Food myths are ideas about food that
1. Not entirely true, not entirely false, and/or
2. Not meant to be true but are useful for the person to believe
“No one who is content with a modest meal can reign over us.”
An archbishop’s remark on why Guido was rejected as the
legitimate hear of the Carolingian Empire.
The Iroquis would tell their children that
a monster would appear to humiliate
them if they ate excessively.
A nutritionist at LSU told the story of a Muslim basketball player
• During Ramadan he would fast during the daylight.
• “Allah desires your well-being, not your discomfort. He desires you to fast the
whole month so that you may magnify Him and render thanks to Him for giving
you His guidance.” From the Koran.
• In most cases lack of eating would hinder an athlete’s performance
• He actually played better during Ramadan.
• [If this is a myth] Why does it work? Fasting benefited him psychologically, giving
him a sense of meaning and control over his life.
The words in a myth are often less important than the usefulness
of believing
• “All gluten is bad”
• “All sugar is bad”
• Sugar and gluten are fine, even good, in moderation. But
reducing sugar and replacing wheat with substitutes might lead
you to eat healthier products and a greater variety of foods. The
result? You feel better. You are healthier. It wasn’t because the
sugar/gluten was unhealthy. It was because believing they were
led you to eat better.
Food myths sometimes lead to truths
• During the 1980s scientists made us think that all fats are bad, always.
• Then came Dr. Atkins and the Atkins diet, that said you can eat all the fat you
want as long as you don’t eat carbs.
• Turned out that many people did well on the Atkins diet. But why?
• Investigative journalists did some digging and found that scientists in the 1980s
did biased, misleading research. Fat wasn’t near as bad as they had claimed.
• Now we know that fat in moderation is okay, and many fats are nutritious.
Why don’t people just stick to the facts?
• As we just saw, the facts are sometimes wrong.
• Willful ignorance let’s us indulge ourselves while not feeling guilty about the
consequences
• Intuition sometimes
trumps science
• Scientists used to
think that feeding
cattle rendered
sheep/cattle carcasses
was okay
• Then we found out
this created Mad Cow
disease
• Those who thought using rendered sheep carcasses as feed was unsafe because
it was “unnatural” ended up with the better information—through the myth
of “natural” food.
Myth is much more important and true than history.
History is just journalism and you know how reliable that
is.
—Joseph Campbell