-OpEd-
BUENOS AIRES — You mutter your mea culpa and then eat what is left of the Christmas panettone.
The hell of the 21st century is flour and you throw yourself at it with a contrite heart and a yearning soul: your body is asking for it, it’s stronger than you. You imagine the TV doctor’s accusatory finger pointing at you, the warnings from nutrition facts and food labels, and you can’t help but feel horrible.
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How long will it take for that morsel of pleasure to swell your arteries and abdomen? How much will it corrode your internal organs? If Jesus were to multiply loaves and fishes again, he would be applauded for the latter (fish has Omega 3) and crucified for the former.
History of bread
Humans began domesticating wheat some 11,500 years ago. But the use of cereals dates back even further. Researchers in Mozambique discovered remains of sorghum flour in an archaeological site dating back 100,000 years. They believe that the grain was mashed to be eaten as porridge. The oldest evidence of bread was found in modern-day Jordan, where more than 600 pieces dating back 14,400 years were found.
“Bread and flour have been faithful companions of our species for countless years, offering an extraordinary way to take advantage of the nutritional benefits of grains,” Spanish researcher Ezequiel Arrieta writes his book The Invention of Food.
Their nutritional benefits are proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals and fibers. Arrieta, a physician and biologist, is critical of the demonization of flour and believes the concerns raised about them are “unfair and excessive.”
So we’d kill for a piece of chocolate cake, but not for a carrot.
The critical point, he says, is eating too much of them and not enough fiber, which is “removed during the refining process.” Without fiber, you get a “blood sugar rush” (the “I love you, I hate you, give me more” experience when you stick yourself with a bill).
The history of human nutrition is a tug-of-war between survival and pleasure, with a new factor in the industrial age: the explosion of ultra-processed products that are designed to appeal, but with a long list of nearly invisible warnings about their side-effects.
Food and instincts
When people “prefer to eat a chocolate bar, a hamburger or a packet of cream-filled cookies, they are following their ancestral instincts,” Arrieta says. Why and how?
Thousands of years ago, our ancestors learned that eating sweet, starchy and fatty foods (with a lot of calories) allowed them to better face their existential challenges (and live a few days longer). So we’d kill for a piece of chocolate cake but not for a carrot.
Arrieta argues that explaining the public health crisis “through the narrative about our sedentary lifestyles and lack of self-discipline” overlooks the role of the food industry, which bombards us with delicious missiles that are lethal in the long term (and knows it). Focusing more on the consumer than on the system is unfair, he believes. So if you want to eat the last of the panettone, eat it — but don’t blame yourself.
