What is in a word?

Here are two adjectives that are everywhere at the moment: whole and real. We can bet our bottom dollar that, because they are taken up into corporate language, their meaning is deceptive and deliberately misleading.

What might “whole” mean? In one piece, with no bits missing. Still in a working system configuration. Able to maintain its boundaries on its own terms. Think about notions like a whole person or a whole valley. It has connotations of wholesome, of complete, of healthy operation.

For contrast, here is the Weetabix lie:

Weetabix is a nutritionally packed**, tasty breakfast made with 100% wholegrain and fortified with vitamins to help set you up to take on the day!

And here’s what’s inside…

100% wholegrain

High in fibre

Low in sugar, salt and fat

Fortified with Thiamin (B1), Riboflavin (B2), Niacin, Folic Acid and iron

“Wholegrain” means that no part of the grain is discarded: it does not mean that the grain is in any way whole.[1] It has been so thoroughly processed that the starches turn to glucose in mouth: low in sugar is technically correct but a nutritional fib of the first order: it is all soon-to-be-sugar as David Unwin calls it. Fibre is an excuse to promote grains and low in fat is a bad idea anyway.

Here is a political lie:

“I will unite the whole country.”

The handy thing about this lie, and why it’s shaped the way it is, is that any listener or reader will assume that they know the boundaries of the “whole” country that are intended. In the UK case the Roma appear to be excluded, as do many people such as the Windrush generation who are perfectly bona fide members of “the country” but whom many prejudiced souls would like to exclude.

Something about wholeness makes it a tempting target for people who wish to pull the wool over our eyes. We need to understand this context for “whole”.

Here is another food lie, where one might least expect it: whole milk is as it comes from the cow, right? Just pasteurised to kill the bugs? Well no, it is also homogenised to prevent the cream from separating out. That is a marketing step, and more than 99% of UK milk is processed that way. But there is research to show that the molecular structure of the fat is changed in the process and that this affects how we digest the milk. Fundamentally, “whole milk” is no longer whole; its integrity has been mindlessly compromised.

The actual nutrient content of milk depends heavily on what the cows eat and on their gut microbiomes. How are you supposed to find good nutritious milk as opposed to milk from cows that are fed waste from the biscuit factory? It is so obvious that we need to have dairy products from cows that eat a diverse diet, from forage that allows the soil to function properly. But no, we are sold something else and most people don’t even suspect the scale of the difference.

Whole is not whole.

What about the fruit and vegetable we are commanded to eat? You may have seen pictures of that part of Spain where 100% of the landscape is buried in plastic and glass, the better to grow veg that looks perfect. Which is then chilled and transported oh so fast to the Tesco shelves. That veg has zero relationship to a working ecosystem, and is further degraded before it gets to you by transport and storage. Salad is also the leading cause of food poisoning in meals out. Go figure.

“Whole” is limp, adulterated with chemicals, bacterially suspect, and devoid of nutrients.

Does it matter? Well, I am accumulating pictures and anecdotes about how people were. Perfect teeth in round faces. People of truly heroic strength, stature, stamina, and intelligence that we rarely see now. A posture that obviated muscular skeletal problems. An ability to live in harmony with their surroundings. Did Weetabix obliterate all that? Well, if not Weetabix then the industry that gives us cheap grain products in a myriad forms of “choice” that undermines the health of ourselves and of our pets!

Notice that we can only understand wholeness in context. It is the systemic context that allows us to see whether something that purports to be whole is actually functioning in a wholesome way. A food cannot be whole in the abstract. All marketing claims for foods are misleading for this reason.

There is a French webshop platform that allows you to order a range of foods that you then collect from the producer. You are persuaded to actually see what whole might mean and what it does not mean. These things are possible, and many French producers use this system.

It is not difficult to understand why things are this way. Food corporations (we are down to 10 giant corporations owning all the brands we buy) have no interest in health beyond health-washing for marketing purposes. Pharmaceutical companies have no interest in our health, making devilish pacts with big food to keep us ill and “needing” medicines. Why are we still tempted by offerings from these giant corporations, such that they soak up the vast majority of our food pounds? That is the question we have to answer for ourselves. It is true, but too easy, to say that we are addicted. Notice that the French platform addresses the correct question, real wholeness.

What price real?

What might real food be? What would justify calling something real? As opposed to what? Synthetic? Simulated? Ersatz? Try “real” meat. Or “real” cheese. What are the resonances? What about real ale and the CAMRA campaign?

Is it obvious that a takeaway pizza is not real food? According to my sources, most ham and cheese pizzas contain neither ham nor cheese. And even if they did contain something that met the trading standards definitions of what ham and cheese are, the economics of production would severely limit the chance of nutrition that we might expect from the notion of real food.

