October 28 2023
My BACK IS SORE.
In our world we have opted for comfort and ease: it’s easy to prepare meals, it’s easy to be entertained, it’s easy to move from one place to another, it’s easy to provide light, coolness and heat.
That easiness, however, comes at a steep price. C. S. Lewis dictum comes to mind: “The safest road to hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” That’s the road we have taken.
So, why is my back sore? It’s not only my age, although that plays a role. It is because last week I and my oldest son – who did most of the work – dug up the potatoes that I seeded in the spring, making true Genesis 3: 17: Through painful toil you will eat. I didn’t dig just to fulfill the words of Scripture: I dug because I shun mechanical tools and prefer homegrown produce to lessen my ‘carbon footprints’.
I had a good growing year: stored in my two small freezers, 50 meals of green beans, 50 meals of red beets and kale; cherry tomatoes. Now in my root cellar, in addition to the potatoes, there are also a large quantity of onions and apples. Ever since I read, almost 50 years ago, Diet for a small planet by Frances Moore Lappé, my wife and I have been vegetarian.
Yes, it’s a struggle out there.
My back is sore, and my psyche suffers too. In my weekly blog, my fusion of contemporary news and biblical references from a somewhat unorthodox point of view, makes me an outcast among the conservatives and thorn in the flesh among the liberal believers who pick and choose the Bible passages that fit their notion.
Food in the news.
This week food is very much in the news, not food, the genuine, back-breaking stuff, but industrial ingredients that are pseudo-foods.
In two respectable newspapers – The UK Guardian and the Toronto Globe and Mail – alarming studies have shown that “ultra-processed foods” (UPFs) are becoming the main source of ‘nutrition’ for a majority of people. Ultra-processed foods contain ingredients you won’t find in your own kitchen. They’re formulations of substances derived from foods along with additives used to flavour, sweeten, bleach, colour, emulsify, texturize and preserve: they contain little, if any, real food. They include chicken nuggets, snack bars, cake mixes, ice cream, breakfast cereals – yes, your morning meal! – sliced breads, frozen waffles, pretzels, soft drinks, processed meats, instant noodles, frozen French fries, frozen pizza and many more. They are high in calories, added sugars, unhealthy fats and/or sodium, but stripped of gut-friendly fibre, protective phytochemicals and naturally occurring vitamins and minerals. They also are dumbing down our brains.
Recommendation.
Replace highly processed snacks with whole fruit, unsweetened yogurt, nuts and seeds, homemade trail mix, homemade muffins and raw vegetables, for example.
Felice Jacka, a leading researcher of nutritional psychiatry, the co-director of the Food & Mood Centre at Deakin University, Australia, and president of the International Society for Nutritional Psychiatry Research, has discovered that Ultra Processed Foods affect our metabolism, our blood glucose, our body weight, and profoundly influences our immune system.
Here’s what Michael Pollan, professor in California, recommends:
- Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
- Eating healthy is common sense. Don’t make it complicated.
- Avoid processed foods and ingredients you don’t recognize.
- Use meat for flavor, not the main course.
- Pay more, eat less
My farming grandparents had quite a simple diet: potatoes, laced with pure fat followed by buttermilk porridge. The pure fat was worked away in their perpetual strenuous farm labor without the aid of mechanical tools. My maternal grandfather died at the age of 70, when, retired, he continued this regime without the heavy manual exercise: a sudden heart attack. My paternal grandfather, a grocer, lived till 90 because his diet was more varied.
The Food Industry.
We live in dangerous times: dangerous because deceit and lies are everywhere, including in the food industry.
Beware:
Just as the tobacco industry, for a long time, tried to confuse people by saying there was no direct link between smoking and health hazards, just as the powerful oil companies play down the cosmic catastrophe connected to the use of their products, so now the Corporate Food Industry is using the same deceptive tactics. Just think of the billions of dollars that are generated in profits through the industrialised food system every year, and the power of those industries to get people, including scientists, to muddy the waters.
Keep Matthew 10: 16 in mind, the wise counsel Jesus gave there:
“I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore, be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves,” worth the occasional stab in the back.