Food Doesn't Want Us to Eat It

Everybody knows that chopping onions can make you cry, but have you ever stopped to consider that some foods can make you sad or give you pain? Or that food has defenses to stop us from eating it? In this entry, you will read about relationship of food to fibromyalgia. This relationship also applies to depression, chronic fatigue syndrome, migraine, tension headaches, temperomandibular joint syndrome, regional pain, and stress. Fibromyalgia is a very common condition where I used to live in Texas. It probably has a lot to do with the consumption of beef.

“If you want to be big in Texas,” the portable sign in front of the restaurant read, “eat our chicken-fried steak and gravy for lunch and dinner. Also available for breakfast.” Beef is big business in Texas, and for many years, our family was a very small part of it. When I was growing up, our family farmed about a thousand acres near a small town in central Texas called Granger. In the summers, our family harvested grain on another thousand acres near an even smaller town in south Texas called Placedo. In my early years, we didn’t go to the grocery store for most of our eggs, dairy, meat, fruits, vegetables, bread, butter, or baked goods, because we raised or made them ourselves. That included beef. If a food appeared on our dinner table, chances were that we had known it personally.
One year our parents gave my brother and me the assignment of taking care of two heifers, Flossie and Bossie. I was primarily responsible for Flossie, and my brother was primarily responsible for Bossie. Flossie was a gentle Holstein cow. She rolled her big brown eyes admiringly upward when she was fed hay, and she batted her enormous eyelashes coyly when her name was called. She never jumped the fence, and she never invaded the rose garden. She had a deep and forceful yet unthreatening and sonorous moo.
Although my brother’s and my recollections slightly disagree, I recall that Bossie was the cantankerous calf of our most independent-minded cow, Ada the Ayrshire (named after a cartoon character of the same name created by Walt Wetterberg). As any farmer can tell you, Ayshires are a difficult breed. We referred to Ayshires as “the cow every farmer loves to have, in their competitors’ herd.” True to her upbringing, Bossie often did not wait to be fed; she broke down the fence to get to the grass that wasn’t really any greener on the other side. She didn’t jump the fence, she tore it down, and on at least one occasion, she grazed in the sweet corn patch and ate my grandmother’s Dorothy Perkins roses. Her sounds were less a moo than a bark. She had to be dehorned so she would not gore Flossie, my brother, or me.
Flossie grew faster than Bossie. When it came to time to restock the larder, Flossie was slated to be the first to go. I protested. I was upset to lose my pet, much less to eat it, so at the age of eight, never having heard the word “vegetarian” in an everyday conversation, I threatened to stop eating meat. “You’re going to get awful hungry around here,” my father advised. Nonetheless, our parents decided to spare Flossie, so the one-way ticket to the meat packing plant went to Bossie. She resisted capture for several hours, and dealt us a number of bruises and contusions until she was finally lassoed and pulled bodily, all eighteen hundred pounds of her, into the loading chute. The only thing my brother had to say as Bossie was trucked away to the butcher was, “Make sure they cut the steaks thick.” A day later, six hundred pounds of Bossie was delivered to our freezer. The family still recalls how tough and stringy the beef was that year. Flossie on the other hand, survived to old age (for a cow), after having borne either ten or (our family memories are fuzzy on this point) twelve calves.

We sometimes don’t want to eat our food, and sometimes we do, but our food almost never wants to be eaten by us. Both animals and plants have elaborate defenses that keep them from being eaten. The simple pinto bean, for example, discourages animals, including humans, from eating it by causing gassiness. (Flatus in a cow can be fatal, to the cow, that is.) Pinto beans contain toxic lectins that have to be removed by soaking and draining off the soaking water. They also contain tannins that cause burping and gastroesophageal reflux.

Soybeans contain chemicals that mimic estrogen. When foraging female animals eat soybeans, their reproductive cycles are interrupted, and they bear fewer young to eat the next generation of soybeans. Tomatoes contain lectins that bind to the lining of the intestine and make it “leakier,” enhancing the transport of potential toxins into the bloodstream of the animal (or person) eating them. Peanut lectins bind and deactivate harmless forms of the bacterium Trypanosoma (the organism that causes Chagas disease), but allow pathogenic forms of the bacterium to accumulate in the human gut.

Gluten in wheat, barley, and rye “downregulates” natural killer cell activity and increases the risk of lymphoma. Wheat, milk, and beef contain exorphins, opium-like chemicals acting in the same way as endorphins to make the people who eat them satisfied and drowsy. Potato starches not only can cross into the human bloodstream whole, they can cause blood clots. Sweetbreads contain hormones that make encourage pathogenic amoebas to take in food. Mussels can release a toxin that causes permanent, debilitating amnesia when they consume large quantities of the diatom, Nitzschia pungens. Scallops consuming the same diatom can induce diarrhea when they in turn are eaten. The flesh of snails (escargot) traditionally is served in garlic butter because the low acidity of the “meat” makes it uniquely vulnerable to spoilage. Rosemary and lavender shift mental activity from the right brain to the left brain—helping to ensure that those who eat them will not soon go looking for more.

Similar qualities can be found in many other foods, even if they are whole, organic, free of pesticides and parasites, fresh, and properly prepared. Clearly, much of our food does not want to be eaten. There is no better example of the pain food can cause when it doesn’t want to be eaten than fibromyalgia.