So, how do we approach food and nutrition from a spiritual angle?  While there is not a Bahá’í ‘diet,’ we do have some guidelines about where we – as a civilization – will be heading in the future. It’s a process, individually and collectively, of moving towards health, not just for ourselves, but for every living thing on the planet.

Listen to this excellent podcast, entitled “Nutrition from a Bahá’í Perspective: Food for the Body, Food for the Soul”, prepared by Margaret Tash.

You can view/download the transcript of this presentation here.

“A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips”, these uncomfortable sayings ominously follow us around like a black cloud. Squeeze our conscience, whether looking at a menu in a restaurant, or visiting the supermarket (feeling the overwhelming draw towards the dessert section) or during a lazy afternoon at home. It is a rude reminder of the dangers of falling victim to our appetites. However, we provide ourselves with excuses: “Just one more”; “It’s a celebration”; “I deserve it” ; ”I need it” ; “It’s a reward”; “If I don’t eat it, it will go to waste”. Occasionally, we use food to fill our spare time, internally claiming we have nothing better to do than find something tasty to eat!

This reality contrasts starkly with the growing obsession to look good and diet. The whole concept has become such a ubiquitous preoccupation in society that it dominates and dictates the thoughts and goals of many peoples’ lives. Everything, all the way up to advertising, is aimed at looking good and eating healthily-with a very unhealthy leaning towards weight loss! Simultaneously, we are bombarded with images of skinny models devouring hidden chocolate, fattening ice cream, fast food or calorie-filled drinks while miraculously looking so slender and toned. Advertising and the media provides us with norms. Images teach us we deserve flavour, should succumb to temptations and are entitled to eat what we like while maintaining desired figures. We are taught that distorted body images are healthy and that was is actually healthy is boring. Society is geared towards tasty fattening fast fixes, and immediate gratification without adequate warning of the effects thereof. This quote from Abdu’l-Bahá perhaps best explains this conundrum we are facing.

Abdu’l-Bahá states:

But man hath perversely continued to serve his lustful appetites, and he would not content himself with simple foods. Rather, he prepared for himself food that was compounded of many ingredients, of substances differing one from the other. With this, and with the perpetrating of vile and ignoble acts, his attention was engrossed, and he abandoned the temperance and moderation of a natural way of life. The result was the engendering of diseases both violent and diverse.

When the subject of eating healthily is investigated more thoroughly, moving away from the purely weight loss aspect of the process, the impact our diets have on our wellbeing as individuals as well as on general society becomes apparent.  According to the Báb:

The Báb hath said that the people of Bahá must develop the science of medicine to such a high degree that they will heal illnesses by means of foods. The basic reason for this is that if, in some component substance of the human body, an imbalance should occur, altering its correct, relative proportion to the whole, this fact will inevitably result in the onset of disease.

It is increasingly accepted that overeating or undereating has a huge role in general health. Interestingly, there is now a new focus emerging in the public health sector; namely, the effect our diet has on the overall health of our body and minds as well as a preventative for disease.

Even the meaning of eating healthy has drastically changed over the years. As recently as 2005, the well-known and commonly accepted ideas that were prevalent in society were improved. The Harvard School of Public Health has designed a guide to healthy eating known as the Healthy Eating Pyramid based on 15 years of research. This period has reshaped the definition of healthy eating providing us with a wealth of insight into the matter. As part of the research, it was discovered that through adopting the methods and new diet, stressing on the consumption of whole grains, vegetables and exercise, the risks of falling victim to diseases that have plagued many individuals are considerably reduced. It also offers the very welcome concept of not worrying about the grams consumed but rather the type of food. A delightful idea for those of us that enjoy sizeable portions of food! On the other hand though, not as welcome when you are considering devouring that extra chocolate bar you have stashed away for a better time or thinking of heading to the local fast food joint for an extra large portion of fish and chips!

A lot of encouragement is taken from the guidance offered by these discoveries and from the direction the research in this field is taking us. Through careful consideration of our eating habits as well as the types of food we eat the lives of individuals can and in many cases have been considerably eased as well as improved. The field of healthy eating is indeed vast and still very much in its infancy. Through accepting and adjusting ourselves to the new discoveries a healthier way of life is formed and perhaps one could venture to say, a healthier society can be achieved.

Well as it turns out, there’s more to the story.

Since the article was written we’ve seen the sub-prime mortgage crisis and feared credit crunch hit the light of day. And while companies are facing foreclosure or downsizing, and workers face the very real prospect of retrenchment, an odd thing has happened. Average food prices have actually gone down instead of up — the price of corn in particular – this without any real policy shifts in major biofuel-producing nations. Confusion reigns. The experts revise their figures and it turns out that while the correlation between the two factors still exists, it isn’t as great as previously estimated. So why have prices dropped?

