Is this really as nature intended?

@AsNatIntended (As Nature Intended) is an excellent health food chain in London. I visit the Ealing branch regularly, but I can't help thinking that the name is a bit misleading, based on a romanticized idea of Nature.

Because some of us might think Nature intended apples to create apple trees, not apple pies. Surely fruit is "designed" to attract insects and birds rather than humans? And for that matter, didn't Nature intend men and women to smell of honest sweat, rather than organic lavender soap and fennel toothpaste?

Upmarket health food is based on a rather strange notion of authenticity. As @stephenpoole writes

"It is widely assumed that food sold as organic is purer and closer to an assumedly benign Nature, although no food is made from inorganic matter and organic farming standards sanction the use of neurotoxic fertilisers." Stephen Poole, Why are we so obsessed with the pursuit of authenticity? (New Statesman March 2013)

But the idea that Nature's purpose is to serve mankind is an old one. We can find it in the Bible and in Ralph Waldo Emerson.

• "Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things." (Genesis 9:3)

• "Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the process and the result. All the parts incessantly work into each other's hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed; the sun evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapor to the field; the ice, on the other side of the planet, condenses rain on this; the rain feeds the plant; the plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of the divine charity nourish man." (Emerson "On Nature", Chapter 2 Commodity)

And the idea that mankind has subverted Nature's purpose is also an old one. @DaveZinczenko suggests that "Whereas our sweet tooth was once nature’s way of protecting us from disease, now it’s the food industry’s way of tricking us into it." (Origins of the Sweet Tooth, Mens Health July 2004) via @br1anv. See also The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food (New York Times Feb 2013) via @EllenNaylor.

Meanwhile, there are endless ideas about restoring Nature's purpose - from naked cooking to public nudity. There was a 1961 film by Harrison Marks called Naked as Nature Intended (Link Not Safe For Work), and there are several militant naturists around these days, including Vincent Bethell and Stephen Gough. There are also some rather alarming ideas for Restoring Nature's Homeostasis (Link Not Safe For Mealtimes).

But is letting nature decide such a good idea (asks @stephenpoole)? 'After all, he reminds us, nature tried to kill us all with the Black Death. Nature is currently experimenting feverishly to find just the right strain of avian flu to cause a global pandemic. "Nature," as the young microbiologist points out in the zombie film World War Z, "is a serial killer." ' Is our love of nature writing bourgeois escapism? (Guardian July 2013)

It could be dangerous to regard nature as benign. The only consistent intention nature seems to have for us it is that we should get old and die. Et in Arcadia Ego.

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See also Madeleine Somerville, Natural's not in it: just because a product calls itself 'natural' doesn't make it good (Guardian 8 March 2016). (I'm guessing the headline was a Guardian subeditor's tribute to the Gang of Four song "Natural's not in it".)

@MadeleineSix "Natural is not in it your relations are of power We all have good intentions but all with strings attached" @gangof4official

— Richard Veryard (@richardveryard) March 8, 2016

“@MadeleineSix: @richardveryard that what the title is from?? The reference was lost on me!”- our ideas are not "natural"; humans make them

— GANG OF FOUR (@gangof4official) March 8, 2016

Finally, @HadleyFreeman writes that "perhaps the most striking thing about the natural trend is how much it reinforces gender stereotypes". If the cavemen did it or ate it, it’s got to be good for you. Right? (Guardian 16 April 2016)


Related posts: Viral Pandemic (April 2005) Arguments from Nature (December 2010) The Purpose of Baldness (Jan 2011). Related category: Death
(Links Not Safe For Romantics)

Updated 17 April 2016

What Alcohol Content Reveals About The Purpose of Wine

According to @felixsalmon (via @TimHarford)

"People like to think of themselves as sophisticates ... In the case of wine, they like the idea of buying something grown-up, with a relatively modest amount of alcohol."

