[Tyr Zalo Hawk]: 712.Essays.Reality vs FFF.The Truth About Food Beliefs

If someone came up to you and offered you a slice of grilled ham and told you it tasted like oranges, would you believe them? Oddly enough, it seems that this is the kind of thing people in this nation are doing with fast food. We are told things about our food, or are otherwise already inclined to think a certain things about it, and that becomes our reality. It’s all a matter of belief. We believe many things about our food, no matter what speed it’s at. That it’s prepared in a certain manner, that it tastes a certain way, and even that it is what they say it is on the menu. The truth about these things, however, is rarely what we believe it to be.
Belief can determine how we see everything from the food in front of our face, to the entirety of space of time. A few hundred years ago, it was widely believed that the Earth was the center of the universe and that the sun even revolved around us. Many of us believe in magic long before we ever hear the term ‘sleight of hand,’ and even then there are still plenty who believe. But, what about food? Food is something that we have to put our faith in everyday, by trusting that it’s healthy enough for us to consume. Oddly enough, if even a small thing about it changed, like an experiment in the 1970’s mentioned by Eric Schlosser in his book Fast Food Nation, our entire perception of the food we eat can drastically change. In the experiment “people were served an oddly tinted meal of steak and French fries that appeared normal beneath colored lights. Everyone thought the meal tasted fine until the lighting was changed… [then] some people became ill” (Schlosser 125). If you think about it, why exactly this happened is pretty clear. You wouldn’t buy meat if it was green instead of red, you’d naturally assume there was something wrong with it and, even if you gave it a taste test, your mind could easily create something wrong with the flavor based on your original assumption. So, if your meat turned green in the middle of your meal chances are you’d think you were poisoned. It’s not just color that determines what we think of our food though, looks and smells matter too. As anyone who’s ever been on a date knows, smell can be very important, and changing what you smell like is a simple process. Scented candles do it, shampoos and perfumes do it, and so does fast food. Approximately 90% of our sense of taste is actually in what we smell, so, with the right aromas, you could make a slice of grilled ham taste just like oranges if you wanted. “Today’s highly processed foods offer a blank pallet: whatever chemicals you add to them will give them specific tastes” (Schlosser 126). Sometimes, that scent in the air isn’t what we think it is, but we’re more than willing to believe until we find out it’s not.
There are plenty of substances that go into every food we eat: Sugars and preservatives, vitamins and minerals, the chemicals that go into making the food taste and smell like it does, and thousands of others. Sometimes these things are so complex we can barely pronounce their names, much less understand what they actually do to our bodies. Every now and then, certain products replace several ingredients with other ingredients to appear healthier, to reduce the amount of sugar present, or even to alter the taste to make it more appealing. For most foods, they’ll tell you when they do this, but not how. Others will simply make the switch silently, hoping you won’t notice. A similar process is used in medicine called the ‘placebo effect.’ Placebos are sugar pills, used in place of actual medication to help treat certain sicknesses. While placebos have no chemicals in them to alter the human body, patients still have relief of their symptoms identical to what would happen on normal meds (Brown). The reason this works is because we believe that we’re getting medicine, and our mind reacts to the medicine it thinks it’s getting because it doesn’t really know any better. If you tell a child something is true, unless he knows any better, he will proudly repeat the information to anyone who’ll listen, convincing anyone else who doesn’t know better of the same thing. The mind works in exactly the same way. When McDonald’s switched from freshly made French Fries to J.R. Simplot’s frozen fries. No one knew what the difference was, because they weren’t told there was one. Not everything’s as easy to change as fries though. Anyone who’s experienced a certain food enough can tell you that they can taste the difference when they change a few ingredients in a food, and placebos don’t always fool those they’re given to. To anyone who doesn’t know any better though, they’re getting exactly what they had before, no matter how different it has actually become.
What we eat will always be important. Our bodies will always need certain vitamins and minerals to develop and grow, and no matter what our minds think of that it just won’t change. However, how we look at and enjoy the foods that we eat which contain these substances is all completely based on our mindset while doing so. They can have an ingredient list with a hundred substances we’ve never even heard of. They can be a color, shape, or size that seems like they were taken right out of a Dr. Seuss book. They can even make a slice of grilled ham smell and taste so close to Florida oranges that you wouldn’t believe the difference until you tried it. If we don’t trust the food though, if we don’t believe it is what it appears to be, or if we do believe when it’s not, then none of that really matters. Fast food has been trying to make us all believe in their food for years now, whether or not we fall for it is our decision.

© Tyr Hawkaluk (2004-Present)