With last week’s article I began to touch on the subject of how our perceptions of food changed over the past few decades. I did this by pointing out how food was viewed in the past. When asked to describe food as a category past generations would very likely have used the following words: Scarce, Seasonal, Natural, Fresh, Hard work.

It does not take a genius to work out that the words used above are a world away from how most of us would describe food today. Our relationship with what we put in our mouths has been so radically altered that our forebears would probably have shaken their heads in amazement at our strange beliefs and habits. The problem is that the changes in our perception had some pretty spectacular negative fallouts, the magnitude of which we are only now beginning to understand. Yet understand them we must, because I firmly believe that many of our modern ailments, including many ADD/ADHD cases, can be traced back to poor food choices. Over the next few weeks we will examine the impact of some of these choices by focussing on our modern ‘answers’ to perceptions about food listed above. This week we take a look at the wholesale abandoning of the belief that food should be natural.

It is very difficult to put something in your mouth these days without also taking in quite a few chemicals that were certainly not part of the original composition of your food source. There are several drivers behind this phenomenon. They include:

• ‘Protection’ of food sources: Humankind has always tried to protect our food sources, this is evidenced in the fact that scarecrows date back millennia! Modern man has taken this quest for protection much further by developing a vast array of powerful pesticides to protect food sources. Good crops resulted but at what price?