Surprise surprise, all these factors are interconnected. As major investors and investing firms watched the housing bubble pop — so the explanation goes — they looked for other avenues to make a profit. With higher oil prices and a greater push to convert food crops to biofuels, it seemed a safe bet to assume that food prices would rise as a result (since there would be less of it). The frenzied investments around this assumption led to what is known as a speculative bubble, where the market value of a resource greatly exceeds its intrinsic value. Commodity prices rose dramatically, and kept on rising, until a point where it got ridiculous and the bubble burst, along with all the other speculative bubbles.

Without fail, this “bubble and pop” cycle has caused untold misery for the world’s poor. And while we would like to imagine that the worst is over, this NY times article predicts prices to rise again next year. So the question arises: is it acceptable for a handful of speculators, who are sitting on masses of wealth, to wreak havoc on the lives of millions of people living “downstream”?

Stephen Pearlstein, business columnist for the Washington Post, described the situation as it was happening:

this bubble is causing economic discomfort for households and businesses around the world, and misery for hundreds of millions of hungry people who suddenly cannot afford a bowl of rice or scrap of meat… the global food crisis has provided a grim reminder that the global economic ecosystem has become so interdependent that a drought in Australia, a tax credit in the United States, French farm subsidies and export controls in India can wind up forcing a desperate African farmer to eat his seed corn.

Shad Rowe, a Dallas money manager, remarked that the situation raises the bigger question of “whether people in a complex society ought to be allowed to make bets that affect other people and that have nothing to do with them.“

The insanity of 2008 has forced world leaders to finally sit up and take notice. At last month’s G-20 Summit aimed at combatting the financial situation, world leaders agreed “to a far-reaching action plan that, over the next 4 1/2 months, would begin to reshape international financial institutions and reform worldwide regulatory and accounting rules.” The plan included a joint statement:

We are determined to enhance our cooperation and work together to restore global growth and achieve needed reforms in the world’s financial systems.

Sounds good – and time will tell if the proposed measures lead to meaningful results. But then, given our chequered history with international reform, should there be any cause for optimism? Perhaps, perhaps not.

Let us, for a moment, dust off our magnifying glasses and take a closer look at the phrases “cooperation” and “work together”. Have our past actions always done them justice? What does it really imply when a determined group of previously separate entities work together in unity to fix a problem? Part of the answer lies in this quote. It starts by describing what unity is not, followed by what it is, and what tremendous effects it has had throughout history:

Unity is not… merely a condition resulting from a sense of mutual goodwill and common purpose, however profound and sincerely held such sentiments may be, any more than an organism is a product of some fortuitous and amorphous association of various elements. Unity is a phenomenon of creative power, whose existence becomes apparent through the effects that collective action produces and whose absence is betrayed by the impotence of such efforts. However handicapped it often has been by ignorance and perversity, this force has been the primary influence driving the advancement of civilization, generating legal codes, social and political institutions, artistic works, technological achievements without end, moral breakthroughs, material prosperity, and long periods of public peace whose afterglow lived in the memories of subsequent generations as imagined “golden ages”

(Century of Light, p. 41)

For a creative power which is essential to no less a cause than the advancement of civilization, isn’t it perplexing that the concept of unity receives no real thought or attention at any of these world showcases? Not a mere passing mention or goodwill gesture, but a profound grasp of what it is, what its implications are, and how to set about reconciling the complex misunderstandings and scattered beliefs that presently exist among nations.

For many, I suspect, achieving unity is seen as being incompatible with nationalistic priorities. Or perhaps it is dismissed as a pie-in-the-sky notion, too abstract and loosely-defined. Nothing at all like those big bad economic theories with the graphs and the formulas that make your head spin…right? Well, not really.

How’s this for a concise definition of what unity is all about:

For unity to exist among human beings — at even the simplest level — two fundamental conditions must pertain.
Those involved must first of all be in some agreement about the nature of reality as it affects their relationships with one another and with the phenomenal world.
They must, secondly, give assent to some recognized and authoritative means by which decisions will be taken that affect their association with one another and that determine their collective goals.

(Century of Light, p. 40)

A solid, scientific definition of unity, “at even the simplest level”. For a practical example of what this means, look here.

No guesswork required.

And herein lies the great paradox surrounding our scientific markets: for what is speculation, if nothing more than an educated guess?

In an interesting article (Hoarding Nations Drive Food Costs Ever Higher, 30 June 2008), the New York Times explains that since 1980 “even as trade in services and in manufactured goods has tripled, adjusting for inflation, trade in food has barely increased. Instead, for decades, food has been a convoluted tangle of restrictive rules, in the form of tariffs, quotas and subsidies….[T]he world is increasingly dependent on a handful of countries…that are still exporting large quantities of food…. [P]oor countries have frequently cut farm assistance programs and lowered tariffs to balance budgets and avoid charging high prices to urban consumers. But they have found that their farmers cannot compete with imports from rich countries — imports that are heavily subsidized”.

