The Bigger Picture: I wish people would think of food as a drug. It's not that I wish people would become more drug-oriented. It's simply that I wish we would hold stronger in our minds the effects of food on our health and wellbeing.
We are biological organisms, and as such we interact with and respond to the world around us. Each item or element that comes near us causes some sort of response. The impact of any item that enters our bodies is undeniably intense for us. Yet, we are in the habit of putting all kinds of inappropriate substances into ourselves as part of our routine.
In our world of convenience, I wonder if we remember where our drugs come from. Drugs have their origins in our natural world, including the foods we eat.
Many of our current drugs were originally inspired by observations of environments and lifestyles. Once a desired consequence was discovered, it was identified, isolated and tried. Most importantly, however, it was patented, manufactured and marketed.
Marketing is probably the backbone of our legal drugs industry. Enormous amounts of money go into it with doctors aggressively pursued to endorse each product.
Once our focus turns to consumerism, however, we know the agenda has come around to the short-term gain and profit rather than a real concentration on health. I'm sure if we began to think of specific fruits and vegetables as sources of our drugs, the pharmaceutical industry would fight hard for ways to brand them and make them very expensive.
Real healing takes time. But time is not something that can be afforded in either the consumerist sector or our under-resourced healthcare system.
In fact, taking time is not permitted anywhere in this economy. When we become sick, there is an intense pressure to get a drug that will counteract the symptoms - a quick fix that will give the appearance of health so that we can return to work quickly.
As long as we are not dead or have become undeniably disabled, we must maintain our function to carry on the economy. And so, as a population, we continue to function while our actual level of health declines.
Lasting responses are slow. The foods we take into our bodies can play a genuine role in developing a strong foundation to good health. Yet, most of us have our attention on filling the hole, gratifying the senses and generating a false sense of comfort or ease from our food. We rarely think of it as having an enduring impact on our bodies, or supporting the daily functioning of our systems.
And taste is a tremendous delusion. It is less an instinctive sense and more one that we have learned to interpret.
There is nothing that is objectively tasty to all people all the time. We form habits around taste, are drawn to familiar tastes, and sometimes take a long time to teach ourselves to endure (and eventually deeply enjoy) some tastes.
A lot of our drive around taste seems to be social. We agree that certain tastes are acceptable or desirable and encourage their consumption.
We gather to enjoy tastes together and develop elaborate methods of mixing elements with time and heat to create the exact taste we want. Taste is fun, it's art, it's a wonderful human expression.
However, the foods that provide this learned interpretation for taste don't stop affecting us when they move past our tongues. They continue to break down in, and interact with, our bodies.
I wish we would think about them in terms of this actual biological impact more than the superficial lure of satisfaction.
All foods have taste. We don't need to be so limited in our enjoyment - coating everything in sugar or salt to appreciate it. In fact, really enjoying the taste of individual items, appreciating their textures and learning about the full impact of each piece of food sounds like a much more gratifying experience.
It would be wonderful if we gathered and supported each other to consume foods that added to our baseline levels of health, rather than cajoling each other into diminishing our health so that we have a passing, meaningless moment where we superficially feel part of something.
There are many useful foods out there that should be a real and dynamic part of our lives. It would be fabulous if we got together to encourage each other to develop our tastes and appreciations for the depth and variety of nutritious foods, sharing them with each other.
More than this, we need a real change in society in terms of how we think of health and living.
It would be useful if our food producers, processors, distributers and retailers really took into greater account the fundamental role foods play as healing elements - every grocery shop becoming a health food store.
This thinking would insist we take real care as to the chemicals we allow into our foods, and the way we prepare them.
• Shalini Sinha is an independent producer, counsellor and journalist. She is a consultant on equality issues and has lectured on Women's Studies in UCD. She co-presents Mono, RTÉ's intercultural programme.