Forbidden Food

  It seems that many of the people who do not have to worry about having enough food, worry about nothing more than food. Able to have just about anything on an increasingly global menu the modern diner worries not about getting something to eat, but instead about eating it. Palsied by plenitude, the worry shifts to the ingredients and angst develops over such things as calories and gluten. That, I can assure you, is the last mention of the g-word in what I hope is a short post. Instead I will discuss two fads (or perhaps I should call them ‘trends’) which seem to me a trifle suspicious (trifle as in trivial, not as in the dessert which you should probably not eat.)

Clean Eating

     We were sitting on the deck on  a summer evening, eating too much food (which was probably both unsanctioned and unwholesome) and drinking too much wine (which is certainly not approved of by most medical and some religious authorities), when the neighbour jogged by on her way back from the gym and mentioned that she was ‘clean eating’. I thought that was probably not a bad idea and surely a better one than eating something dirty.

     Not realizing that it is a ‘current food thing’ I went hunting for ‘clean eating’ and found it first among the Fletcherites who were, oddly enough, the followers of Horace Fletcher. He was known as “The Great Masticator” and he suggested that "Nature will castigate those who don't masticate”. Back then (early in the last century) ‘clean eating’ had more to do with chewing than eating; one needed to chew even mashed potatoes very thoroughly. In any case, it seems to me that with a few minor spelling changes Old Horace could have had another career preaching on about activities that take place toward the other end of the body.

[Fake news alert: I know you think I am making all of this up and that no one would fall for Fletcher or practice ‘clean eating’. But, you are wrong. If you go searching, just make sure you search for “Horace Fletcher” not “Joseph Fletcher”  who “was a leading academic proponent of the potential benefits of abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, eugenics, and cloning”. He certainly deserves a post of his own.]

   Since ‘clean eating’ is a current food thing, or was earlier this year, you probably know what it is and I will not go on about it. It seems now to be more about the food than the chewing. I am sure it is all probably explained in the magazine, Clean Eating. I will now move on to the other current food thing, or it was earlier last month.

Placenta Eating

     This seems like a rather abrupt jump from clean eating, but apparently it is the ‘new thing’. I don’t follow the tabloids or read much celebrity news, but if you do, you probably know all about it so I will keep this short. In fact, I will simply turn this subject over to someone else.      
     This is from an article in the Washington Post, but, unfortunately, it is not fake news:

“Over the past decade, the authors say, there’s been a growing interest in natural childbirth by people wary of bringing a human life into the world in an antiseptic room full of intravenous drugs, gloved doctors and fluorescent light. And many have questioned whether doctors have it all wrong when they place a placenta in a biohazard bag and toss it out.
After all, for many mammals, the consumption of placentas — placentophagy, as researchers call it — has been going on for as long as there have been placentas.
For anyone who missed that day in biology class, the placenta is an organ shared by a pregnant mother and her growing fetus, functioning as the lungs, gastrointestinal system, liver and kidneys of the developing child.
During birth, the organ is expelled along with the baby, and most hospitals discard it as medical waste.
Proponents have said eating placenta reduces pain, improves mood and energy level, increases milk production, and may even have anti-aging properties — a wonder drug produced by a pregnant woman’s own body.
For humans, eating placenta has been a fringe practice until recently.
Positive placenta-eating anecdotes have flourished, and so have companies that charge hundreds to prepare a placenta for consumption, dehydrated like beef jerky or processed into smoothies or pills.”

Source: : “Don’t Eat Your Placenta, Researchers Warn,”  by Cleve R. Wootson Jr. , Washington Post, October 18, 2017.

     For all of you who eat and who are unnerved by all of this I suggest you follow the advice offered in the title of this article, “Relax, You Don’t Need to ‘Eat Clean”, and read the first couple of  paragraphs: 

“We talk about food in the negative: What we shouldn’t eat, what we’ll regret later, what’s evil, dangerously tempting, unhealthy.
The effects are more insidious than any overindulgent amount of “bad food” can ever be. By fretting about food, we turn occasions for comfort and joy into sources of fear and anxiety. And when we avoid certain foods, we usually compensate by consuming too much of others.
All of this happens under the guise of science. But a closer look at the research behind our food fears shows that many of our most demonized foods are actually fine for us.”

     So there you have it. The current culinary zeitgeist summed up in two fads with only one mention of gluten.

Sources:
The article quoted directly above -” Relax, You Don’t Need to ‘Eat Clean” - is by Aaron E. Carroll, and it is found in The New York Times on Nov. 4, 2017. 

Fox News followers who believe that anything published in that publication or the Washington Post is surely to be suspect should see:

“Consumption of the Placenta in the Postpartum Period”, by Emily Hart Hayes, in the Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic, & Neonatal Nursing, January–February, 2016,Volume 45, Issue 1, Pages 78–89. It includes a full literature review. Here is the abstract:
“Postpartum women are consuming their placentas to achieve claimed health benefits, including improved mood, energy, and lactation. Strong scientific evidence to substantiate these claims is lacking. Self-reported benefits from some women include improved mood and lactation; animal models suggest there may be an analgesic effect. Possible risks include infection, thromboembolism from estrogens in placental tissue, and accumulation of environmental toxins. Women’s health care providers should be aware of this practice to help women make informed decisions.”

[Avoided above are all the religious strictures which further complicate dietary matters and which serve, as they usually do, to reduce our enjoyment while increasing the likelihood of nasty doctrinal disputes. For a quick primer see the essay “Food and Drink Prohibitions” provided by Wikipedia. You will learn, for example, that in regard to the consumption of bats: “In Judaism, the Deuteronomic Code and Priestly Code explicitly prohibit the bat. Likewise, Islamic Sharia forbids their consumption. (However, in the predominantly Muslim nation of Indonesia, bat meat is known to be a prized delicacy, especially within the Batak and Minahasa minority communities, both of which are largely non-Muslim.)”]