What's a natural diet? (with Richard Tellström)

What influences the meals we enjoy today? Meal historian and cultural researcher Richard Tellström from Stockholm University suggests that the surrounding natural environments and ecosystems only play a minimal role. Instead, he argues that our choices are primarily shaped by cultural, political and economic forces. This episode dives into the dramatic shifts in Swedish diets over the past century, highlighting how changes such as new food preservation methods in the 1970s, Sweden's entry into the European Union in the 1990s, and shifting cultural trends throughout have redefined what's fashionable, and therefore possible, to eat. 

This is the second installment of a two-part series, following our first episode with archaeological chemist Amy Styring who investigates what our ancestors ate during periods of significant societal transitions. Listen to Part 1.

For more info and resources, visit: https://tabledebates.org/podcast/episode60

Guests

• Richard Tellström, Associate Professor at Stockholm University

Episode edited and produced by Matthew Kessler. Music by Blue dot sessions.

Transcript

Matthew

I can just start with this premise. We typically eat three meals a day and depending on how old we are, We might assume these are the foods that we’ve always eaten. These are the foods we grew up with, and the thing I’m interested in exploring is - how do these meals naturally end up on our plate.

Richard

It has nothing to do with nature. This is pure culture.

Matthew

That’s Richard Tellström, professor in meal science at Stockholm University.

Richard

I'm an ethnologist. I'm a culture researcher. For me, the culture is the important thing. And you can say that food is the material that I study.

For me, as a cultural researcher, I would like to emphasize that human mankind is created from the food culture. That is how we have created a society or a group or living together, we start to cook 2 million years ago. And therefore we have to ask ourselves, why do we start to cook and why do we not continue to eat raw food like the apes do? And I would say that one answer to that question is that we are very interested in creating a group by eating differently. So we are interested in the difference between different food types and dishes and so on.

Matthew

As these groups start to differentiate by the foods they eat, they begin to create their own societies. The other thing that happens when we start to eat cooked food is that our brain starts to grow.

Richard

And we end up today with this rather huge and complicated brain, that is so much focused on social think. That's why Facebook and Insta is so popular. It goes on our social DNA.

Matthew

You’re listening to Feed, a food systems podcast presented by TABLE. I’m Matthew Kessler.

In our last episode, we heard professor Amy Styring at the University of Oxford talk about what new archaeological research reveals about our past diets.

Amy

What is a natural diet? I think it's diversity. Even when people started farming, they didn't stop hunting animals for a very long period, they didn't stop collecting the wild fruits and nuts and plants.

Matthew

If we gain more insights into what our ancestors actually ate, that will help us shape our views of what’s a natural diet. But, debates about the past are usually hiding the fact that we’re actually talking about the present and also debating what the future should look like. What we eat today is only partly shaped by our natural environment.

In this episode we’ll explore how the food on our plates today is shaped by politics, economics, and culture. We also ask Richard Tellström how diets have changed in Sweden over the last 100 years, what are the origins of the Swedish Fika, and why it’s so hard to find good horse meat in Sweden.

First I asked Richard how much agency do we have in deciding what we eat 

Richard

I would say that every meal is a planned thought. You're exploring what you think your ideals, your upbringing, your values. You're not eating what you like. You are eating what you agree upon. So what you have on the plate is a statement of yourself.

Matthew

Even though every plate is a statement of yourself, Richard says that the food we eat and the options we have available are largely shaped by factors outside of ourselves - specifically the economy, politics and our own values. The economy includes both our own family income and the state of the national and global economy. Politics includes different policies and regulations. And under this umbrella of values you have cultural values, ethics and religious values. But the menu of options that you have available to choose from to eat changes quite a lot throughout our lives.

Richard

The ordinary everyday meal is usually not older than 30 years. But a festive food and some other food you eat can be much older, but you know, the regular food that both you and I are going to eat in about three hours or so is usually not older than one generation or two, not more than that.

Matthew

So there are obviously some meals that we don’t have on holidays and festive occasions that last more than a generation, but a lot of the food that we find in stores, canteens and restaurants typically changes on this cycle.

