Is one man’s meat is another’s poison?

I suppose we all qualify for an opinion on food and health, especially since the two have married and became a debate,celebrity cooks  called on the government for a sugar levy and got it (starting April 2018) and fair weather farmers are telling us food is to cheap, it seems the ability to fold and present a decent omelette and tell one end of a cow from another has been a great enabler.

Their expertise or celebrity has been brought to farming agriculture and fisheries, at the expense of cooking a meal and letting us decide whether or not we are prepared to chance the few calories, or how to cook a banquet for a family of four within 15 minutes and a Tenner.

A food programme now is more likely to prepare a chronology of the worlds best diets meaning healthy, rather than put something on a plate, we normally feature well south on these lists and collect the most wooden spoons for continuously cocking a snoop at a bowl of couscous (so good they named it twice).

Adding to our culinary inferiority our nearest rival south, the Mediterranean  and its diet has long been the poster boy for healthy eating  the virtues of which, has recently popped up again waving a stick of celery about like a nutritional truncheon, I forget the number of times we have been introduced to the hillside farming couple from this region who,s existence seems to pre-date the industrial revolution, we get the tour of the farm its practices,  foods produced and  the people, both held up as an aspiration.

And to be honest, they don’t look any better meaning healthier, than my neighbours at home of that  generation, who don’t enjoy the long hot summers and warm winters the Mediterranean is favoured with, instead they endure  dark damp cold winters and  keep a hope alive that the rain will get warmer during the months accused of being summer.

This environmental stress not only determines what they eat  but how they cook it and the viability of food production in their country, producing the foods they are used to eating. The affability of the Mediterranean climate produces one of the most extensive ranges of  food in Europe if not the world it fringes a sea that covers one percent of the earth’s surface, further adding to the abundance of land produced foods. these resources have ensured its inhabitants can avail of a  varied and greatly balanced diet indigenous to them, which they have flourished on.

Much of the Mediterranean fayre is capable of bowling me over for days, with allergies this would be largely due to my physical and physiological characteristics which are Nordic,inherited from people who populated the northern coastlines of Europe, which for several months of the year supported no vegetation Nordic people sustained themselves from the sea eating much more fish than meat, also eating seaweeds from the shore and moss from coastal rocks. Many Nordic people to this day supplement their diets by taking kelp tablets which are a composite of the minerals found in the sea bringing them back to eating in sync with their ethnicity.

When I eat, in close accordance with this ethnicity I share with Nordic people, I find I get optimum nutrition less food goes further, is digested more efficiently and my overall health is in balance.

Global mobility has meant we are evolving with an international DNA the speed and transportation of food has never been faster meaning we are acquiring a taste for, before a tolerance off many foods.

Allergies are just one reminder that diet has developed specially to people, places and their lifestyles and the old adage off one man’s meat or wheat is another man’s poison will apply for some years yet.

getting through the SHIL