Footnotes to a Conversation, October 23, 2023

Fear & Anxiety Around Food

Eggs are bad for us. Eggs are good for us. Butter is bad. Butter is good. The latest demon in our kitchen cupboards is ultra-processed food – and that’s probably over half the food you eat as it includes more or less everything you don’t make in your own home and is sold by a big corporation – from hummus and baked beans to Haribo candies and energy bars.

“A nuance that is typically glided over in reporting is that it’s virtually impossible to make causal inferences from these types of studies. Although diets higher in UPF are associated with poorer health outcomes, it’s more difficult to pinpoint exactly what is causing a particular effect. People who eat the most UPF are different to those who eat the least on virtually every conceivable level: education, income, family history of disease, deprivation.

“I’m not arguing that we don’t need to change the food system. My argument is that the headlines have leapfrogged science, allowing people in places of power and privilege to create fear and shame about the food we eat. This creates a sense of urgency that keeps us focused on food as the issue, rather than the social, political, and structural forces that shape our lives and our experiences of well-being. Instead of rallying against systematic underfunding and the backdoor privatisation of healthcare, we’re occupied with finding minimally processed alternatives to Dairy Milk.” [Vittles]

Haunted Houses & Jack-o’-Lanterns

When I was young, there was a small house surrounded by a very tall hedge just down the block from where we lived. I was convinced that a witch lived there. Was it just the hedge that I found scary or had something happened there that I no longer remember? It certainly wasn’t the traditional Victorian-style haunted house so beloved of horror shows and ghost movies.

When architects moved towards clean, modern designs (e.g. Frank Lloyd Wright), they condemned the tacky excess of Victorian design, the mansard roofs and gingerbread trim. “After World War I, America turned its back on Victorian design even more vehemently. Returning soldiers saw death in the once uplifting factories and bright dreams of their Victorian fathers, and began to portray Victorian houses as ghostly remnants of a corrupt past.” Victorian architecture became a shorthand way of displaying decay, danger, and creepiness. [JStor Daily]

And, in case you’ve been wondering, “The original Jack-o’-Lantern … was a blacksmith named Jack who was too evil to go to heaven when he died. But Jack outwitted the devil and was barred from hell too, leaving him to wander the earth, lighting his way with a vegetable he had filled with glowing coal.” [JStor Daily]

“ … Leaving, on a Jet Plane”

As a teenager and young adult, I risked falling over my own two feet as I admired every plane flying overhead, knowing that in just a few days, I’d be heading off to France. Not much has changed. I leave on Friday for 5 ½ months in England and France. I’m slightly panicky about getting everything done before I leave but also excited about what lies ahead. I’m looking forward to lots of time near the ocean as I’ll be spending Christmas in Hove (next door to Brighton) and 3 ½ weeks in Vannes, Brittany. I plan to enjoy the Christmas light display at Kew Gardens and take in a Victorian Christmas Fayre in Worcester. I’ll be exploring history (Richard III) in Leicester and a market town in Norfolk. There’ll be time in Lyon, France’s third-largest city, as well as a return to favourite walks and day trips in Quillan close to the Pyrenees.

I won’t be posting Footnotes to a Conversation on October 30, but it will be back again on November 6.

Footnotes to a Conversation is a weekly Monday feature covering an assortment of topics that I’ve come across in the preceding week – books, art, travel, food, and whatever else strikes my fancy. I also post occasional articles on other dates, including frequent book reviews and travel tales.

If you share my love of nature, check out EcoFriendly West, an online publication encouraging environmental initiatives in Western Canada, and Nature Companion, a free nature app for Canada’s four western provinces.