From Fresh: A Perishable History (2009) by Susanne Freidberg, p. 3:
Of all the qualities we seek in food, freshness best satisfies all these modern appetites. It offers both proof of our progress and an antidotes to the ills that progress brings.
Oops. A better title would have been Fresh: History of a Delusion.
I think you’re getting carried away with the rotten food thing. In some cases, “aged” foods have properties that are beneficial and I’m sure that for a variety of cultural and economic rasons people eat far less aged food now and have an aesthetic aversion to even slight spoilage of any food that we couldn’t have afforded in the past, but there are limits to what the human digestive can deal with. Just as there is a reason that humans have a taste for fermented foods, there is also a reason we have an aversion to spoiled food. I’ve never had food poisoning myself but from what I hear it’s among the the most painful kinds of illnesses you can have.
I think to make this case you have to pick specific foods that are better aged and demonstrate the benefits (and acknowledge that certain other foods either have no benefits if eaten aged or should be avoided if they are spoiled). You made the case with omega-3s and your self-experimentation using the balance and math tests. With fermented foods, I haven’t seen in your blog posts the empirical evidence to back it up the claim that they are beneficial. It does sound plausible that we need fermented food and since you posted about it I’ve started drinking kombucha and would say that my digestive tract seems happier than it’s ever been, but I don’t keep any kind of diary that would give me good data to back up the claim. I think one clear weakness of self-experimentation is that it will miss long term effects (good and ill) of some practices. For example, perhaps eating enough fermented food substantially lowers your risk of colon cancer. Self-experimentation can’t address that question at all.
David, thanks for your comments. When you talk about missing a lower risk of colon cancer, you are describing a weakness of all experimentation, not just self-experimentation. As for the dangers of “spoiled” food, what about the dangers of heart disease? (Not to mention allergies, autoimmune diseases, and the common cold.) Which should we care more about? The Eskimos, with very low rates of heart disease, eat/ate lots of “spoiled” fish. Long ago many people thought white bread and white rice were better (cleaner, purer) than whole-wheat bread and brown rice.
I agree with your general point: It seems plausible that for some kinds of foods prepared and handled in certain ways, it’s possible to eat and derive health benefits from food that would be considered spoiled by our standards. But from your posts it sounds like you’re saying “all spoiled food is good, in fact better than, fresh food.” I suspect the truth is more nuanced: that some foods, prepared and handled properly, offer benefits when eaten aged that the don’t when eaten fresh (and likewise offer benefits when eaten fresh that they don’t when eaten aged…the Eskimos would have eaten fresh as well as ripe fish). Other foods, should be avoided when either under or over-ripe. You would need to study the traditional methods of food preparation of various cultures to recover these technologies.
There’s a long way from fresh to spoiled. I’m certainly not saying “all spoiled food is good”; rather that we are often too close to the fresh end of the spectrum in what we eat. Maybe in 50 years my views will be seen as similar to the idea that brown rice (harder to store) is better than white rice (easier to store), just as fpod allowed to age is closer to spoiling than fresh food. I agree that some food really is best fresh — vitamin C for example degrades with time.
I wonder if the author in the quote from the post above would consider some of the fermented foods which Seth advocates as “fresh”? A natural yogurt would likely be considered fresh when compared to irradiated, hermetically sealed mylar packet of go’gurt.
I also think that a call for fresh food is 100% compatible with Seth’s views on healthy intake of bacteria. Compared with canned peas, fresh peas for the farmers market will give your gut much more of the good stuff.
Nor, do I think that spoiled and fermented are synonyms — fermentation is a food preservation strategy.