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.

Teaching or indoctrination? the way that values are inseparable from education

Some people object to the existence of 'faith schools', because they worry that children are being 'indoctrinated'.  In his 2010 Channel 4 documentary Faith School Menace? Richard Dawkins expressed concern that young people were being taught particular beliefs about the origins of the universe, and argued, most importantly, that they were not being taught how to think or question.  The Oxford geneticist has argued in the past that 'it is immoral to brand young children with the religion of their parents' (Independent, 2006).

Richard Dawkins presenting Faith School Menace? in 2010
(Source: Channel 4)

When I was last commuting into London a few months ago the Evening Standard was waging a campaign against Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), calling on schools to be at the front line, arguing that teachers are in the best position to spot where a girl is at risk, or is showing signs of having undergone this process whilst on a trip abroad to see family.   Yet here we saw another protest - the Standard reported that often teachers were anxious to get involved for fear of offending cultural sensitivities.  FGM is at the forefront of the debate into when we just agree to disagree and let everyone be entitled to their own view, and when we fight for what we believe is right.

Thirdly, people in my life have expressed concern about the future of education, saying 'I don't want the state bringing up my children, and telling them that their parents are wrong.'  Much of this centres around the controversial and heated topic of sex and relationships education, where everyone has a view and awareness of what actually goes on in these lessons is actually very varied and often affected by the media blowing things out of proportion.    However, there is reason for any parent to concern themselves with this.  I don't know what the current messages will be when it comes to the time that I might have school-age children, but I will want to teach them certain things I believe to be important about sex and relationships, because everyone has values around this area.  So, you may not mind whether your child is married first, and that's where you and I differ, but going back to topics such as FGM, I'm sure you'd join me in wanting both girls and boys to be taught that abuse is not acceptable, showing that everyone does have things they are willing to make a stand for.

So, the big question is what role schools should play in instilling values. You may not want the state, church, mosque or secularist instilling their values into your children, or anyone else's, and may want to have an education system that is not about 'indoctrination', but about growing young minds and readying people for the world of work and to contribute to society.

Well, I've come to the conclusion that doing this without values is a myth.

Here's my interpretation on how schools came to exist:

At some point in history we learnt how to make enough food that some people didn't need to be involved in food production.  The division of labour occurred and this made things more efficient.  Some people went out and produced food, and whilst they were doing this, other people were doing other things to provide for the community.  The community decided to set aside some people to teach the children - this became a school.

Schools were borne out of the need of a community.  Such a community would have had shared values, and would have wanted to instill these values in their children.   Now, I use the word value in an entirely neutral way.  Believing your daughter needs to go through FGM in order to make a good marriage is still a value which drives your behaviour, even though I think it's wrong.  So is empowering people to make their own choices.

Every community has values and British state schools are still the product of a community with a set of values that wants to educate its children.  That community, however, is no longer a unified community with one set of values, but an artificial one.  The values behind state education come, therefore, from the government who are elected to represent this huge community.  Of course, such a small amount of people can't represent 60 million people, and, more to the point, the values and beliefs of that people in this country hold are diverse and contradictory, and therefore it is impossible to have an education system that instills all of them.

And so, our education system reflects the values of the government, an artificial reflection of our 'community.'  These include, and I'm not saying whether these are 'right' or 'wrong': multiculturalism, 'tolerance', sexual liberalism, academic skills, readiness for the world of work, gender equality, thinking critically, and I'm sure many others.  Now, do I blame the decision-makers in state education for wanting to drive education to these values?  No!  Because everyone wants their children to be educated in the things they think are important.  I do believe that politicians choose their careers for a reason, and even if it's just the votes than encourage you to try and lower teenage pregnancy rates, or fight gang culture, you still want to make a change.

They might not realise it, but the new atheists who object to faith schools do not do so because the faith schools are teach values, but because they values they teach are ones they disagree with.  The values of humanism centre around the idea that people shouldn't waste their lives worshipping a God that doesn't exist and society should value human beings instead (if God doesn't exist, then fair enough!).  These are values by which people live their lives and make decisions.  The reason why Richard Dawkins argued so passionately against faith schools is because he believes so wholeheartedly in living according to the values of evidence-based reasoning.  This isn't about how he came to that conclusion, what it means for how we should live our lives.