I asked Richard how old do these cycles go back - where the typical meals we have change each generation?

Richard

The thing that happens in the mid 19th century, when food is becoming a commodity or a product that you buy, you're not producing it yourself at your farm, or so you're buying food that is produced by a producer or artisan, handcraft or a big factory. And so this makes food to the thing that you buy and therefore it's related to food trends, ideals, marketing, and so on. So you can never buy the food that you want to have when you go to the store. You can only buy the food that also other people buy and when you're becoming older you will notice that suddenly your favorite product  is not available anymore. It has gone out of market because of lack of interest from other consumers.

Matthew

So another thing that I'm curious about is how meals have changed over time. What was a very common meal, say 100 years ago in Sweden?

Richard

We were eating more starches, carbohydrates, more bread, more gruel, and less meat compared with today. 100 years ago, that is 1920s. So that is the year after First World War, the economy was quite lousy in Sweden. We had an unemployment rate of about 25% in the 1920s. And therefore food became filled with lots of carbohydrates. That is what happens when we are poor. 

Matthew 

So oats, barley,

Richard 

Yes. Rye is the most important that we know we have it in the knackebrod, but also porridge. So important. And the main staple food in Sweden, through history has been different cereals and the products that are made from it is beer, it's gruel and bread. Three things, you can follow them during the last 1000 years.

Matthew

So the biggest change in Sweden, say the beginning of our modern diets, occurred around 50 years in the 1970s.

Richard 

That is a change in choosing food from using stored food, like dried products, smoked products, salted products, we changed to frozen and fresh imported food from different countries. There is also a change in the size of the meal. We are eating more and more meals during the day. If you go back hundred or 150 years ago, we ate only three meals a day. At least during wintertime. Summer we ate seven or eight meals a day because we work so much. So there is a change in how many meals we eat today. And today, I would say it's quite common is that you eat perhaps six or seven meals a day. But they are very small. You have learned to know the fika tradition, the biscuits or sandwich that goes with it. 

Matthew  

Sweden is a bit famous for its fika tradition. This is a mid-morning or mid-afternoon break where you relax with some coffee and conversation, and often with some bread or sweets. Richard says the drink of choice used to be a low alcohol beer, and there’s a record of that going back to about 400 years. But over time that was replaced with coffee.

Richard

We are the second coffee drinkers in the world. The Finns are number one. Coffee became important in the late 1800s. The fika that we know today with, coffee, bread, biscuits and so on is from the 1960s. Actually, here we have an example of what law and policymaking is doing with food culture, because in Sweden, the employer can provide his employees with coffee and small biscuits, and he hasn't the obligatory to pay taxes for that. So it's free for the employer. So therefore it's very popular,

It's the same with the saffron buns or the cinnamon rolls or. It's a relation between the employer and the employee. And that has a very long traditions in Sweden. And so the fika is actually living by this law.

Matthew  

That's really interesting. And I guess there's kind of a government imposed cultural heritage. They want to bring a sense of national identity.

Richard

Yes, that's an example that policymaking and politics and law is very important in creating food culture. In Sweden, at least.

Matthew

So in the 1970s there was a big increase in stored products, as we now preserved foods through drying, smoking, salting and freezing them. Another big change occurred in the 1990s when Sweden joined the European Union. 

Richard

That's another example of this political change, that has an effect on food culture, food culture, because food prices fell very dramatically after we joined the EU. And that made food cheap, and that is the start for a lot of Swedish food diets. Because food becomes so cheap. So for instance, you can eat LCHF, low carb, high fat. That was a diet that would have been impossible in the 1800s or 1700. Because meat and fat was so expensive. So about here, yeah, the food prices are falling, and therefore you can create and eat almost anything because food becomes so cheap. Food has been very expensive in Sweden through history.

Matthew

We’ve been talking about Sweden, which is similar to the other Nordic countries, but also has its differences. You might wonder how food cultures influence what we eat in the rest of the world.

Richard

Well, we eat quite differently all over the world, as is well known, I don't know if you have seen this culture value map that is produced by what is it called the Inglehart-welzel map or something like that. 