But as Felix argues, there is a growing trend of wine producers deliberately understating the alcohol content on the labels. (The law permits a margin of error, and the wine producers exploit this.) There's an obvious motive for them - if consumers use the labels on the bottles as a guide to regulate their alcohol consumption, then this will result in people drinking more.

But why would the wine producers want to put more alcohol into the wine in the first place, and then lie to the consumers about it? This only makes commercial sense if this is what a significant number of consumers really (unconsciously) want.

As Felix concludes, consumers love to be lied to.

Felix Salmon, Why is wine getting hotter? (Reuters, 21 June 2011)

Why does a salad cost more than a Big Mac?

Because the US Federal Government doesn't subsidize healthy foods ...

... thanks to a political phenomenon known as Pork. Because a small number of farmers care greatly about farming subsidies while the rest of the American population care very little, and because a small number of politicians care greatly about being reelected, it turns out that the distribution of subsidies to farmers cannot be permitted to be influenced by vulgar considerations of healthy diet. You don't win votes with salad (see Lisa the Vegetarian).

source: Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, Autumn 2007

via Consumerist, Farnam Street and the New York Times.

See also Pork Scratchings

All-purpose cheese

There are several cheeses for which this honour is claimed.

• Chedder
• Edam
• Farm Cheese (via Literary Safari)
  
• Gouda d'Aur
  
• Jarlsberg
  
• Provolone Picante

What strikes me about this list is its apparent diversity - soft and hard, strong and mild. What is the set of purposes that all these cheeses (and so few others) satisfy?

But as you might already know, this is not a blog about cheese but about purpose. My son returned late from a party last night, ate a toasted cheese sandwich and went to bed. This morning he reported an unusual quantity of dreams, and we were minded of the old wives' tale about cheese causing dreaming.

So is that the purpose of cheese? Salvador Dali produced some interesting paintings after dreaming of Camembert. Or was it just that he produced paintings about dreams after eating Camembert? [Meg Nola, Martin Ries] Unfortunately I can find no clear evidence for the suggestion (which appears in a few random internet comments) that he ate cheese before bedtime deliberately to stimulate dreams. Wasn't that the Dream of the Rarebit Fiend?

A recent study has confirmed the effect of cheese on dreaming. Steve Jones blames Tyramine (found especially in Stilton). Apparently different types of cheese produce different types of dream: Sweet Dreams are made of Cheese (British Cheese Board, 25 September 2005. Also reported in Mail and Sky. See also discussion in the Museum of Hoaxes and The Virtual Stoa.)

Or maybe it was the party that prompted my son's dreams, nothing to do with cheese at all. I wonder if my son is up for a bit of scientific experimentation ...

Food Dye

What the purpose of food dye?

• Sometimes it is used to make food look more attractive, like bright colours on confectionery.

• Sometimes it is used to make food look more like people imagine it ought to look. For example, butter is coloured differently for different markets - people in some countries expect butter to be nearly white, while in other countries people expect butter to be nearly yellow. Farmed salmon is coloured pink (usually by feeding colour to the fish) to make it resemble wild salmon.

How does this affect people's choices?

• They might select an artificially coloured product over a naturally coloured or uncoloured product, because the artificially coloured product deceptively looks more "natural"

• They might even prefer factory-processed food to naturally prepared home-cooked food, because the former appears more attractive. For example, many children would prefer a shop-bought birthday cake to a home-cooked cake, not just because it contains even more sugar, but also because it looks better.

What other effects do food dyes have?

• There is some evidence (the FDA believes there is no "scientific" evidence, but the UK Food Standards Agency disagrees) that some food dyes cause hyperactivity in some children.

• Manufacturers of processed foods prefer artificial food colour whenever this is permitted by local regulations, which suggests that it is either cheaper or more well-behaved in the manufacturing process. As an example, Nutrigrain Cereal Bars (Kellogg) contain artificial food colour in the USA but contain natural food colour in the UK.
  