And then with young children, you have to 'indoctrinate' them in order to teach them anything!  People indoctrinate their children into looking right and left before they cross the road.  I want any future children I have to be safe, and to know they are loved, and so I will do all I can to get that message into their heads.  For me, part of knowing they are loved will be knowing the love of God.  I would be a terrible parent to not teach my children something I believe is so important, regardless of whether it is right or not.

So, what can we do?  We can't get away from value-driven education.  It is impossible.  How on earth can we have a state education system that brings up our children in the way we want?  And what do we do about the education that goes in the opposite direction to what we value?

Those, my friends, are the questions.

Was the division of labour a big mistake? The loss of something important

When it comes to making a difference in our world, caring for those in need, and fulfilling the activities that the market cannot, there are millions of heroes who give their time to work in the community, at home or abroad. These people connect with those around them and make a difference. We need them.

However there is another group of people we need - they are the earners. The companies that sponsor charities, the individuals that provide the cash, and those with the mortgages. I think the last point is one maybe most often overlooked: the way that the non-economic workers depend on the economic workers is not just a matter of cash transactions. When I was in my late teens I travelled to Argentina with a missionary organisation. I funded myself through working. However, I was able to do this because I had a permanent home provided by my parents. I know many people in various different churches, who give their time working for the church, and who lodge with members of the congregation. This wouldn't be possible without the homeowners within the congregation.
 


Connecting with a community in Salta, Argentina

 
So, the economic and the non-economic are dependant on one another, and I could just leave it there, the message being that we should value both and not just assume the romantic bohemian lifestyle as superior to that of the established - it is what you do with your resources that is important. It's an important point to make, and until recently I thought that was it.

However, that is just setting the scene.

I'm not going to pretend to be an expert in history, but I do know one basic fact. At one point, people learnt how to make enough food to allow some people to not be involved in food production. These people could then specialise. This was the beginning of 'civilisation' and the building of cities. Out of this came the technologists, scientists and artists. The production of specialised goods meant that things were produced for trade - the birth of the market and the 'economic'. It was also the birth of different 'classes' or groups in society.

There's another shift that's happened - I'm told it was during the industrial revolution. Economic activity moved out of the household and into the city. There was a place of home, and community, and a place of work.

I am currently in the economic work domain. Sometimes I feel a little envious of friends that are freer to travel and don't have mortgages to pay and or 9-5 jobs to which to commit, but actually I'm very happy. There is one thing that bothers me, however, and that is that I am often cocooned in the world of the professional and sometimes wish I had more time to get out into the community of the non-economic and connect with others. To be honest, I can find the time and I resolve to, but it's hard.

At work, we 'do CSR'. We actually are entitled to one CSR day a year, which we can take to engage in people-based voluntary work - I'm not sure how many people use it. It's difficult enough fitting holiday in - there's always something coming up. The easiest way for people I work with to engage with charity is to give their money: we have cake sales and dress down days and workplace giving.  Corporately, many companies are wanting to move away from purely giving money, in the form of the traditional philanthropist, and trying to 'do business' in a better way - this is good.  But here I'm talking about the individual.  It is OK for us to just earn money and then pass some of it on, in the manner of the traditional philanthropist, but on a smaller scale?

The thing is, giving money is easy when you're earning a good salary, because at the end of the day you can always make more. I say this in comparison to giving your time, which you will never get back. Time is absolutely finite.

There's another thing with giving your time. When we transfer money, we just send it away to that less fortunate 'other'. We can feel better about ourselves: it's a simple transaction where in return we simply get the knowledge we've helped someone somewhere or a reduction in guilt (in the cases of most, probably a bit of both). But go and actually meet the 'other': suddenly they are not the poor or unfortunate or ill, but people: people who you are no longer judging by their economic or social background, but people who are individuals and who can teach you in return.

And if we can view those we previously merely pitied as individuals, we can view those we previously looked down on as individuals too, not seeing accent, lifestyle, clothing or education, but just men and women and children. Even in my short career in business, I feel like I've come across so much lack of awareness of 'how the other half live', and so many prejudices against those in other parts of society. That is not to say everyone is heartless - but being cocooned in the world of the professional and wealthy doesn't help.

It is at this juncture I find myself in a place of tension. On the one hand, I believe that economy should not be seen in terms of individuals but as households, because that's the way it so often works. And this division of labour goes wider, and society forms groups who provide certain functions, according to the skills they have. Each depends on each other. Of course, even if this is true we do not recognise it. At different points and by different groups, different types of are valued work over others - particularly the economic over the household.

