Desiccated idli and sambhar in outer space… mashed potato and gravy sealed in foil pouches in-between shellfire on the battlefield… dehydrated sausage frittata on the ocean floor…. We take great pains to enhance our eating experience beyond just what we need to survive. We want – even need – food, not just ‘feed’. But we may be headed for a time when ‘feed’ is all we have left. Koli Mitra discusses.
We humans are funny about our food. And we are often much pickier about it than we can afford to be. When people are accustomed to eating a diet centered on a primary grain as a staple, they experience a failure of that crop as a famine, even if other foods are plentiful. My grandmother used to tell stories about people in her village ‘starving’ during the Partition of India because they couldn’t afford the high price of rice. But they had orchards full of fruit and gardens lush with vegetables and ponds brimming with fresh fish…. I asked my grandmother why these people didn’t just eat all this other stuff. “Well, they did… but how could they live on that?” she asked me in return, incredulous at my naiveté. “You don’t understand… there was no RICE! What would they eat the fish and vegetables with?”
Food is so much more than just nutrition to us, that even when we are forced to simplify it down to the most minimal source of sustenance, we generally try – if we can afford to do so – to infuse it with as much of the associations of culture and pleasure as possible. Organizations (like militaries, and human-crewed space programs) that need to make food highly portable, long-lasting and very easy to store, prepare and eat go to great lengths to make those foods mimic the look and feel (and hopefully the taste) of home-cooking.
The first Chinese human spaceflight had onboard meals of Yuxiang Pork and Kung Pao Chicken. In anticipation of the first Indian mission with a human crew, the Defence Food Research Laboratory (DFRL) in Mysore has been working on developing a variety of Indian dishes, including tiny desiccated idlis and bright powdered sambhars that will spring to life when a hungry astronaut adds a bit of moisture. The international space station crew members have meals especially designed, not only to provide them with ample nutrition, but also to celebrate their diverse cultures and, when possible, try to cater to their personal tastes.
This was not always the case.
In the early days of human space flight, American and Soviet astronauts fed themselves food pastes and gels from tubes, or freeze-dried foods in the form of cubes and powders. Those methods were adequate for the astronauts’ survival needs, but, despite dwindling science budgets and despite all the enormous difficulties still associated with other vital areas of spaceflight, considerable resources and research efforts are still devoted to preserving not only the freshness and nutritional value of space food, but also its taste, flavour and look… to making it more palatable… ‘more appropriate for human consumption’.
Even before we had these advanced technologies that let us eat some approximation of sushi in low earth orbit or beef wellington in the trenches of the desert battlefields of Afghanistan or palak paneer on the Andes, militaries and exploratory/scientific expeditions have always attempted to make the best of ‘convenience food’. In the 19th century, for example, full-course meals were ‘canned’ in metal jars or pouches by being boiled until sterilized and sealed in to prevent spoiling. Soldiers’ bodies could well have been fueled with salted meats and dried fruits, but it was worth taking the trouble of canning, as it simulated a ‘real home meal’– a must for their psychological health.
But why is it psychologically important to enhance the experience of consuming the things that just make us stay alive? What is it about eating that drives us to endow it with so much more meaning and to require from it so much more than the fuel? Why must we have ‘food’ and not just ‘feed’?
According to conventional wisdom, our species has spent the early part of its life as a species – the vast majority of its time on the planet – like most animals, eating only to stay alive. But evolutionary biology tells us that pleasure must have played some part in food consumption, as the propensity to gratify that craving for pleasure would have led to eating well and eating as richly varied a diet as we could manage, and, consequently, having the physical resources and adaptability necessary to survive and reproduce (thereby replicating and passing on to descendants that propensity, among other survival-enhancing traits). As comparative psychologist George Romanes posited, as early as 1884, “Pleasure and pain must have been evolved as the subjective accompaniment of processes which are respectively beneficial or injurious to the organism.” But this was perhaps a more rudimentary type of “pleasure” (satisfying an instinctive drive) than what we think of as gastronomical enjoyment today (engaging the senses and making various subtle distinctions, etc.).
Then, a few millennia ago, as we became settled and civilised, food came to play key roles in the ever-increasing complexity of our personal and social experience: aesthetic/ sensory pleasure, sacrament, bonds of family and friendship, performance of status and power relationships, religious ritual, play, trade, art… in a word, ‘culture’.
Today’s food connoisseurs are as imaginative as in any previous era, and, in some aggregate sense, perhaps more so than ever. In recent years, there has been an explosion of creativity in culinary experimentation, and it hasn’t been limited to gustatory considerations, nor even to sensory considerations generally. There are people creating foods informed by everything from astronomy to geography, from the migratory patterns of game animals to the migration patterns of human communities spreading out over centuries. Incredibly specific areas of interest often show up in the way people think about food. Back when I was first discovering the joys of cooking, a friend of mine gave me a gift that was meant to appeal to that nascent passion as well as to my already well-established fascination with history: something called the Civil War Cookbook. It was a collection of recipes for the more or less miserable fare that hard-up soldiers were forced to consume during the American Civil War in the 1860s (all packaged with elaborate instructions for making it ‘authentic’ and sold to my friend for $35.99). The food was horrible. Yet it was a strangely enriching way to connect to the past and share with my friends (a mixed group, whose ancestors may very well have fought each other during that war, and some of them would have been slaves owned by others of them).
