When it Comes to Food, We’ve Lost Our Minds.

Our reliance on Big Food and Big Pharma is a terrible strategy.

It’s exasperating to hear the phrase “I don’t like” before rudimentary foods such as cabbage, porridge or boiled potatoes. People hate broccoli but love kale, devour french fries but loathe mash, eat pasta but detest couscous. It’s totally irrational.

I used to hate milk. I could take it in coffee, yet drinking it neat made me gag. As I learned more about its nutritional merits and started buying a full-fat, unhomogenised version from a local dairy, I found it to taste incredible. I now have to limit my milk consumption because I can happily chug a whole pint straight from the fridge door.

The more knowledge you acquire about food, the more your perception of that food can change. This will affect the flavour and hence your pleasure in consuming it.

Rice pudding is a classic case of illogical thinking. How can a dish of rice, milk and sugar impart such disgust? It would appear that memories of dinner ladies standing behind deep metal trays of mottled brown stodge, armed with dangerously large spoons, have completely overridden our sensibilities.

So many adults baulk at the mention of rice pudding, but if they stopped to think about what it consisted of and perhaps tried making it themselves, they might realise what a simple and deeply satisfying dish it can be.

All over the World, people devour bowls of milky rice, famed for its heart-warming qualities — essential for the young, the old and the infirm. Yet many of us, happy to graze on industrially-produced, lab-created, chemical-covered crap, refuse to eat it.

Of course, many more people have access to many more foods, and exotic flavours and textures can be challenging for some — especially kids. However, most examples of fussiness are simply a lack of thought about what we are eating.

The industrialisation of our food production and our migration to more urban environments has caused us to become increasingly disconnected from its source.

Our purchasing has become focused on supermarkets where we buy increasingly processed foods. We have lost touch with the raw ingredients, the farmers and the producers and with it, not only our ability to distinguish quality but also our ability to prepare and cook meals.

If you have no knowledge about how your food is produced or the quality of the ingredients, then what criteria do you use when deciding what to eat?

A wedge of unpasteurised cheese from a local dairy or a slice of tasteless orange plastic? A colourfully packaged bagel or a chunk of home-baked sourdough?

I guess you might choose the bagels because they last longer, are easier to slice or because it’s a brand you know and trust for consistency. But this is a crazy way to judge something that you plan to ingest and that you rely upon to keep yourself healthy and alive.

When it comes to food we’ve lost our minds. We are all getting fatter and sicker, but are unwilling to accept it’s the crap we are eating that’s to blame. Worse still, even when we know it is what’s making us fat and sick we still eat it.

We have been completely brainwashed by the billion-dollar advertising campaigns and the chemical combinations contrived to make cheap, unhealthy food utterly irresistible.

We are certainly the only animal on this incredible planet that seeks out food which makes us sick.

We seem incapable of prioritising what we put into our bodies over which phone to buy or which trainers to wear. As a result, we are losing the skills developed over thousands of years to source and prepare nutritious food.

As we empower the food industry to make us sicker, so we rely more on big pharma to keep us alive. Ozempic, a drug to treat obesity, is a stark reminder of this insanity. The system is too skewed and corrupt to treat the problem at its source.

So I urge everyone to learn about food. Learn how to cook. Learn how to find the freshest ingredients. Try your best to buy food as close to its source as possible. It does take time, however, it’s neither difficult nor expensive, and it’s not only an investment in your health, the health of your family and the health of the planet, but it’s empowering too, because every dollar you spend is a vote.

Don’t vote for them!