I have about an hour before the end of Blog Action Day, to write post about food…
So…here goes a bit of a stream of thoughts…don’t expect too much structure!
Earlier today I was listening to BBC Radio 4 and heard a programme mentioning diamond Shreddies. A quick YouTube search later and I found this: (I’ll wait while you watch it)
Brilliant huh?!
As the day wore on, this video has been floating around my head and I have realised how much eating is done with the eyes and the brain. My young son won’t eat broccoli if we call it broccoli – but if we call it “trees” he will wolf it down.
I don’t eat pasta. I tell people it is because I don’t like the texture – but this is only kinda true – I don’t like the texture I am expecting when I think about it. The thought of “pasta” is enough to put me off. I don’t actually remember trying pasta (I have, I just don’t remember it) but my immediate mental image is of “slime”.
What interests me is how there are some foods I can eat without thinking, and others where eating them is a more cerebral experience.
Meat for instance. I feel that I should be put off by the idea of eating something that was once living, with blood pulsing round its body, but I can ignore that and happily eat chicken, pork, lamb, turkey or beef (I once found a piece of vein in a piece of pork, and it suddenly bought home to me what meat was). If you offered me dog, puffin or even goat meat (as I was offered recently) I am sorry, but I couldn’t do it. That said, I have eaten deer, ostrich, kangaroo and rotting shark. The difference was I had to make a conscious decision to do it -and they have not become regular parts of my diet in the way that chicken is. So what have I turned off in my head that fast tracks the usual suspect meats? What is the difference? I am not altogether sure.
Of course, I am aware that I am in a very lucky position to have the choice:
- I have never had to eat something because it was choice of eating something or starving to death.
- I have never had to be fed intravenously.
- I only know of one food allergy I have (Quorn Mycoprotein – makes me throw up)
But despite my luck, and the almost limitless range of food stuffs available to me, I find I have a range of probably 50 dishes (maximum) that make up my regular diet – and these are things I don’t have to think about as I eat them.
In some ways this is what makes the diamond Shreddies so interesting – you are suddenly thinking about a product that you don’t usually think about.
I am not sure what all this means, but I have enjoyed the thinking…
I’d like to leave you with a question…what would it take to make you eat lab grown meat without thinking?