The allure of eating foods typified by ancient generations permeates our food choices in ways that are both deceptive and enlightening. From our "Sweetness and Power" reading, Mintz writes briefly in chapter 3 about how holidays preserve what has been lost in everyday activities. Specifically, Mintz is talking about how sugar used to be used as a spice in meat dishes, and that habit has since been scaled back to adding brown sugar to ham at Christmas etc. Although I no longer consume pork, I still couldn't help but feel a sense of kinship with the past through the preservation of this sugar-as-spice practice.
Recently, I have gotten into the new food fad of chia seeds. They are marketed as the "running food." Aztec warriors would survive on less than a teaspoon a day and march 24 hours to do battle (http://www.living-foods.com/articles/chia.html). Apparently, the seeds hydrophilic qualities help you to stay hydrated and fuller longer, while simultaneously hastening your metabolism. Well, the metabolism aspect pulled me in. And after a month or so of consistently adding them to my tea/breakfast smoothies, I daresay I'm in love. But after reading Mintz, I look back on my first inclination to try them and admit that it was the piece about ancient Aztecs that really sold me in the first place. Their compelling historical usage made me overlook the fact that advertising it so is just a marketing ploy.
Even today at Pricechopper, I again fell victim to the clever marketing of Peasant Bread:
"Hand-crafted." ""Traditional European style." "daily staple for centuries." But what these marketers cleverly neglect to inform us, is that the reason that bread was a daily staple was because grain was the cheapest food option. According to Mintz, the diet of poor families was predicated on the consistent availability of various grains to make bread and was supplemented by the sparse availability of other, more nutrient-dense foods. But there I was, 6 centuries later, wanting to feel close to my British ancestors and willing to overlook the fact that peasant bread was not such an endearing term as it is now. Even with the new knowledge of the reality of the starch-based European diet, I still bought the bread because there is something in me, perhaps in a lot of us, that can't help but feel that our food is in constant decline, and that what was good back then must be better than what we have now, now that so much of what we eat is so processed and shipped. Something in me, in many of us, is magnetized towards tradition and simplicity. And I have a feeling that food marketers have caught on to that.
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