By Dave Riley
In a world in which at least one quarter of humanity is malnourished it seems somewhat cruel and paradoxical that diet has become a preoccupation for the overnourished. The remedies for war, social injustice and economic anarchy all take second place to the weight of advice we receive for the care and feeding of the inner person.
If you are too poor to purchase food you won't have the wherewithal to be so absorbed. Instead, your lot is a complex spectrum of undernourishment which grades from the marginally hungry to starving to death. Living in appalling conditions, the 25% of humanity who hunger as a lifestyle are the same 25% who harbor an intestinal zoo of parasitic worms. The lack of a sewerage system and clean water leads to constant reinfection with pathogenic intestinal bacteria and viruses. "Thus," writes immunologist Robert Desowitz, "our Third World human is trying to feed himself and his parasites and his infectious diseases caused by a multitude of pathogens".
Even the noble intent of the green revolution has fallen short on its promise. Before the introduction of Miracle Rice, for instance, the peasant farmers grew a mixture of cereals and legumes. The legumes provided the protein that the cereals lacked and were grown in enough abundance to keep their purchasing price within the pocket of the urban poor. The cash rewarding shift to mono-crop rice following the green revolution has drastically reduced the supply of these nutritious legumes rising their market price beyond the reach of the peasant and urban poor.
The ready availability of a huge range of relatively cheap foods in our society seems obscene in comparison. The foodstuffs we take for granted at the supermarket are products of those same regions that now hunger. Potatoes, tomatoes, capsicums, squash, eggplant, avocados, corn and most commercial varieties of beans, for instance, were nurtured onto the human menu by the Indian population of Latin and Central America before the Spanish invaders destroyed their civilization and ransacked their land.
What we assume to be simply given and available is really a quite complex historical process. The tomato plant, rather than being the excuse for a universal condiment, for example, initially grew as a weed in the cornfields of the Mayan Indians. In the Middle East it was not fields of cultivated grain that brought some of the first human villages into being but new and abundant fields of wild grain. Because these early grains had to have a preliminary toasting before they could be satisfactorily threshed, raised bread was an impossibility until new types of wheat were developed many centuries later in Egypt.
Some foods that feed us aren't as innocuous as we assume. The solamine he cyanide in lima beans are poisonous. The oxalic acid in spinach can promote kidney stones. Indeed, the fruits of the earth are now being blamed for many of our ills.
The big C, it seems, is waiting for you on the end of your fork. It is argued by some researchers that 60% of cancer in women and 40% of cancer in men is caused by diet. Some investigators go even further. Biochemist Bruce Ames vigorously campaigns to denigrate environmental factors in the etiology of cancer in favour of the compounds occurring naturally in the food we eat. This is the type of science that the chemical companies love and are keen to fund.
In contrast, other factional partisans advocate the healing properties of foods. In a mix — one part alchemy, two parts science or vice versa — everything from arthritis to asthma, even cancer itself, is supposed to bend to special dietary regimes of selected foods.
Instead of the GP's pills and potions nature has its own magic bullets. All we need do is find and employ them. Zinc supplements to cure anorexia nervosa and schizophrenia, vitamin C to roll the common cold, yoghurt for the bowel and radish for the nose. A new branch, orthomolecular medicine, has grown up within orthodox doctoring to specialize in diet and supplementation, while corner shop naturopathy employs nutritional analysis as its primary intervention. Special foods and how-to books galore are readily available. Eating your way to health, recovery and perpetual youth is big business.
Recent advances in biochemistry has encouraged this nutritional determinism where your lunch has kill or cure properties. We are experiencing a new epidemic of foodism in the form of dietary dogma which insists that you are what you eat. The open ended tube that winds from head to tail within us has the potential to promote our hearts desire. The promise of our existence, therefore, is reduced to how we feed our biology. Supposedly within reach is the best of all possible diets. We are implored to attend to our tucker — replicate the stone age menu, go vegan, or check out the Pritikin promise.
With a huge range of foodstuffs available to us picking and choosing our dishes seems a deceptively simple recipe for health and happiness. While hunger and the belly certainly come first it is not what you eat but how you go about getting it that will determine who you are. The social world cannot be divorced from the gut and be displaced by biology.
While we probably innately like sweet foods, the pervasiveness of sugar in our diet is a product of a cynical calculation in processing with profitable addiction in mind. Any parent with a young child and a TV set knows this to be true.
Even heart disease — the bogey of the cholesterol set — cannot be reduced to a pad of butter. The links between job loss, stress and heart disease have led researchers in both the USA and Australia to postulate a general law — unemployment is the main cause of this century's heart disease epidemic. This doesn't mean that what you eat is irrelevant to either health or happiness. Eating is obviously related to nutrition but in humans this physiological necessity is part of a much greater complexity. We could all consume the same foods as the legendary Hunzas and still be separated from them by much more than mere locale. As the biologist Richard Lewontin points out, "What is eaten, whom you eat with, how often you eat, who prepares the food, which foods are necessary for a sense of well being, who goes hungry and who overeats have all been torn loose from the requirements of nutrition or the availability of food".
It is this significance that today's pervasive fetish with the properties of food fails to account for.
[This is the last in a series on the politics of eating.]