Thought for food

What should set humans apart is that we can reason and choose

In the Prophets’ Reading of Shabbat Re’eh, we read from Isaiah 55:2, ‘Eat what is good and let your soul delight in abundance.’ But what is ‘good’?

Delicious food is not always good food

Animals and even plants have no choice. If it tastes good, they have to partake. If it tastes bad, they have to avoid it as much as they can.

We can choose. We can choose good over attractive. We can feel like something and not eat it. And we can take a bitter medicine. And we can delay gratification and do things not so nice so that later, it’ll be nicer. These are aspects of Free Will, an ability to prioritize good over enticing.

On the other hand, wild animals and plants seldom overeat, but we could. And sometimes we do so because ‘it tastes so good.’ That’s not eating well, even if the food itself is good for the health of us and our planet.

We forfeit our human specialness when we choose tasty over good, now over later. ‘I know it’s bad for me, but I had to have it.’ No, you don’t.

The food industry advertisements focus almost completely on taste, ignoring whether the food’s nutritious or non-harmful to us and Earth. I just saw new food wrappers in the store: ‘Feels good, tastes good.’

Meat, eggs, and milk are almost tasteless. What’s done to give them flavor is often not good for your health.

‘Flavor enhancers’ are added by greedy food producers because they promise the same taste for fewer ingredients. This is absurd. So is coloring white bread to make it look ‘healthier’ and adding red dye to meat.

Corn used to be multicolored. But some corn plants exposed to nuclear tests in the 1950s lost the ability to create any color but yellow. That was ‘new’ and ‘neater,’ and now it’s hard to find multi-colored corn. White rice and bread were more ‘elegant’ and ‘chic.’ Many now consider them ‘normal,’ while they are nutritionally far inferior.

In the industrial world, much good food is sold in bulk only to force us to overbuy and then overeat or throw it out.

Rational thinking, and not strong emotions, should determine whether you should consume stuff or not. A good feeling may come from having given in to harmful food you are addicted to. Feeling sick after consuming something might be unrelated to the quality of the food, only come from the quantity or speed at which you ate, or may have restored enough of your health that you now feel a preexisting sick condition.

Easy food is not always good food

A smoothie is drunk quickly, but what do we have teeth for? We’re not babies anymore. We need to chew to be satisfied. And if we are not satisfied, we’ll eat more. That’s good if you’re into bodybuilding (but also then, you can overdo it) or need to gain weight after starving or being sick.

‘Astronaut’ food was designed to have as little fiber as possible during space flights, but in the long run, the intestines need fiber to train their muscles. Maybe less during weightlessness? (Malnourished patients with a hard time eating sometimes are prescribed these drinks. Will it bring them nutrition faster than atrophy to the muscles of their intestines?)

People who don’t eat a high-fiber diet are bound to overeat on junk food.

White-flour produce ‘that melts on the tongue’ is almost as bad as just eating spoonfuls of sugar. ‘Soft drinks’ are true junk food, to get you addicted to their content and elevated status. Water is far better.

I’m sorry, but I can’t qualify anything undone from its fibers as ‘food’: white rice, pasta, pizza, cookies, or bread. How do they satisfy anyone?

Many commercial foods are created to make us overeat by adding stuff people are (or will become) addicted to. Deep-fried, over-sweetened, and over-salted. Sometimes a taste from an addiction is used in other foods, like in BBQ potato chips and peanut butter from overly burnt peanuts.

Peeling fruits may be laborious, but that doesn’t make tinned ones better.

Fast food often is no food; comfort food is often neither. The harm of junk foods lies in the quantities (one potato chip does no harm), but they are designed to ‘help’ you overeat, giving you calories that you don’t need, and so, replacing true foods so that you miss out on nutrients.

Eat a bit of your favorite snacks as appetizers and desserts to great meals.

Expensive food is not always good food

Animal produce (meat, fish, eggs, milk, cheese, honey) is sold as exquisite and therefore of quality. Yet, these give you little nutritional bang for your buck and often are tasteless, so that you’ll add all kinds of taste makers that you don’t need or even are harmful (salt, pepper, burnt, and onions).

The hype is that if you have little money, buy at least something good, like animal products. That is a big lie. Rather, for a fraction of the price, with more nutritional value, you can have full rice with lentils, a whole-wheat slice of bread with real peanut butter, or pea soup with artisanal bread.

Traditional food is not always good food

Even if your culture idolizes certain alcoholic beverages, you can be proud of your heritage without buying into the nonsense.

