A little bit of what you fancy By Dr Desmond Morris It was a meal to make a food faddist swoon away in horror.

My mother was piling her plate high with a greasy, fatty, fry-up of a mixed grill and tucking in with gusto. When I say 'with gusto', I mean she was eating with the urgent pleasure of a predator at a kill. Although she was born during the reign of ueen !ictoria, she was more in tune with the robust food pleasures of the eighteenth century, when a feast was a feast, and nobody had heard about health foods, diet regimes, or table eti"uette that demanded you chew each mouthful #$ times before swallowing. Watching her in action and trying my best to match her appetite, I glibly remarked that if she kept ignoring the words of wisdom of the health gurus and diet experts, she would die young. %his may sound like a cruel thing for a son to ha&e said to his mother, but the fact that she was in her ''th year at the time of the meal in "uestion, helps to put my remark into perspecti&e. %he simple truth is that my mother had li&ed through almost the whole of the twentieth century without e&er gi&ing a moment's thought to what was 'correct' to eat. (he ne&er suffered from e&en a momentary pang of anxiety concerning the possibility that certain food ob)ects might be bad for her. If they tasted good, they must be good, and that was an end to it. I think it was her lack of anxiety concerning diet that kept her so fit. If you are perfectly relaxed about what you are eating, your parasympathetic ner&ous system rewards you by helping you to digest it well. If, on the other hand, you are tensely nibbling a lettuce leaf and agonising o&er whether to indulge yourself with another spoonful of low-fat yoghurt, the tension of your mood ill-suits the pleasures of the table. *our system rebels and the small gains you may ha&e made from fashionable culinary restraints are massi&ely outweighed by the cancer-inducing ra&ages of acute ner&ous tension. %here is a breed of modern pontificators who feel it is their social duty to tell the rest of us what we should and should not eat, as though they ha&e somehow disco&ered the secret of eternal life. %here are two flaws in their arguments. +irst, they keep on changing them. ,ne year it is bad to eat something and the next year this same, &ilified food ob)ect is suddenly disco&ered to be good for you. (econd, they all seem to o&erlook the fact that the human species e&ol&ed as an omni&ore. -ating the widest possible &ariety of foodstuffs was what ga&e

us our special ad&antage o&er our animal ri&als. And this is about the only rule that one need apply when sitting down to a meal. %he bigger the &ariety of foodstuffs we eat, the better off we will be. -nd of story. ,ur alimentary system can easily dispose of excess, unwanted matter, and a &aried diet will gi&e it the chance to pick out what it needs and discard the rest. If it is this simple, then why do so many people today suffer from obesity, indigestion, and &arious diet deficiencies. %he answer lies in our lifestyle. If we are inacti&e we should be less hungry and therefore eat less. /ut so many of the inacti&e urbanites of modern times also happen to be bundles of ner&ous tension and anxiety. If they feed themsel&es when they are in this state, their autonomic ner&ous system will be in the wrong mode for good digestion. Worse still, they may start 'comfort-eating' to an alarming degree, not because they are hungry but because they are stressed. +ood should be sa&oured, relished, en)oyed, and digested at leisure. In the West today we ha&e a better range of foods a&ailable to us than at any time in the history of the human species. Much of this food is greatly impro&ed, when compared with its prime&al e"ui&alent. 0espite recent scare-stories about geneticists interfering with our foods, we ha&e in reality been genetically modifying them for about ten thousand years. %hat is what agriculture does. It takes a wild food and then starts impro&ing it by selecti&e breeding, and we ha&e been benefiting from this process e&er since man first put a plough to a field. It is worth asking why, if we are such de&outly omni&orous creatures, we ha&e so many food taboos. Why do some people refuse to eat pigs, or cattle, or shellfish, or insects, or horses, or 1 in extreme cases 1 any kind of animal food. %here are two answers. ,ne has to do with totems and the other with poisons. +rom ancient times, it became a local custom to select one particular animal as a tribal mascot 1 an emblem, a god-figure, a totem 1 and to protect it. %his protection included not eating it. If the animal in "uestion was an ibis or a falcon, there was no harm done to the human diet, but when it happened to be a basic item such as pork or beef, then a whole culture was denying itself an important potential food source. Aiding and abetting these totemic taboos was a deep-seated human fear of being poisoned. Many plants and animals ha&e protected themsel&es from the attacks of predators by becoming poisonous or foul-tasting, ,ur ancient ancestors

countered this with a natural caution and it is this caution that can be exploited all too easily, e&en where it is not appropriate. If people belong to a culture that will not eat, say, pork, they will con&ince themsel&es that, in hot climates, pork is dangerous to eat. %hey ignore the fact that in many hot-country cultures, pigs are considered a delicacy, and they continue to prey on their own, prime&al fears of poisoning, to keep their taboo ali&e. It is this same, ancient fear of poisoning that comes to the aid of the modern-day misery-makers when they tell us that we should not to eat certain foods because they will damage our health. We are irrationally keen to accept their &iews because they fit neatly into the corner of our brain reser&ed for protection from poisoning. -&en as we defy them and en)oy another unit of salt, sugar, fat, red meat, or whate&er is currently frowned upon, there is a tiny black cloud of worry floating in the blue sky of our pleasure. %he anxiety-makers ha&e scored again. ,ne answer, of course, is to defiantly proclaim oneself in fa&our of a short life and a merry one. %hen, if ha&ing fun leads to a longer span of years, one can always en)oy the extra time as an unexpected bonus. 2ersonally, I expected 3purely on statistical grounds4 to die ten years ago and I made sure that, in the short time I had a&ailable, I tried e&ery dish known to cooks, at least once. (omething has gone wrong with my prediction because I am still here, and I ha&e a feeling that part of the reason could be that I ha&e managed to maintain a deep disrespect for all the health police, the faddist gurus and diet fascists who plague our bookstalls, radio stations and newsagents. When my mother was dying 3)ust in time to a&oid putting the ueen to the trouble of sending her a telegram, as she expressed it4 I asked her if there was anything she wanted, 'A gin and tonic' she whispered. I had to feed it to her through a straw. 'If you'&e got to go, you might as well go with a swing' she said. And where food and drink is concerned, you might as well stay with a swing.