On Food Culture

With the ongoing global obesity epidemic showing no signs of slowing down, is it not worth pausing to think about some of the possible reasons why everything has gone wrong when it comes to our relationship with food? All over the world we are experiencing higher levels of obesity in the adult population than ever before. Alarmingly, the statistics show that millions of children too, are suffering from this debilitating chronic disease.

I say debilitating because that is exactly what it is, and I cannot stress that enough. Not only does obesity sap your energy, but it stops you from doing things that people of a healthy weight take for granted, such as exercising, showering or tying your shoelaces without getting out of breath. It can also have disastrous affects for your mental health as well, such as lowering your self-esteem, your confidence, and may lead to depression.

So why is it that the obesity epidemic is taking the world by storm? I don't know the real reasons for it, but I can put forward a few thoughts for consideration.

Once upon a time, food was sustenance, providing us with a source of energy which we needed to survive. Nowadays, food is more confusing. It has become a lifestyle, a science, and indeed a business venture. Clever people in white overalls are using the power of science to create food that tastes good and can be produced cheaply, delivering for the business people, the most bang for their buck. What the customer typically gets is a highly refined, craftily engineered food stuff, that is designed to fire off our dopamine receptors and get us wanting more. Advertising and now so-called "social media influencers" are bridging the gap between the customer and the venture capitalist, selling to people a lifestyle of convenience, increased productivity, and health and wellbeing. The shining example of this can be found by looking at companies offering nutritionally complete meal substitutes, or even plant-based alternatives to meat.

Unfortunately, just like in the film "Falling Down", what we are being sold does not reflect the reality. Think about the last time you ordered a burger from a fast food restaurant. Did it look like the pictures in their advertising materials? No it didn't, did it? I'm not just blaming fast food restaurants of course. Fine dining, too, seeks to deliver extraordinary flavour combinations to tantalise the palettes of the more refined among us, and plays a part in the obesity epidemic.

The internet has a role to play here as well. We're truly spoiled for choice when it comes to food and the internet. There are millions of recipes available online that can have us cooking anything ranging from pasta dishes, stews, curries, and more. The possibilities are truly endless. More recently, people have been pushing fake recipes out on social media, triggering inflammatory reaction posts from other users who were unfortunate enough to believe the recipe was genuine, and laughs from those who know how to cook and saw that it couldn't possibly work. Then you have the Mukbang trend, where a "host" eats food on a live stream, sharing the experience with people across the globe. Because watching someone else eating food isn't going to make you hungry and binge away, right?

Now to my point. We have a cultural obsession over food. This obsession is as unhealthy as smoking, or drinking excessively, but isn't typically seen as such, until it is. After all, we all need food to survive, don't we?

So how can we turn this ship around? Well, if I knew that, I would keep it secret until I knew how to monetise it! On a more serious note, I think we need to acknowledge the situation we have unknowingly gotten ourselves into, start rejecting food that has been engineered in a lab for mass-production, and begin to rebuild healthy habits centred around the consumption of simple, locally sourced, unprocessed whole foods.

Food is a source of energy first. Everything else is secondary to that fact. But I have no business telling you what to do. I'm certainly not going to make friends with the entrepreneurial classes in society by telling them that their products are falsely advertised junk foods. But you can't please everyone.