And yet I find myself wishing that every single person could work part-time. How great it would be if I could spend, say, 2/3 of my time in economic production and the other 1/3 in non-economic work. I wonder if this would really work?

Perhaps it is a case of the old 'small is beautiful: if something is wrong, it is too big, as expounded by writers such as E F Schumacher.  Our economic world is simply so big that we can travel such long distances within it and never see the outside. If you live and work in a small community, all parts of society, economic and non-economic, rich and poor, are in reach of each other. Then take my working day when I worked for a client in Canary Wharf: London is so big that it could build a world of wealth all around me, from getting on the train at my local station, to reaching the office, where I never saw anything else except office workers and the occasional wealthy mother with a designer pram when I went out to get some lunch (from Marks & Spencer, of course...).
 

Canary Wharf (Source: The Guardian)

 

So, the real sacrifice is to give our time and our hearts. Arriving at that fact is not rocket science. However, we are embodied people and we feel through our actions and lives, and the logistics of breaking down those barriers is harder than we might think.  In the division of labour, we risk losing empathy.

Living the Questions: about this blog

Just over a week ago I attended a TEDx conference on the theme of 'Living the Question'. This is inspired by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke in her poem, Letters to a Young Poet:

'...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.'

The motto behind TED, and TEDx (independently organised conferences under its name) is that of Ideas worth spreading.  Conferences are filled with interesting and inspiring talks largely based around creating a better world.  I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone who wants to be challenged intellectually and morally at the same time.

I have wanted to write a blog for many years, and the TEDx conference was what inspired me to actually get on with it.  It also gave me a theme - that of living the questions - which fitted perfectly with everything already in my mind, and hence I have shamelessly stolen it for this blog.

I love exploring the questions.  Sometimes, I come up with tentative answers, but often these lead to more questions in themselves.  I firmly believe that we shouldn't underestimate the difficulty in answering a question.  When talking to people, I meet many with differing opinions, faiths and beliefs to myself, but what bothers me most is when someone has an opinion and they've never thought why.  How we arrive at a conclusion is often just as important as the conclusion itself.

Having said that, I do believe in objective truth and I do have a faith in Jesus Christ, who died for me in order to pay the price for my sin.  For some people, having faith in a God is completely incompatible with the open, intellectual and questioning mind.   And yet for me it is fully compatible with a respect for the complexity of the truth and the difficulty in truly knowing the answer.

It is my belief that we cannot only act on that which we are certain - that would be foolish.  Sometimes I find myself paralysed because I do not know the answer because it is so complex, and I therefore do not act when I probably should. No one is certain regarding the exact nature of the degradation of our planet, for example.  Yet if there is a risk that we are damaging resources for future generations then surely we should act?  Faith actually goes further than that - it is not just a case of weighing up the risk.  I am not a Christian 'just in case'.  I cannot explain faith - it is a deep conviction of God having acted in my life.

All people have faiths - not just the 'religious' or the theist.  This is something that will no doubt enter into future posts.  The atheist has faith that there is no God, for example.  Everyone has a worldview which they will hold onto: 'it is right to love your children and look after them' - that is not something we've arrived at through intellectual debate. 

What is important is knowing what is faith.  If  you have faith in something, fine. But accept that it is faith and you cannot win others over to that faith by intellectual arguments.*

Furthermore, I believe my faith and Christian life is one of living the questions.  Living the questions rather than searching for just the answers.  The Bible is full of people questioning God, and yet after all: 'Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, or with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens?  Who has held the dust of the earth in a basket, or weighed the mountains on the scales and the hills in a balance?'  (Isaiah 40:12)   But never fully knowing is not the same as wrestling with the questions.

So, this blog is one of posing questions, and sometimes offering tentative answers.  It is a blog of deconstructing narratives, myths and attitudes and grappling with questions that are important to us.  If we are to move forward to some answers, we must know what the questions are and why we are thinking them.

Happy reading and questioning!


~

Thank you to the organisers of TEDx Exeter for putting on the event which was the final catalyst for putting me into blogging action.  Click here to find out more about TEDx

*Disclaimer: this does not mean that as a Christian I am against verbal proclamation or apologetics - far from it.  We just have to know that in the end it is the Holy Spirit who convicts, and intellect alone will not win people's hearts.