Top Quotes: “Eat Up!: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want” — Ruby Tandoh

Introduction

“Do you know how hard it is to find artworks that show people eating? It’s an impossible task. Food is everywhere, in the old masters and even in the strange, difficult, modern art of the here and now, but good luck finding a painting of someone actually taking a bite of something. Even in Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, none of the thirteen figures at the table are taking the opportunity to actually eat. People make a living from taking photos of the food they eat in the restaurants they visit, and posting these snaps online, and yet we seldom see these self-declared gourmands take a single bite.”

“Stress can suppress our appetites, dry our mouths, cause indigestion, and lead to diarrhea or constipation.”

“It’s not just what you eat, then, it’s how you eat it. Eating food that you enjoy, in a context that’s relaxed and pleasurable, is a step towards more efficient digestion and better health.”

“By the time the summer has faded and this second generation of caterpillars has come into the world, the oak’s spring catkins have long gone. The tree is heavy with gray-green leaves. A caterpillar coiffed to within an inch of its life in shades of chartreuse, decked out with bells and whistles, would never survive in this monochrome world. So it doesn’t try. These autumn caterpillars grow fuzzy, a greenish gray, slim and twig-like. They forge themselves in the image of the sticks and shoots they live among. But just how could these two caterpillars — a single generation apart, and genetically identical — look so different?

“Caterpillar Disguise: You Are What You Eat” is the title of a 1989 article in the journal Science News. Speaking to the journal, researcher Erick Greene of the University of California hypothesized that the eventual form of the caterpillars is dependent on the levels of tannins in the food they consume. The spring catkins are low in tannins, and spring-born caterpillars react to this by very quickly growing into their catkin coats. In autumn on the other hand, with the catkins gone and the leaves rich with tannins, the caterpillars’ bodies receive a different cue. This cue sets off something in them that makes them grow green, streamlined and stick-like, just like the environment they live in. Eat catkins, become “catkins.” Eat leaves and shoots, become woody little “twigs.””

“In Japan, rice is so integral to the national diet that the word gohan, or “rice,” can be used to refer to a “meal” more generally. “Breakfast” can even be translated as asagohan, or “morning rice.””

“Let’s talk about MSG. Monosodium glutamate is a flavor enhancer, doing much the same job as salt. You can buy it online and in plenty of East Asian food stores cheaply enough, and it’s commonly used in certain areas of Japanese and Chinese cooking. It is simple stuff: salt, and glutamate (a compound found naturally in cheese, tomatoes and much more). MSG even has a cute origin story: a Japanese professor, Kikunae Ikeda, took a sip of his wife’s soup and remarked that it tasted even better than usual. The secret was, it turned out, in the kombu — a variety of edible kelp — used to form the soup’s dashi broth. From that sip of soup, Ikeda went on to unmask all of the secrets of that savory, moreish flavor, carefully homing in on the glutamate contained in the kombu. Ikeda had taken a bite from the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and all the marvels of taste lay there for him to grow rich on. He stabilized the glutamate he extracted by adding salt, and monosodium glutamate was born.

It wasn’t long before MSG found its way across the oceans to America and Europe. It became popular in factory-made foods including tinned foods.”

“Then came the fall from grace. In 1968, a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine described something dubbed “Chinese restaurant syndrome. The letter described a sense of general malaise and weakness after eating out at American Chinese restaurants. It set off a chain reaction that Alan Levinovitz describes in his book, The Gluten Lie: “Less than two months after [the letter was published], The New York Times ran an article under the headline ‘Chinese Restaurant Syndrome Puzzles Doctors. Within six months, the prestigious journal Nature published research by scientists who definitively identified MSG as the culprit — and, alarmingly, pointed out that it lurked everywhere, not just in Chinese food — TV dinners, canned goods, seasoning, even baby food.

As quickly as it had come, MSG fell out of favor, and it carries its bad reputation with it to this very day. Everyone seemed to have a story about how awful they’d felt after Chinese food. Everyone had some undiagnosable ailment with fuzzy edges that looked, if you squinted, like a reaction to some poison. This was a public health disaster drummed up through the steady rhythm of scaremongering newspaper headlines, fear of the unknown and, as usual, a seasoning of racism. A fearful Western public enthusiastically turned against this unfamiliar, suspiciously foreign-sounding thing and, with its three cold little letters and its clinical, untrustworthy chemical name, MSG was thrown unceremoniously out with the garbage.

And yet this awful chemical, this “poison,” shipped straight from foreign shores to an unsuspecting American public turned out to be completely harmless. Again, and again, and again, the health risks of MSG have been debunked. None of those symptoms — from “head fog to palpitations — were attributable to monosodium glutamate when trials were conducted scientifically, rigorously, away from the media storm. The whole furor had been for nothing.”

“It’s perfectly possible to suffer a nocebo effect (like a placebo effect, except you feel worse — not better — thanks to the power of anxiety, stress and nervous anticipation).”

“When we hear, then, that gluten is “glue” for the gut, it’s normal and natural to be scared. The effects of anxiety and stress on our digestive systems are well known. It’s understandable to start feeling a bit nervous around pasta and big carb-heavy feasts. It makes perfect sense that this anxiety would rain down through your body, settling in the pit of your stomach, and puffing your belly out in gassy, painful protest. Before long, perhaps the very thought of a bread roll leaves your belly groaning. You cut wheat out. You avoid most cakes and even the eternal glory of a Greggs sausage roll. You learn to be on high alert, checking ingredient lists and labels at every turn. This anxiety has found a permanent home in your body, and it positively insists on your food intolerance at every turn. If you didn’t have a bodily reaction to gluten to start with, you sure will now.”

