EXTREME CUISINE: We tend in the West to have a mundane relationship with food, focusing on vitamin content (all those Bs, As and Cs), mineral micronutrients, protein, starch and fats. In fact, we try to understand our food through the flotsam of science found in popular literature and our diets become a bit like 2nd year biology classes.
Science has regular changes of mind about the relevance of different food elements to our health. Far better for us if we had a permanent framework that elevated our relationship to food above its vitamin content or glaecymic index.
Chinese and Ayurvedic systems of thought are, of course, precisely this - total philosophies that speculate on the nature of the body, its relationship to the basic elements of the earth, such as fire and wind, and how to achieve optimal health, with no separation between mind, body and personality.
By way of contrast the fickle and changing nature of science to food was a continuing feature of the 20th century.
After the discovery of vitamins, a vegetarian Dr John Harvey Kellog, appalled by his American cooked breakfast, set out in the early 1900s to persuade people away from meat, by founding a breakfast cereal company that today is a major user of vitamin and mineral additives.
Vitamins were the new silver bullet and food manufacturers quickly incorporated into cereals, a breakfast choice unheard of in America at the time. In France today Kellogs is trying to persuade teenagers away from their traditional croissants and pain chocolat and onto CrispX, a new generation fortified, and sugary, Cornflake. The gradual dismantling of French culinary knowledge is one of the great tragedies of European culture.
From 1900 until today the combination of science, food manufacture and marketing persuasion have distorted not just our diets but our ability to grasp the food knowledge that tradition should have bestowed on us.
Food science has had many benefits of course. Let's not be intemperate. But science is compromised by marketing as Dr Kellog would no doubt admit were he alive today.
Cultures that have remained outside the full-on assault of competitive food marketing have retained a body of knowledge that can intrigue and inform us.
We can detect the residues of traditional wisdom in our own habits. Why, for example, do we sprinkle salt and grind pepper onto our food?
Salt is an anti-bacterial wonder and applied to meat and vegetables plays its part in reducing harmful microbes (byway of illustration it protects the eyes from air born microbes, hence tears are salty). An alkaline mineral it also has anti-inflammatory properties. Black pepper opens the pores to allow us to sweat, thereby kick-starting the detoxification process as we eat. It benefits the lungs, the first port of call when our bodies try to vent toxins that have converted to gases during metabolism.
Food is potentially a dangerous substance and humans have spent centuries finding ways to make it less toxic and to render it palatable. Culinary culture is the name of that art.
Soy products are naturally among the most toxic of all foodstuffs. That's why the Japanese and Chinese used them only as a nitrogen fixer in crop rotation until they learned how to detoxify them through fermentation. Once fermented soy becomes highly beneficial.
Watch how the Japanese, when they eat potentially toxic raw fish in sushi, combine it with three powerful digestive aids. First soy sauce which as a ferment contains beneficial digestive bacteria. Second mustard which does the same job as black pepper, preparing the body to detox. And finally ginger, usually pickled. Ginger is a powerful antidote to all forms of nausea. When pickled it too contains beneficial bacteria. The soy and pickle are pre-digested by the fermentation process that lightens the burden of food on our bodies. The peculiar habits of sushi eating are in fact a natural science of digestion.
In the West, soy is manufactured through chemical stripping rather than through fermentation. There are doubts over how effective the stripping is. Toxic residues might have entered the food chain, ironically in all those health products. We eat in doubt, if not in ignorance.
In Eastern philosophy food is palpable knowledge. The purpose of food is to enhance the energies of the body and the organs that determine our health, feelings and personality.
A plant can undergo many thousands of chemical reactions as it deals with the toxic world of air and soil. What we consume, and what cattle, sheep and poultry consume on our behalf, ramps up the number of reactions by many more thousands. The value of traditional knowledge is that at least a workable model of these processes exists.
Eastern philosophy tells us that a duality pervades most things we see and experience. Health then is optimised between a number of opposites: deficiencies and excess, heat and cold, interior and exterior imbalances that differ for each of us.
We now routinely use a number of new condiments as our food horizons expand, in Indian food, Thai, Chinese, even in traditional foods.
Our experience is incomplete without knowledge of why, whether the knowledge be interiorised through tradition or exteriorised through learning.
Of course, the superficial explanation for eating hot condiments is that heat produces cold though sweating but take this with a pinch of salt.