Unsupported Speculation

Here I go again, pontificating about eating. I believe I have some interesting ideas though, and so I’m afraid you will just have to sit there until I’m finished. At least I’m not talking about my workout.

Ask yourself: Why do organized religions tend to have feasts, as well as make such a big deal about family dinners? The answer is because many organized religions tend to practice regular fasting.

You see, many religious systems are NOT really about supernatural forces acting upon mankind for good and evil. What they are really about is the accident of being human beings who are born and exist long after the prehistoric age of hunting and foraging.

What happened after we gave up trying to down animals and search all the common places for berries, nuts, roots, fungus, insects, eggs, ext., is that we attempted to meet our needs entirely with domesticated meat animals and farming.

The problem, and a problem that still exists to this day, is that once we transitioned away from the hunter/gatherer existence, then we only learned to hit the three MACROnutrients reliably, and we only ensured we were able to eat protein, carbohydrates, and fat without having to scour the environment for it.

This however is not enough, because whatever MICROnutrients we happened to be getting from goat herds or grains, we were failing to get everything a human being needs in order for all the myriad processes that keep us alive and healthy from beginning to slowly fail.

This led all over the world to the practice of ‘fortifying’ all consumed food with herbs and spices which they rightly knew in their own way corrected these dietary deficiencies without actually knowing the reason why it healed people.

Now getting back to religions who feast as well as fast: The goal of these religions is essentially to teach the unteachable, which is that human beings CANNOT taste or otherwise sense whether food we eat contains everything we need, nor do we have any reliable awareness of whether our diet over time accomplishes this as well.

It is a blind area in our perceptions, because what we DO sense very well are only the three macronutrients of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, especially carbohydrates and fat. Why do you think a still warm-from-the-oven chocolate chip cookie is so rewarding? Carbs and fat, straight to the brain’s reward centers. Is there anything else valuable in that hypothesized chocolate chip cookie? Not a flippin’ thing.

THUS, many organized religions are really about attempting to make people understand that they need to vary their diets as much as possible, because if they don’t, then we will ALL slowly slide into the celestial and supernatural phenomena that religions are famous for; ie Dietary Mental Illness.

You see, imagine our total dietary needs are like a tabletop role playing game that has been converted into a computer game so that the game can perform all the number crunching itself, freeing gamers from having to roll the dice or work out the math on scratch paper.

Now imagine this computer game has all these different meters which rise and deplete on their own as you eat certain things. The rate these meters all deplete depend on the level of activity and of what sort by your character. They also depend on the physical attributes of the body of your character as well, meaning that some character classes need much more of some things and less of others than different character classes. A character’s uniqueness causes each different meter to fall at different rates according to how much of something like a vitamin or mineral the body of your character actually needs.

Imagine you have something like, lets say, TWO-HUNDRED such meters all quietly running in the background of your game while your character continues to go through the pockets of his fallen victims. The big three macros are there, protein, carbs, and fat. But in addition you have all this OTHER stuff just rising and falling haphazardly and INVISIBLY in the background of the game.

The thing about this scenario is that all the meters ultimately fall quickly, even the meter of the single micronutrient we hardly need at all, but DO need it.

And this is the situation many organized religions attempt to correct: We don’t know what we need in food, but if we learn to vary our diets and sit down in somewhat formal settings to eat lots of different kinds of food, much of the physical illness and subjective hocus-pocus that stems invisibly from a bad diet goes away.

Being able to set a varied table is a lot more than just being able to plan and execute a Thanksgiving dinner without a hitch. In the past, especially in the Middle East, it meant the successful establishment of trade routes. For people in the bazaars buying items imported from far away lands, it meant responsibility in labor to be able to afford to buy varied food for the home. No single person could buy everything that was required, and so all members of a family at working age would contribute towards the goal of regular varied meals.

All this multi-factor stuff got everyone in the family free from the physical and mental illnesses that creep up slowly on people who cannot fix their diet issues.

In a heretical, but utterly true sort of way, the awe, wonder, and fear of only having a small role in the eternal vying of powerful supernatural forces was the warning, and if you found yourself there, you needed to find a way out.