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robinturnerToday I left my meal tickets at home and left the house with almost no money, so by the time I got home, I was ravenous. After a couple of dolma relieved the worst hunger pangs, I started thinking about food. One saying that really irritates me is "We eat to live, not live to eat." What a dismal philosophy! It seems to rest on some dodgy Thomist assumption that anything which is necessary for survival should not be pursued for its own sake. We might as well say "We have sex to reproduce, not reproduce to have sex." Try telling that to the average seventeen-year-old.
This food fascism is reflected in the demand that we not only eat, but eat healthily. Obviously if we eat healthily, it will, by definition, improve our health, but I hate the way people make it into a pseudo-moral principle. It's like, if I prefer fish and chips to tofu and seaweed, I'm bad (by the way, this is worse for women, who are told that if they eat unhealthy food, they will not only be unhealthy, they will be ugly, which is worse).
Let's face it, the difference between healthy and unhealthy food is relative. You can eat all the spinach and broccoli you can stomache, and you're still going to die; no food will make you immortal. Actually, some Chinese used to believe (and maybe still believe) that there are certain mushrooms that confer immortality o whoever eats them, but there have been problems in testing this empirically. You can just imagine those Taoist sages mushroom-picking on Mount Taishan:
"What about that red curly one Master Wu ate yesterday?"
"Hmmm ... he died vomiting black bile, so that's probably not it."
"Well what about those mushrooms you ate an hour ago? do you think they'll make you immortal?"
"Immortal? Man, I'm already immortal. I'm as immortal as those little green dragons flying round your head ..."
Although there probably isn't any food that will make you immortal, this doesn't stop food manufacturers trying to make the food itself immortal. Some convenience foods now have so many preservatives in, you could probably use them for mummification. Whip out the internal organs and fill the cavities with Wonderloaf, then put them in canopic jars and add a few tablespoons of peanut butter - the resulting remains would probably last longer than Tutankhamun. I imagine that soon you'll look for the sell-by date and it'll say "Best before the Apocalypse."
This food fascism is reflected in the demand that we not only eat, but eat healthily. Obviously if we eat healthily, it will, by definition, improve our health, but I hate the way people make it into a pseudo-moral principle. It's like, if I prefer fish and chips to tofu and seaweed, I'm bad (by the way, this is worse for women, who are told that if they eat unhealthy food, they will not only be unhealthy, they will be ugly, which is worse).
Let's face it, the difference between healthy and unhealthy food is relative. You can eat all the spinach and broccoli you can stomache, and you're still going to die; no food will make you immortal. Actually, some Chinese used to believe (and maybe still believe) that there are certain mushrooms that confer immortality o whoever eats them, but there have been problems in testing this empirically. You can just imagine those Taoist sages mushroom-picking on Mount Taishan:
"What about that red curly one Master Wu ate yesterday?"
"Hmmm ... he died vomiting black bile, so that's probably not it."
"Well what about those mushrooms you ate an hour ago? do you think they'll make you immortal?"
"Immortal? Man, I'm already immortal. I'm as immortal as those little green dragons flying round your head ..."
Although there probably isn't any food that will make you immortal, this doesn't stop food manufacturers trying to make the food itself immortal. Some convenience foods now have so many preservatives in, you could probably use them for mummification. Whip out the internal organs and fill the cavities with Wonderloaf, then put them in canopic jars and add a few tablespoons of peanut butter - the resulting remains would probably last longer than Tutankhamun. I imagine that soon you'll look for the sell-by date and it'll say "Best before the Apocalypse."
