Instincto and Dietary Re-education

Who hasn’t complained of a certain perversion of the senses that pushes man (and woman) to swallow all sorts of harmful foods, while the animal knows perfectly well how to refuse what harms it?

It’s true that a fox will not eat the belladonna it comes across, toxic to it because it lacks the enzymes needed to break down atropine. The roe deer, on the contrary, feasts on it without being poisoned at all, having, like all herbivores, the appropriate enzymes. The poison breaks down in its digestive tract like any other food component, and its instinct would be wrong to deprive it of this highly nutritious berry.

Why isn’t man protected against this poisonous plant, when it is dangerous to his body, even deadly from just a few berries? In reality, he is protected too: no attractive scent draws him to taste this elegant nightshade; if he does, it’s only out of curiosity or carelessness. Someone picking blueberries might mistake them for it and make a dessert with disastrous consequences. Mixed with blueberries, sugar, and whipped cream, the sense of taste is unable to protect the consumer. Belladonna tasted alone, without mixing or any other alteration, has an unappealing flavor, and only a deliberate effort of will could get it swallowed.

This example clearly shows the limits of natural protection: the absence of an attractive smell is the first barrier; a deliberate act is indeed required to put it in the mouth; curiosity is therefore capable of outwitting instinct; taste constitutes a second protection, again on condition that one does not force down a bland product, nor sweeten it through some preparation.

Now, the same rule applies to all foods and all natural poisons: as Jean-Jacques Rousseau already observed, no toxic plant is attractive to the senses so long as it is presented unaltered. But an odorless, tasteless plant is not necessarily non-toxic. This is the first and crudest re-education that instincto allows: never put in your mouth a food that isn’t attractive to smell, and never swallow what isn’t stimulating to taste.

Apparently very simple, this rule requires a difficult step back from habits instilled by upbringing: a spoonful for mommy, a spoonful for daddy, finish your plate, eat your soup so you’ll grow up big, there are poor people who’d be happy to eat that, etc. From the earliest age, upbringing works hard to imprint on the child the negation of their own instincts and to swallow what is imposed on them — something that later resurfaces in relational, social, and political life.

The remedy consists of listening to the body. It’s not just a matter of never forcing a red light, but of only moving forward on green — that is, consuming only foods that are attractive in every respect in their raw form. The main barriers are smell, taste, texture, and satiety. The corollary is that one must acquire, as a reflex, the understanding that processed foods can be attractive (or not repellent) even while being harmful. French fries, for example, are very attractive, though polluted with toxic trans fats, and other highly harmful substances such as acrylamide or Maillard compounds. The same goes for a death-cap mushroom omelette — see Instincto and Natural Poisons on what makes cooking, in this case, more dangerous than the natural poison itself.

Re-education, however, goes much further: it involves learning to recognize, in natural flavors, the nuances and endless variations that reflect the body’s needs. A child who has not learned language during the so-called sensitive period can never again acquire normal language. Likewise, someone who has not learned early on to distinguish the countless facets of natural flavors will have great difficulty ever recovering normal sensitivity and discrimination. Instincto is, in this respect, the best possible re-education. It teaches us not only to become aware of the senses’ messages, but also ensures a kind of correction of sensations, on the model of animal training: every transgression of a sensory signal comes with feelings of discomfort, while attentive listening allows one to reach a maximum of well-being.

The universal carrot-and-stick principle (reward and punishment) is thus at work, gradually rebuilding the natural functioning of dietary instinct. This form of harmony then carries over to the rest of one’s life: nothing is more valuable than being able to listen to deep intuitions, which is how one can avoid serious errors in daily decisions and choices.

A third aspect is added to the above: one’s inner stance toward “temptation.” Doing without habitual foods, treats, little sauces, and other seductive delights of culinary art proves, at first, extremely difficult.

The bottomless-pit phenomenon, intrinsically linked to alliesthesic mechanisms in the culinary context, forms a vicious circle on several levels: first the simple physiological phenomenon, which produces a drop in satisfaction with natural foods as soon as an overload (even a slight one) is induced by a denatured food defeating the alliesthesic barrier. Re-education here consists of becoming aware that culinary pleasures ultimately represent a decline in natural pleasure, and that these natural pleasures, once the body has been cleansed, are far superior to artificial ones.

To this is added the problem of family and social conditioning: treats and good meals have been associated with parental love, with conviviality, since earliest childhood. Just as alcohol is associated with celebration, friendship, good deals. Or as cigarettes once were with the image of virile manhood. Yet these associations are perverse, given that the underlying artifices are harmful to health and ultimately degrade true joie de vivre. Recovering the natural relationships between palate pleasure, deep satisfaction, well-being, health, and joie de vivre is undoubtedly the most valuable re-education that the practice of natural eating allows.

Over time, an increasingly clear relationship becomes established between the body’s proprioceptive state and the foods likely to address it. This correspondence, however, is never absolute and must always be filtered through smell and taste. It nonetheless helps guide testing and the search for candidate foods.

One must, however, exercise great caution with plants known to be toxic, such as the death cap: it would be wrong to claim that instinct alone can infallibly distinguish the useful from the harmful in every case — see Instincto and Natural Poisons on this point. For this type of risk, knowledge and identification remain preferable, as a complement to sensory listening rather than a substitute for it.

This re-education thus aims, ultimately, to recover the body’s listening: spontaneous taste for healthy foods, repulsion for the denatured, as in wild animals, attention paid to satiety, and the progressive sensitization of smell and taste.

It is by consciously establishing the link between the sensory signals perceived upon ingestion and the well-being or discomfort that follows that a broader learning is gradually built: that of a greater psychological openness to inner signals — intuition — as well as to outer signals — vigilance.