Instinct and Culinary Art

Culinary art is among the most meritorious achievements of civilization. Numerous forms of culinary art exist in different parts of the world, but no nation or ethnic group exists without some form of cuisine. The generally accepted conclusion is that culinary art is inseparable from the human condition.

Some researchers and philosophers present cooking as the key to humanization, arguing that it allowed us to avoid the energy loss due to digestion and instead use it to serve the brain. Indeed, brain size seems to increase with the growing importance of cooking throughout history.

It should be noted that these arguments can be reversed: the increase in brain size and inventive capacity can explain the development of increasingly sophisticated culinary techniques. This can then be explained by evolutionary factors, such as the usefulness of developing intelligence for survival in the face of life’s dangers.

Other arguments, however, support the usefulness of food preparation: cooking rids food of bacteria, mold, and parasite germs that it may carry. Medicine most often presents it as the best prevention against parasitic infections. As a result, the idea of ​​eating raw food seems simply dangerous.

This reasoning actually masks a fundamental assumption: researchers base their conclusions on the reactions of individuals who practice culinary arts to determine the usefulness of cooking in preventing infections or parasitic contamination. However, experience shows that it is, on the contrary, the consumption of food altered by culinary techniques that makes the body more vulnerable to environmental microbes. Indeed, there is a link, still unexplored by medical research, between processed food and certain dysfunctions of the immune system.

These few points seem to contradict the universality of culinary practice. Several questions inevitably arise: why do all nations of the world consume cooked food? Does culinary art represent progress compared to a natural diet? What are its precise consequences in terms of health and disease? Would modern humans still be able to feed themselves without cooking? What would be the impact of an unprocessed diet on the environment, and what are the ecological consequences of our culinary habits?

It is very difficult to answer these questions theoretically. This is why the answers that the experience of instinctotherapy can provide are crucial. In summary

1. An individual who practices a strictly natural diet and then begins to consume processed foods quickly becomes dependent: processed foods bypass alliesthetic barriers, so that the quantities consumed exceed actual needs; immediately, alliesthetic mechanisms intervene to reduce consumption. These mechanisms function correctly with unprocessed foods, causing them to become unpleasant to the palate and leading to digestive difficulties. Processed foods remain palatable and automatically override raw foods. This dependence develops more or less rapidly depending on the type of food and its preparation. Over time, all ethnic groups that began cooking became dependent on it, and today, the world presents a picture of the human species as an exception to all other animal species in that it would be incapable of surviving without culinary intervention.
2. It is now known that diet plays a crucial role in the development of the most serious and common diseases (atherosclerosis, myocardial infarction, stroke, cancer, diabetes, obesity, etc.). However, experience shows that a strictly natural diet protects against all these diseases, as well as against infections and parasitic diseases. Scientific research has been able to show that natural foods provide many substances capable of protecting against these diseases – although it would be more accurate and simpler to say that culinary food deprives organisms of natural protective substances.
3. No theoretical reasoning can determine whether modern humans are still capable of sustaining themselves long-term as their primate ancestors did—that is, on foods found in nature and free from any culinary preparation. Scientists are divided, or prefer to ignore the issue. Common sense suggests that such a return to a primitive diet is no longer physiologically possible. The Instincto experiment, conducted by thousands of people, has largely demonstrated the contrary, notably the growth of children fed without any culinary intervention from infancy, and born to mothers who themselves had been fed this way for many years. The longest experiments now represent more than fifty years of practice, forty for the children.
4. An unprocessed diet implies a massive reduction in the amount of grains, the elimination of dairy products, a significant reduction in meat and seafood, and, conversely, a much greater consumption of fruits, nuts, and vegetables. The landscape of the countryside would be completely transformed: orchards would replace fields of grain, a few small vegetable plots would suffice, and livestock farming, with its massive consumption of soy, corn, and grains, would be replaced by a few animals and poultry roaming freely under the trees. It’s immediately clear that the problems of monocultures, pesticides, hydrological imbalances, deforestation, and desertification would disappear.

Ultimately, one might question the purpose of culinary art. This purpose is not conscious, since it is passed down from generation to generation. What, then, are we unconsciously pursuing by spending hours each day in front of the stove? To reveal the purpose of our culinary efforts, simply try eating the same foods, but without any preparation. We then realize that the cook’s goal is to make foods that are unappealing in their natural state palatable—a seemingly laudable goal.

If we add to this what can be demonstrated elsewhere regarding food alliesthesia—namely, that any food is pleasing to the senses if it is beneficial to the body, and unpleasant or uninteresting if it is harmful or useless—the purpose of any recipe takes on a completely different meaning: it aims to make us eat what we shouldn’t eat…

Culinary art thus appears more like a trap into which humanity has fallen over millennia. The picture becomes even more complicated when we consider that gluten, present in most grains, exorphins in milk, or certain molecules generated by cooking exert an addictive effect. It is therefore almost as difficult to break free from culinary habits as it is from smoking or any other form of drug addiction.

However, the benefits of returning to a natural diet more than compensate for the effort required, in terms of fitness, health, mental state, and the pleasure of the palate.