Rob Hanna
Rob Hanna
Jul 30, 2017 · 4 min read

Again with the outliers as object lessons about eating food…hmmm.

We get to the heart of Bratman’s simplistic response to outlier behavioral errors around eating where you note his conclusion,

These days his eating advice is completely minimal, in part, to discourage eaters from getting overly fixated on their diets. “The answer is so boring people don’t accept it: Get enough food. Don’t eat too much.”

That’s it?

“Yeah. That’s it.”

Well, no, that’s not it.

There are too many demographics of extreme negative health impact significance in today’s first world economies to sit with that advice in any helpful way. Too many people are suffering greatly today (e.g. from pre-diabetes, diabetes, auto-immune syndromes and CHD) and all driven by the primary consequence of eating enough and not too much… non-food.

Where the masses are being continuously fooled by rampant consumerism is specifically around what is and what isn’t real food — not by the craziness of dietary fetishism and eating behaviors that exist on top of this degraded baseline reality.

Industrially manufactured crap is now so pervasive that we are ever more consistently persuaded to believe it is real food, even though it is not. This begins with ignoring the degraded quality of soils by focusing on simplistic NPK path dependencies and continues with GMO end-game efficiencies to maximize ever greater mono-crop harvest yields and then ends up with Madison Avenue Monsanto campaigns of high-dynamic-range images selling us what are essentially oh-so-pretty-lifestyle-labeled profit margin containers for Big Ag… ain’t a goddamn biologically nutritious thing in them for the consumer, unless you compare it to the packaging itself (though sometimes eating the recycled cardboard would be a healthier choice than what it contains).

These problems are not solved by having people recalibrate their volume and pacing of eating, i.e.

Get enough food, don’t eat too much.

No, that’s fucked up advice except for the extreme orthorexic outliers who need to hear it. For the rest of us common folk the actionable advice is:

Eat more real animals and real vegetables and real minerals as your foods… AND don’t be a freak about trying to supplement your eating of what’s real food with whacky fringe shit in the hopes of it compensating for NOT EATING real foods.

And it’s precisely here where we face the greatest contextual challenges, let alone awareness raising and behavioral compliance:

REAL foods have been consistently disappearing from our commercial food supply choices for the past century (see pic), especially the many, many heritage foods and greater nutritional varieties of commercial plant foods that were extremely common and robustly regionally available even as recently as 30 years ago.

Why?

It’s hard for Big Ag to make a bazillion dollars playing that way. So they don’t and they attempt to crush all those smaller producers and suppliers who try to do it.

To the extent that orthorexia exists among a fringe population of statistically insignificant, leisurely income spending, relatively wealthy individuals who have enough time and aberrant psychosis to expend it around the sourcing, preparing, eating and cleaning up of food as an amateur pursuit (i.e. they’re not in the food business), then such a point is as inconsequential to the greater discussion of eating and food behaviors as is claiming that there are serious climate scientists who have something valuable to offer against the thesis that global warming is real.

Orthorexia is a red herring distracting us from many more fundamental problems across our global food supply manufacture, production, distribution and consumption continuum…

Ok, I’ll throw Bratman a bone: were we feral animals in some ecological cornucopia then his advice would be sound enough advice indeed.

But face it–we’re not.

Our modern day hunter gatherer quests for real foods across deserts of industrially manufactured food crap is a very justifiable and responsible choice for many individuals and families… (even though we may agree with Bratman that at such orthorexic extremes it can be harmful, counterproductive and serve as an object lesson of what not to do).

Until most of us begin to live at such extremes we are better served by more practical injunctions that correct the systemic food issues our global societies currently face — regardless the level of awareness, ignorance or aberrant fringe elements muddying the bath waters therein.

We need to keep the baby of creating and finding more real foods safe for consumers while others toss out the bathwater of commercial nutraceuticals, huckster vitamin and superfood salesmanship and the pathological neurosis that attends a small percentage of consumers in every sized population trying to figure out how to eat better these days.

Rob Hanna
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