The Blackberry Walk

"The heart is a pump", said the slayer of Pan, blood dripping from his axe. In times gone by, this fact of biology wasn't believed to be the case. Long ago, the heart was the circulator of vital life energy through the body, a more mystic conception of the heart's function. But now, after the white-gowned scientists have had their Long March through the enchanted world, the mysticism of the heart - whilst the symbolism of the heart may remain as a residue - has been squashed, flattened, into seeing it simply as a pump. Science has a way of making the mysterious mundane. And just as the heart became a pump, so too did the human body become a machine. Each joint is a servo, each muscle a hydraulic; our brains are computers, and our digestive tract is a great fermentor. What's interested people most today is that last assertion, that the digestive tract is a kind of fermentor or energy extracting machine for the body. We are what we eat, as we've always been told. Any number of Youtube stars have come to fame as proselytisers for their favourite diets. While the Atkins diet has fallen out of favour today, any number of its children have inherited the popularity, from Carnivore diets, to Paleo, to Keto, Animal foods only, to Peating - a panoply of diets, with their allowed foods and disallowed foods, their halal and harem, all taking up arms against the dietary establishment! Usually, these diets love eggs and red meat, and lament the previous generation of dietitians' campaign of hate against these foods. They usually hate omega-6 seed oils too, oils, which they claim man has never eaten in the past, and they campaign against carbohydrate of most kinds. Their main opponent? Bread. Now, I love bread. My blog and online alias, BreadIsDead, has bread in the title for good reason. Bread could be my favourite food. A slice of freshly baked quality bread, crusty, whether white bread or a dark complex rye, with some creamy butter cut like cheese on top, could be my favourite food. Back in Alsace-Lorraine, a trip I've recently written posts about, one of my favourite memories is eating a fresh crusty slice of bread, spread with Camembert so gooey it ran from its casing, and a glass of champagne, all for breakfast. We were leaving the accommodation in Metz that day, so I had no choice but to finish the cheese and champagne - I'm not an alcoholic, don't fret. But anyway, alighting from my fantasy, bread is my favourite food. And all these diets despise bread. You can feel their anger and vitriol for the humble loaf, the loaf that has powered and fed the generations of Europe. These diet hawks say bread has no vitamins, that bread is low in protein, that bread is low in healthy fats, and that bread's starch breaks down into pure glucose in the blood, a risk for insulin resistance. But show me where, in times gone by when bread was the staple, this insulin resistance was? The populations of Europe ate bread every day, making up a lot of their calories; but they weren't all diabetic, an untreatable disease in those days. The main cause of insulin resistance is having too much blood sugar; it's that people don't use the blood sugar, with exercise, which is the problem! Poor bread, caught in the cross-fire of a largely silly correlation-causation confusion. These celebrity dietitians are trying to hack the body. Again, the body is a machine to be understood and ran on maximum efficiency. It is a vision of the Nietzschean ubermensch - there is something very Nietzschean about these dieting fads. These cultures of the past were based on their diets. In understanding the body as a machine, we know that people grow, both individually and epigenetically, according to what they eat, so much so that our diet controls our moods and how we think. Our gut microbiomes, factories of bacteria breaking down our food, work tirelessly day and night, to convert something tasty we put into our bodies into something useful for our bodies to use. In this endeavour, our gut microbiomes produce neurotransmitters, serotonin and dopamine, etc, which enter through our bloodstreams to work as neurotransmitters. Then we have hormones. Certain nutrients and combinations of foods up-regulate and down-regulate hormone production in our glands, like cortisol and thyroxine, making us more stressed or at peace. We are what we eat; our diets - to an extent - determine our character. Let us now take this thought further. Given that one person changing their diet can change how they feel, and given the existence of epigenetics consolidating the changes generation to generation, it stands to reason that different ethnicities and lineages require different diets. We see this in how different ethnicities respond to insulin resistance, for instance, or how lactose intolerance varies by ethnicity. Different diets co-evolve, in a sense, with their people: sociology and biology are intertwined like the two snakes of Caduceus' staff, where the rod of forming the centre of the staff is our psychology. While the biology and sociology, our genetics and culture, adapt and tussle with each other, the individual's psychology is wrapped around and constricted in the centre, caught in-between them. We can't help but be products of these forces beyond our control. There are questions then. Those Indians, like the Jains, who for thousands of years since the time of the Gymnosophists recorded by Alexander's Greeks have forgone meat: how different is their digestion? And the Muslim Arabs, who for over a thousand years haven't drank alcohol nor eaten pork: how different is their digestion? And for both these groups, how different is their culture because of it? Islamic culture would be very different with alcohol. Amerindian culture did look very different after alcohol. Whatever our psychology may want, sociology and biology has been conspiring with its own ideas on how we should be. Let's return to our much maligned friend, bread. European Christendom is build on the foundations of bread - and wine for that matter - and to Western man, bread has been, through every crusade, innovation, and great work of art, a companion. The word companion, after all, is con-pain, to have bread together; bread is baked into our language. And as a companion through our history, European man has co-evolved with bread; our DNA is like a braided loaf. Any Westerner who isn't coeliac is meant to eat bread, should eat bread, and eat bread every day. We are made to eat bread. It is our energy source, the food which powered every great triumph of the West across history. Nelson ate bread, in a form, on the Victory, as was Turner powered on bread as he painted. Luther ate bread as he nailed his theses, as did King Henry VIII as he turned his back on Rome. King or pauper, they ate bread. Each great war of Europe is bread-powered people fighting other bread-powered people. It's all bread. The irony is that so many of these diet Youtuber types are quite conservative, selling their diets as a masculine endeavour, and these influencers have quite a positive view of the West. Yet it doesn't show. They turn their back on their ancestral staples, in favour of diets unthinkable to earlier generations - not because they were unfeasible, a lord would have the money - but because they would be seen as silly. The Puritan obsession with food, and then the 7th Day Adventist obsession with food, was secularised in the States, becoming the next strange mind-virus to spread across the Atlantic, yet another obsession of the American, of the California elite, the telos of Spengler's Faustian man. You can't get much further West, after all. Bread is humble, bread is community, and bread is Christian. The attack on bread is everywhere. We may well learn how to hack our diets, and create a new Atlantean civilisation of spiritual carnivore diet extremists. And it would be a new civilisation. They'd be fuelled by new food sources, and begin to think in new ways - which would be their aim, too. But to what end would that serve? Food is to be shared. The vegan, requiring every restaurant to cater to them, breaks the company, the communion, in requiring their own dish, and then the food can't be shared. Food is for sharing. It's sustenance, and we live, sustaining ourselves, together. For many, their daily bread isn't enough; they want something more, to be something more, to be given magic powers and Newtype abilities, if only they keep their fat intake over a certain percentage. Such striving is the road to Babylon. Our daily bread is enough. The macros might not be perfect, the vitamin content and nutrition may not excel, but it suffices. Bread is good, bread gives energy. It is our ancestral food, rooting us in millennia of traditions. And however popular rice, corn, or quinoa - whatever quinoa is - becomes, I will always patronise bread: our carb, the greatest carb.