SeattlePI: Organic Food Promotes Self-Righteousness

Right, so the study proving that just looking at organic food increases self-righteousness and reduces compassion is so full of flaws that I suspect students who did it would have had to do a make-up project to finish a sophomore class at Berea College.

But it's funny (and short):

http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/2012/05/18/study-organic-food-turns-people-into-jerks/

If and whenever Grandma Bonnie Peters starts writing for this site, Gentle Readers, this is the easiest way to tell her and me apart online. (In real life, there's a thirty-year age gap...but then my identity has already been stolen by someone on the other side of a twenty-year age gap.)

Some health food enthusiasts are evangelical. They grew up, or matured as health food enthusiasts, on the defensive. You can hardly ask them to pass the salt without them whipping out a fifty-frame slideshow about sodium and hypertension.

The worst offenders in this category are of course the ones who still aren't all that healthy. I lived with one of them for a few years, and understand how they come to exist. Someone who is still disabled by chronic health problems is just so thrilled not to be in a wheelchair already that she can't stop talking about the dietary adjustment that she thinks kept her out of the wheelchair...even after twenty years have passed by and recent research now suggests that her prospect of a wheelchair-bound old age was probably overestimated in the first place.

How much of Ellen White's actual writing can you read, or worse yet listen to, before you yell, "Is there any proof that this Victorian windbag ever even had tuberculosis?"

Sometimes the health food evangelists get into a healthier-than-thou competition. I can be goaded into this kind of thing myself. Listening to the fat, stooped, slow-moving, slow-thinking lady who's thrilled just to be on her feet, I feel an urge to fight nagging with nagging. "Yes, and if you dried your laundry before hanging it in the closet, your children might not walk around scratching like fleabitten dogs all the time!"

Seriously, if I'm going to play the verbal abuse game, I want to challenge somebody who has a better defense than "You're just picking on an older person. With a disability, yet."

But when writing about food, my restricted diet, and my belief that food choices really can control a large number of the health problems we have...I try very hard not to be evangelical. In real life, I recently car-pooled to a grocery store with a mutual friend after visiting GBP, and surprised her by not wanting to talk about food choices in the store. Because what works for GBP doesn't always work for me, or vice versa, and what works for her is probably different from what works for either one of us.

I can tell anybody, without a qualm, that eating mindfully is likely to cure some chronic problems or so-called symptoms of aging you may have had, and fend off problems you may have in the future. I can't tell you what food tolerances or intolerances you may have inherited, or how your body is able to balance and metabolize what you eat.

If you crave a bowl of fresh clay mud every day, or have an overwhelming urge to lick ashtrays, I can tell you that you probably have a nutrient deficiency that's caused by an imbalance and could be more effectively relieved by a better selection of normal human foods. I can't tell you exactly what either your imbalance or your optimal alternative selections would be.

If you seriously want help researching natural healing alternatives that might work for you, I can do that sort of thing, but it's not the kind of service I would ever thrust upon you. It's work. It's research. I usually work cheap for people with disabilities, but I would demand some sort of compensation before I started devoting serious time to researching natural healing ideas for you.

I can share some general information that seems likely to interest a lot of readers out there, such as--this still comes as news to some of my generation--the fact that many Caucasians become lactose-intolerant in middle age, and this unsuspected, undiagnosed, untreated, chronic indigestion is what makes so many older Euro-Americans so grumpy. Is this fact particularly relevant to you? To your parents? I have no idea. It's probably relevant to somebody you know. If you think it might be relevant to you, test yourself and find out.

And I can tell you that organic, locally grown food is likely to be the pure-dee best food you can get; particularly if you happen to be in Scott County, Virginia. But if you can't afford the best, why would I want to rub it in?