Yet, all of this diversity of preoccupations that are now the subjects of culinary engagement – even for most people among the small minority of humans who can afford it – is a matter of quaint curiosity or occasional indulgence. In reality, eating, as the single most important object of human effort, seems to be turning – or has already turned – the corner toward a culture of food as no more than a nutrient delivery system. Since the mid 20th century, there has been a tremendous emphasis on specific microelements of food. Carbohydrates, sugars, vitamins, minerals, proteins, amino acids, fatty acids, triglycerides, good cholesterol, bad cholesterol, saturated fats, polyunsaturated fats, monounsaturated fats… We read labels, count calories and take supplements. We sprinkle nutritional yeast onto ‘multi- grain’ cereals and pour soy milk over it for breakfast. Better yet, we look for a packaged dehydrated ‘breakfast bar’ that incorporates all those ingredients and comes wrapped in a sterile plastic wrapper that we can peel and eat with one hand while driving to work. We try myriad “diets” based on different kinds of ‘body-goals’; we want to lose fat, increase our ‘lean’ muscle mass, control our insulin levels, promote heart health or bone density or hair growth… We want to prevent acne.
Manufacturers inject specific nutrients into foods that don’t naturally contain them (or have had them stripped in the manufacturing process, which prioritises industrial efficiency and shelf-life over the natural nutritional richness of food). Then they charge us a premium for these “edible food-like substances” (to quote Michael Pollan) because they can now be classified as “fortified” or “enhanced” – and we are happy to pay it.
It is tempting to reassure ourselves that this trend too is reversing. There are ‘real food’, ‘whole food’ and ‘slow food’ movements advocated by the likes of Michael Pollan and Carlo Petrini cropping up all over the world. If we’re talking about the kinds of people who have the resources and education to make meaningful ‘choices’ about food, it certainly seems that such movements might – in another few years – replace the calorie-counting, glycemic-indexmonitoring, recommended-daily-values-heeding ‘nutrient’ obsession of the last few decades. But the overwhelming majority of the world’s human population – many of whom are not even officially poor but poor enough to always be at the frontlines of global crises – have already felt what food-trend-followers have the luxury to overlook, at least for now: the scarcity of real food.
The surest sign of an incipient global food shortage is that the cost of food has suddenly skyrocketed in the last few years. The price surge in produce and other fresh food items has been consistently outpacing that of most other consumer goods. The significance of this was poignantly communicated to New York Fed President William Dudley a couple of years ago, when he tried to explain to a group of non-economists why they were wrong to complain about inflation. His point was, when you take into account all of the consumer goods available in the market and average the movement of prices across the board, you can see that the cost of living really hasn’t gone up that much. To illustrate his point he mentioned that the iPad 2 was released at a much lower price point than the original iPad. An anonymous voice from the crowd blurted out “but I can’t eat an iPad.”
I recognise that the price picture is more complex than a simple scarcity. Journalist Paul Roberts, who has devoted much research into the economics of scarcity, has explained that it is really the business of production rather than the availability of natural resources that underlies the problem of food security. Michael Pollan has pointed out how the industrialisation and commoditisation of food (and deference to powerful political pressure from mammoth agribusinesses with adverse commercial interests) has led to the proliferation of faux-foods masquerading as nutritionally fortified improvements while simultaneously leading to the depleted nutritional value of actual food by simplifying soil chemistry and reducing crop diversity, among other things.
But while Pollan himself appears to remain hopeful that the problem can be reversed by reviving the culture of growing and eating “real food” I wonder whether this is still possible on a significant scale. We are adding a billion new people to the earth very decade and a half (compare that to the first time the earth had a billion Homo Sapiens, which took from prehistory all the way to 1804 CE), even as vast numbers of plant and animal species and the habitats that support them are vanishing from the earth for ever at alarming rates.
In North America, the pollinating bee population – essential for germinating fruits, vegetables, and grains – has declined by some 30 % in just the last decade, and large reductions are also estimated elsewhere in the world. There might soon come a time when we have no option but to consume nutritionally degraded organic substances, artificially fortifying them with synthesised nutrients – at least those that our then-current state of knowledge tells us are important.
Is that what the future holds? Will the conception of food as nutrient delivery system transform from a misguided approach to ‘health’ into a necessary strategy for survival, in a distorted – even ironic – echo of the presumed habits of our instinct-driven ancestors who ate ‘only for survival’?