Matthew 

The Inglehart-Welzel cultural map visualizes global values across different nations. The two main axes for the map are: Traditional values versus secular-rational values and survival values versus self-expression values.  In the lower left corner you find Pakistan and Nigeria, which are supposed to show the strong traditional and survival values, whereas Sweden is positioned in the upper right corner, indicating high levels of secular-rational and self-expression values. It’s worth saying that using only these few measures greatly simplifies the complexity of societies and there are many cultures that exist within one country. So for example, if you’re not a white, European Christian living in Europe, you may not see yourself reflected in this cultural map.​

Richard 

This cultural cross, and Sweden is up in the corner. And that gives us a rather good view of how different cultures use food, because you're becoming a culture, a group by how you eat. So the easy thing is creating the group. And when it comes to contemporary question of sustainability, therefore, you as a researcher must be aware of that you are interfering with people's culture. When you say you should eat in a new way, you are interfering with their right to create a group. It's like saying to them, you have to dress in another way. This is not a sustainable way of having clothes on you. So you must wear this type of clothes. And that's extremely tricky. An provocative. And I would say that natural scientists doesn't understand what culture is, they have no idea how powerful it is. They say that, well, you must be rational and focus on the scientific facts.

Matthew

It’s a funny example. But, getting people to change their wardrobes, or their diets, could happen pretty quickly - if it was made into law. That would obviously get pushback, possibly mass protest - unless that was outlawed too. Just to say that shifting norms is possible, either through more or less palatable ways. 

And as we’ve been laying out from the beginning - politics, economics and culture each help explain what we ate in the past and what we’ll eat in the future.

Richard 

We do the things that create a belonging and that has been our trademark since 2 million years.  The group is everything. Yeah. And so food that creates a great group feeling will succeed. This is why we are following influencers, because we think they will create success for ourselves. If a food type or a drink or a meal suddenly becomes dangerous for our social position, then we will stop to eat it. So it has nothing to do with flavor. When we choose food or so it must be okay in the group. 

Matthew

Richard offers the example of horse meat in Sweden, which has been eaten in this country for more than 1000 years. Despite it being an affordable and practical source of protein, it’s gone out of favor. At different points in Swedish history, eating horse meat has either been banned or discouraged for various reasons, and that effect still lingers today.

Richard

And it's still very difficult to find a good horse meat in the shop. They don't have horse meat on the menu. Why not? It's such a good meat. No, it's because it is considered to be inedible. So food is an idea in our head.

Matthew

That wraps our two part series on ‘what’s a natural diet?’ Each offers a pretty different take, which I guess, isn’t exactly surprising. That’s what happens when you ask an archaeologist and a cultural researcher to explore the same question!

For Richard, the divide is between nature and culture. For Amy Styring, an archaeological-chemist who examines what we ate in the past, what’s natural is much harder to pin down, because… how long ago was it when humans lived more ‘natural’ lives? 100 years? 1000 years? 10,000 years? Even further back? 

Like we heard earlier in the season, what’s “natural” simply doesn’t seem to serve as a good guide for thinking about how or what we eat. For Amy, it’s not a good guide because we just don't know enough. But if pushed, she might say people ate a much greater diversity of foods in the past than we do today. And for Richard, while he values the power of the group mentality in shaping what’s normal, he sees little value in claiming what shows up on our plate as “natural.”

Matthew

A big thanks to Richard Tellstrom, professor of food and meal science at Stockholm University. 

And thanks to you for listening. Are you enjoying the season so far? Give us a rating on Spotify, Apple podcast or wherever you listen. You can always shoot us an email with your thoughts on the series to podcast@tabledebates.org

TABLE is a collaboration between the University of Oxford, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences Wageningen University in the Netherlands, the University of the Andes in Colombia, National Autonomous University of Mexico, and Cornell University in the US. This episode was produced and edited by Matthew Kessler with special thanks to TABLE staff Jackie Turner, Hester van Hensbergen and Tara Garnett. Music by blue dot sessions. Talk to you next week.