One way to come at this problem is to look flavourings that convince our nose and palate that something is worth eating. We do have a phenomenally sensitive apparatus from discriminating the odd billion different nutrients (and poisons) in food. But these senses are systematically bamboozled by synthetic chemicals put there by food manufacturers. How could it be otherwise? I think it is fair to say that if our physical senses are misled by design then the food cannot count as real. Why would we need to be lied to?

Or you can come at this the other way ‘round. Our hens have just started laying for the first time. (Well, two of the twelve seem to be laying, the rest just consume!) We gave the first eggs to the grandchildren to honour their friendship with the hens and their greater need for good nutrition. But when I get to eat the eggs there is no doubt that they are superior even to the local free-range eggs we normally feast on. So, if you can find a gold standard benchmark from which to judge produce, it is quite possible to determine if a food is real or not. The quality of our eggs will improve as the spring comes, with more insects and grubs for the hens to forage for and a greater diversity of plants for them to eat. The quality of standard free-range eggs changes very little as their “ranging” is a bit token.[2] Real food?

Or put it in supply chain terms. People used to have their own chickens and to fatten their own pig. They were tempted away from doing that largely by price and convenience. My eggs are in danger of costing a pound each, if I did the accounting that way. It is not even legal to keep a pig to eat your kitchen scraps. Supply chains make “real” hard to come at.

The best example of this I know is school dinners. It is possible to have a cook at school and for the cook to buy local real food and prepare it inside the low, low budget. Or you can go to a foodservice company who will pay the salaries of their buyers out of the bargains and economies of scale they are able to make. The foodservice route introduces many sorts of distance between reality and food: you get anonymised pap that is designed to appeal to the children in ways that have nothing to do with nutrition.

How can it be that our precious children do not even get an acknowledgement that the nutrient content of food is important? We get the criminally unscientific “eat your five a day” and nothing about real meat and real eggs, even if liver is a step too far for some. The nutrient content of liver is 1,000 times that of the vegetables and fruit that are served up. And of course, it is cheap. Liver is real food partly because almost no-one tries to enhance it. How did we get enticed away from eating liver and oil-rich sardines?

Oils

Is sunflower oil either whole or real? We are told to eat polyunsaturated oils in preference to saturated fats, but this is another lie because the goodness of oils is roughly in proportion to the ease of extraction. It is probably possible to squeeze some sunflower seeds and get some oil. If you eat the seeds or the oil prepared by squeezing straight away, then it might even count as real food.

That is not what sunflower oil is, because polyunsaturated oils are all unstable at room temperature and become toxic when the temperature is raised, such as in frying. No-one could sell a product that behaved like that, so the oils are heavily chemically processed. Some of this processing produces so-called trans-fats that are not found anywhere in nature and are now officially toxic. Think Oreos!

So, we can be sold toxic oils that don’t seem to our senses to be toxic. Whole or real these products are not. Ever. And if you eat out, all the way from fish and chips to gourmet meals, your food is highly likely to be adulterated with these products, because of the dogmatic rejection of saturated fats. Is a restaurant meal real food? Well, your steak might be tolerably real but I can get better meat and cook it better at home.

The propaganda

It has a certain logic that the food you are sold is not going to be real or whole. And it has a more forceful logic that Public Health is going to promote messages like “five a day” that normalise this and make it OK. Public Health is not the least interested in your health (try testing this) and does not work on behalf of the public. Otherwise the food industry would not work.

Indeed, many commentators start there: how can we nudge the current lies towards something that is less disastrous for our health. Food mustn’t cost too much so the supply chain logic must rule. Except that as we saw with school food, that is a lie too. There are lifestyle influencers and celebrities who promote expensive health fads and supplements, most of which are demonstrable nonsense — I think I just saw Gwyneth Paltrow suggest alkaline water with a spritz of lemon; where I come from lemon juice is acid.

Ask yourself about the propaganda: from EAT/Lancet through Public Health England to the Daily Mail. Why do these channels and campaigns so dramatically miss the point of whole and real? Why?

In my mind this is because food is sold to fill a perceived need and want. Therefore, it is the need and want that always have to be defined or discovered anew. We have to have out needs defined for us and explained to us in good capitalist fashion. We have to want something new or be addicted to something profitable or food-as-industry doesn’t work. Whole and real don’t come into it.

[1] One of the challenges that vegans face is the sheer amount of processing that is inflicted on plant-based foods, much of it in an attempt to replicate the natural properties of certain animal-based foods

[2] You’ll recall from an earlier post that no more than 10% of free-range chickens venture out of their sheds