There are two proper rules for food in our lives.
First, fuel. We know this. We know that, given enough time without food, we’ll die of starvation, and we also know that there are plenty of people in the world right now who risk experiencing exactly that.
But we live in a society of abundance, indeed over-abundance. While there are certainly people in the US who go hungry every day, the experience for most of us veers in entirely the opposite direction: Not only is food readily available to us at all times, we are also constantly urged to eat by means of advertising. (Little side note on our family: We didn’t own a TV until we moved to Denver in 2009, so for the first 17 years of our marriage we did without. We didn’t even have a CD player on the computer until our son was well into grade school, and if we wanted to watch something we had to huddle together around the computer monitor. We did lots of reading aloud after dinner with Gideon when he was little. Jim read all of the Narnia books and all of the Freddy the Pig books; those are the ones I remember the best. Those evenings were wonderful! On the rare occasions when children’s daytime TV was available, notably when we were visiting another home, I was appalled at the JUNK FOOD MARKETING TO KIDS. Man, I had it so easy as a mom of a small child! We’d rarely go down the cereal aisle, and if we did so the only thing I’d buy would be oatmeal and Cream of Wheat. There were no meltdowns from a little boy who wanted Cocoa Puffs. I can’t claim the credit for this TV-less state, by the way—that was Jim’s idea. He said when we were first married that he didn’t want us to have one for at least the first year of our marriage so that we’d be forced to talk to each other in the evenings. I guess it shows what procrastinators we are that it took us so much longer than the original plan to finally buy one. In reality, we did set out to buy a set when Gideon was about two, looked at something reasonably-priced that we liked, and were almost ready to close the deal when the salesman outsmarted himself by showing us another model with a better sound system. He thought he’d get us to upgrade. We said, “Oh man! The sound on that is so great! Now we’ll never be satisfied with the set we were going to buy! But there’s no way we’re spending that much money on a TV. So . . . sayonarah!” And we walked out the door. I wonder if the salesman has stopped kicking himself by now.)
Anyway, back to fuel. Now, I’m going to make an extremely obvious comparison here. Are ya with me? If our bodies were cars, many of us would have long since ground to a halt, our engines shot, stranded by the side of the road. Why do filling stations have different-size nozzles for gasoline and diesel fuel and usually have different sides of the pumps for them, along with clear signs? Because you’ll ruin the engine by putting in the wrong fuel. (Heavy-handed pause.) But our poor bodies have to deal with whatever we choose to put into them, and unless we’re ingesting an actual poison our digestive systems gamely get to work on it. The damage is being done, though, even if it’s not immediately obvious. As my dear pastor said in a sermon not too long ago, “You’ll never get good results from Dr. Pepper and Doritos.”
So what is proper fuel for our bodies? Well, let me give you an extremely technical term here: Proper fuel for humans is . . . um, let’s see . . . it’s on the tip of my tongue . . . oh, right: It’s real food. It’s some substance that has a reasonably-obvious source in the natural world. It doesn’t have to be organic, or all natural (a meaningless term) or tenderly raised by Tibetan monks. It doesn’t have to fit into a vegan, vegetarian, low-carb, low-fat, or ketogenic diet plan. Generally speaking, if what you’re eating would be recognizable to your great-grandma, it’s probably okay. There’s an enormous range of traditional foods out there. Here are some sort-of-strange diets that have nourished people for centuries and are now disappearing:
Masai tribespeople—meat, milk and blood from their cattle
Inuit—fatty fish, whale blubber, seal meat (Seals were sometimes stacked against the walls of a traditional igloo, where they’d pretty much stay frozen through the winter. Pieces could be hacked off as needed. Things would tend to get pretty gamy, though, as the spring thaw progressed.)
Germany and other Northern European countries—fermented and pickled foods, especially sauerkraut and herring (This is “real” sauerkraut, not the stuff in cans.)
You get the picture. The point here is not to say that we should all try to drink cow’s blood. It’s that we should ask ourselves how far from its source anything we consume is. Take Cheetos: they do have a base of cornmeal and the orange “cheese” coating does have some real dairy in it, but no one in his right mind would call its strange mix of ingredients from the cornfields and from the food lab “real.” What’s your poor body supposed to do with it? And besides, Cheetos (and I’m not picking on this particular junk food; it’s a stand-in for any kind of junk/snack food) weren’t invented to be nourishing and sustaining. They were invented to be eaten as sn-a-a-a-a-a-cks, that is, to be eaten just for the sake of being eaten, for the crunch and the explosion of salty flavors in the mouth. They’re entertainment, and poor entertainment at that.
I’ll leave you for now with Gresham’s Law. GL, as originally formulated, has to do with economics: “Bad money drives out good,” but I’m not going to apply it that way. Instead I’ll rephrase it to say “Junk food drives out quality.”
More on this later in the week.