Eating lots of potato dishes was good in a cold climate that’s wet enough to grow them cheaply when manual labor gave us our daily bread.

You may have been ingrained (pardon the pun) with the nonsense that meat or milk consumption is ‘normal,’ but that still doesn’t make it true.

True, also bread, pancakes, and cookies need a flavor enhancer in the form of salt. But who said they should be made boring? If salt-free breads have olives, red lentils, full rice, wheat kernels, and raisins, do they still lack salt?

If most people need milk and sugar to make coffee and black tea drinkable, perhaps they’re poisonous? They are. And they are highly addictive.

New food is not always good food

Many plants have a gene that makes them produce new fruits one after the other. In nature, that guarantees a constant stream of fruit. But for farmers, that means they need to harvest the same plants over and over. Food engineers took out this gene so that a plant ripens all its fruits at the same time, and it needs harvesting once. It seems to have no bad effect.

They developed baby or cherry tomatoes. Great success. Then they modified them to orange, long (‘date’), and other varieties. No one tells you that the modified products keep for only a few days in the fridge.

Exotic food is not always good food

Often, it’s too expensive and not nutritious at all. Try to eat foods that made your ancestors live longer and that are grown locally (to reduce transportation pollution and costs).

Fashionable food is not always good food

It’s kind of crazy to put butter on your white bread and then eat low-fat yogurt with bran. It’s like taking the car to the gym instead of biking.

There are all kinds of food hypes. Certain people need to have certain foods; always have multi-colored foods, not because they look more appetizing, but because they would be more nutritious.

On the other hand, some food myths got it almost right. It’s good to have meals centered around veggies, grains, and beans, and not meat.

Natural food is not always good food

They say that the olive oil, grape juice, and applesauce we buy are 100% natural, but often, all the pulp is filtered and thrown out. Pure fraud.

Some natural foods are poisonous. If they’re low-level poisonous, they’ll make us addicted (caffeine, nicotine).

Animal produce has the danger of having microbes that make us sick, too, and it can spoil dangerously.

On the other hand, some complex plant molecules in herbs stop infections or pests but also taste good for animals and us, giving our food much taste.

Yet, there seems to be something wrong if one’s food always tastes the same, no matter what it is: after onions, garlic, salt, sugar, cloves, vanilla, pepper, etc. Or everything one eats is tasteless, and the question is why. Or one’s addicted to set tastes, and that’s all one likes. What a boring diet!

No ‘natural’ diet can give us all we need. Each one always lacks Vitamin D, so we need to eat foods fortified with it or take pills. Women, before they could get pregnant, should take folic acid, to be on the safe side.

Replacement food is not always good food

Fake meat may be better than dead animal parts in some ways, but it is, compared to non-animal produce, still much too expensive, too polluting, and too dangerous (with antibiotics replaced by preservatives).

Fake cheese may taste similar but is often just coconut fat with some color and flavor, nutritionally worthless. See ‘oat milk,’ which is 95% water.

Fake fruit juices are often just sugar water with some flavor. Water is best!

For decades, margarine was ‘better’ than butter because it could be spread straight from the fridge and was cheaper. Until scientists found that trans-fats elevate the risk of heart attacks and were all but banned.

Fake bread and cookies for Passover are just potato flour with salt and have no nutritional value. White matzos are like white bread, but the matah sh’mura is whole-wheat and among the best foods you can get.

Some people stop with tobacco but then start to overeat. Healthier replacements are exercising, taking a walk, making art, and talking.

Enriched food is not always good food

A friend of mine was an artisanal bread baker. He only made kosher, biological, whole-wheat breads. Why not something lighter to entice the white-bread eaters? He answered, then I need to add stuff so it will stay ‘fresh,’ then I need to add stuff to protect that, and there is no end to what you can or must add. I sell bread. If you want more, go to a pharmacist.

One of the first medical symptoms of alcoholism is neural and brain damage from a prolonged lack of B vitamins in their diet. If all your calories come from alcoholic drinks, your diet will be harmful beyond the harm of the alcohol. Beer producers then suggested fortifying their beers with B vitamins. Surprisingly, physicians rejected that. ‘Soon, they will claim that beer is healthy because it has vitamins in it.’ So, it’s not done. Drinking so much alcohol is a total disaster in the making (psychologically, socially, cardiologically, oncologically, mentally, etc.). Vitamins won’t improve that.

Every diet needs you to take supplements. No diet is perfect. ‘Enriched’ foods are not better than the natural stuff plus supplements.

