Nature, health and Crohn's disease

I have Crohn's disease.  It's a chronic auto-immune disease of the digestive system.  However, I am very happily in remission.  Drugs just didn't seem to work for me - sometimes they'd almost work, but never enough to get me in remission.  What did work was a special diet...

So, what did I eat?  Brown rice? Dried fruit? Lots of fibre?

My medical salvation was entirely unnatural.  I didn't eat anything 'natural', I ate complete nutritional supplement that was born in a lab and a bit like a cross between protein shakes and formula milk.  Its creators, just to top it off, were Nestle, the enemy of all moral foodies.

My diet for six weeks, which transformed me for an underweight, chronically fatigued shadow to someone who could actually have a life.

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What I'd like to question today is one of the myths that pervades our current culture: that of the moral link between wellbeing, 'nature' and environmentalism.
 
Fast forward from the liquid diet, and I became fond of Eat Natural bars for a while. They are shockingly expensive so I limited myself to one packet of three a week. My fondness of these was nothing to do with the story they tell - it is simply because I find them tasty.   Eat Natural boast that they use only natural ingredients, 'and nothing dodgy'. Arguing that creating delicious-tasting food is 'simple', they use no additives or preservatives and try hard to find the finest ingredients from 'like minded' producers. I'm sure they do use high quality ingredients - that's how they manage to taste so good without the use of additives - it also makes them very expensive - £2 for a pack of 3 - so really not that simple as half the British population wouldn't be able to afford them. 

Having discovered I tend to get a reaction to wheat, I have also now become a frequent visitor to the 'free from' aisle of the supermarket.  In Sainsbury's, this section is called 'Well-being', although it would be far healthier for me to go to the fruit and vegetables section than to buy some of Mrs Crimble's delicious Dutch Apple Cake. There are a lot of 'natural' products in this aisle as well: ones who's marketing relies on the fact that they contain just a few ingredients and nothing else and therefore are good for us and good for the environment, and are going to turn us into super-healthy glowing people who are connected to the earth. 

So here is the story: natural=delicious, and good for you to. 

In the academic world all this is know as a 'double commodity fetish'.  A commodity fetish is where marketing stories create a product into something new, masking its actual origins.  A double commodity fetish is when this involves creating a new story about where it has come from.

In the academic world it is also clear that 'nature' is a myth.  A myth in this sense is not a mystical being that doesn't exist, but a cultural story.  So what is the 'nature' story?  My conclusion from reading the world is that what we regard as 'natural' is non-human, and has undergone minimal manipulation from humans.  This definition can apply to food or to environments.  In the case of the former, it is a relative term.  It means the food has obviously be harvested and mixed together, but not manipulated in a lab.  In the case of the latter, no farming or building or addition of other chemicals.
 
But this is a myth, and it is destructive.  Humans are just as much a part of the physical landscape as everything else.  Nature is a man-made idea which has been responsible for removing people from their land in order to make space for 'nature reserves', and hiding those involved in production from view.  I carried out an undergraduate dissertation on Dartmoor, a landscape in which farming plays an essential role.  If 'nature' is to run its course then the lovers of this landscape would not be happy as it would become overrun with bracken.  Another approach would be to see the farmers as part of 'nature.'  Well, we seem to see nature as 'non-us', so that would be extremely condescending to the farmers.  They would form part of the landscape, which we view and enjoy in the style of Gainsborough's Mr & Mrs Andrews (core reading for any cultural geographer).
 
As I've already stated, 'natural' is not always best for a variety of standards of 'best' when it comes to eating the food that's best for us.  Sure, lots of added salt is not good for the heart, and fruit and veg and good for you, but the link with 'nature' is by no-means de facto or absolute:

• For health: my medical salvation was found in lab-created food, and I also have a friend who is allergic to fruit.  There are also plenty of poisonous substances to be found in the biosphere, and I'd rather cook my chicken than get salmonella.
• For taste: some of the finest food involves much processing: we have no objection to a starter of pate and toast in a good restaurant, and yet this mashed up and processed paste bears little resemblance to the meat it came from. Simple is not always what creates the best food - think of the fine balance of many, many spices that go towards making a curry.

And what about in terms of environmental and social sustainability.  The Bruntland Report (1987) definition of sustainability is 'the ability of the current generation to meet their needs without compromising the needs of future generations'.  I think in there is also a sister to this temporal sustainability, and that is spatial: 'the ability of one region to meet its needs without compromising the needs of others'.  In the words of our cultural narratives, this means getting the food we need without squeezing poor Nigerian farmers.  There are of course, many important considerations to be made here: not over-farming, fair trading, energy consumption and such like.  But let's not forget the first part of the sustainability definition, the ability of the current generation to meet their needs (and it's counterpart in the spatial sustainability definition).  Additives in bread have made it possible for this staple to last longer and be produced cheaply (known as the Chorleywood Process), and we mustn't forget that poverty is not restricted to the world of coffee and banana growing.  Many people in Britain cannot afford to feed their families.  We cannot expect them to buy the expensive Fair Trade or Organic varieties.

