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Musings Report 2024-6 2-10-24 Delicious Food As Medicine
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Delicious Food As Medicine
Last week I discussed the many "Layers of Dysfunction" in every system that no longer works, and used healthcare as an example to make this point: with so many inter-connected layers of dysfunction, where do we start in restoring health?
A good place to start is Leo Tolstoy's famous observation: "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself." In other words, let's start not with ideas about reforming pay-for-service, Medicare fraud (see link in From Left Field), Big Pharma's regulatory capture, etc., but with what we control: what we eat, what we do for fitness and what we do for our psychological-emotional-spiritual health.
There's a Chinese saying that summarizes a key dynamic in human health: "disease comes through the mouth." This is not a reference to microbes but to the food we put in our mouths.
Today is Lunar New Year (gung hay fat choy--"may you be happy and prosperous"), so exploring how the Chinese principle that good food leads to good health is particularly timely.
Those of you who prepare Chinese cuisine at home are probably familiar with author Fuchsia Dunlop, who has written a number of books on Chinese cooking and culture. She was one of the first Westerners to get formal culinary training in a Chinese institution, and she's spent two decades tasting and preparing a wide range of Chinese cuisine.
Her latest book is Invitation to a Banquet: the Story of Chinese food, and she addresses the long tradition of equating food with pharmacology: food is not just something to satisfy our hunger and desire for something delicious, it's medicine.
Here is her summary of this principle:
"While I love shepherd's pie, fish and chips and toasted cheese sandwiches as much as the next English person, I have to confess that decades of privileged eating in China have turned me into a terrible Chinese food snob. Increasingly, I don't believe any other cuisine can compare. This is not primarily because of the diversity of Chinese food, its sophisticated techniques, its adventurousness or its sheer deliciousness--although any of these would be powerful arguments. The reason, fundamentally, is this: I cannot think of another cuisine in which discernment, technique, variety and sheer dedication to pleasure are so inseparably knit with the principles of health and balance. Good food, in China, is never just about the immediate physical and intellectual pleasure: it is also about how it makes you feel during dinner, after dinner, the following day and the rest of your life.
There is no contradiction, in Chinese gastronomy, between healthy eating and sensory delight. While in western cultures, 'healthy eating' is often seen as the flip side of pleasure and indulgence, in a Chinese context even food expressly intended to nourish and cure can be skillfully cooked and seductively flavored." (page 73)
Dunlop also mentions that young Chinese have largely abandoned this cultural tradition in favor of takeout and corporate fast food. (Given how easy it is to hijack our innate dopamine igniters --see below-- this is not very surprising.)
In the West, the marketing and media emphasize taste above all else: If it tastes good, then buy it, consume it, enjoy it.
What tastes good? Our brains are hardwired to respond to fat, sugar and salt, as these are scarce in Nature. This makes it easy for giant corporations to engineer their processed food products to light up our dopamine responses with big doses of fat, sweetness and salt.
We need far more than fat, sweetness and salt to be healthy, but natural selection did not dole out dopamine hits in equal proportions: our microbiomes need fiber to be healthy, but eating food with fiber doesn't light up our pleasure centers in the same way fat, sugar and salt do.
It's natural to prefer delicious food over tasteless, boring food, and Dunlop's primary point is to stress that in the Chinese conception of the culinary arts, healthy food is just as delicious as sumptuous extravagances.
In the West, rich, unhealthy food loaded with one or more of the dopamine igniters (fat, sugar and salt) is what's promoted as good tasting, pleasurable, desirable and an indulgence we deserve. I'm still surprised by how many hosts of cooking programs on TV (even the ones on PBS) cavalierly toss in a stick of butter or a half-cup of olive oil "to add richness," not because the recipe demands all this fat but because "richness" is desirable for our taste buds and mouthfeel.
Food lacking the dopamine igniters is viewed as some sort of penance one endures as the price of over-indulgence, a dreadful discipline that is jettisoned as soon as the desired weight has been lost or the gout eases.
In mass media, meals with "healthy" carrot and celery sticks are either ridiculed (the gruff boss enjoys a greasy sausage while mocking his underling's "rabbit food") or presented with a false bonhomie, as if we all know that "healthy food" is not delicious and must be consumed with a wince: oh dear, when can I go back to eating comfort food and my favorite indulgences?
The idea that healthy food is actually more delicious than greasy, over-salted, over-sweetened "tastes good" processed food is so far outside the mainstream that anyone making this claim is rejected as a snob or health-fanatic. Yet this is the truth Dunlop examines through the lens of Chinese cuisine and a truth that is equally true when viewed through the lens of any traditional cuisine with roots in a culture bound to the land.
We have numerous neighbors who are active into their 90s, and two are over 100. The foods they consumed over their long lives were nothing out of the ordinary, but they ate the traditional diet of Asian village cultures with some standard American fare, all prepared at home.
As Dunlop observed, what we eat has the potential to not just please us in the moment but make us feel good far down the road because it serves our health, not just our taste buds and mouthfeel.
Once we let go of these cultural chains--that only excessively fatty, sugary, salty food "tastes good" and healthy food is by definition dreadfully unappetizing--we can let go of corporate processed foods entirely and not miss any of it.
One key characteristic of healthy, delicious food is that the vast majority of it must be prepared at home, as takeout food, fast food, restaurant fare and corporate food is not all that delicious or healthy.
Food is medicine, and those who grasp this simple truth are far more likely to avoid lifestyle diseases than those who view healthy food as unpleasant penance for delightful over-indulgence. Once we taste truly good food that happens to be healthy, we lose your taste for greasy overly-processed corporate products.
Delicious food is medicine. Gung hay fat choy!
Highlights of the Blog
Household Belt-Tightening: Will the Trickle Become a Flood? 2/8/24
Irony Alert: "Outlawing" Recession Has Made a Monster Recession Inevitable 2/7/24
The International City Model: Freedom Is the Solution, Coercion Is the Problem 2/5/24
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Speaking of food, here's a snapshot of one of our standard stir-fry dishes, green beans from the garden, shredded carrots and a handful of mushrooms.
The lime tree is producing, so I squeezed lime juice. It's quite delicious and adds to a wide variety of dishes.
From Left Field
NOTE TO NEW READERS: This list is not comprised of articles I agree with or that I judge to be correct or of the highest quality. It is representative of the content I find interesting as reflections of the current zeitgeist. The list is intended to be perused with an open, critical, occasionally amused mind.
Many links are behind paywalls. Most paywalled sites allow a few free articles per month if you register. It's the New Normal.
U.S. investigates alleged Medicare fraud scheme estimated at $2 billion--tip of the iceberg?....
Medicine Has Been Fully Militarized: The 'medical-industrial complex' is every bit as real as its military-industrial counterpart, and it is every bit as real a problem.
BLUE EMPIRE – HOW YOUR SUPERMARKET SALMON IS IMPACTING COMMUNITIES IN WEST AFRICA
State eyes closure of SUNY Downstate hospital in Brooklyn: report
Could vertigo be a post-COVID-19 sequela or presenting symptom?
WeWork’s Co-Founder Is Trying to Buy the Company
The big idea: is compassion fatigue real?
My experiment in phonelessness was a failure. It also changed my life
I pick up my phone 111 times a day – it doesn’t matter how much time we spend on it
Bigger, stronger, faster: how my exercise addiction nearly killed me
The Foundational Inequity in Commodity Futures--all labor should be paid a fee for use of fiat money....
Why Is Tony Blair So Keen for the UK's National Health Service to Sell Off Its Patients' Health Data to Private Companies?
"There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth." Leo Tolstoy
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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