Recently I read somewhere that eating well could be considered an act of resistance-resistance to the dominant ideas about meat, eggs, diary, fish, processed factory food and takeaway fast food,  as what food consists of.    Resistance to being normal and travelling down the normal path in life.  This normal path is be overweight to varying amounts, to have one or more chronic conditions, to respond to these chronic conditions by taking ever more medications and at least for now, to live longer but with an ever greater burden of sickness and decreasing  quality of life.

To not follow  this path, takes a deliberate act on our parts.  This is where Frantz Fanon and John Butler come in.  In 1961, Fanon wrote a book titled The Wretched of the Earth about colonisation, at the time when anti-colonial movements were starting in Africa.  He drew attention to the fact that it was important to de-colonise your mind as a first step in freeing yourself-from the oppressors, the dominant ideas, the colonisers.   He pointed out that it just wasn’t your country  that the colonisers had taken over-they had taken over our minds: how we felt about ourselves, what we thought was important, what we gave value to, what gave us pleasure-in other words, we don’t have to be controlled and policed by the outside, but we are controlling and policing ourselves from the inside.   This fits also with Foucault’s ideas about power.  So, Fanon argued that when the colonisers have taken over our minds we think about ourselves as they think about us and we want to be like them.  He was referring to the black people of Africa taking on the coloniser’s ideas that they were inferior to the whites and should stay in a master/slave or servant relationship.   In the colonisation of our minds we have taken on the idea of the big companies that we are worthless, we have no inherent value, but we can accrue value by getting and having things-buying and consuming.  The culture of consumption:always having more, getting more pleasure.   This is partly why people are always happy to add something to their diet, that is the latest fad to cure all ills, like fish oil for example.  But they are not so keen to take things away from their diet, which is curious as the problem with people’s diets is too much fat,sugar and protein: excess not deficiency.  Our biology sets us up to seek pleasure and consumer culture blows that up or uses that propensity.   But nothing happens in isolation: every action that we take effects how we see ourselves and how we see ourselves effects every action.

John Butler the Australian muso has a couple of songs very relevant to these ideas:  Better Than and Used to Get High.   In Used to Get High, he uses the idea of  getting high from drugs as being out of touch with reality but in the chorus, hooks it right into food.

“I used to get high for a living, believing everything I saw on the TV

I used to get high for a  living, eating or the bullshit food that  they sold me”

So, have a listen.

used to get high-right click to open link in new tab and hear song