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 S.M. King investigates a new food-related neurosis.
Back when I was a kid, things were different. Not, mind you, were they necessarily better. Certainly not. Children of the 80s had all sorts of injustices with which to contend. These included, but were by no means limited to, nuclear armaments, sexual intolerance and a personal style for girls led by Bananarama. Although I might have grown up terrified of Russians, homosexuals and the thought of leaving the house without a muslin rag-bow in my hair, I was not, let it be said, frightened of real food. A genuine terror of food has now taken a generation in its hold; many of us are now paralysed with doubt insofar as the quality of our food is concerned. Citizens of developed countries have a great fear that the things they are eating do not provide adequate nourishment. On the one hand, this dread might be seen as positive. As obesity rates soar, this fear seems like a logical counterpoint. Wary of a convenience food culture that tempts us with sugar, trans fats and preservatives, we’ve begun, in very large numbers, to turn our attention to high-nutrient fare. Just a few years ago, items like vitamin water, probiotics and flaxseed supplements were unthinkable. Once, terms like “Omega 3”, “Antioxidant” or “Lycopene” were solely the language of food scientists. These days, the idiom of phyto-nutrients is plain for all to see. It’s written on the box. This, more than anything, is what troubles me about the large scale “health food” trend. To offer convenience food as the antidote to convenience food strikes me as essentially wrong. Activist foodies will know the work of Michael Pollan. This mandarin of slow, sustainable and tasty food recognises a modern disease: “orthorexia” is not something you sprinkle on your corn flakes to help you poop better, it’s an eating disorder characterised by the extreme focus on eating only healthy foods. Pollan, a respected author and activist, urges a return to eating whole foods. Meals cooked from scratch using ingredients that have not undergone processing are, he says, a surer ticket to long term health than, for example, the use of cholesterol cutting margarine. Just as there are no shortcuts to good food, there is no convenient route to good health. An emerging body of work suggests that additives, artificial sweeteners and modern agribusiness practices make our systems sluggish. I tried to explain this to body-fat obsessed Partner for years as she reached for her frozen “Lite” convenience meals. It wasn’t until she read Pollan and understood that chemicals can put the brakes on your liver and actually make you fat that she began to shun foodstuffs in boxes. Every now and then, of course, there is little more soothing than a great old lump of petrochemical derived shit. Packaged Macaroni and Cheese is our household’s hangover cure-all. But we expect no nourishment and only pain from this dietary deviation. I expect the same even from factory made “vitamin enriched” foods. The substitution of one processed option for another can’t be a useful remedy, surely? Replacing regular bread with Folate Enriched factory crap strikes me as about as constructive as replacing Bananarama with the Spice Girls. If you get my drift.
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Lifestyle 
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