In our Economics 101 lectures we were taught about Adam Smith’s ”invisible hand“, about comparative advantage and the importance of free trade.  By the time we made it to post-graduate courses, our lecturers could no longer hide the fact that Messers Smith, Keynes and Friedman did not have it all worked out, and that in fact “free market forces” did not have the power to fix everything.

In a statement entitled Valuing Spirituality in Development (18 February 1998), the Baha’i International Community posits an entirely different view of economics:

Central to the task of reconceptualizing the organization of human affairs is arriving at a proper understanding of the role of economics. The failure to place economics into the broader context of humanity’s social and spiritual existence has led to a corrosive materialism in the world’s more economically advantaged regions, and persistent conditions of deprivation among the masses of the world’s peoples. Economics should serve people’s needs; societies should not be expected to reformulate themselves to fit economic models. The ultimate function of economic systems should be to equip the peoples and institutions of the world with the means to achieve the real purpose of development: that is, the cultivation of the limitless potentialities latent in human consciousness.

There is a very useful tool that economists use to measure the inequality of wealth distribution. The Gini Coefficient is a ratio between 0 and 1, with 0 being perfect equality.  The map below illustrates the 2007/2008 Gini Coefficient for the world, as based on a recently released Human Development Report by the UNDP.  The darker the colour, the more unequal is the distribution of wealth in that country.

Addressing the problem of the extremes between wealth and poverty, the Universal House of Justice said this, in their 1985 message to the world The Promise of World Peace:

The inordinate disparity between rich and poor, a source of acute suffering, keeps the world in a state of instability, virtually on the brink of war. Few societies have dealt effectively with this situation. The solution calls for the combined application of spiritual, moral and practical approaches. A fresh look at the problem is required, entailing consultation with experts from a wide spectrum of disciplines, devoid of economic and ideological polemics, and involving the people directly affected in the decisions that must urgently be made. It is an issue that is bound up not only with the necessity for eliminating extremes of wealth and poverty but also with those spiritual verities the understanding of which can produce a new universal attitude. Fostering such an attitude is itself a major part of the solution.

Unbridled nationalism, as distinguished from a sane and legitimate patriotism, must give way to a wider loyalty, to the love of humanity as a whole. Bahá’u’lláh’s statement is: “The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.” The concept of world citizenship is a direct result of the contraction of the world into a single neighbourhood through scientific advances and of the indisputable interdependence of nations. Love of all the world’s peoples does not exclude love of one’s country. The advantage of the part in a world society is best served by promoting the advantage of the whole.

It is important for all of us, especially those from more developed countries, to remember our responsibilities to the rest of the world and to not take our material comforts for granted, as if they are somehow our “God-given rights”.  The resources of the world are the God-given patrimony of every member of the human race.

God is not partial and is no respecter of persons. He has made provision for all. The harvest comes forth for everyone. The rain showers upon everybody and the heat of the sun is destined to warm everyone. The verdure of the earth is for everyone. Therefore there should be for all humanity the utmost happiness, the utmost comfort, the utmost well-being.

But if conditions are such that some are happy and comfortable and some in misery; some are accumulating exorbitant wealth and others are in dire want — under such a system it is impossible for man to be happy and impossible for him to win the good pleasure of God. God is kind to all. The good pleasure of God consists in the welfare of all the individual members of mankind.

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Foundations of World Unity)

According to this Science Blog article, PETA is offering a US$1 million reward to the first scientist to produce, and bring to market, artificial meat manufactured in the laboratory. Promising first steps have already been made using animal stem cells and in-vitro methods but there is still a way to go. Interested? To win you must achieve both of the following:

• Produce an in vitro chicken-meat product that has a taste and texture indistinguishable from real chicken flesh to non-meat-eaters and meat-eaters alike.
• Manufacture the approved product in large enough quantities to be sold commercially, and successfully sell it at a competitive price in at least 10 states in the United States.

I’m pretty skeptical about the first point, since the taste of meat depends to some degree on the diet of the animal. And, although I would love to be proven wrong, humans tend to be quite adept at distinguishing the real from the processed.

Then again, do we actually know what real chicken tastes like these days? With all the hormones being pumped into chicken, not only is it beginning to taste like processed fish, but the moral and ethical implications of “keeping up with demand” are being questioned more than ever by groups such as PETA.

Truly, the killing of animals and the eating of their meat is somewhat contrary to pity and compassion, and if one can content oneself with cereals, fruit, oil and nuts, such as pistachios, almonds and so on, it would undoubtedly be better and more pleasing.

(From a Tablet of Abdu’l-Baha, The Compilation of Compilations vol. I, p. 462)

Perhaps a breakthrough in producing artificial meat will resolve the ethical dilemma of meat consumption, leaving us free to address the next challenge, that of leading strong and healthy lives without the need for meat.

Considered from another angle: if there is a breakthrough and the solution is made affordable enough, it may even help to control those soaring food prices…