Dietary Decline
How to get food for thought: Take one large portion of knowledge and mix with equal parts of writing skills, common sense and positive outlook on life. Mix thoroughly and serve with plenty of illustrations. What do you get? A book that offers plenty of food for thought.
In this book Wendy Cook presents one of the most central elements of our lives - food. Without it we cannot survive for very long. Still, as so often with the most essential things in our lives, it is taken for granted by people in the rich parts of the world. And in the poor parts an endless source of hardship for people who have to struggle to feed themselves and their families.
But we are what we eat and it is essential that we all get a good and balanced diet. And to get the right diet we need to know what to eat and what effects different types of food have on us. In the first part of the book Wendy Cook gives a historic outlook on food; how we went from a very healthy diet based on local food and lots of carbohydrates, to adding on more and more variety from other parts of the world. With the increase in travel, potatoes, spices and other foods that we now see as local and essential for our cooking spread to all parts of the world. This chapter adds extra value by linking diet with social evolution. One such example is the introduction of stimulants such as tea, coffee and tobacco that happened simultaneously as the last great shift in Western worldview lead by Descartes, Newton and others.
In later chapters we are introduced to the qualities in various foods; what effects they have on our body and how to combine them. Only fifty years ago this kind of knowledge was passed on from generation to generation. But the introduction of supermarkets and fast food has changed things drastically and with disastrous effects. Instead of improving our eating habits, the whole of the Western world has seen a rapid decline in diet leading to small children with terrible tooth decay, obesity, allergies and a variety of potentially life-threatening problems.
The book concludes with suggested weekly diets and eating habits. Another important factor that has deteriorated rapidly with the introduction of fast food [and so-called TV-dinners] is that fewer and fewer families share their meals together. Instead we fall into grazing, eating snacks or eating in front of the TV, no longer sharing our meals but our TV programmes.
Wendy Cook also looks at food production, how farming has changed from small plots to sustain one or a few families, to the huge areas of mechanised farming, and the consequences this has, not just for the farmland, but also for our awareness of how food is produced - and above all - the importance of organic farming.
The fact that more and more people in the Western world have completely lost contact with how our food is produced does not just make us less interested in good quality food, it also makes us less interested in environmental issues. Perhaps it is no coincidence that two of the world's most industrialised countries, where food production equals stocking shelves in a supermarket come a long way down the list of environmentally conscious countries. And with recent world events in fresh memory, the thought comes to mind if there is a link between the attitude to food and the willingness to spend huge amounts of money on combating potential threats of chemical weapons rather than on real environmental threats. There is no need for spy satellites to determine that there is a real and great risk that many parts of the world will run out of clean water within the next few decades. Nor is there a need to find out how to reverse pollution [or impurities in the air and water as one of the world leaders calls it]. The knowledge is there. The technology is there. What is lacking is willingness from politicians to invest the money needed and toside with consumers rather than producers.
To change our attitude to food and return to a healthy diet takes a combined effort. Not just to influence politicians in the right direction. It also means an effort by consumers to demand higher quality organically grown products. As we saw with GM food, it is possible for consumers to influence the food industry. It also needs a long term view and measures to educate children to develop a healthy diet. To blame children for their poor diet is both unfair and wrong. It is the job of adults to teach good eating habits.
One key element for improving our diet is knowledge. Wendy Cook's book offers this in abundance as well as many interesting facts about one of the most important aspect daily lives - how to provide and prepare the food that keeps us alive and that makes so much difference to our quality of life.