e=mc2andallthat

O tempora, o mores!

What times! What customs!

— Cicero

We are all orthorexics now.

Or so it would seem, at least to me. Orthorexia is the obsession with eating foods that the individual considers ‘healthy’. When I started teaching, a typical teacher’s packed lunch consisted of a sandwich, an apple and a packet of crisps. This was such a common combination that I remember one wag saying that such unthinking adherence to culinary group-think would even have brought joy to the heart of Josef Stalin.

But now — oh my goodness me! What times! What customs! What a huge selection of weird and wonderful Tupperware!

And the food! Growing up in North Wales in the 70s, I’m sure that the majority of food being ingested in our staff room would not have been available in most supermarkets. Perhaps not even in Llandudno ASDA where my parents, cosmopolitan souls that they were, would venture every now and again to buy exotic packets of VESTA dried foods.

But enough of Vesta packets (my favourite was the Beef Risotto, especially eaten as a sandwich), what kind of modern foods am I talking about? Examples would be Black Lentil and Aubergine Stew (“Because black lentils are so much more nutritionally dense than your everyday red lentils, darling!”), Kale and Lemon with Giant Couscous Salad or Smoked Mackerel Pilaf.

Oh lordy, it’s enough to make a chap self-conscious about his cheese sandwich, apple and packet of crisps. Except . . . the way I look at it is: food is food. The human organism is evolved to ingest any old random crap that either can’t or doesn’t run away fast enough and turn it into, well, human-stuff: snot, phlegm, fingernails parings, earwax and so on. A human being can survive for a surprisingly long time on “empty” calories, provided that a few trace nutrients are also present (“Scurvy, anyone?”).

What I do find strange about the now almost universal orthorexic mindset is the attribution of near magical properties to food-stuffs, especially the less familiar and exotic ones.The power of a secretary of state of education seems as nothing compared to that of Jamie Oliver.

That said, there is cause for concern in the amount of processed sugar consumed by youngsters and well, everyone else actually. But I cannot help but feel that there is a strong element of public performance, and perhaps even “nutritional virtue signalling”, in the eating patterns of many adults today.