It’s an interesting question, posed at last week’s British Library lecture - how much does food (myth and reality) count for our make-up?

Quite a lot on both counts, it would seem…

The debates were offered by 3 social scientists from the full range that the discipline offers:

• - a sociologist (Prof Anne Murcott, Uni of Nottigham)
• - an experimental psychologist (Prof Martin Yeomans, Uni of Sussex) 
  - ‘the man from the FSA’  Terrence Colins (Director of Comms, Food Standards Agency).

Prof Anne Murcott kicked things off by addressing the myth of the decline of the family meal. Using stats to disprove the myth (families eat together about as much as they always have), she then asserted that it has in fact been a fear for the last 100 years or so - people in 1910 were as worried as we are today - if the myth of the decline had been real, by now families would NEVER sit down together.

Interestingly though, she then suggested that the reason the myth had, and should, persist is that it gives people an aspiration which in turn makes them work harder to keep their family eating together.

So in fact, the myth of the decline may be what has prevented the actual decline of the family meal.

People are twisted aren’t they!

Well, if you think that demonstrates the topsy-turviness of human nature, wait till you hear about the next speaker, Prof Martin Yeomans - an experimental psychologist. Everyone loves experimental psychology, there is something endlessly fascinating about watching people’s behaviour (personally I think it is what glues us to the screen, stage or cafe seat, we love to watch each other ‘behaving’) and Prof Yeoman didn’t fail to deliver the goods.

His main assertion was that external factors, not internal sensors, actually control what we eat. To demonstrate this he used a wealth of experimental examples. My favourite, and the most telling, was an experiment on some hungry medical students (of course!) to establish whether the body was able to regulate itself internally based on calories and/or volume consumed.

Basically these students had a tube put into their stomachs and were also given a big bowl of pasta to eat. Over the course of several lunch sessions the students all had high cal/low cal/large/small volumes of soup pumped into their stomachs, whilst they were eating the pasta.

Surprisingly they all ate the full bowl of pasta (hungry med students, remember) regardless of how much extra volume or calorific intake of soup they had. Suggesting that our internal sensors are just not very good at working out how much we have eaten - they really only work the other way, to say eat more.

We basically eat what is on our plate…

The problem being that we have large plates, an over availability of food and food imagery at every turn causing us to over eat.  The other problem being that while an alcoholic can avoid all booze, a person who over eats cannot. In the good news though he did also prove that depriving yourself just makes you want (and eat) twice as much - so don’t deprive yourself - and that most of us still manage to stay within the realms of healthy. But, what of the future? Our biology won’t change any time soon, but our culture’s work the hard food sell more and more, it seems reasonable to expect that this trend for over eating will continue to grow…

Terrence Collins ‘the man from the FSA’ now came on to explain how the FSA was trying to be a force for good in our food culture, balancing out the hard food sell.

I had always been a bit suspicious of the FSA, which is much younger than I’d thought (barely 10 years old), but Mr Collins did talk a good talk. He explained how the FSA tries to be transparent, meaning that sometimes debates it is having are still forming when they go public and can be easily taken out of context - I’m not sure I know enough to really decide, but I am willing to cut them a bit more slack. He underlined that they had consumers’ best interests at heart.

Most importantly though, he talked about their support for the reform of the UK libel laws which often prevent scientists from entering into meaningful public debate. This is a really important topic, scientific rigour in the UK is basically getting suffocated by legal fear, which can’t be good for anyone.

Especially as we need to be careful about our myths, to make sure they don’t automatically turn into (destructive) realities…

Download podcasts of the debate (available soon)

Find out more about the campaign for Libel Reform

Tags: British library debate, Our food culture

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 14th, 2010 at 3:56 pm by urban foodie and is filed under Food Facts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.