Many foods and beverages nowadays are heading toward not to only be organic, healthy and low calorie, but also effective to our body like medicine. Even Pepsi became a healthy drink to decompose the extra fat in our meal like oolong tea for oily Chinese dishes. Beer is promising 0 calorie and 0 fat. Surprisingly, we can get these “healthy foods and beverages” at the convenience store, 24 hours, very easily and in a fast way.

The distinction between healthy food and unhealthy food becomes unclear because we used to categorize healthy food as slow, and fast as opposite. I have already mentioned that we can get healthy approached foods and beverages in a fast way. We recently  witness in Tokyo a long long line in front of a pop corn store serving also very rich high calorie pancake shop with full of creams and sugar on it. Sometimes people wait under the rain to get caramelized popcorn for 2 hours or more, and people try to experience Hawaiian style creamy and big pancake breakfast from early morning and they finally can eat them around lunch time.

Are we heading toward to a health conscious food life? I am not trying to say that popcorn and pancake boom is good or bad, but I found it is a very interesting moment: we see that the fast, slow, healthy and unhealthy categories have an unclear status.

Now it is time to re-think and re-construct what is healthy and what is not, what is fast and what is slow and so on. From this fast healthy and slow fat movement, we start to think what is really healthy for our body and soul. It is still true that we need to be conscious about the use of agricultural chemicals and about the way we feed cows and pigs. To keep fit, we need to think of the calorie and nutrition smart way.

At the same time, we cannot forget to nourish our soul and sense and maybe sometimes it is only done by something we already categorized as “ not healthy” food. I witness 3 girls surrounding a big creamy pancake together and cut in pieces and eat with big smile. I can imagine the joy when you bring back the big popcorn box with crispy and sweet smell. Suppose we take healthy things in fast and daily to allow ourselves to enjoy not healthy without any hesitation?

Since human being is a very wise animal, it is natural to balance between opposite matters so that this antagonism can be not too far from the truth? Same things can be said with other industries, fashion, architecture, design…. Anyway, we want to nourish our body and soul at the same time, and for that, what we need to think is to face our humanity in a new way.

Kaori Ieyasu