What is food? /Eat Less Trash, Eat More Food (2)/
In the article ‘Eat Less trash, Eat More Food (1)’ some weeks before, I wrote about products that, although being sold under this label, they do not satisfy the term food, in a healthy lifestyle approach. So, what are they, then? I used a harsh term, ‘trash’, in that article, because in my opinion the place they really belong to is much more the trash bin than a human stomach. This raises the question what can really be considered as food? I would like to shape this idea in your head, and give new perspectives to think about food.
Just a little brainstorming: if I ask you the question, ‘What is food?’, what are the ideas coming to your mind? Please, think about it for a moment.
These are the concepts that came to my mind:
‘Food is something that we eat.’
‘Food is the fuel that gives us energy to stay alive and do different things.’
‘Food is a source of pleasure.’
‘Food is a natural product of plant or animal base.’
These sentences seem to be meaningful, even true, right? Now, I’m going to challenge their truth through these pictures. Remember, our site and the Life Mentoring Method ® is about healthy lifestyle, which food makes a crucial part of. The quest in this article for things that can be called food means that they need to satisfy the healthy criteria.
100 grams of white sugar contains 387 calories. So, it does provide energy. A lot of people eat (a lot of) it. It is made of plants like sugarcane or sugar beet. However, it is quite impossible to identify that natural origin when we look at the fine white powder.
By the way, what are these bottles filled with? Well, you need to examine their ingredients list carefully, to get a clue, but I’m afraid they consist mainly of sugar or any other sweetener and different kinds of aromas. They provide energy, a can or one bottle of half a litre between 150-300 calories. Alcoholic beverages even more, a single glass of beer contains 150 calories for instance. People do drink them, with pleasure even. The trick here is what natural, nutritious ingredients they have. ‘Anything in there that it useful for the organism?’ (Silence.)
These ones give energy, pleasure, and are from some kind of animal or plant origin. I suppose the breakfast cereal is made of some flour, a lot of aromas, colourants and preservatives, and went through high pressure and temperature extrusion processing. The meat-like product probably has some connection with the meat (and who knows which other parts of what kind of animals), and more water, colourants, aromas, preservatives, and the hormones that made the animal grow in the fraction of the naturally necessary growth period.
Here are some pictures as a contrast to the former ones.
These pictures represent what I mean by food: nutritious, healthy, enjoyable, varied and as natural as possible. It is not enough that we put something in our mouth that marketing calls ‘food’ and has no more than empty-calories, and even harmful additives. Food needs to look like something natural and nutritive. That is their central role, to provide all the substantial macro and micro nutrients, vitamins and minerals, to our organism to function properly, to prosper, to grow. To be healthy, they have to provide the right kind of macronutrients, mainly complex carbohydrates, good fat and lean protein. And we need to be able to tell their origin when we meet them on our plate. The least food processing they went through, and the more natural they look, the more reliable and healthy they are. If the source is not identifiable, then forget them.
Obviously, you are not always going to be able to tell, what grain your whole-grain flour was made of, when you want to prepare these marvellous buckwheat pancakes, with sugar free plum jam and walnuts, or raw honey, dried figs and cinnamon. The grains are milled, the plums cooked, the olive oil is pressed, still, these pancakes are natural, extremely nutritious and healthy, and I can tell you they are heavenly delicious.
They took like 20 minutes to prepare, and I needed to have the right ingredients at home, some of them fresh vegetables that you cannot stock for too long. And, of course I needed to have the willingness to make all the mess, and this is important, so remember: food means work with your own hands in the kitchen. For me this is fun, not work, a creative process full of curiosity, while I am enjoying the magic of mixing always different ingredients in different ways, having a lot of pleasure by the smells and tastes. This is food.
I know that what I am eating is healthy. And that is the secret substance. It adds an extra delicious flavor while eating, the notion of the food just on its way into my organism being healthy. This is very important, to remind ourselves all the time when we made the right food choice, that this is good for us. The same consciousness can also help rejecting unhealthy but tempting products. With time they start to promise less pleasure, keeping in mind that they are unhealthy.
To be honest, I cannot be totally sure about the raw material I use. As our lifestyle changed in modern society, we changed our relation to Nature in a lot of ways. Many of them very harmful for Nature, consequently for us humans as well. When we talk about pollution, it’s essential to remember that the food we eat contains all the toxic particles of the air, water and soil. Food is our connection with Nature, with Mother Earth. It is literally the product of how we live: how much and what kind of waste we produce and how securely we treat it, the extent to which we exploit the lands and the amount of greenhouse gas we produce with all the transport and production. There is no healthy food grown in a contaminated natural environment. What we can do is to prefer local, seasonal, ideally biological food, besides living a lifestyle that is the least harmful for the environment, making environmentally-friendly day-by-day choices.
The food we eat becomes part of us.
Anything we eat, gets broken down by the biochemical processes of our body.
On the cellular level, we are constantly rebuilding our whole organism, and the material being used for this ‘construction’ is the food that gets into the system. Our physiological processes, though, determine our psychological well-being. To demonstrate this logic, here is a simple example of eating chocolate or peanuts. Since they both contain tryptophan, a precursor of one of the happiness hormone, serotonin, they can increase our serotonin level and improve our mood.
Although this is a single, occasional effect, but consider the results of consequent food choices on the long term.
Years of sticking to a healthy diet can seriously shape the way we look and feel, both physically and in general. If you take a look at vegetarians that follow this diet for several years already, it’s very likely that, when guessing their age, you give them less 5-10 years. The truth is that vegetarianism alone has serious health benefits, but usually the fact of being vegetarian goes hand in hand with a general awareness about food choices (like avoiding sugar, fries and gluten), and the sum of this makes the big difference.
‘You are what you eat’. I already heard this old phrase in different European settings, but Eastern traditions like Buddhism, or the Yoga tradition goes even deeper with the importance of it. Both of these philosophies include vegetarianism due to its peaceful nature. It’s not only about avoiding slaughtering millions of animals, and the destruction of rainforests with all their inhabitant animals to gain more cropland for producing livestock feed. (Currently almost 80 % of all agricultural land is dedicated to the production of feed.) It is also about avoiding ingesting something into our organism, that has been violently killed.
According to the Yogic diet which has its origin in Ayurveda, a more than 3000 years old holistic healing system, even certain foods like onion and garlic are banned, because they are associated with the qualities of passion and ignorance, thus being detrimental to meditation. While it might sound a strange idea to a Western-minded reader, but it can make us wonder about the subtleties of the way food can have an effect on us.
So, what is going to be your next food?
Wishing you a neat and healthy life,
Pedro Proff
Healthy Lifestyle Coaching
"For a Neat Life."
Life Mentoring Method ®
"The Art of Learning to Be Yourself."