Plastic Surgery for Food? The GMO Question. Living an Authentic Life, part 4

Is there such a thing as living food? If so, does that mean that there is dead food? Why should it make a difference, if the most important thing about nutrition is the calories, fats, protein and vitamin content of a food? Let's explore this a little: certainly fresh food tastes better, and fruit that has ripened on the tree or vine has a whole different quality than fruit that was picked green and shipped around the world. It also seems increasingly clear, from all kinds of different perspectives, that highly processed food is not good for us. Processed food is not the same.  Like formula for babies, which even if it chemically is as close as we can possibly make it to breast milk, it is not an equivalent. That is at least in part due to the fact that the nutritive substance in breast milk has already been enlivened by the mother's body. It can easily be digested and taken up into the body. The substance of the milk is living—it loses some of that when it is frozen or stored for too long, but it is still an amazingly living nutrition. We can think about general food nutrition in the same way—that the closer the food we eat is to its original growing state, the better we can make use of it. We meet it in a different way and can incorporate it into our own living physiology in a better way. Therefore, we can say (though someone who relies solely on laboratory analysis will often argue this) that the Vitamin A, K, and B vitamins in spinach are more living and healthier than if we eat those same vitamins in a concentrated pill form.

 Let's talk about this connection in a different way. Let's talk about the wrinkles people get on their faces! Wrinkles come with age, but even more so they come with use. Naturally our wrinkles are related to the shape of our face, sun exposure, and moisturizer use, but generally we get the wrinkles in relation to the way we use and hold our face. Concentrate a lot and scowl, you'll get one set. Smile a lot, and you’ll get another. Go on vacation, and your wrinkles might change! The skin folds are ‘down stream’ from the expressions and emotions that we carry in our life. They are honest and tell the truth of our lives, even if at certain moments we might not be overjoyed about how they look in the mirror.

 Now suppose that a friend of yours had plastic surgery so that he or she couldn't frown. The skin and muscles were stiffened and sculpted in such a way that frowning was no longer possible. And you find out that your friend had this procedure done because there is now firm evidence that people who frown tend to be unhappy, and unhappiness can lead to depression and depressed people sometimes miss work, which leads to less productivity, with the end result that the United States economy loses “xx hundred million dollars a year” due to wrinkles. Ok, that is very tongue-in-cheek, and that is all related to outer measures. Instead, let's consider how this surgery would change the inner life. How would it be to spend time with this friend? What happens if this friend has lost a loved one, but no one on the outside can see that the person is mourning inside, and so one assumes everything is fine? It would certainly be bizarre as well as disconcerting, because you could no longer accurately sense what your dear friend is feeling; and at a certain time your friend would probably have the experience that his or her face doesn't fit very well any more. There is now a disconnect, a gulf, between the person's inner life, and the outer shape of their face.

 Back to the plants we eat, that same gulf is important, because there is an inner life, a vitality, energy, and being-ness to the plant that then gives rise to its substance. The process of the plant manifests in its physical character and nutrients. When we genetically change the physical shape of the food we eat, so that it will grow three times the normal number of grain kernels, or so that whole fields of plants can be sprayed with an herbicide and not be killed, we are disrupting our connection to a living nutrition. The substance of those plants has been pulled away from its natural living process. There is no way that your body can make use of that substance in the same way that it can with a living food. Consider the discussion about how the wheat grown today is a dramatically different plant from the wheat that was grown fifty or seventy years ago. This has to figure into the conversation about why there are so many people today with gluten sensitivity or other kinds of food allergies. We are living beings. We need living food.

Avoid GMO's when you can. Celebrate your wrinkles!
Dr. Blanning