Hold on! Hold on! Don’t be offended. But masturbation? You must be joking. No, I’m not joking. Masturbation is by definition self-stimulation. So would you believe that we use food for the same reason?
We are the victims of our conditioning. David Kessler, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and author of The End of Overeating says, if you’re used to self-stimulation every 15 minutes, well, you can’t run into the kitchen to satisfy that urge. How do we satisfy that urge? With “fast food” of course; too much fat, too much sugar and too many carbohydrates. What are we going to do about this lamentable reality?
Although we are going to focus on food in a moment, we have a much more profound goal in this essay than our eating habits. The purpose of Simple Reality is to encourage people to address their dysfunctional behavior patterns—all of them. Our behaviors related to food are similar to all of our self-destructive human behaviors because they are the result of the fundamental defining characteristics of P-B, namely a delusional narrative, a false identity and self-destructive habits.
That underlying structure of human consciousness tells us that by changing our worldview (attitudes, beliefs and values) we will be able to re-define our identity resulting in new, healthier behavior patterns. In this way we can begin transforming all of our self-destructive conditioned behaviors simultaneously. But not all of us are ready for that, so what if we took just one of those behaviors to see how it works? Succeeding at this, we would then have a clearer understanding of how to move on to the next behavior modification goal or how to undertake a more general process of self-transformation. This may be expecting too much, but to fail to at least try to stop the self-destruction is unthinkable.
Humanity will soon have to begin considering a paradigm shift in its eating habits because the way that we nourish ourselves on the planet is unsustainable, especially in the U.S. Americans won’t be eating the nine ounces of meat per person per day that we do now because there won’t be enough feed grain worldwide to permit such self-indulgence. In addition, perhaps humanity will come to realize the disastrous toll on the environment associated with eating meat. Americans would do well to learn about traditional diets from other cultures, many of which are substantially healthier than the standard American diet.
All human problems in P-B are based on illusion, a failure to understand the nature of Simple Reality. For example, Americans with small budgets try to save money by where they buy their food and by what they eat. Further, many American families are short on time – no time to prepare food at home. We believe that “fast food” saves us not only time, but money and work. But that’s often not true. We will see that our relationship with food is replete with many mistaken beliefs; we are out of touch with the facts, out of touch with reality. Sound familiar!
Is fast food really cheaper? That’s our first myth. Highly processed food is in fact more expensive than preparing nutritional food at home. Let’s say a family of four orders a typical McDonald’s meal. Two Big Macs, a cheeseburger, six chicken McNuggets, two medium and two small sodas which costs about $28. Substituting a couple “Happy Meals” can reduce the cost to $23.
The same family could instead drive to the supermarket and buy a roasted chicken with vegetables, a simple salad and milk for about $14. This is true even though the government indirectly subsidizes the hyper-processed and unhealthy food offered by fast-food restaurants, which outnumber grocery stores five to one.
The 50 million Americans who are enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps) which provides $5 per day worth of food would get more nutrition per dollar shopping at a supermarket and eating at home.
Another myth more ridiculous than the first is that junk food is cheaper per calorie and the poor need those calories. The truth is that half of all Americans (and a higher percentage of the poor) eat too many calories. That’s how a third of us became obese—duhhh!
Not all calories are the same as far as being healthy or not healthy. The same number of calories cooked at home in foods such as rice, grains, pasta, beans, fresh vegetables, canned vegetables, frozen vegetables, fresh fruit, canned fruit, meat, fish, poultry, dairy products, bread, peanut butter and many other things prepared at home are a far healthier alternative to junk food.
Author of Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice and the Limits of Capitalism, Professor Julie Guthman of the University of California, Santa Cruz says “People really are stressed out with all that they have to do and they don’t want to cook. Their reaction is, ‘Let me enjoy what I want to eat, and stop telling me what to do.’ And it’s one of the few things that less well-off people have: they don’t have to cook.” Sacrificing our physical and mental health for a few minutes of leisure time is a costly trade-off.
