The Dynamics of Food

In recent years I have become increasingly interested in what might be called the dynamics of food – that is, the cooking, eating and chemical formulation of it rather than the purely allergic or ‘ingredients’ phenomenon that is so important to the work at our clinic.

The first clues came from unrelated observations that were simply interesting facts: for example, well-cooked and minced beef is more allergenic than rare steak; pastry is the form of wheat most likely to upset a patient; vegetables such as celery, carrots and cabbage when well cooked seem to be far less allergenic; fried potato is more likely to cause a reaction than boiled; stir-frying is a particularly ‘safe’ way to prepare foods, and so on.

It is easy to hypothesize that processing our cooking food will alter the allergic basis for it and therefore produce a different reaction. Evaporated mike (heat-treated), for example, is tolerated by about half our milk-allergics. Indeed, the discovery of fire had a great deal to do with humanity’s ability to feed safely on a wide variety of foods.

Dr Amy McGrath, a doctor of history from Australia, has pointed out that bread is no longer manufactured in the way it used to be and that this could have had hidden effects on its allergenicity. Apparently the change in conditions of work, specifically the hours of shift-working introduced after the Second World War, meant that bread was no longer fermented overnight. Instead it was rushed through the rising process using so-called ‘improvers’ to fluff up the loaf. The result was a very different bread, chemically, to the traditional loaf.

Dr McGrath hypothesizes that modern bread contains unchanged maltose in large quantities and reckons that is why her family can’t tolerate it. The same bread ingredients, baked using the old-fashioned long dough are fine for her and her children, since the maltose is removed.

She points out further that it was traditional practice in Ireland to cover oatmeal with water overnight before cooking and that this gave a much finer porridge. The secret seems to be that this allowed a simple fermentation process to take place (there is sufficient yeast present) and once again this would remove maltose and other reactive complex carbohydrates. I’m sure most of the people did not appreciate this point but they had learned that it was the best way to prepare that food.

As Dr McGrath puts it, it seems that there is a lot of traditional wisdom that has been passed on from generation to generation simply by trial and error: people have found that certain procedures render food less toxic and harmful and therefore more nutritious. We seem to be in danger now of throwing out this traditional wisdom and replacing it with modern technology, pre-packaged food and the mania for ‘instant’.

A BRIEF FOOD ANTHROPOLOGY
Dr McGrath points out that Australian aborigines, Melanesians and Polynesians rarely eat food raw. Traditionally they cook vegetables at high temperatures, steaming them or baking them in earth ovens. Asians, too, seldom eat raw vegetables or brown rice. Vegetables are usually cooked well, as in stir-fry. Rice is soaked, the water thrown away, then boiled, baked or fried, the husks or bran are fed to the pigs. Brown rice, they say, is indigestible.

Indians often cook foods for a lengthy time. Greeks soak and boil beans for some hours. West Africans process corn for days. Taiwanese farmers boil sweet potatoes before giving them to the pigs as food. The Native American Hopi pick corn green and dry it to make bound niacin available.

Finally, my young secretary from Dublin points out that certain Latin American tribes soak maize in lime juice before cooking it; apparently this frees up the niacin (B₃), without which pellagra – the symptoms of which include dermatitis, diarrhoea and dementia – is common (as in the southern USA). They may not know any biochemistry but they have got ancestral wisdom, which is what this section is all about.