April 7, 2009: Food, Wonderful Food!

I am thrilled to say that I love food. My personal belief is that God made food for us to have the fuel we need to live and also to have pleasure. How nice of Him was that?! He could have made our bodies to need only radishes to live. We would eat radishes for breakfast, lunch, and supper. Occasionally, someone would take a foray into turnips, and the really "out there" types would eat cabbage.

But, He didn't. He made a huge world with all sorts of plants, ocean life, and animals. All over the world, there are foods that work well with the cultures living there, some ideal for the physiology of their bodies. (And we are all sad that some places have no food at all and people are suffering.) I'm pretty sure He still has foods to reveal to us from His creation. But what we have now is incredible. We get to taste sweet, salty, sour, bitter, bland, spicy and enjoy that myriad. What stresses us out are the experts who have thrown taste away and dissected it down to chemicals.

Take chocolate. Here is the real-life progression we have watched from the start of the 1900s until now:

  1. Milton Hershey creates wide distribution network for chocolate via mass production. "Eat this! It's a treat of modern technology!" Even marketed as a meal substitute.
  2. Don't eat it, it has too much fat and sugar.
  3. Really don't eat it, because on top of the fat and sugar, it contains a chemical related to caffeine.
  4. It's okay to eat it, but only the dark chocolate, and only in vary infrequent instances.
  5. The dark chocolate isn't good enough, you have to eat dark chocolate with at least 30% cacao (pronounced kak-ow).
  6. Actually, try to get the highest amount of cacao you can. (Godiva has an 85% cacao chocolate bar. Just FYI, I wasn't paid for that or anything.)
  7. Chocolate actually has phytochemicals in it. Phytochemical research is becoming huge, and we are seeing more and more how important these substances are in food. This permits a little more consumption of it than we said before.
  8. Two ounces of dark chocolate each day won't kill you and will probably help you because we just discovered that the antioxidants in it could do you a lot of good.

Ummmm...hello?

Or, we could rejoice that the Spanish were introduced to it when they were discovering America (sorry, Columbus fans!) and we live in a time that it can be mass produced. And, that God created it in the first place and let the Mayans and Aztecs discover it. We'll ponder all of this while we let the dark chocolate melt on our tongues.