EXTREME CUISINE Haydn ShaughnessyThe Inuit Eskimos, legend has it, have 80 different words for snow. No doubt these words convey the significance of snow's weight, compactness, volume, ice content and the essential characteristics that make each type significant to life.
We have numerous words for wind. Breezes of varying intensity, wind itself, gale, storm, storm of varying speeds, hurricane, words that signify direction; and all convey essential knowledge to those of us who live in exposed crags in the ocean.
How many different ways do we have to articulate, share or convey the significance of what and how we eat? How many ways do we have of saying food?
Grub?
And then what?
Nosh?
This linguistic paucity has, in parallel, a gushing pornographic relative. Take this example from a recent restaurant review: "I liked the amuse," the reviewer writes, "an acidulated beetroot puree around a quenelle of horseradish cream, which was a deconstructed version of that great Jewish condiment Chrain."
The language surrounding food, the verbal and visual enrichment of our culinary culture, has been a significant development over the past 20 years. In the 1980s, as the fast food revolution developed, Irish and British people began discovering the aesthetic value of sophisticated cuisine.
American food sensibility is becoming more attuned to healthy combinations even as people become sicker.
Extravagant claims are now made for Spain as the new home of cuisine excellence. Belgium prides itself as the hidden gem of global culinary innovation.
Food culture has become a source of intense national pride, an indicator of greater cultural sensibility. Yummy.
Images of food have a rarefied, aesthetic quality once reserved for film stars. They are staged. Food is photographed only when it approximates to perfection. Many top photographers double up as food photographers, flitting between the catwalk and the dish.
Food has gone beyond being the new poetry to becoming a new category of icon or a family of icons: the hors d'oevre, meat dish, dessert, restaurant and chef.
We have the restaurants, we have the chefs, and we have the intricate menus, just like we have the cancer rates.
How we speak about food, the language we use is a significant part of this revolution and the US Department of Agriculture turned up an interesting finding about this very point, down in the Barrio:
"Examination of Hispanic diets reveals that less acculturated Hispanics - those who don't use English - eat somewhat more healthful diets than acculturated Hispanics - those who use English."
These non-English speakers actually live longer.
"Even more remarkable," according to Prof Cutberto Garza of Cornell University, who led the research, "is that the lower-than- expected death rates [of non-English speakers\] from heart disease, stroke, cancer and lower- than-expected infant mortality are sufficient to compensate for the extraordinarily high mortality rate due to homicide and unintentional injury."
In other words, those who can't read the adverts for food, can't work out the recipes or read the menus, stay healthy.
The convenient reaction of food critics is to blame fast food and junk food for the corrosive effect of food on human health but the effects of food are integral to our new food culture.
We have not dramatically increased the number of fast food restaurants (these have replaced the chipper) but we have increased the number of restaurants of all kinds.
In the west, oesophageal adenocarcinoma (EAC) and gastric cardia carcinoma (GCC) have started to become significant diseases.
These are aggressive, hard-to-treat cancers and they occur just where indigestion hits the oesophagus. They are linked to gastrointestinal reflux, the acid and bile that passes back up the oesophagus, when we're overloading the stomach.
Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease attacks regardless of income. GERD knows no class or income barriers. It requires only a combination of haste, excess eating and a high protein diet. GERD affects around 7 per cent of the population globally but disproportionately more in advanced societies.
Nearly 10 per cent of us now can't eat without anticipating the pain we are going to feel later and, where studies have been done, they show as many as 40 per cent of people report experiencing pain after meals, at least twice a week.
Studies show that "severe gastro-oesophageal reflux can increase the odds ratio 43-fold for the development of adenocarcinoma compared with those without symptoms".
These illnesses are a result of greed, perhaps but not of ignorance.
If cancer was in the past a silent killer, our bodies are now screaming for relief, not just from fast food but from most of the food out there.
We already eat an extreme form of cuisine, one that our bodies actively reject and it needs to be mitigated by new forms of eating.
The high culture of food, however, is a barrier. We have integrated dangerous eating into our aesthetic senses. Iconic food worthy of worship is now an integral part of our culture regardless of its effect on our bodies.
When the Inuit want to discuss their chances of finding fish, they presumably use the word for soft snow covering thin ice. When we need to talk about how to develop a tradition of restorative food, we unfortunately are stuck for words.
Haydn Shaughnessy's Extreme Cuisine: a topical concoction of Pensées Diverse in a text of occasional zest avec bon acidité is currently in preparation. He lives in West Cork.