Tag: Food

Joy in the task

Articles & Essays, Food

We are not simply hedonic machines who thrive if supplied with things that tick certain boxes for sensory pleasure, aesthetic merit, and so on. We are knowing as well as sensing creatures, and knowing where things come from, and how their makers are treated, does and should affect how we feel about them. Chocolate made from cocoa beans grown by people in near slave conditions should taste more bitter than a fairly traded bar, even if it does not in a blind tasting. Blindness, far from making tests fair, actually robs us of knowledge of what is most important, while perpetuating the illusion that all that really matters is how it feels or seems at the moment of consumption.

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Confused? Maybe you’re not drinking enough

Articles & Essays, Food

We seem to have bought into a computational, ledger-based model of health which breaks everything down into its constituent parts and counts what goes in and out. Look at the reports I’ve highlighted and the key concepts are “BMI”, “calories” and “units of alcohol”, all things that can be measured and then used to create rulers with which to measure us. Our bodies, however, are more complicated than that. They are systems in which all the different elements work together. As soon as you try to isolate one, you lose the bigger picture and can easily be led astray.

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Think there’s too much excess at Christmas?

Articles & Essays, Food

Christmas Day lunch is the ideal target for the newest but already most tedious Christmas tradition of them all: the ritual moan about the terrible excess and waste. You know, all that money spent on too much food, of which too much is eaten, too much is thrown away and too much is bad for you. I’ve been as guilty of this as the next party hat refusenik. Yet I wonder whether the Yuletide vices we loathe are just the shadows cast by the festive virtues, and we can totally escape the dark side only by destroying the splendours that block the light.

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The lessons of fasting for atheists

Articles & Essays, Food

It might seem odd but I, a convinced atheist, have recently completed a 10-day fast based on the Hindu festival of Navratri, which is being celebrated this week. These days, if we limit what we eat, it is almost certainly because we are trying to lose weight, detox or realise some kind of health benefit. The idea that we might seek to forgo certain foods for moral improvement seems bizarrely anachronistic.

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