All this talk about ‘healthy’ is really making me ‘sick’?

Weight log:223lbs

Let me begin by asking a few questions…

What makes one item of food healthy and another one unhealthy? Why do some people find chicken nuggets gross and unhealthy while the same meat (parts of the chicken) used in your mom’s chicken soup are actually used to treat colds (sort of)? How can the same material object be both terrible for your health and also able to relieve the symptoms of your illness? What are the criteria that make certain foods healthy and others not so? Is it just what ingredients are used, how they are mixed together, what sort of tools are used to make them, or could it be that the idea of what is health is actual rather an arbitrary thing? Is it possible that the idea of ‘healthy’ might actually be something we have created to make some kind of political statement? By saying something is healthy or unhealthy are we actually engaging in a sort of revolutionary project? And while being revolutionary might give us a certain swagger, what is it that we might be trying to revolt against? Is it possible that food itself becomes a sort of play thing that we use to talk about how we feel about certain forces of power in our world? Is it possible that food provides us with a foil that we use to determine our rank in comparison to each other? (For instance: “I cannot stand drinking Folgers coffee!” Is that because it tastes bad or because I am trying to make a statement about who I am in comparison to all those other hopeless addicts. Am I actually exercising what Pierre Bourdieu would call cultural capital?)

Here is another example: Friends of mine own a vineyard in Kelowna. The grapes from their vineyard are a distinct variety that produces one of the most flavourful wines I have tasted. Summerhill Pyramid Winery’s Baco Noir sells for between $25 and $35 per bottle. It seems that when Mr. Eides began growing the grapes on contract for this winery the expectation was that this wine would likely range in the $10/bottle price range. But after substantial test and showing at various wine tasting events (I’m not really even sure what that all entails) this wine received substantial acclaim which translated into the significant increase in price. So the question is: what is the real worth of this bottle of wine? The actual material contents of the wine have not changed but it seems that due to the interact of experts and a willingness on the part of the public to sustain this price the wine has increased in value. Of course it does not hurt that the narrative around the wine is a classic “Little Engine that Could” Story. But you can see how this related to the question of health? Why can we apply labels of healthy and unhealthy to foods?

Wanna have some fun with this? Check out this little quiz that I have made up to see what you think about certain foods…

Take the Survey (click here)

But while you are pondering that let me take this a step further and ask you to push a little bit further into the reasons for why we might be constructing ideas about health that are not necessarily related to the actual material matter. But that I will save till next time…