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.