Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
For today’s post we have a little bit from Reading and Runnigwithninjas writer and friend of the site Rob Whang.
Regardless of your views on creationism and the existence of macroevolution’s occurrence, you have to admit that humans have evolved drastically ever since the first humans began populating the Earth 200,000 years ago (or 10,000 if you’re one of those “Young Earth” creationists). No longer are we a nomadic society of hunter-gatherers that strive for survival, today we stand as an enlightened people driven more by personal success and gains than merely staying alive day to day. And naturally, as mankind has evolved throughout the course of time, so have our paradigms. However, in some ways our gradual changes have not all been for the better.
We USED to be so cool.
The ways that our perception of food and our diet have changed is simply insane. The concerns that we have based on what we consume would have our early human ancestors rolling with laughter if they had known what kind of pansies we turned out to be. They were strong, hearty people that lived off the vegetables and fruit found growing out in nature and ate meat fresh from their latest kill with their only concern being that their food might kill them in some way (whether directly by fighting back during the hunt or indirectly through spoiling/poisons). In fact, man seemed to have this lethal/non-lethal binary perception towards their food for quite sometime; it was only until we began to become an industrialized people that our views really began to change.
Through the miracles of scientific discovery machines began to replace man in the hard labor business. And because of this man no longer needed to focus purely on surviving life, but now had time to enjoy and obsess over trivial matters. Of these trivial matters a major concern was then placed on the food we ate. We began to become less worried over the fact that our food may cause immediate death and began to become more worried over food’s long term effect on us. Scholars began to formulate the ground work for the concepts of modern nutrition and food nourishment, moving away from the medieval mindset of meat being a superior food source with vegetables being merely filler. People were even beginning to have a rudimentary idea of how caloric intake worked from the writings of Ben Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Almanac.”
Though the basic knowledge of general health through good nutrition is very vital and maintaining a proper caloric intake is essential for staying fit, our growing concerns and obsession with our food took a ridiculous turn as time progressed. As science had originally showed us how food was affecting us, we then began using science as a way to control our foods. Our working knowledge of how excess amounts of some food causes eventual health problems such as obesity and diabetes sparked a fear fueled obsession within us. We began to manufacture artificial replacements for these “danger” ingerdients such as sugar and fat leading to chemically laden diet foods with the nutritional value of chewing gum. Even food not meant for those concerned about their caloric intake and diet got the chemical treatment with a slathering of chemical: preservatives, flavor agents and dyes. In the end our attempts to manufacture “healthier” food exploded in our face with a shotgun blast of esters, coloring agents and preservatives.
It seems that in the light of all the confusion and constantly changing views on what constitutes as healthy food our modern society had officially gone insane concerning our food. We’ve currently succumbed to all fronts and now have a type of food for every crazy school of thought. While we still have the chemically laden “health” food; we now have a market for health food that’s more inline with what our caveman forefathers were eating, organic food that’s grown close to nature with no pesticides or growth boosting chemicals added to them. We also have food that illustrates how much of a society of pussies we really have become. Foods that have naturally occurring components removed from them because people are “sensitive” to them (read: too sissified to clean their plate). This leads me to my main point of “what the hell happened to us as the top species on this planet?”
We’ve conquered nature, traveled and inhabited nearly the entire solid surface of this planet, yet we can sit there and gaily say “Oh, I’ll pass on the bread… Gluten upsets my stomach, you know.” It’s simply unreal. Gone are the days where we look at our plate of food and munch it done heartily after a grueling day’s work, simply because food was food. That isn’t to say that I’m not a proponent of great tasting/well prepared food, as you’d simply be an idiot to prefer something that tasted awful and was poorly cooked. However, I do think it’s simply madness to see several types of spinach at the market that’s not separated by brand or species, but rather the way the plants were grown.
We’ve become quite the pansies with this whole health conscious/organic food movement. To the point where we’re concerned about harmless things such as pesticides used on our produce that’s comparably weaker and in lower concentration than that of which the agriculture industry of our parents and grandparents generation were using (and may I also add they were drinking tap water from lead plumbing a lot of the time and they came out fine for the most part). Still is it any wonder that we have such astringent criteria of what goes into our bodies now-a-days; to the point where we’re willing to spend twice as much on a chicken because it wasn’t subjected to growth hormones (which do break down with most heated cooking methods and have not been proven to cause any long term biological problems when eaten)? For me it’s no surprise simply because OUR GENERATION SUCKS.
