It’s one of those things you hear, and occasionally you might give it thought when it comes to trying to assess your diet or eat a bit healthier. Or it might be thought of when they maybe refer to overweight people eating fatty foods, or people who eat junk food. So they say, just think about what you eat.

But that’s not the saying is it. It’s ‘you are what you eat’. Funny if you imagine eating lots of doughnuts and turning into a doughnut, or like the character in Road Dahls Charlie and the chocolate factory, who ate the blueberry gum, and turned into a blueberry. But as with that last one, there was something so very sinister going on there. To show you how temptation can override even a warning, and it leads to being what you eat. Maybe that was the show and tell bit, by way of programming, but for something sweet and made into comedy or a fancy colourful musical. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down for example.

But the obvious ease by which you can get someone to ingest something, especially if you sprinkle it with sugar and name anything dubious with a strange unidentifiable code, is quite scary. Lots of people suspected additives in food and drink decades ago was causing some issues for people. Makes me wonder if that was really the tip of the iceberg, as it has been with so much else recently. Food though, is a high priority and with good reason. My article If you control the food points out why if you hadn’t given it thought previously. But that is from an angle of keeping it back from you or rationing it by way of monopolising. This one is from a perspective of where it goes after, and would appear has been filtering through. A brief look at the ‘new meat’ we have coming our way was covered in Beyond meat, or beyond ridiculous? As usual though here, I will reference a couple of films, as they go down the road of it being people turned into food and unknowingly being fed to people.

Soylent Green (1978)

Cloud Atlas (2005)

Reality however, is starting to tread a very strange and dark path. A mainstream wave of gore, simulated human mutilation and cult type fetish has appeared. Is that just a mere coincidence? That a few decades on from a burst in the horror and gore genre in TV and film, we have an overtone of that same representation now being acceptable. Which starts to make other things acceptable in some minds too. Sexy up vampires, oh look, adrenochrome talk hits the streets. Familiar concepts are more likely to be scoffed at as ridiculous or embraced, rather than have to go through the phase of being accepted as a thought. Half the job is done.

You are what you eat. Back to that, and another thing I think of when I prepare food, about how food is supposed to taste better when made with love. Now, that may be all well and good, but I bet there are some people (myself included), who sometimes make something that tastes awful, or just goes wrong. But I did wonder, about cooking and the idea of spells, and how it ties together. How you could possibly transfer an energy as well as the ingredients. If possible, it would lend even more weight to the original saying but gives it more.

So, what do we eat? Processed food, pesticides, mechanically made items which must lack ‘heart’ to a point. So do we become soulless if we eat nothing but empty food, not just empty of calories, but empty of life and natural process? They say your body is your temple, treat it as such. It may stand to reason then that animals treated badly may pass on something, food cooked with hate too, tainted in some way by that process. Insects being on the menu next makes me think the same. Farmed insects with no natural environment at all, just another species to try and dominate and construct a ‘reality’ for. And today I see talk of it possibly being the case that aborted fetal tissue could have been put into food products. I’m not surprised, but people are not impressed, and rightly so. And maybe this will make more people start giving thought to the whole process of food production, ingredients and what happens to food along the way before it even gets to us. Because if what is being said is true, the title of this article suddenly becomes a lot more than just words.

(c) K Wicks