All of our problems relating to food are intertwined. Unraveling the complex relationship of each strand to the other is necessary but separating them from one another at the solution stage will not be possible. The whole context of self-destructive eating will have to be addressed simultaneously. If we perceive food preparation as work, then eating out becomes an escape from work, then a pleasure and then a “crutch” as we become conditioned to that behavior.
Denial is common when we try to confront what we know to be our harmful behaviors because we don’t really want to change. In a country where more than two-thirds of the population is overweight or obese, food choices are often made on impulse, not intellect. Although 47 percent of Americans say they would like restaurants to offer healthier items such as salads and baked potatoes, only 23 percent tend to order those foods, according to a survey last year by food-research firm Technomic.
We would do well to understand as much detail as possible about the connection between food and health. Today the obesity rate in the United States is 10 times what it is in Japan. Fully a third of Americans are obese and the costs to the country of caring for these self-indulgent loads is breaking us. They require more doctor’s care, medication, time in hospital, treatment for diabetes, for heart disease, cancer and countless other maladies brought on by overeating.
Just being born in the U.S. has us living in a deadly context and that paradigm may also give us an identity that can literally kill us. After all, eating fresh fruits and vegetables isn’t “manly.” Jason Sierra who has high blood pressure and high cholesterol has been cutting back on unhealthful foods, but when his office buddies order lunch, he opts for “man food” such as pizza to fit in.
Enter the profit-driven corporate food industry which is partly responsible for encouraging consumers to behave more like zombies on the hunt rather than awake humans consciously seeking healthy nutrition. …the engineering behind hyper-processed food makes it virtually addictive. A 2009 study by the Scripps Research Institute indicates that over-consumption of fast food “triggers addiction-like neuroaddictive responses” in the brain, making it harder to trigger the release of dopamine. In other words the more fast food we eat, the more we need to give us pleasure…
As the food industry is driven by profits (the security energy center of the false self), we as individuals have become increasingly driven by our addiction to junk food (the sensation energy center of the false self). Because in the context of P-B the various segments of the human community do not work together for mutual benefit, the food industry functions at cross-purposes to the welfare of the consumer, helping to create self-destructive food addicts.
This addiction to processed food is the result of decades of vision and hard work by the industry. For 50 years, says David A Kessler, … companies strove to create food that was “energy-dense, highly stimulating, and went down easy.
We will, of course, need to address our own personal relationship with food. There is also the possibility of a local or Federal response that could encourage healthier eating habits or discourage unhealthy ones. Maybe we could tax fat—seriously—and before you laugh; read the article in the Guardian entitled “Body blow for butter-loving Danes as fat tax kicks in.” The article reads: “Danes who go shopping today will pay an extra 25p on a pack of butter and 8p on a packet of crisps, as the new tax on foods which contain more than 2.3% saturated fats comes into effect…The additional revenue raised will fund obesity fighting measures.”
There is a similarity between food addiction and tobacco addiction and we can be encouraged by what we as a society accomplished in reducing the number of smoking addicts over the last 30 years. A “cool” habit was converted into one practiced by pariahs. Today American children tell their parents, “I wish you didn’t smoke.” Tomorrows parents could hear their children booing as they drive by McDonalds.
We must begin with a courageous look at the problem regarding our relationship with food, which we all know exists, because that awareness can give us the motivation to take action. In this essay we have revealed the enormity of the problem, acknowledged the truth, and now we are confronted with a choice. Go back into denial, back to sleep, back into the madness of pain, suffering and self-hatred. Or choose self-forgiveness, self-empowerment and freedom from suffering, helping yourself and the environment. What will it be—fear and reaction or compassion and response?
__________________________________________________________
References and notes are available for this article.
For a much more in-depth discussion on Simple Reality, read Simple Reality: The Key to Serenity and Survival, by Roy Charles Henry, published in 2011.
