The organic vision over eating and over food open an entirely new perspective on Western food: it appears as a set of radical changes and, at least in terms of evolution sudden changes have occurred in the last 150 years not only on our food, but also on our trophic relationships, from the soil on the meal itself. The ideology rise of nourishment is a incorporate part of this change.
Usually when we think of “environment” of a species, we take as aiming points the geography, predators, prey and climate. But one of the essential elements of the environment of living creatures is the nature of food available to it and its relations with the species they eat. The interfered changes in the feeding way of a living creature can have extremely serious consequences.
The first major change to man came with ten thousands of years ago with the invention of agriculture. (And it destroyed our health, generating a series of deficiencies and infectious diseases, which we manage to keep under control only in the last hundred years). What is the most important change in the intervened in our food environment? The appearance of modern food. To see better the nature of these changes we must understand how we can change our relationship with food -how we could improve it, so that we can improve our state of health. The changes were numerous and profound, but we propose to start by analyzing the following five fundamental transformations that have affected our food and the way we are nourishing.
All are reversible, maybe not in the global food system, but certainly in the live and in the consumed diet of any individual and, I hasten to add, without having to revert back to Savanna or hunters or gatherers.
The case of maize is highlighting one of the key features of the modern food: adopting food from increasingly refined, especially carbohydrates. The refining of grain is at least since the industrial revolution, the white flour and white rice is preferred over the other ones, even at the cost of losing nutrients.
On one hand, the motivation was given by the social standard: because for a long time, only the rich people could afford to buy grain refined, they have gained a sort of aura of prestige. The process by which grain is refined, prolongers their life of conservation (precisely because they are less nutritious to pests which compete with us for the calories) and make them more easily to digest by removing the fiber that normally is slowing down the release of sugars.
In addition, the more the flour is milled fine, so much greater will be the surface exposed to digestive enzymes, accelerating thereby the transformation of starch into glucose. A big part of the modern industrial food can be considered an extension and an intensification of this practice, because of the processors that are inventing new ways to deliver glucose- the brain’s favorite fuel- is increasing faster and much more efficient. Sometimes this is the purpose, for example when corn is turned into corn syrup, but, sometimes, that what results is just an unfortunate by-product of food processing that was actually for other purposes.