Have you ever experienced a terrible hang-over and rubbed horse-radish on your wrist to alleviate the pain? Have you ever broken your arm and had to crush raw banana and coconut together, inhaling this pungent jello through a recyclable straw, to reset the bones? Have you ever suffered dizziness and found by eating frozen porridge boom! you got better?
No you haven't and do you why?
...because food isn't fucking medicine!
But wait, you've heard of someone's sister's aunty whose illegitimate love-child's third cousin had a growth in their brain which was pressuring their that-thing and who, after having enormous amounts of Vitamin C came right, right? How many of "those people" do you know about? Maybe one, possibly two -- if in fact you even know them?
I suspect you don't but...
...you certainly heard someone else talking about them.
Some loud-voiced vegan sipping their green-tea-gluten-free-soy smoothie at the [insert_nauseating_cafe_title_here] cafe which is filled with like-minded chai-chugging, petrol-hating, wican-whack-jobs in androgenous attire, body-art-piercings and open relationships telling glowing stories about the quality of their stool samples immediately afterwards.
Here's the catch though, kemosabe: walk into any hospital and ask their top surgeons (y'know, those boring people who succeeded at school and worked their asses off to get to where they are now) how many lives they've saved by operating on people's skulls to remove goddamn growths in people's brains and they 'll tell you dozens if not hundreds.
Is it even true?
Or is it some global brain-washing-surgery-works epidemic?
Could it be fake-news ramped up on steroids and ass pimple-creme?
Do you know why your healed-by-Vitamin-C numbers are so agonizingly low to non-existent whilst the surgical operation numbers are so stupendously high, kemosabe? Wait for it: it's because food isn't fucking medicine! Gosh, that line seems to keep popping up again and again, huh? It's almost like I'm trying to say something.
RISE OF THE WELLNESS-CULTURE
We live in a wellness-culture filled with internet gurus (like me) espousing all sorts of ridiculous ideas. According to these netspurts we can out-exercise terrible eating habits, think ourselves to wellness and through diet and food selection, heal leprosy. The wellness-culture is self-supporting, self-extrapolating and self-aggrandizing.
To not support the wellness-culture is to automatically be anti-wellness and pro big-pharma and no, you don't get a say in being portrayed like this because you don't have access to who defines said conversations, let alone the machinery which delineates its outlines and designates its limits. The only good news is this too shall pass, but not before it engulfs many others in the short-term.
The wellness-culture has experienced a surge in popularity due to the spill-over of HAFI (pronounced haf--fee aka the Health And Fitness Industry) into mainstream pop-culture. Body-beautiful has been and always will be a human obsession but fitness fads can now take the world by storm due to our inter-connectedness via ye old internet. Plus the more you hear/see something the more its existence solidifies as both actual and factual.
Even if it's neither.
We've moved from the Abdominizer to Tai Bo to Pilates to P90X to Zumba to the Atkins Diet to Cross-fit to Paleo and now Keto (god knows what the next one will be). Actresses freely disperse advice on how to keep your chu-cha clean by sitting on pineapple chunks; celebs explain how their broccoli-and-carrots diet transformed them; little Annie's mother is still telling anyone who listens how going vegan saved her daughter's life.
FOOD IS BETTER NOW THAN EVER BEFORE
I purposely chose the above title for this section because we've been and continue to be inundated by how toxic our food choices are and how they're packed with preservatives, flavourings, sugars, salts, emulsifiers and MSG you bloody name it. We've forgotten all about the rise in food-technologies that enable us to grow more food sources better. Good news doesn't sell.
We don't hear how these food technologies have not only extended the life-span of millions or increased the nutritional intake of entire populations, but have had a ripple-effect in improved planting, harvesting, picking, growing and farming techniques. Instead we hear about deforestation, the rise of pesticides, the increase of fertilizer run-off into our waterways, packaging and environmental impacts.
No-one is saying these are unimportant (quite the opposite in fact should you care to read current media) but no-one is saying let alone listing the myriads of benefits our modern food-producing technologies have provided either. Even if you only buy 100% organic, it is precisely our modern food-producing technologies and understandings that enables us to quantify what "organic" should look like.
We are able to leverage the most we can from both nature and man-made advances to ensure high standards of produce at affordable prices with a minimal impact on the environment, along with recyclable packaging and/or packaging that breaks down in the short-term once interred as landfill. We've come a long way and here in New Zealand, we're working hard on improving this further.
Our meat, fruit, vegetables, wheat and grain-based products are of high quality. Our food is better now than ever before. That's something we should be celebrating! Do we still have shit food though? Of course we still have shit food and the reason so many people buy it is many-fold, not least because of poverty: shit food is the cheapest and when you're poor, you're poor.
HOW WE GOT GOOD FOOD WRONG
Good food provides good nutrition in fact, even Captain Coloniser -- sorry, I meant Captain Cook -- had to stop in at various ports to replenish his fruit and vegetable supplies to stave off scurvy as he visited the Pacific. We've long since understood the connection between food and health and continue to unpack the ramifications of what this means for us today.
That's not the issue.
The issue is when we empower food with the ability to heal, elevating it to the role of medicine, when in fact there's a shit-load of difference between apples and antibiotics. Just saying is all. But. Like all good band-wagons, once it gains enough momentum and buy-in from the generic hoi polloi (that's you and I by the way) it starts edging towards truth.
Fascinating thing truth: the more people believing something to be true, the more "true" said something becomes. Go back and reread that, because it really is a numbers game. Interestingly, as these numbers increase -- thus solidifying whatever "truth" is popular at the time -- so too whoever doesn't believe this truth-of-the-masses becomes ostracized.
...non-believers and ousiders are never received well, are they?
This is where the mud-slinging and labelling begins, as both sides contest the other's legitimacy.
:: CONCLUSION
Food-as-medicine has become regulated with other "outside groups" such as enviromentalists, anti-vaxers, minimalists and libertarians -- groups not toeing the official (read big business) party line. Thrown into the mix and discounted as yet another popular lobby group on the peripheals, the more extreme of the HAFI are now labelled "anti-science" or somesuch but again, that's not the issue.
The issue is imbuing "food" with powers it doesn't have, not people.
Simply eating well benefits one's health, absolutely: a healthy body is more inclined towards a strong immune-system and thus, better able to stave off sickness. Yay. We all get that. But it doesn't counter-act disease or genetic markers. It doesn't double-down as a medicine, least of all as a stand-alone variant. Healthy-eating people still die of cancer, still have heart-attacks and strokes, still succumb to severe illnesses.
We need to remember that dieticians folks, go to the doctor. Organic fruit growers go to the doctor. The owners of health-food stores also go to the doctor. Farmers, food-technicians and foragers go to the doctor too. You want to know something really weird? Even doctor's go to the doctor -- not the food store or their local health-eatery, but the doctor and do you know why? Because food. Is. Not. Medicine.