The dominant paradigm within which we conceptualise our relationship to food has largely been based on the reductio-mechanist mode of inquiry. We relate to food commercially by deconstructing it into identifiably fundamental components which can be replicated by reconstructing them chemically into synthesised products for commodification which imitate the living things in nature they once were. What we all too often fail to recognise is that the reductionism which characterises food processing serves on the one hand to detach us, as it were, from the subject matter of our investigations, 'real food. On the other hand the paradigmatic epistemology it presupposes covertly drives us to develop technologies of power designed for the most part to transform and reconstruct the living world of nature into a world of increasingly chemicalised, inert and deadened things. Being detached from our food is a facet of an epistemology of power which in an important sense alienates us from the world. We tend to take this alienation for granted and thus mindlessly live out our lives in environments which are highly artificial, impressively synthesised. Motivated by our obsession with power and dominance to control everything around us, we use our technology to transform the living world, namely, our mammoth cities in particular, into lifeless jungles of concrete, metal, and plastics. It is by virtue of the lifeless concoctions we manufacture that we gain a greater measure of control of the way in which inert things can be used in utilitarian ways. Indeed, the epistemology of power is designed to serve the gods of vested interest. This epistemology of power represents a new hierarchy of value that perpetuates itself by reproducing and recasting the world technologically. Within the commercial context of food technologisation, the mechanist processes which encourage our emotional detachment from the things of nature is the same modality of insensitivity that allows us to process our food by systematically destroying the living elements which define its natural configuration. Without a contrite heart we thus mindlessly and shamelessly transform the once living world of food into marketable but artificial and chemicalised nutritional packages of synthesised inertness. In what follows we endeavour to show that there is evidence to believe that how we feel about the food we eat makes a significant difference as to the capacity of the human body to digest, metabolise, and assimilate the nutritional value of what we eat.
