The financial and economic crises of the early 21st century, coupled with a resurgence of international conflicts, civil wars and terrorism, have nevertheless had a positive consequence: more and more people are beginning to understand that our Western way of life has harmful repercussions on humanity and on our world.
We see new initiatives blossoming around us related to sustainable development, to our way of consuming, working, eating... Unfortunately, as is very often the case, human beings tend to go from one extreme to the other: they throw the baby out with the bathwater, ignoring the past, both the bad and the good things. They also tend to replace old vices with new addictions.
This is how the sharing economy emerged, and with it the booming of a new category of independent labor. The rat thus feels like it is freeing itself from the yoke of its experimenter. In doing so, however, it replaces its boss with customers, and at the same time loses its modest social security coverage.
In the same way, more and more rats are rushing to buy new food products that are supposed to be healthier and better for our planet. We see gluten-free, lactose-free or animal protein-free products appearing everywhere. The rat then has the impression of freeing itself from the power of the big agri-food groups. However, many of them continue to buy industrialized products, stamped organic, vegan or others, and which are sold in supermarkets in plastic packaging. Not to mention that some of these goods are sometimes stuffed with palm oil or other unsavory additives.
In both cases, whether they choose to go freelance or to consume in supermarkets in an "alternative" way, they continue to play in favor of the system. Better, they constitute a godsend for their torturing experimenters since in the first case they can exploit them by having less fixed costs and less risks, and in the second they can provide them with food, supposedly better for their health or for the planet, much more expensive than other traditional industrial products.
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Here is a short article that just came out this morning and which is very timely in relation to this last post:
Suspicion of the agri-food world has popularized "free from" diets (vegetarian, vegan, raw food, etc.) as the guarantors of a healthy nutritional balance. But these practices can turn into obsession, even orthorexia.
"Eating a fruit only if it was picked less than a minute ago, having mini meals with food supplements... The orthorexic is imprisoned in a set of rules that he imposes on himself," explains to AFP the professor of intercultural psychology Patrick Denoux who estimates, according to studies, the proportion of orthorexics in France to be 2 to 3% ("Why this fear in the belly", JC Lattès).
Conceptualized in the 90s in the United States, the term orthorexia was defined by Le Petit Larousse in 2012 as “disorder”.
The issue of healthy eating is at the heart of the Food Summit launched on July 20, which must attempt to find solutions to the agricultural crisis and agri-food challenges by November.
– 'Suspicion of poisoning' –
"We are experiencing a cultural shift in food that is leading us to fundamentally doubt what we eat because of the distance between the producer and the consumer, the delegation of control by the consumer to distant institutions, food crises, etc.," lists the specialist.
After the "trauma" of the mad cow crisis in the early 1990s and then the horse meat crisis in 2013, "we have never been so afraid of what we eat," Pascale Hébel of Crédoc (Research Center for the Study and Observation of Living Conditions) confirmed to AFP.
"The distance from rural areas has created these anxieties" which "crystallize among the upper classes," believes Ms. Hébel.
In our Western culture, this "suspicion of poisoning" is "valued" as proof of our "insight," says Mr. Denoux.
"I felt like I had the truth to live as long as possible," says Sabrina Debusquat, who was orthorexic for a year and a half and who published a book on the subject ("Métro, Boulot… Bonheur!", Edition Ca se saurait).
This 29-year-old French woman developed her syndrome following skin allergies caused by cosmetics: from click to click, she came across sites criticizing industrial food.
"All this information has generated enormous anxiety in me. It's an extreme reaction to extreme junk food," she sums up.
Mr. Denoux defines three major food systems: the traditional one of "our grandmother", the industrial one which "fills our stomach" and the health one which sees "food as medicine".
"The orthorexic cannot combine these systems, simplifies by taking refuge in health" and by excluding foods.
In a year and a half, Sabrina Debusquat became vegetarian, then vegan (refusing to eat any animal protein), then raw foodist and frugivore (fruit-based diet).
"I wanted to reach a state of purity," she explains.
She hoards products she considers "healthy", weighs them and takes their temperature, all the while criticizing those close to her who do not follow the same diet. She loses her hair, without worrying about it.
– Lack of vitamin B12 –
Only her partner's unusual nervousness makes her realize her obsessive state. "My body had ended up tyrannizing my mind." She decides to get out of it and goes out to buy vitamin B12.
Obtained by animal extraction, this element is mainly used in the production of red blood cells.
This is the same vitamin that a patient of Sophie Ortega, a nutritionist in Paris, was lacking: "She was starting to go blind due to a B12 deficiency."
"A hardcore vegan," this patient refuses to swallow it. "It was as if she would rather lose her sight" than "betray her commitment to animals," her doctor worries.
A practitioner for 25 years, Sophie Ortega highlights the current loss of bearings among her patients.
"It's becoming a headache to fill your supermarket trolley and balance your menus. There are now foods presented as medicines; we tell ourselves that it can only be better."
But this doctor insists: "good nutrition includes vegetables and animals", allows "spontaneity" and... "pleasure".
(©AFP / July 26, 2017 8:31 a.m.)