“Cookery has assumed the disguise of medicine, and pretends to know what food is best for the body; and if a physician and a chef had a contest in which children were the judges, or men who had no more sense than children, to decide which of them best understands the goodness or badness of food, the physician would be starved to death.” — Socrates (via Plato), in Gorgias
The ancients (not just in Greece, but in all cultures) saw food as a form of medicine, understanding that food is nourishment and that the type of food your body receives will affect the type of body you have.
In Gorgias, Socrates verbally spars with a handful of sophists who are portrayed in a particularly unflattering light, even by the standards of Plato’s dialogues. One of the main themes of this discourse is whether one should simply persuade others to do what you want, using their ignorance and short-sightedness to your advantage (the stereotypical sophist’s position), or whether one should only seek, and try to help others seek, the true and the good, which is the position Socrates always held. (Oh, and by the way: Socrates is — of course — the original “gadfly and guru”…)
Socrates used the quote above as an illustration to show how the techniques of persuasive rhetoric can — when used to flatter and conceal — mislead the unwary, preventing them from discovering deep truths and thus interfering with the development of their souls. To the group of philosophers in this dialogue, an obvious analogy could be made with food: if a contest were held with children (the epitome of short-sightedness) as the judges, to determine who made the “best” food between someone aiming to stimulate the senses and someone aiming to provide good nutrition, they would of course choose the chef’s food every time. And the sugary confections that I am sure would garner the most praise from children would, over a pretty short timeframe, make them ill.
In the developed world today, with plentiful cheap and tasty food, the same basic choice happens to us all multiple times every day, though the contest is less obvious and less stark. But in fact the very subtle nature of these choices, combined with their ubiquity, make them — over the long run — far more pernicious.
And of all the choices you can make in selecting your food, the worst choices are almost always the most prepackaged and processed ones. These are the equivalents of the worst sophists taking advantage of ignorance and false promises of immediate pleasure, as opposed to the more difficult but ultimate healthier wisdom of Socrates. The philosophical sophists in Greece would destroy your soul, and the “food sophists” of today will destroy your body.
The Problem
The problem with highly processed foods isn’t really the chemicals and preservatives. The problem isn’t even that they are “empty calories” — pure energy source devoid of any real nutritional value. No, the main problem with highly processed food is that it is designed to be hyperpalatable. As the prefix “hyper-” implies, hyperpalatable foods are designed to be excessively delicious. Pretty much every food you intuitively think of as processed is engineered to make you love it. And when you are constantly surrounded by this hyperpalatable food, your brain is tricked into overeating it.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with delicious food per se: a piece of cheddar cheese is undeniably delicious, as are ripe strawberries. The reason you find them tasty is because they provide lots of good nutrients for the human body, and so we’ve evolved to find their flavors very pleasing. But what happens when a lab technician figures out how to create a molecule that tastes exactly like strawberries and attaches it to a combination of sugar, starches and gums to make a Skittle? Or when someone takes an artificial “nacho cheese” powder and coats an otherwise flavorless corn chip to make a Dorito? In both cases your brain is being tricked into believing that this food is providing you with nutrition, when in fact both provide you with absolutely nothing your body needs and much your body does not.
Since the dawn of civilization, people have specialized in making food delicious, at the expense of health. But a couple of important changes have occurred in the last several generations. For one thing, food became cheap. This is, certainly, great on many levels: it has reduced the level of people starving throughout the world and makes it possible for people to spend their wealth on other things. But when combined with the second change, which has exploded in the last fifty years, you get a recipe for disaster.
This second change is the development and refinement of food chemistry, especially with respect to the ability to fabricate artificial flavors, engineer textures, and design “taste experiences” that bear no relationship to their underlying nutritive value. Like every other business, those in the food industry have two goals in mind: make their product as pleasing as possible, as cheaply as possible. At one obvious extreme, you get breakfast cereals and snack chips that are nothing but grains mashed into a pulp, with all possible fiber and natural oils removed (so as to provide a long shelf life), and then dusted or soaked with lab chemicals designed to fake specific flavors.
We are now constantly surrounded by “food” made with the cheapest possible ingredients, at prices that make them virtually free, from an historical perspective. This is not a situation your brain was meant to handle, and it overrides your brain’s and body’s naturally evolved equipment for making you eat the right amount of food for your situation. And while I don’t want to oversimplify the complexity of the obesity epidemic, this surfeit of cheap, non-nutritious and hyperpalatable food is a major cause.
Things gets even more insidious when food companies market their products as “healthy choices,” either implicitly or explicitly. This is where the “food sophistry” reaches downright immoral levels. These products are worse than even chips or candy, since they are marketed as, if not exactly healthy, then at least “not-bad.” But look at the nutrition labels and compare things you know to be “treats” versus some “healthy” or “sporty” alternatives. Gatorade is just sugar water, it’s really not much different than Coke. And while it may make sense for a professional athlete or marathon runner to drink it while performing, it has absolutely no business being a part of any normal person’s diet. The energy bars marketed to help sports performance — but usually eaten as a semi-healthy snack — are only marginally more nutritious than a candy bar. And compare granola bars with oatmeal cookies: they are virtually the same.
I understand that businesses need to compete, and that their products have to be pleasing. But when they cross the line and make claims that their regurgitated flour-and-sugar concoctions are healthy, by deceptively adding flavors to trick your taste buds and using deceptive marketing to trick your mind, they cross a line. Those who are marketing pop-tarts to kids or adding a half-dozen chia seeds to make their candy seem healthy should really be ashamed.
A day of reckoning is coming. I lean pretty libertarian, and I generally feel like consumers are responsible for the decisions they make. But deception is fraud, and what many of these people are doing is downright lying. I strongly suspect that within a generation, the major food companies will be treated like cigarette companies today.
Don’t fall prey to the food sophists. Take a cue from Socrates’ example and seek “wise” food.