabled health-conscious dieters to regain some of the enjoyment they have lost by integrating some of the ingredients and techniques of foreign cuisines, Asia in particular, to introduce novelty into the low-calorie diet. It's suggested that this may be a symptom of a cultural identity crisis, but the components of foreign cuisines adopted into the domestic diet are pursued in a mercenary manner - consumers seek to gain the advantage of the nutritional content and are not concerned with the cultural underpinnings that led the components to become popular in their own culture.
Conclusion
(EN: Nothing further is offered in the conclusion - just reiterates some of the key observations.)