Recently changed
up the way I eat – another experiment testament to these protean times: using
food perhaps as a way to find a mooring?
Seems like folks today try diets like trying on clothes, new fads that people
try then discard. We can already date a
photo by what people are wearing in it – so too with food? (Just speaking of clothes, I swear people in
the eighties look as though they are from a far different time than even people
you see in pictures or films from the fifties or sixties or even seventies. Could
this happen
today? If it did it wouldn’t be the
same.)
Food is
undoubtedly important. What interests about
the range of diets available is that there is presumably a best way to
eat. That is what all the lifestyle
diets out there are trying to achieve. A
way to eat to achieve optimal health for the duration of your life and also to
perform and work at exceptional levels. I
feel like my recent dietary shuffle is because of these aims. Fear of death? Is that something lurking in the background
when we make such decisions? On the
surface I say/think that my choice is for the former reasons.
To disclaim
though: everyone is different so there are probably multiple smart ways to
eat. I mean some people constitutionally
can’t eat some things. Others choose not
eat certain things based on ethical decisions.
Any time you enter the realm of morality, though, you encounter uneven
terrain and concealing fogs. Re: meat: saying
you shouldn’t eat animal flesh because it is wrong is one thing while saying
you shouldn’t eat it because it is unhealthy is a beast of another pelt. I think these two ideas get a little
conflated. On the moral side: good, I respect
that choice/have experimented with it myself.
If you don’t partake of meat because you think it is murder (bless this man! (eighties,
again . . .)) then you have thought about it, placed yourself in the hooves or
what have you of others. Regardless of
religious non-affiliation or whatever compassion is virtuous.
The other
side of this meat topic is where the murkiness lies. That you shouldn’t eat it because it is
unhealthy runs firstly into the problem, previously stated, that we are all physiologically
different. If it is true that different
people respond differently to different food then there can’t be one ultimate
diet. This is Platonism at its finest
and it attempts to steamroll uniqueness.
Destroying uniqueness in the name of a higher order is usually the job
of institutionalized faith. Saying one
diet is the best appeals to capital-T Truth.
Unfortunately this truth lies well within the murky domain of morality, with
its obfuscatory mists and mirage-like substance.
So that is
the grain
of salt (literally, and Himalayan at that) I take as I explore gastronomic
alternatives. Despite critiquing what
Plato thought I still think an unexamined life is not worth living. I also think it is easy to go through life without
examining what we eat. Oh no, what if I try
different ways of eating but don’t find the way that is best for me? Worth it to try.
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