When I was in college studying Anthropology, I took a course on flintknapping. Before we began banging rocks together we watched an instructional series in which a master flinknapper explained quite confidently that flintknapping is about creating a "cone of force" that would break the rocks in just the right place. Just picture where the edge of this imaginary cone would be, and you could hit the rock in the right place.
"Does that sound good to you?" our professor asked.
"Yes," we all said, "It seems reasonable."
"Well, it's entirely wrong," he replied. The cone-of-force theory of flintknapping did not withstand rigorous scientific testing, and the predominating theory (unless it has changed since then) is that you're actually pulling the rock beyond its elastic limit, flaking pieces off, not creating a cone of force that chips off triangular-shaped pieces. That's not something I expect you to actually care about. What I expect you to care about came next.
"The moral of the story is this: You do
not need to know how or why something works to be a master at it."
That stuck with me, because it describes so much of both toolmaking and food preparation. I started
a batch of mead the other day (which is going great, by the way). I did this knowing full well that what I was doing was culturing yeast and bacteria naturally found in the air, honey, and fruit I used. Today I also made sourdough bread, fully aware that the rising of the dough was due to bacteria I had cultured in the flour starter I made weeks ago. I know how fermentation works in yogurt, cheesemaking, making pickles and sauerkraut. I also have a reasonably good idea of what foods contain what nutrients, I know how sugar and fat work in the body and I know what a calorie is.
Our ancestors knew none of these. When things worked, it seemed like magick to them. And it
was magick. For me, understanding microbiological processes, whether by microorganisms or by the cells within our bodies, is like a study in the underlying process of magick. I understand it, but I don't stress myself out thinking about it. In fact, the deeper I get into using food for magick and ritual, the more likely I am to actively avoid thinking about those underlying natural processes in a literal manner at all.
I don't think of them as yeast and bacteria. I think of them as magickal processes transforming food. I don't think of food as a matrix of protein, carbs, and fat with vitamins and minerals. I think of nutrition as a transfer of life force.
Obviously it's not
bad if you choose to geek out over such things, and they're certainly fascinating and helpful for nutritionists and biologists. But there are some hazards to it, as well, especially when capitalism is added to the mix. We've become in a way too smart for our own good, reducing the amount of processing done to raw ingredients in order to make the end product cheaper for manufacturers. When this results in nutritional deficiencies or poor taste--as it has on multiple occasions--the knee-jerk reaction isn't to go back to traditional processing methods, but to try balancing it out with even more non-traditional processing methods.
Bread is a great example of that. It started with the discovery of yeast, meaning bread is now usually made with one strain of intentionally cultivated yeast rather than facilitating local colonies of yeast and bacteria. This made it possible to make bread very quickly without actually fermenting it, compromising its digestibility and tolerability. Then flour processing changed, which made bread super-palatable and appealing, but stripped out valuable nutrients, causing nutritional deficiency. Rather than go back, they started adding synthesized vitamins and minerals to the flour instead.
Although this is better than nothing, it's important to recognize that none of this is done for optimum nutrition, it's done to keep food cheap to produce and increase the profits of food manufacturers. Adding synthesized vitamins and minerals allows manufacturers to use more fillers while boasting the same or "better" nutrition. That's the issue with cellulose--often colloquially called "wood pulp"--in food. Is it dangerous? No. But it's cheap. It tricks your body into thinking you're getting something nutritious and whole when you are not.
A similar thing happened with maize (corn) flour, something that was traditionally treated with lime by indigenous people in the Americas in order to make dough. When this step was eliminated by people who figured out how to merely grind dry maize into flour, it resulted in major outbreaks of pellagra. They didn't know it at the time, but the lime treatment was what made niacin in the maize bioavailable. Thousands of years of food processing knowledge had prevented a nutritional deficiency even without knowledge of what vitamins even are! (On an aside, most maize flour I find is treated with lime rather than enriched, so in this case I guess people learned their lesson).
Tinkering with the macronutrient content is another classic way your food is modified, particularly when we're dealing with whatever the latest macronutrient demon is. In the 1990s, when people were freaking out about eating fat, manufacturers found ways to remove the fat. But since this also makes food absolutely disgusting, they added carbohydrates--usually sugar--and salt just to make it palatable. Low-carb food similarly involves taking out the carbs and replacing them with fillers and artificial sweeteners. Food like this is based on the idea that you can separate macronutrients as well as micronutrients from food, recombine them, and have something that sustains human health. It's a very futuristic-sci-fi concept that sounds reasonable but ignores that we just don't know
everything about how food sustains us. This is why you shouldn't try living off things like Soylent (or any other meal replacer for that matter).
New breakthroughs in food science seem like lifesavers that will feed a hungry planet until they reveal some health deficit that was being prevented by traditional food preparation methods. And they
all seem perfectly fine per common sense until we discover them. Nobody could have possibly recognized that giving up nixtamalization of maize would give people pellagra, for instance. But this mistake killed thousands of people.
Furthermore, feeding a hungry planet was never the goal anyway. There are enough resources to go around if people just share, but instead corporations throw away tons and tons of perfectly good food as "waste" because they overproduced it, decided it was too ugly to sell, or refuse to give anything for free to the hungry. The idea that GMOs, skipping production steps, synthesizing new ingredients in labs, or otherwise making major changes to the food system will end world hunger presumes that the problem is not enough food, which has never been the problem. We make more than enough. It just doesn't go where it should. Feeding the hungry isn't why they do this, profit is. Creating addiction (which is great for profit) is.
I cultivate a magickal perspective on food because of this. It doesn't matter if this is really the way it works, or if magick is real at all. Viewing food in a magickal way, believing that it should be as traditional and natural as possible, will automatically put you in a better place nutritionally than all the calorie and nutrient counting in the world will. It also--when you make as much effort as you can to produce your own food or create a local network of food producers--helps reduce the amount of profit going to companies that are getting rich off peoples' health.
Am I saying you shouldn't gain an understanding of nutrition? Or look into what known vitamins and minerals you might be deficient in? Absolutely not. But you should
always use that knowledge to gain a different perspective on
real foods, not to compensate with fortified or enriched foods or synthesized vitamins. There's more to food than we already know.
-- ☥ Setkheni-itw
