When do we call a food a food?
If some foods contain ingredients, and ingredients make up some foods, does that mean that all ingredients are food?
Have you ever had a craving for something that you can’t put your finger on?
You want something. But you don’t know what it is.
It’s not a food. It’s an ingredient. You’re craving an ingredient. I was thinking about this the other day and my head almost exploded. It could just be the whole pandemic fatigue thing is finally wearing my brain down, or maybe, just maybe, there’s something really strange about craving an ingredient.
In an effort to increase my intake of fruits and vegetables, I’ve been doing a lot of juicing lately. Mostly kale and lemons. But the more I juice the more I get random cravings that I can’t even begin to identify.
Things that I can only imagine must be like… blue food dye #4.
It’s totally random.
I don’t want something specific, usually just some … colour. Like something artificially purple. Maybe a result of detox? I don’t know. So far I haven’t given in to any of these cravings, partially because I don’t know what I would buy. I don’t know what I’m actually craving.
You know when you are watching a movie at night and you crave popcorn–you can just go make some popcorn. It’s direct. It’s specific.
Artificially flavoured foods are more nebulous. What is it that you are craving exactly? The food itself? Or a chemical inside it?
I do a pretty good job of staying away from processed food, and we really try to limit junk food in the house, but every now and then the kids will come home with something, or they’ll buy something at the candy store that sets off some sort of chain reaction of food cravings.
Case in point, Halloween.
I remember a few years back, after I finished combing through all the trick or treat loot, I ate two mini boxes of Nerds. I used to love Nerds when I was a kid — they’re sweet and sour all at once and I was an actual nerd so I felt like there was something really serendipitous there.
What are these colourful little rocks?
The boxes are tiny, together maybe one little handful of candy. But it’s enough. You shoot ’em back all at once, because it seems like such a small amount, and then your mouth is filled with a sweet and slightly sour combination of sugar and artificial flavours and colours.
It tastes like blue. And pink. And purple.
The actual ingredients are something like this:
Sugar
Dextrose
Corn Syrup
Malic Acid
Artificial flavour
Carnuba Wax
Carmine (fun fact: carmine is extracted from little insects called cochineal)
Blue 1
Blue 1 Lake
Blue 2
Blue 2 Lake
Red 40
Red 40 Lake
Yellow 5
Yellow 6
And so on. Different coloured/flavoured boxes may vary, but you get the idea. Apart from the sugar, corn syrup, and famous bug-based colouring, I don’t know where any of it actually comes from. A lab?
It’s not food.
It’s not even close to being food.
But after eating that little box, with about 1 tbsp of that chemical concoction, I craved those “ingredients” in some form or another for about a week. I guess that’s what gets you hooked, you have inexplicable cravings that can only be satisfied by chemicals, and unless you ignore them, you’ll have to eat more chemicals and so the cycle goes on and on.
In short, just because something is listed as an ingredient in an edible product, doesn’t mean it’s actually food.
And even if we allow that the whole might be greater than the sum of its parts, when it comes to the chemical concoctions we trustingly allow into our bodies, the margin isn’t much.
So, what are we actually eating? And how is it even allowed? Should non-food items that are made entirely of chemicals that may or may not be (but probably are) slowly killing us even be legal? Does it matter? I mean, if the electric company mails me a bill and I decide to crumple it up and eat it, does that make it a food? (And does that get me out of paying it?)
Food is a hard subject that people spend their whole lives grappling with. A trip to your local bookstore to see all the floor and shelf space devoted to the subject will tell you that much. So why are we making it any harder for ourselves? And who doesn’t profit from the struggle?