EXTREME CUISINE Haydn ShaughnessyThe Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Britain might seem a strange place to start a discussion about food but in the days when marching, rather than fighting, was a popular way for crowds to behave, the politics of food was a topic of conversation up there with the really significant debates: Vietnam, equality, the Bomb, yoghurt.
The scientist who detonated the first atom bomb must have thought: "I know pretty much all there is to know about this atomic stuff. Except I don't know what it looks like, yet."
Confident and assured when he pressed the button he presumably had to admit that he never imagined one giant fungus. "Jeepers," you can hear him say. "Mushrooms!"
That's also the way of balanced diets. They are of atomic importance as well as anatomical. And they sure look different from what we imagine.
There's a naive assumption that fruit, vegetables, grains and meat eaten in sensible proportions equal balance. But balance can also be that between sweet tastes and sour, complex and simple carbohydrates, fresh and persevered, herbs that dehydrate, vegetables that moisten, foods that warm and those that are cooling.
Food conditions the body in different ways, making it moist, dry, cool, hot, acidic, alkaline (all conditions that affect health).
And this is where balanced eating gets complex and difficult to sustain without re-educating ourselves.
Balance is as much about taste as it is about the actual product. Taste defines the underlying qualities of foods.
Sour and bitter tastes are generally alkalising, whereas sweet foods, in general, create acidity. Sweet does not mean sugary. Sweet tastes include the majority of vegetables as well as meat.
Too much acid caused by sweet foods does what you might expect, it burns. Burns the oesophagus, nibbles into the bones, overheats the bowel. And the result is disease.
Western tastes are so overwhelmingly disposed to foods that are sweet, however, that it is hard to imagine pleasure, sour and bitter in one sentence. And those who aspire to being practitioners of proper balanced eating are usually invited to crawl into the loony corner because we ask questions like: But where's the sauerkraut?
Balanced eating, so say the Chinese, and I rely on them for any semblance of wisdom in this argument, requires regular doses of bitter and sour foods: lemon, of course but also vinegar, sorrel, sauerkraut, tamarind, grapefruit, pickles, fermented foods, sourdough.
And the reason is that sour and bitter are simply super. People need to crave them.
Sweet foods are satisfying. They are great for pigging out, letting the belly flop over the trousers when you reach for the brandy. Whereas sweet foods encourage us to distend, sour and bitter encourage us to pull ourselves in, one is flabby, the other sharp. If they are satisfying, it is more for facilitating a sense of order and purpose. In evolutionary terms, the predominance of sweet tastes would have been impossible. The human body relied for millennia on preserves.
Sour and bitter are often the tastes that result from good preservation techniques.
Perhaps only a loony would go out on a limb for the return of bitter and sour foods or campaign for the food giants to rot our vegetables in more constructive ways. But bitter and sour are only the start.
Balance also means juggling foods that dehydrate and foods that moisten the body.
According to eastern philosophy, green leaf vegetables - the ones the doctors recommend - moisten (imagine soggy spinach) whereas most herbs dehydrate. Spinach with copious amounts of herbs is good balance, as is cabbage with bacon.
Should you be eating five a day of fresh fruit and vegetables? What's wrong with preserved food? If food is preserved properly without chemicals then it is only what we've been eating for centuries. If it is frozen, the chances are it reaches the table fresher than after spending weeks in transit and on a grocer's shelf.
Fresh is a red herring. Preserves create good bacteria - think yoghurt. They offer bitterness as part of the process of decay and they are in part pre-digested by enzymes.
Fruit and vegetables are sweet but fruit and vegetables preserved by traditional methods tend, naturally, to be sour.
We need both. We only survived for millennia because we had both. The tastes associated with controlled decay and the bacteria that go with it are what human beings relied on for survival.
And another thing. Complex carbohydrates. If you have cereals for breakfast, wholemeal bread at lunch and wholemeal pasta for dinner, chances are you've eaten wheat, wheat and more wheat. Balance means dipping into rye bread, sourdough, barley, couscous, and sometimes taking a rest with good old-fashioned white rice.
So here arguably is the essence of balance. Wholegrain versus refined is less important than diversity. Foods that warm are superfluous without access to foods that cool. Fresh is irrelevant without preserved. Sweet is deadly without sour.
Which leads me to the Campaign for Appropriate Decay. It is difficult to make the case and escape the white jacket, of course, but rotting food constructively is clearly the way forward. Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!
Haydn Shaughnessy is a journalist and author, who is working on the wonderfully digestible Extreme Cuisine: Notes on The Aesthetic Nature of Rotten Food - he lives in west Cork.