Therapeutic food is not always good food

Some are allergic to gluten. That doesn’t make the staple of human food, wheat, ill-advised for most people. Gluten is important in our diet.

Some are allergic to peanuts. That doesn’t make groundnuts dangerous for most people. Our bodies make from its oil protective cholesterol.

Many people in the West need to lose weight. Their preferred diet might be a lifesaver for them but dangerous for recovering anorexics.

Alternative food is not always good food

Beware of ‘trendy,’ ‘hyped, ‘in-vogue,’ ‘popular,’ or ‘fashionable’ diets that lack peer-reviewed traditional-scientific support. A claim that standard, scientific medicine doesn’t want to acknowledge this cleverly marketed diet doesn’t mean these restrictions or promotions are frontier thinking.

If your ancestors lived long, healthy lives, consider taking their traditional diets, possibly modified for doing less manual labor now. Yet, it’s possible they stayed so healthy because of their active lives and not their diet.

Harmful food is not always bad food

Mango’s oxalic acid binds to Calcium, a complex that the kidney removes. So, Mango removes Calcium from your teeth and bones. But not if you consume it together with chalk or calcium-rich foods like milk products.

A small alcoholic drink a day may save a sick heart but ruin a good heart. ‘Alcohol licks the liver but bites the heart.’

One puff of a cigarette or a little alcohol is always harmful (though not fatal), but fried foods are only harmful in large quantities. But most people find it hard to contain themselves once they start eating them.

Overeating might still be harmful to people who won’t gain weight. Also healthy, skinny people should eat measured, health-supporting diets.

Unhealthy (though ‘normal’) lifestyles (eating, drinking, smoking, sitting) may only show their effects after decades. Why (continue) to take the risk?

Liking harmful food won’t protect you. To the contrary. The more you consume it, the greater the chance you’ll live to see it kill you. Spicy food and meat may cause cancer. Too much salt can ruin your blood pressure.

Most kids eat lots of low-quality food (fiberless, animal produce, tons of sugar, and they avoid anything green), but still, their health doesn’t seem to suffer under this. Of course, we don’t know what nutritious kids’ diets would do for their longevity, eventually.

Health food is not always good food

For most people, wheat is the staple of human food. But not if you’re allergic to gluten.

The oil of groundnuts gives us protective cholesterol, but these humble peanuts may kill someone allergic to it.

It’s important always to drink plenty of liquid, but not if your kidneys are (almost) gone.

It’s irresponsible to try to gain or lose weight drastically without personal medical advice, supervision, and lab testing.

It is irresponsible to become vegan or vegetarian and not take the specific supplements that belong to those diets.

If you’re bodybuilding, don’t go too crazy on protein intake, and make sure you never take hormones or drugs. Have medical checkups.

Most ideas about longevity foods are based on faulty statistics. Stick to what medicine consistently found beneficial: varied, fresh produce, vegan, with good fats/oils (avocado, peanuts, olive), and lots of fiber.

Good food is not always good food

You can overeat on good foods, too. It’s harder to overeat on whole-wheat bread than on potato chips or ice cream, but it can be done and is done.

Food must look and taste good, not just be valuable. Not all people have the same taste preferences, but tasteless food is not food—it’s medicine. I knew of a restaurant where everything was done to the highest standard. The water used was hand-pumped, the breads were whole-wheat and sourdough, the cooks had the highest intentions, etc. But all the food was totally tasteless and at times hard to chew. The eatery closed long since.

Good can be relative. You don’t want to eat food that’s good for you but bad for others or the planet.

Food can be excellent for your body but not so good overall because it has a tremendous footprint, needing a lot of water to grow, leaving the earth exhausted, being grown by cutting away rainforest and its ecosystem and wildlife, costing a lot of transportation effort to get to you, and needing much energy to prepare it for consumption. Is it worth all of this? Maybe there is food that can very well replace this and is overall less costly.

‘Jews should not eat pig. It’s better for the Jews and better for the pigs.’

When you cook potatoes in salty water, they absorb the salt and taste nicer. But when you do the same with pasta, rice, and dried beans, they also take up salt, but you don’t taste it. So the food doesn’t taste that salty, but eating it dumps a lot of salt into your body. Not so good, but hidden.

With this section, that good food must be tasty, we’ve come full circle since the first segment discussed that tasty is not always good.

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Don’t rely on general information for your health. Get a good physician to inform you. Although MDs are not trained about food, their lab work can tell you if your diet gives you what you need or what needs upgrading.

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