Saving the World

 

The quick answer:  The cure to the global chronic disease epidemic rests on the power of thoughtful and caring people to influence the lifestyle of those they know.

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Stoics and Epicureans

It’s the comments that make this blog work; I’ve said that before.  So it caught my eye that this week’s topic, fasting, drew just three comments.  By comparison, bread, a topic from early in the year when there were fewer readers, drew over fifty.  “Food for thought,” I muttered to myself.

My thought wandered to the Greek philosophers.  Remember the stoics?  Stoics sought harmony with Nature, through the practice of virtue.  Pain and pleasure must be ignored, they reasoned, in the quest for virtue.  If a stoic visits your home, what do you feed him?  Raw carrots, but only after doing the stadium steps until you both drop. 

The stoics’ opposites were the epicureans who, though wary of strong passion, found comfort in life’s pleasures.   Not quite hedonists, they took comfort in true friends, and in the tranquility of a life well lived.  Got an epicurean coming over?  Make a carrot cake and settle down for a comfy visit.

So you’re thinking, “What am I?  Sometimes I want to be stoic, but other times I’m totally epicurean.”  Think about how you bathe.  Do you like a quick shower with cool water to stimulate?  That’s your stoic.  Or does a long bath with a favorite book and a candle burning sound better some times?  Yeah.

The Industrial Revolution

Modern, post-Industrial Revolution society has brought out the epicurean in us all.  Yes, we still work hard, though not physically, but look where we spend our money.  The rise in sugar consumption since WWII is a good measure of our epicurean drift.  Think about the automobile.  The first cars were open to the air and you had to crank them to get started.  Now we’ve powered about everything we can on cars; there’s even one that claims to do its own parallel parking.   I suspect the pendulum has swung about as far as it can.  Blame it on the Industrial Revolution.

In three generations—about a century—the Industrial Revolution changed everything about life in western society.  And we are like people whose house has burned down, picking through the rubble to save what we can.  China is the most interesting country in the world today because they’re rushing through industrialization in just one generation.  It’s a crazy mad dash and as food tradition is thrown aside, chronic disease is on the rise. 

The solution, as always, is conflicted.  Take tobacco, for example.  According to a Reuters’ report, tobacco causes 1 in 3 cases of respiratory disease, 1 in 4 cancers, and 1 in 10 cases of heart disease.  Now that’s a fine business:  tobacco, all diseases considered, kills half its users.  Smoking is rampant in China.  Here’s the conflict:  China National Tobacco is owned by the government and provides 9% of its income.  The U.S. tobacco companies have no qualms about exporting their stuff and the Japanese government, a power in the region, owns half of Japan Tobacco.  There’ll be no mercy shown.

People Helping People

Next week the United Nations convenes a landmark meeting driven by the horrific rise in global chronic disease.   The meeting will focus on four: cancer, cardiovascular, diabetes and respiratory diseases.  (Besides lung cancer, the main respiratory diseases are asthma and emphysema, which when advanced become chronic obstructive respiratory disease, or COPD.)  You can expect to see news story about this meeting.

The intentions of those attending the United Nations conference are good, I suppose, but will they make a difference?  I’m not hopeful.  Food Inc. will be circling the meeting, looking to protect their right to sell food-like products as food. 

Real change comes from the everyday interaction of regular people; we’re social creatures so we like to move together.   We like helping, and sometimes need to be helped.

This brings us to a book coming out next month: The Kitchen Counter Cooking School.  This isn’t a plug for the book—I haven’t read it, so don’t know if its any good.  But I like the idea of the book.  The author, Kathleen Flinn, a business world refugee turned chef, trained at Le Cordon Bleu, makes an offer to nine hapless novices—free cooking lessons.  The inspiration comes from a chance supermarket encounter with a woman loading up on processed foods.  (A prior book, The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry, tells of her adventures at the world’s most famous cooking school.)  A true believer in home cooking, Flinn’s underlying question was, “What holds people back from cooking?”  

Think about the math.  If each of the 9 women Flinn taught in turn each taught nine others, and this continued for ten turns, the majority of the world's cooks would have been trained in healthy cooking.  Women can change the world and a good place to start is the art of making dinner.  We need to move faster, the poor Chinese, rocketed into the post-industrial era, need help but so do the people around us.  Next week’s topic is home cooking.  It’ll be fun. 

What can we do to change the food people eat?  Please comment.

Comments

[Skip Hellewell]

Agreeing with Valena:

I add my vote to Valena's. It really is cheaper to MAINTAIN HEALTH with home cooking (using natural foods) than any other way. Maybe you can eat top raven noodles, or mac 'n cheese out of the box cheaper, but that diet doesn't maintain health--it just slows dying.

There are typically three stages to bad dietary habits: First, you grew up in the processed food era, eating lots of factory-made stuff. Second, you went to college and as you got busier you ate more and more fast food. (Yes, pizza is fast food.) Third, after college you could afford restaurant food, or take-out and you didn't want to shop and cook for just yourself. The dietary sins of your 20s and 30s have consequences that usually appear in your 40s and 50s.

Home cooking is both cheaper and healthier than all the alternatives.

[Mims]

Katherine, I'm impressed by you! I have to say that the best way of teaching people to cook is to invite them to cook and eat with you. Most people would gladly join in and help you with what they can, and will learn while doing it even without "lectures". I like to cook (most of the time) and do cook healthy, but I too have learned loads by cooking together with other people, and most of all, cooking together is both fun and inspiring. Off course, there will always be those who only mill around the kitchen, but I like to think that they learn something as well, I'm a great believer in passive learning ;)

As for kitchen equipment being expensive; I started out with 1 cooker, a couple of pots and pans from goodwill, a medium sized all purpose knife (also from goodwill), a plastic cutting board (the cheapest from the supermarket), a strainer (goodwill), a potato peeler, a grater, a can opener and a spatula (the last four probably also from goodwill, but I can't remember). This was perfectly adequate for basic, everyday cooking. I also had a couple of plates, bowls, cups and glasses, but not really for more than 2 people, so for many years I had to ask my dinner guests to bring their own. Almost everything I had in the kitchen was from goodwill or the dollar store, and I didn't really pay much for it at all, so I disagree with the notion that it is expensive to equip a kitchen, it can be, but it doesn't have to be. As for cooking being more expensive than eating out, if I hadn't cooked, my earnings would only have lasted a week, now it lasted the whole month, though admittedly, some months I had rice and beans and grated carrots for every meal but breakfast for the last week, but I did have food on the table!