Im in my second week of the online certificate program in plant-based nutrition, and one of the students relays a story that really brings home the influence of culture, affluence and the standard American diet. This is what she said: A Filipino woman (okay, she was my dental hygenist) told me (one-way conversation) that in her culture, families ate the food out of their garden until they became more prosperous, at which point they bought more meat and more canned food as symbols of higher status. This got me to thinking about the reverence many cultures seem to hold for animal protein, and how deep those roots are. I think of fairy tales with the inevitable misfortune around the family’s cherished goat or cow, or of nomadic societies, where many of the food choices (fermented mare’s milk?) revolved around the animals that moved with them from place to place. With this unconscious, almost mythic reverence for animal protein reinforced by a daily onslaught of advertising promoting meat and dairy consumption, it’s no wonder that in America, eating meat became synonymous with being affluent. Meat consumption moved from a sometime-thing to a daily event. Wasn’t there a presidential slogan: “A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage”? (I had to look it up- it was 1928, Hoover). Perhaps people associated their ancestors’ simpler, garden-based diets with leaner, less prosperous days—much like the family of my dental hygenist did. To step outside of these powerful cultural perceptions about animal protein and to look at the paradigm critically almost requires a disruption in ones’ personal life, something that challenges the status quo. In Colin Campbell’s case, it was being confronted with evidence (in the distressing form of sick children who were eating a diet he advocated) that didn’t square with his hypothesis about protein- and thank goodness it was his research, as another scientist might not have been so dogged in the pursuit of truth when the evidence failed to line up according to expectation. In the case of many of us now embracing the WFPB paradigm, which—let’s face it—is considered by most to be wacky and marginal and by some to be downright dangerous, it took a serious health challenge, a rupture in our complacency to give us a different perspective. Powerful, aint it? Your thoughts...
Posted on: Tue, 22 Jul 2014 12:59:23 +0000
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