So, we can see that we  need to take each situation on its own in order to evaluate what is 'best'.  So why don't we - well, it's back to the 'double commodity fetish' and other similar processes in the media which construct narratives not to sell food, but to put us off.  Why does it work?  Because people don't know where their food comes from.  I am of the opinion that being aware of where things come from helps to weaken this myth, as well as solve the problems that do support it.  This is because knowing where things come from, and particularly in the case of meat, what it looks like in previous stages of life, makes people less susceptible to the idea that if something is disgusting it must be a) unhealthy, and b) unnatural. 

Let me illustrate: one of my particular reality-TV guilty pleasures has in the past been Channel 4's Super Size vs Super Skinny, where a severely overweight and severely unweight person swap diets in order to see the ludicrousness of their own diets, under the watchful eye of well-known TV guru Dr Christian Jessen.  When either of the pair is particularly notorious with the quantities they take in of a particular food or drink, Dr Christian will often take them away and break down that food into its component parts in order to show them what they are actually eating.  One particular skinny ate far too many gummy sweets - they were basically his sole source of calorie intake.  Dr Christian got him to mix together the ingredients, which included various bits of pig.   It didn't look very appetising or pleasing to the eye.

Every time I see deconstructions such as this, I think: so what?  If one ingredient is particularly harmful, then I agree it is a good idea to cut down.  But looking at the ingredients being mixed together, the pigs' heads really don't put me off.  They came as no surprise to me: at a fairly young age I met vegetarians who couldn't eat Haribo and wondered why, and it was explained to me that gelatine was made from animal bones.  Just because gelatine comes from something which looks unappetising (and I'm not particularly induced to eat a pig's head raw when it hasn't been turned into something tasty), that doesn't necessarily mean it is unhealthy.   This particular point proved nothing about whether or not sweets are bad for you.  But for this particular skinny, it really put him off and he vowed never to eat them again.

I find this really annoying, because I've concluded that main reason why it works in stopping people from consuming these things is because they find it disgusting - it appeals to their emotions rather than their reason.  And the reason they find it disgusting is that they never thought before what goes into their food, and so what I think are obvious things are a great shock.    And so, the producers of Super Size vs Super Skinny are exploiting the fact that people have never looked at where things really come from.  If we were to construct a narrative around something that is quite simple to produce, and where the end product doesn't look so radically different from the component parts, people probably wouldn't be so shocked.  But these things, as shown, are not necessarily de facto better.

A Pig's Head not dissimilar to the one on Channel 4

(Source: http://www.bdws.co.uk/2012/02/07/feeding-the-dogs-part-6/)

 

And what about sustainability?  We seem to like the idea of a shorter production line - it's in fashion at the moment.  I can't deny that it is enjoyable to go to a farmers' market and experience buying meat straight from the person who's produced it, enjoying that open-air, liminal appeal of a market with all its sights and sounds.  I'm also not denying the fact that there are many cases where shorter production lines are better for health, community, or environment.   However, not only does one not necessitate the other, but also, just because we like it, it  doesn't mean it's good.  We are flawed and our emotions are not the way to determine what is best for the environment or our health.  The reason why shorter supply chains are often better is because they involve fewer food miles and fewer middle-men, meaning more of the end price goes towards the producers, not because they are morally pleasing to Gaia.  And also don't forget, those farmers at that farmers' market are people, not picturesque components of 'Ye Olde Worlde' there for your enjoyment.

A key advantage of shorter supply-chains is that people can be more aware of where their food has come from, and therefore when there is a problem, they can do something about it.  I grew up in rural Devon, where being stuck behind a herd of dairy cows on their way to milking was a common occurrence on the country lanes.  Last year, struck by how unhealthy these cows look and how obvious their suffering is, my mother wrote a blog post about buying organic milk if we are able (click here to read the blog, which also provides some far more pragmatic tips on leading a healthier life than my philosophical ponderings).  This is what we should be doing, but note that she recognises that some people cannot afford to buy organic milk all the time.

So, go and buy organic milk if you are able, eat less sodium chloride, or buy locally in order to support your community, but helping the environment will not necessarily earn you well-being points and give you more energy, and neither will eating healthily necessarily help the environment and earn you Gaia points, making you one with Nature.  Understand where things come from, change the things you want to change, and just accept the rest of it.  If you don't want to eat the product of a pig's head, then don't, but realise that this is merely a matter of taste, and not of health or morality.