Populist Eating
Gee I hope this isn’t fake news. It does seem too good to be true. Imagine that we can safely eat foods that taste good and historically enjoyed by generations of people without annoyance by finger wagging food nannies. Cheese, butter, marbled steaks, wine: bring it on!
As anyone who’s lived long enough will know, almost every food or food group has at one time or another been tagged as risky for consumption. Yet over time, subsquent research overturns those views and then, once shunned foods come back to favor again. This includes coffee, eggs, red meats including bacon, dairy and certain sweet confections. For some reason, foods that resemble kibble have always been blessed as desirable by the food nannies. Consequently, nuts, oats, seeds, root vegetables, seaweed and dandelion greens acquired favored food status. If people paid attention, they would notice that these are things that wild animals eat….principally because they haven’t evolved to cook eggs, meats, dairy and make coffee.
Oddly, you never find heaping helpings of granola and kibble at high level political meetings of State Poobahs. Those menus usually feature expensive cuts of meat, rare cheeses, decadent desserts and choice bottles of wines. Oh the sacrifices those people make for their minions!
Humans can exhibit much of the behavior famously shown by lemmings. While only one in a crowd can influence that crowd, once that crowd gets a head of steam going, it takes a lot to move them the other way, even to the threat of their own existence. We saw this in the most recent US presidential election for example as the left continued to pursue directions that were non-sensical and suicidal. We see this in the ongoing cult of global warming believers. Many may recall that it was only a couple of generations ago that an earth-wide cooling phase was threatening man’s continued existence. Remember overpopulation? How about the once prevailing wisdom of bleeding people as the accepted way to treat malaise?
The gullibility of people was perhaps best exemplified in the late 1930’s when Orson Welles’s famous radio broadcast of War of The Worlds created mass panic among the listening population. The parallels to today’s Global warming narrative is eerie. Except that the fiction is fueled by much more reach, more money and many more influential people. The first clue that the premise is iffy is that it’s being championed by lawyers and entertainers. At least in Welle’s case, there was a strong disclaimer of fiction at the outset of his broadcast.
So as far as the change of heart on what constitutes ‘healthy’ food intake is concerned, I hope it’s all true, but who knows. What I do know is that it’s better to eat good food and live a decent life than to eat granola and still have the possibility of dying early. If you only go around once, eat what you want and enjoy it. Who wants to be 113 anyway?