I occasionally write about food superstitions and various peoples' clinging to their various notions of "healthy food." It is all cultural, of course. In America, we have the food obsessionals and the indifferent gourmands, but most are overweight and all will die. Contra most religions (including the Christian Mass), there is no food magic or magic food. Exceptions to that statement might be foie gras and ice cream.
A good piece on the topic: Eating Toward Immortality - Dietary culture is just another way of dealing with the fear of death:
The act of ingestion is embroidered with so much cultural meaning that, for most people, its roots in spare, brutal survival are entirely hidden. Even for people in extreme poverty, for whom survival is a more immediate concern, the cultural meanings of food remain critical. Wealthy or poor, we eat to celebrate, we eat to mourn, we eat because it’s mealtime, we eat as a way to bond with others, we eat for entertainment and pleasure. It is not a coincidence that the survival function of food is buried beneath all of this—who wants to think about staving off death each time they tuck into a bowl of cereal? Forgetting about death is the entire point of food culture.
When it comes to food, Becker said that humans “quickly saw beyond mere physical nourishment,” and that the desire for more life—not just delaying death today, but clearing the bar of mortality entirely—grew into an obsession with transforming the self into a perfected object that might achieve a sort of immorality. Diet culture and its variations, such as clean eating, are cultural structures we have built to attempt to transcend our animality.
Tracked: Feb 11, 02:33