Today, 8 November, is a very important European holiday. European Day of Healthy Food and Cooking. And you’ve probably never heard of it. Like probably 99% of society.
We’ve got an ageing society. Which means more and more people will be needed for care, and the health service will be more and more overloaded, because 70-year-olds get sick a lot more often than 30-year-olds. On the other hand, we’ve got a growing percentage of young people, even kids, who are overweight or obese, and who’ll start getting diseases typical of retirement age after thirty: heart attacks, strokes. And type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance, en masse. And they’ll be loading the health service more and more too. And on the third hand, we’ve got a health service that can’t cope and is underfunded. Where public healthcare still exists. It’s going to fucking blow.
As humanity, as individual developed countries, we’ve done a hell of a lot to wipe out many diseases that used to kill and reap a huge harvest: tuberculosis, polio, plague or rabies.
But there’s a huge neglected area, and that’s diet and lifestyle, which are responsible for around 40% of all deaths in developed countries.
On 8 November 2007, the EU health commissioner Markos Kyprianou launched the “European Day of Healthy Food and Cooking”.
The aim was to encourage children to eat healthily in response to rising childhood obesity in Europe. Euro-Toques, the European association of cooks, was a co-organiser.
Chefs visited schools, let kids into their kitchens and taught them to cook.
As the European Commission said at the time, every year another 400,000 children in the EU become overweight or obese.
Important issue, important topic, action badly needed in this area.
And?
And bugger all!
And the upshot is, you’ll mostly find out about this day if you browse “calendars of unusual holidays”. Here and there some NGO or other runs healthy cooking lessons for kids in schools.
Most of it in Portugal, where the main player in this holiday is… Nestlé.
It’s a bit like hunters promoting veganism. Innit?
A bit, trace amounts of this Day exist in Poland, in Lithuania. And that’s it.
Worth asking why that happened.
Worth asking who would lose out from a healthy lifestyle and a sustainable diet.
Corporations exactly like Nestlé. The alcohol, tobacco and meat industries. These are powerful corporations with decades of experience in corruption, with money and power comparable to the money and power of a mid-sized state.
And if we follow the money, even though that dangerously close to putting on a tinfoil hat, we can easily see that the fitness, supplements and private healthcare industries and the pharmaceutical giants would lose out too. Because if we eat a sustainable diet and keep a proper lifestyle, we don’t need gyms, supplements or drugs all that much. Or at least, statistically, at the level of society, we need a lot, lot less.
And the only way to solve this problem is to take the whole farm to fork chain, and lifestyle, out of the logic of the market, meaning de facto capitalism, and treat it as a public service.
One whose aim is to give every human being a sustainable, tasty diet, plus the means and the inspiration for a healthy lifestyle.
But it’s easier to imagine us all dying of obesity than to imagine the death of capitalism.
And what if it turned out we don’t have to imagine it? That it’s happening to some extent? That in many countries around the world there are organisations pulling the farm to fork chain out from under the logic of profit and working in the logic of community. Inclusion instead of alienation through work?
And one of the biggest is in Poland? Anyone? Anything?…
Koła Gospodyń Wiejskich, the rural women’s circles, running since 1866, one of the oldest organisations of that kind in the world. Poland has wonderful, proud traditions of cooperatives, associations and co-ops. The Społem Consumers’ Cooperative, with over 150 years of tradition, is one of the oldest cooperatives in the world. And Edward Abramowski is one of the key figures of European cooperative thought. Today almost forgotten in his own homeland.
Of course, as a Marxist, I understand that it’s impossible to recreate what worked 50 or 100 years ago.
As the productive forces develop, every sphere of material, cultural and spiritual life inevitably changes. That’s why all social conservatism is so absurdly funny, so Monty Pythonesque. Whether social-democratic or monarchist, Christian or liberal, and all the tribal villages and similar attempts to solve modern social problems by going back to real or fictional forms of social organisation from centuries ago.
That might happen in a post-apocalyptic scenario, where, as a result of either climate catastrophe or war, civilisation is wiped out.
And funnily enough, all these conservatives mostly operate on the internet. Well, in medieval conditions it’ll be harder for them.
Likewise, sadly, there’s no going back to the welfare state of the period after the Second World War. And a state like that would be able to deliver public services like these. The current one isn’t capable of it. Just like it isn’t capable of solving other social problems.
But the old world inevitably carries the seeds of the new. Like free school lunches for all kids, like Mamdani’s municipal grocery stores, or Abdul El-Sayed’s public-health ideas, like the restrictions and bans on junk food advertising in Britain.
The kitchen is my space for lifestyle medicine.
I'm not a dietitian or a doctor – I'm a chef, and a member of the Polish Society of Lifestyle Medicine. Nutrition is essential to a modern kitchen, and that's nothing new: working from Hippocratic dietetic principles was part of a cook's craft centuries ago. At Rude Kitchen I tie that tradition to modern science — and to lifestyle. Read more about how I bring cooking and lifestyle medicine together on the About page.