America has many regional cuisines and local flavors, but many local food establishments have been lost to the growing national cuisine–chain restaurant food. Fast food restaurants like McDonalds and Wendys, as well as sit-down chain restaurants like T.G.I. Fridays and Red Lobster have taken part in destroying or undermining many local food cultures around the nation. Our local economies and our health have suffered as a result.
The microwave oven provides a perfect example of how tradition, and not modern science, should guide our habits of selecting and preparing foods. Since the 80′s, microwaving food has become commonplace. But such practice is unwise because it is a method of food preparation that is untested by tradition and almost certainly has unknown and harmful effects on the nutritional quality of our food on, thus, on our health.
Human beings are omnivores, and, as such, can eat many different things, both animal based and plant based. With this in mind, the array of food choices available to man is staggering. Only tradition can serve as a reliable guide as to which foods are nutritious and how to prepare them. What are “food traditions”? They are the collection of customs and habits, usually passed down through centuries, that a population uses, whether knowingly or not, for the choice and preparation of food. Unfortunately, in our modern world, we have abandoned tradition in favor of the messages from the media. The media serves as a poor guide, and the health of modern man has suffered greatly as a result.
The following story can be found in Weston A. Price’s book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. It is a powerful lesson on the nature of tradition and its importance to human health and survival.
Our minds have been so thoroughly trained by the media and its messages that much of what we believe about the world and our environment, and much of our culture, is not a product of our own minds but, rather, the product of the media’s influence on us. Of course, part of our belief system and culture relates to the food we eat.
People usually think of nutrition as a field of science, akin to biology. But such perspective is practically limiting. If we try to understand nutrition from a purely scientific perspective, we must ultimately conclude that we don’t know very much about nutrition. For all of the scientific discoveries and advances in the modern era, I believe that mankind is still without basic knowledge of much in the field of nutrition. Nutrition is more properly the subject of history.