“As babies, we also take mouthfuls of the amniotic fluid that our parent’s body has made to cushion our stay in the womb. This amniotic fluid bears the imprint of all the things they’ve eaten, so that before we’ve ever set foot in the world, we might have a taste for garlic, beef rendang, anchovies. After we’re born, we lock onto any breast we can find, and begin to breastfeed: this milk, like amniotic fluid, is flavored with the tastes of the food that our parent has eaten.”

“So-called “survival projects” included clothing distribution, the provision of free medical care, education and lessons on self-defense. They worked to aid drug and alcohol rehabilitation, and build sustainable community businesses. The Free Breakfast for Children Program was perhaps the most successful of all these ventures, blossoming from the red walls of St. Augustine’s into a nationally deployed program, feeding over 50,000 children at its peak. This was a program that transformed the lives of children in deprived neighborhoods who might otherwise have gone to school on an empty stomach.”

“In Victorian Britain, white bread — uneconomical for the bran and germ it left out — found favor among the wealthy, while the poor ate heavier, healthier brown bread. Today, it’s brown bread (especially when aspirationally coded “whole,” “artisan,” “granary” or “farmhouse”) that signals a loftier kind of eating. White bread is cheap and plentiful, and so its stock has plummeted.”

“A 2016 study found that half of all people in poverty in Britain are either disabled or live with a disabled person.”

“It wasn’t until 1950 that the first self-service grocery store opened — a Sainsbury’s in Croydon — and revolutionized the way we shop. Until that point, shopping was an all-morning endeavor: a trudge from sales assistant to sales assistant, ordering meat, then bread, then canned goods from each counter in turn as though you were visiting the stations of the cross.”

“Stories often make the headlines about “supertasters” — the 25% of the population who have increased sensitivity to bitterness, making foods like beer, brassicas and coffee particularly unpleasant for them.”

“Chocolate as we know it didn’t even exist when Cadbury started trading in 1824. At the time, chocolate meant drinking chocolate, although it was a far cry from ancient Central American chocolati that had inspired the Spanish conquistadors, who had, in turn, brought a taste for chocolate to Europe. Chocolate was in fact so little known in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that English and Dutch sailors once threw the precious cargo on a Spanish ship overboard, thinking the cocoa beans were sheep’s droppings. The delicacy soon gained traction, however, and in the upmarket chocolate houses ofLondon, the rich, bitter, spiced chocolate drink that the Mayans had enjoyed was modified to fit British tastes, sweetened with a hefty dose of sugar and enriched with milk.

The trouble with some of the early incarnations of this drinking chocolate, however, was their oiliness — a result of the simple grinding down of the whole cacao nib to create thick cocoa “liquor” that formed the base for these drinks. This paste contained not just the dark cocoa solids that gave chocolate its essence, but also fatty cocoa butter which gave an oily sheen to the chocolate drink. Slowly, producers found a way to separate the solids from the butter, creating cocoa powder from the former. And it was this refinement in drinking chocolate that led, in a roundabout way, to the creation of the solid bar of chocolate we know and love. It was a Bristol-based manufacturer called J. S. Fry & Sons who perfected the chocolate bar by mixing in more of the very cocoa butter that cocoa manufacturers had learned to take out. This cocoa butter combined with the solids, plus a little sugar, made a chocolate that was solid at room temperature. Two years later, in 1849, the Cadbury company followed suit with their own chocolate bar.”

“With the temperance movement in full swing, and many religious communities mobilizing against what they perceived to be the corrupting power of alcohol in Britain, chocolate became a savior. Along with tea and coffee, whose stimulant properties were considered a safer alternative to the sinful grogginess of booze, chocolate was a nourishing, sensible drink. And among the ranks of the Quakers, excluded from the best universities and persecuted on the grounds of faith, chocolate represented not just a social force for good, but a business opportunity that could keep their communities afloat.”

“More people than ever are turning to veganism — an increase of 300% between 2004 and 2019 in the US.”

“Several years ago it emerged that consumers had been duped, with horsemeat bulking out beef products on supermarket shelves.”

“Organizers even juxtaposed the “savagery of the dog eating Igorot people with the polite conformism of a troop of Filipino soldiers in blue United States army regalia.

This was horror versus humanity, taboo in contrast with tradition. The aim was to engender support for the United States annexation of the Philippines by showing that Filipino people needed the civilizing powers of the Western superpower. As Bel S. Castro explained in an essay for the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, “the 1904 World’s Fair stands apart as a unique situation in history where food, disgust, identity, and power collided…A ritual of eating and dining became a tool for vilification and was instrumental in pushing forward a political agenda.”

It’s baffling to think that the simple practice of eating dog meat was enough to drum up domestic support for the bloody America-Philippines war, but that’s just what happened.”

“In certain ethnic groups in West Malaysia, the taboo status of food depends not just upon the food but also the eater: different people have a different permitted roster of foods to choose from, based on the strength of their spirit. Children might only be allowed small birds, toads and water snails while they build up enough maturity to handle the spirits of larger animals such as deer.”