Day 76 – Fed Up With Food

“Esse est percipi”

~ George Berkeley

189.1 lbs

I’m at the point now where I’m counting the days until I’m finished these 100 days, and the end is in sight. On the one hand I have a long road of recovery ahead of me – working out like mad to keep from blimping up as I start eating again after hammering my metabolism to a dead stop – but on the other hand I’ll be free of stressing over every calorie I swallow.

To read the news reports, you’d think that everything we eat is killing us. While some of that is true (coughhighfructosecornsyrupcough) much of it is the usual news media hype – keep you scared long enough that you won’t change the channel during commercials.

The Holy Heart Grenade of Antioch

From sustainable agriculture to fair trade coffee to the 100 mile diet (aka locally grown), it seems like everything is a big calamity. Even the stuff that conflicts with the other stuff. How biblical.

Someone should tell the news media this bit of advice I once heard a short chick with a weird hairdo say to a tall asthmatic whose voice didn’t really match his body:  the more you tighten your grip, the more they slip through your fingers. Hey, I talk about this stuff because that’s one of the things this site is about. But as I’ve said before, everything in moderation. Fat isn’t the devil. One slice of pizza now and then won’t kill you. And if you tolerate lactose, tolerate the occasional summer sundae with  your sweetie.

Otherwise you’ll get caught up in the backlash that’s already happening.

“I would love it if the world of political correctness would stay out of my grocery store,” says Josh Aldrich. Who? Nope – no fancy researcher this time. Josh is an average, everyday resident of Alberta who, like many people, is exhausted by horror stories and food propaganda.

“We like to believe that something is either the best for us or the worst for us when, in reality, there’s very little wrong in buying the same food that we have for generations.”

He doesn’t have a problem with socially responsible shopping, but the constant guilt is more than he can bear. Buy the free-trade coffee so workers don’t get exploited? Buy the eco-friendly, non-rainforest-chopping-down coffee so rainforests aren’t getting clearcut to stock Starbucks? Stop buying coffee all together since it’s bad for you? AAAArrgh!

Or, as Josh put it, “I don’t like being guilted into [a decision]“.

I watched Food Inc. a documentary about food production. Personally I thought it focused too much on Monsanto and how evil that company is to farmers, and not enough on how our food is actually produced, and there were a lot of musical interludes that ate up time that could have been better spent explaining the food industry better. You know, like the title implied.

Some other people didn’t care for it because they now get anxious at every mealtime. Tony Partikas of Edmonton can barely eat chicken now. “I worry about health risks because such a big deal has been made about how they’re force-fed steroids and antibiotics,” he say.

“Then I’m made to feel guilty by the hype about how they’re being farmed up to Franken-size as fast as possible in minuscule cages that are stacked sky-high in blacked-out barns, which have been likened to concentration camps by animal-rights activists.”

I advocate eating lots of whole, fresh foods. But regular or organic? I already delved into that particular debate and voiced my opinion.  The hate mail is still coming in.

Experts worry about all this worrying. Eating should be pleasurable, like most oral fixations. Just done in reasonable amounts and with a little thought to your health. Like most oral fixations.

Unfortunately that’s not how it goes. “We have food police here,” Mary Bailey, a bestselling Canadian food author, points out. “We’re caught up in this pattern where every time we turn around, something else is ‘bad.’ ”

Where the 100 mile diet has helped local food producers (and I still say farmer’s markets are fun, dammit) you have chaps like James McWilliams writing books about how they’ve got it all wrong, and studies piling up that show he’s probably right.

For every nutritionist waving the Food Pyramid around saying fat is bad and carbs are good, there are studies showing how certain complex carbs cause heart disease and how in two decades of vilifying fat while praising carbs has seen an increase in heart disease and obesity, not the predicted decreases.

I think you get the point.

Maybe that’s why some people actually buy KFC’s Double Down, Wendy’s Baconator Triple and… I dunno, the Holy Heart Grenade of Antioch.Oh great. Now someone is going to use that. Note to self: start on trademark papers once you’re done this article.

I can understand why people are war-weary when it comes to all this information about food, but I don’t think it’s that food has become too complicated. We’ve just been told food is simple until we believed it.

Why? Because people like simple solutions. Take this pill and you won’t digest fat, so you’ll be thin. Eat this shark cartilage and you’ll never get cancer. And similar bunk.

Some researchers, however, say the problem isn’t necessarily that eating has become too complicated; it may be that society has for too long been misled into thinking food is simple.

“There are just so many factors that you need to consider in order to make fully informed decisions. I don’t know that there are any shortcuts around it,” says James McWilliams, the fellah I mentioned earlier who wrote the book on the 100 mile diet. Or rather, why it’s misguided.

“As consumers, we have to push for gatekeepers. . . . But we also have to be willing to take on a little complexity. Right now, people will do more research into the cellphone they buy than into the food they eat.”

Sure, about 100 years ago when we were eating nothing but unsliced bread, fresh produce, and beef & chicken food seemed easy. It was also rather bland, and people still didn’t live as long as they do now. Going back even farther, hunter-gatherers had to worry about whether the dark red berries were the toxic ones, or was that the bright red berries?

All in all, be mindful of your diet. But don’t obsess over nothing but your diet. there’s life to be lived.

And really… should it take a starving man to tell you that?