• The food industry also funds organizations such as the Institute of Food Technologists, which dismisses the validity or relevance of the studies linking artificial food colour and hyperactivity. See for example Food Allergies and Other Food Sensitivities (pdf - search for "Feingold" or "hyperkinesis").
  

What is the effect of labelling?

• In Europe, all food additives have E-numbers. Many consumers don't distinguish between different additives and are averse to any E-numbers whatsoever.

• The food industry therefore resists any extension to food labelling regulations, because manufacturers fear this will prompt consumer rejection.

So let's come back to the question of purpose. Are these additives a secret weapon by the food industry against the consumer, as some consumer groups appear to imagine? And does the power of this weapon disappear if the secrecy is exposed, as some manufacturers appear to imagine?

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Source: Do food dyes affect kids' behavior?

Purpose of Ice Cream

The Consumer Perspective

Loquacist: "They should make ice cream so hard to dig out of the container that you actually end up burning more calories digging it out than you get by eating it." Texas Big Hair: "But that defeats the purpose of ice cream."

Ice-Cream Advice Tips "The purpose of ice-cream is to gorge upon it."

The Provider Perspective

The concept of pleasure food is that the psychological value of the food is more significant than its nutritional value.

The eminent psychologist Isabel Menzies Lyth once wrote a paper called The Development of Ice-Cream as Food, in which she discussed the unconscious meaning of ice-cream. Did you think it was a coincidence or accident that ice-cream, which Menzies Lyth described as "'the pleasure food par excellence", is commonly served in small breast-shaped lumps?

At the time of the original study, few households had domestic refrigerators, which meant that ice-cream was an expensive and impractical substitute for custard. The focus of the study therefore shifted to canteens, especially in hospitals where consumers (nursing staff as well as patients) were often subject to unusually high levels of anxiety and were therefore thought to be in greater need of comforting through food.

Menzies Lyth advised ice-cream manufactures that the consumption of ice-cream aroused strong infantile feelings, which could easily turn to frustration, anger and hostility if the supply of ice-cream were to run out. An unlimited supply of ice-cream was therefore critically important to ensure that consumers never experience these negative feelings. This was especially relevant for places like cinemas, where consumers might demand ice-cream at any time, not merely as a dessert at the end of a meal, and where these demands must be instantly fulfilled in order to maintain the infantile dependence of the consumer.

Peter Miller & Nikolas Rose, Mobilising the consumer: assembling the subject of consumption, Theory, Culture and Society, 1997, 14, 1, 1-36 (pdf)

Comparing Apples and Pears

I have two pear trees in my garden. In the middle of August, the grass is suddenly covered in rotting pears. Why do pears rot faster than apples? 

People have long observed that pears sink in water, while apples float. The pear is more dense, and has a higher water content. Apples continue to breathe (absorb oxygen) after they are picked, which keeps them fresh, but pears get out of breath (don't absorb much oxygen) and can decay fairly quickly. 

From a human point of view, apples are more well-behaved than pears, and fruit growers and supermarkets would like pears to behave more like apples. Belgian scientists have now discovered differences in the cell structure that explain why apples can breathe better than pears. 

But what does better mean? The apple is more efficient at staying fresh. But the pear is more efficient at rotting. Why is staying fresh better than decaying? The biological purpose of the pear is to grow a new pear tree, not to get wrapped in plastic and put onto a supermarket shelf. For the pear, staying fresh is a bad idea because it delays the fulfilment of its biological purpose. 

Of course, that's not to say that the pear is superior to the apple in terms of producing new trees - it has merely evolved a slightly different method. But both methods seem to work, even in the absence of human intervention. If we try to understand botanical behaviour in terms of human purpose, we may get curious results. 

Jonathan Amos, Apples beat pears on crunch issue, BBC News 11 July 2008

Related posts: Redesigning the Banana (July 2009), Is this really as nature intended? (November 2011)