Day 26 of My 40 Day Fast: Relinquish Subservience to the Taste Bud Overlords

Our taste bud overlords seem to have shaped society. Food is everywhere, and that’s made it easy to succumb to our taste buds rather than eat according to our body’s needs. Food is, first and foremost, fuel for the body.

The majority of foods in grocery stores are not whole foods. The shelves are lined with items that don’t necessarily serve our bodies, but they taste good. The streets of metropolitan hubs are lined with restaurants, fast food chains, and food carts. What is within us we project out into the world, and it's obvious society has a fixation with food.

Obsession is rarely a positive thing, and the obsession with food has ill-effects on the population. The Lancet published The Global Burden of Disease Study 2013 which says that 95 percent of the world's population has had a health problem, and 2.3 billion individuals were experiencing more than five ailments. As the world’s population rises, these numbers are expected to rise over the coming decades.

An unhealthy population is a strain on the health care system. Individuals with health conditions endure waitlists when trying to receive medical attention. As someone who has been through the health care system because of a severe gut disease, the added stress of a pandemic on hospitals was no surprise.

The pharmaceutical industry is worth billions of dollars. These companies create medications to alleviate symptoms, but they don’t cure disease. One has to take medication for the rest of their lives in order to cope with illness. Medication gives the illusion of good health, but if medication is the reason we’re alive then we’re not okay.

The body should be able to function on its own, we’ve just been led to believe that it can’t. The body is able to heal, and all illness is preventative. The cells in our bodies have been meting out their duty for millennia. The body is 4 billion years in the making, it knows exactly how to function as long as it gets what it needs.

The pervading belief that the body cannot heal only makes pharmaceutical companies rich because they have a paying customer for life. A diseased body is a diseased bloodline, which means they have also banked future generations.

I wrote about removing disease from the bloodline. If you want to know more, click on the story below.

The obsession with food not only has ill effects on us, but also on the planet. As I said before, that which is within us is projected out into the world. So within, so without. An unhealthy population will most definitely live on an unhealthy planet as our outer world is a reflection of our inner world.

I worked in a grocery store for 23 years, and the amount of food thrown away on a daily basis is astonishing. Thousands of dollars of fruits and vegetables, baked goods, meat, dairy, and prepared food go into the garbage each night. Some foods can be donated, but large companies are afraid of the repercussions of liability. They don’t want to get sued if someone gets sick from food they’ve donated. Restaurants also throw away vast quantities of food. I realize it’s difficult to get away from food waste altogether, but it’s happening on a large scale throughout the entire food industry.

Healthy homemade meals would require one person to stay home, but modern living leaves little time for homemade meals for ourselves and children. As two person income households are common, the food industry has filled the role of cooking our food.

Takeout food creates unnecessary garbage. The landfills and oceans are filled with plastic takeout containers. The process of decomposition in landfills produces greenhouse gases, and so the more garbage in landfills the more greenhouse gases are emitted into the environment.

If we really want to see change in the world, then we need to take it upon ourselves to create that change.

Taking food off the pedestal is a practice in self-control, and it’s a process. It’s also about putting your health, the planet’s health, and future generations above the demands of the tastebud overlords. Take food off the pedestal and put yourself on it.