“Please sir, I want some more” – a conversation with my stomach
'Mr Limbkins, I beg your pardon, sir! Oliver Twist has asked for more!'
There was a general start. Horror was depicted on every countenance.
'For MORE!' said Mr Limbkins. 'Compose yourself, Bumble, and answer me distinctly. Do I understand that he asked for more, after he had eaten the supper allotted by the dietary?'
'He did, sir,' replied Bumble. 'That boy will be hung,' said the gentleman in the white waistcoat. 'I know that boy will be hung’. [1]
Have you ever wondered what your
stomach would say to you if it could talk?
Perhaps I am alone in this odd curiosity except that – in many different
ways – my stomach is quite capable of communicating with me and I’m fairly sure
that’s not specific to me. Sometimes it
talks almost as a romantic partner, commenting freely on the physical and
sensual aspects of the food I present to it.
Other times it is far more critical, reminding me of my responsibilities
both personal and societal by complaining of my excesses - loudly. And frequently, it has to be said, it brings
a number of my other internal organs into the conversation, especially my
heart, arteries and – if you’ll forgive the indelicacy – my colon.
On a surface level, and most
conspicuously noisily, my stomach tells me many things of immediate
import. My mind and mouth love a lot of
items that my stomach frankly isn’t so sure about. It complains vociferously about spicy foods,
rich fatty foods, dry bulky foods to name just a few. It complains of me making it fat and gassy. It complains when I am nervous. It complains particularly when I’ve
overstuffed it or ignored it for too long.
And sometimes, just like that romantic partner I mentioned, it really
just wants the comfort of a nice rub.
I like to think that on a deeper
level, however, my stomach is communicating in this manner because it is also
keenly aware of the other aspects of food and eating that I mentioned briefly
above. Eating our food can be a
profoundly spiritual and sensual activity, akin in many ways to our sexual
impulses. Indeed, in the West our
predominant religions lump excesses of both into the same category of
sinfulness. Both gluttony and lust
feature in the list of the seven deadliest sins we can commit (as well as on
most sensible people’s lists of fun activities). In her highly entertaining examination of the
topic of gluttony in her eponymously titled work, American novelist Francine
Prose opines that ‘The traditional solution to the problems of gluttony and
lust has been to suggest that the element of sin enters in only when we allow
ourselves to relax and enjoy satisfying the needs of the body. We are
allowed to eat and have sex as long as we don’t like it (emphasis mine).
Just as the challenge facing the true believer is to be fruitful and multiply
without experiencing lust, so it should be possible to eat without savoring our
food. So the notion of gluttony considers the limit of what we need to survive
and attempts to disassociate the minimum daily caloric requirement from the
contaminating influences of craving, obsession, or pleasure.’[2] In contrast, other religious traditions
revere the act of eating and incorporate it into their rituals. In the Hindu belief system, for example, food
is considered to be central to creation, life and God’s expression of diversity
and “Hindu rituals invariably involve the offering of food.” Penances for sin often involve the
restriction of diet. [3]
The obverse of this is that we in the
West have developed an arguably highly unhealthy attitude towards food and
eating by turning the substance and act itself into an ersatz religion of
sorts. This religion has its own
rituals, sinful behaviours and practices – such as replacing actual meals with
protein bars and shakes to be ingested quickly and with the minimum of fuss
and/or social interaction – and consequently its own clergy, for example Nikiko
Maumoto, author of “Changing season:
A father, A daughter, A family farm”.[4] This societal attitude was, of course,
satirised beautifully by Roald Dahl in his seminal children’s classic “Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory” where the gluttonous Augustus Gloop is swept
away by a river of chocolate and the empty-calory obsessed Violet Beauregarde
bloats into a human blueberry and has to be rolled off to the juicing room.[5] Only the abstemious and food-respecting
Charlie comes out unscathed and with the keys to the Factory itself.
The point of the latter book, beyond
the social satire of course, is that as Charlie understands that food deserves
and demands respect, a contention that my stomach knows only too well. In our increasingly shallow Western society
we have largely forgotten this and become extremely lazy in our relationship
with our own nutrition as Dahl’s characters illustrate. In our food religion we punish sinners, e.g.
the obese, while not acting as societies to provide even the option for healthy
eating to the most disadvantaged among us.
We use fundamentally flawed tools such as the BMI to identify those
sinners despite the fact that science is constantly evolving as to what the
concept of healthy eating even means and what health actually looks like. In some cases we have gone even further. The journalist Michael Pollan has observed
that ‘Diabetes is well on its way to become normalized in the West – recognized
as a whole new demographic and so a major marketing opportunity. Apparently it
is easier, or at least more profitable, to change a disease of civilization
into a lifestyle than it is to change the way that civilization eats.’ [6]
We have also turned the final act of digestion – excretion – into a taboo (I
think the last westerner not to do this was Diogenes in the third century BC)
which hugely complicates our relationship with our food and our discussions
around food waste and how much of a challenge this is to our planet. Indeed, eliminating obesity and halving the
number of overweight people would reduce the 2050 caloric gap between rich and
poor in the world by only six percent whereas between the farm and the fork,
roughly a quarter of food calories are lost or wasted. Furthermore in industrialized countries,
consumer waste makes up roughly half of the food loss and waste whilst in
developing countries, two-thirds of food loss occurs during harvesting,
handling, and storage. The contribution
of waste to food inequality around the globe is difficult to overstate. [7]
So, to return to my first conceit,
what would my stomach say to me if it could talk in ways more eloquent than
occasional flatulence? Well, beyond
critiquing my love for spicy foods, I think it would remind me that food is
important not only for my survival but for its social, cultural, religious
meaning. It would remind me that it is
wise not to judge people with religious fervour for having an “unhealthy”
lifestyle, especially given that those people may not have the opportunity to
live a healthy lifestyle. It would be clear
on my responsibility not to waste food, by literally throwing it away, or by
unthinkingly gobbling it down when I really don’t need more. And, most seriously, it would insist that I
should adapt my eating habits to contribute to solving the problem of the food
gap in the world, a gap that was only too obvious to Oliver Twist and his
fellow orphans. Now that deserves a nice
rub in anyone’s book.
Attributions
[1]: Oliver Twist,
Charles Dickens
[2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39940.Gluttony
[3]: Hinduwebsite.com
[4]: https://www.amazon.com/Changing-Season-Father-Daughter-Family/dp/1597143669
[5]: Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
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