How different the actual future is. With more variety of food than ever before and cooking shows amongst the most popular shows on TV, eating is still well and truly alive. Kitchens are getting bigger and fancier, there are more places to go out and eat, and the access to foods from various cultures and the proliferation of super foods has shown that in no way are we ready to give up eating for a nutrition packed pill.
Imagine life, though, if this future had come to pass.
Firstly, all that time spent shopping for, preparing, eating and cleaning up after food would vanish. That would amount to enormous hours of the day that we could reclaim to do other things.
Secondly, imagine the extra storage space in our houses. Plates, bowls, pots, pans, casserole dishes, cutlery, the "good" crockery, could all go, freeing up mountains of cupboard space. Also the pantry would be a thing of the past, and who would need a massive fridge anymore? The oven, the cook top, the microwave, the dishwasher, could all go. There would be just so much stuff we could get rid of and then have so much less clutter to deal with and so much more cupboard space. Now that's something I definitely need.
Thirdly, it would eliminate that whole issue of trying to eat a balanced diet and the weighing up of the pros and cons between various ways of eating. But here is the crux of the matter. How could any responsible scientific organisation possible come up with the perfect diet encapsulated into a nutrient rich pill when they can't even agree on what constitutes the optimal diet for humans?
For the past 30- 40 years we have been fed the mantra of low fat, high carbohydrate as being the way to live a healthy life. I believe it, I've grown up my whole life being taught this. It hasn't stopped me from having an 'apple shape' rather than a pear shape, which is now deemed unhealthy and a precursor to syndrome X and it's attendant diseases of modern living such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes. Nice. But to a certain extent I feel a bit powerless as my father and his mother before him had the same 'apple shape'. Was it diet related or was it genetics? At least they didn't have to suffer the indignity of being told that they have a waist to hip ratio that is going to kill them.
It is tempting to basically ignore any government health warnings from this day forward. It seems that no one really knows what they are doing in the field of nutrition. Hundreds of billions of dollars are thrown at all manner of studies trying to prove which is the optimal diet for us. All that seems to happen is that the studies are either inconclusive, are interpreted according to whoever is reading them's bias, or are instantly disproved by another study.
The bottom line is, there are just too many variables in the modern diet because it is such a cornucopia of variety. To scientifically isolate one variable is well nigh impossible. People have slightly different genetic make up and respond differently to different diets too, which further complicates things.
I have come to the conclusion, after much reading about how the caveman diet is our optimum diet, that although that maybe true on an individual basis, on a population basis a high carbohydrate diet is better.
Think back, 10,000 years ago, we switched from predominately eating meat to growing and eating grains. We may also have introduced a bunch of chronic degenerative diseases that became more apparent as we became clever enough to eliminate the other major killers of misadventure and infectious disease. But these chronic diseases of modern living, still allow us to live long enough to reproduce, so they are not bad enough to impact on our survival as a species. And this is the point. Our population got to the point where it had to evolve to move further up the evolutionary scale. As a population, we are incredibly healthy and successful. Perhaps as individuals not so much.
But, agriculture allowed us to guarantee a food supply that had never been guaranteed before. It lessened our day to day reliance upon capturing or picking fresh foods because now we could store vast quantities for long periods of time. It also meant that less people were needed to be involved in the actual procurement of food and that freed others to go and progress civilisation. In the last 10,000 years not only has our population sky rocketed but our civilisation has moved ahead in enormous leaps and bounds that just wasn't possible while we were existing day to day on a tenuous food supply.
So in order for the human race as a whole to make the next development leap and form societies, government, religion, culture, science, technology, the list goes on and on, we had to free ourselves from the grip of the hunter gatherer lifestyle. This is evidenced by the hunter gather cultures still in existence in the last few centuries, who were primarily living very primitive lives until they were introduced to Western civilisation. Their rates of chronic disease were low, to the point of non existence, but their populations were relatively small and isolated which impacted their ability to develop technologically.
Reverting to a hunter gatherer diet is a luxury that affluent Westerners can embrace. It may make their individual health outcomes more positive. But for the entire world population to revert to such a diet is unsustainable. We just don't have the capability to feed the whole world on a predominately meat diet. That ultimately means that the third world and poorer populations will be fed with the cheaper high carbohydrate model and be prone to chronic disease, while the affluent will live long happy lives. There is an inequality here. Our success as a species has meant that we are destined to be less healthy individually. It's a small sacrifice we all make to ensure the species remains strong. Like herds who have their strength in numbers and can afford to sacrifice the weak few, so that the herd as a whole survives.
If this be the case, then governments trying to control what we eat and haranguing us about our health to do it is futile. Basically we are damned if we do and damned if we don't. Arguably Western nations have the wealth to manage expensive health budgets that deal with chronic disease. It may be the pay off we have to make to avert the greater evil, that of starvation and malnutrition.
As I ready myself and the family for an experimental dietary change to explore the hunter gather diet epitomised by the Paleolithic diet I find myself reducing cupboard stock of carbohydrates and legumes. I am starting to feel slightly unsettled by this, and we haven't even begun the diet yet. As the large fridge in the shed which houses the 'staples' of rice, pasta, bread mix, flour, dried beans and legumes becomes emptier and emptier I start to feel a small pearl of worry forming. It is ironic that the very carbohydrates that supposedly store themselves as excess fat on our bodies are the same carbohydrates that we store in stockpiles outside the body in order to protect ourselves in lean times. With an empty 'store' of carbohydrate staples I feel vulnerable. What if there is a truck strike, or we have an event that wipes out the electricity for a few weeks? Focussing our diet on just meat and fruit and vegetables is a predominately fresh food diet. It is extremely reliant on me being able to access the supermarket, butcher and greengrocer. We grow a few of our own vegies, fruit and herbs and have our own eggs, but in reality, these will not go anywhere near providing adequate calories or nutrition for our family of 6 if the need should arise. By having a fridge and pantry laden with carbohydrate foods, a short breakdown in the food chain supply, although inconvenient, would not be catastrophic.
As the one who is primarily responsible for the provision of food in the house and the mad one who is proposing we trial this diet, I feel a small sense of responsibility here. Obviously the likelihood of some disaster occurring and interrupting the food supply is slight, but it is not entirely out of the question either. Should I cover my bases and stockpile some emergency food in case of need? After all the advent of agriculture cemented our survival as a species because it insured as against this very thing. But as the Paleolithic dieters advocate, all carbohydrate (particularly refined) needs to be gotten rid of in order to avoid temptation. Refined carbohydrate is the evil one in all of this, the most likely culprit of chronic disease and obesity, but it is also the food that is least perishable and so the most useful in times of food shortage.
It is a dilemma. Oh wouldn't life be so much simpler if we just had a pill to take and all these decisions would not need to be made.
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