Odysseus is all around us, not just in Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster

 

He is everywhere in our cities, anywhere we see shipwrecked people adrift and wandering 

Fintan O'Toole   21/7/26

Now that it has returned as a $375 million cinematic blockbuster, it is worth remembering that The Odyssey is the story of a rich man who is forced to behave like a poor man. The great epic works by winnowing its hero down until he is the lowest of the low.

Odysseus starts out on his journey home from the Trojan wars as the admiral of a small fleet. Then he is captain of an isolated ship. Then a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a piece of wreckage. Then a homeless stranger. And near the end, before he resumes his place as king of Ithaca, he disguises himself as a dirty old beggar.

In the Iliad, the Homeric epic that precedes the Odyssey, Odysseus is already cunning, ingenious, sneaky, crafty. Achilles contemptuously describes him as a man “who says one thing but hides another in his heart”. But there’s a big difference between having your wits about you and living on your wits. In the first condition you use your brains to exert your will. In the second you use them to survive. That’s what poor people have to do.

Odysseus is famously called in the Greek polytropos. Emily Wilson’s recent translation renders this as “complicated” which is rather flat and unspecific – which of us isn’t complicated? Scholars tell us that polytropos has an apt double meaning, carrying notions both of personal evasiveness and of a meandering journey which of course is what the story goes on to narrate.

I much prefer the opening of Robert Fagles’s translation: “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns/ driven time and again off course”.

I like this perhaps because it brings to mind a Dublin word that seems to have gone out of use: a twister. If it rings any bells now it is probably as the American term for a tornado. But a twister in Dublin was a chancer, a con man, an artful dodger.

Odysseus the twister is all of these. Like poor people throughout the history of humanity, he does what he must do in order to endure. He lies and cheats, ducks and dives, charms and seduces. He sings for his supper, telling enthralling stories to strangers who feed him.

He is supremely shifty: a king who can appear as a miserable slave. In the backstory recalled in The Odyssey, Odysseus infiltrated Troy as a spy: “Scarring his own body with mortifying strokes,/ throwing filthy rags on his back like any slave,/ he slipped into the enemy’s city, roamed its streets – / all disguised, a totally different man, a beggar, / ... and no one knew him at all”.

He becomes a literal nobody – one of those people we step over on the street. To be a nobody is to be beneath our notice. Part of what makes Odysseus so good at survival is that, for all his privilege as a king, he knows this: even in the small, intimate cities of his world there are invisible people – and invisibility is the superpower of the weak.

This nobody is who he becomes again as the poem reaches its climax. Because his court is infested with suitors who will kill him, he has to slip back into his own home as a repulsive old vagrant.

Odysseus is the refugee, the migrant, the foreigner, the evacuee, the stateless, the undocumented, the outsider, the alien. He is also the tramp, the beggar, the slave, the street dweller, the drifter, the transient

The goddess Athena transforms him: “She shrivelled the supple skin on his lithe limbs,/ stripped the russet curls from his head, covered his body/ top to toe with the wrinkled hide of an old man/ and dimmed the fire in his eyes, so shining once./ She turned his shirt and cloak into squalid rags, /ripped and filthy, smeared with grime and soot.”

Squalid, filthy, smeared – we are invited by these terms to feel about Odysseus the worst thing we can feel for any human being: disgust. If we met him on the way to Ithaca we would literally turn up our noses at him.

But one of the most extraordinary things about this poem is that it gives a slave a name and a voice. The person who first shelters Odysseus when he gets back to his island is the swineherd Eumaeus. He is a vividly realised character with many lines of dialogue and a meaningful part in the unfolding of the story. He surely smells of pig and muck but he speaks to us across the millenniums as a decent and dignified human being.

His decency is rooted in a set of values that is the beating pulse of the whole epic: the moral obligation to accept and protect the stranger. As he informs Odysseus (who he takes to be a miserable tramp): “It’s wrong, my friend, to send any stranger packing –/ even one who arrives in worse shape than you.”

[ What is The Odyssey? The 3,000-year-old questionOpens in new window ]

This is the duty imposed on civilised humans by the supreme god Zeus in his aspect as Zeus Xeinios, protector of strangers. “Zeus of the Strangers,” says Odysseus to the one-eyed Cyclops, “guards all guests and suppliants.” This quality, xenia, is the precise opposite of xenophobia.

Odysseus is the archetypal stranger, thrown again and again on the mercy of those who don’t know him. Eumaeus imagines that if he is still alive Odysseus must now be a man who “starving for food, I wager, wanders the earth,/ a beggar adrift in strangers’ cities, foreign-speaking lands”.

Odysseus is the refugee, the migrant, the foreigner, the evacuee, the stateless, the undocumented, the outsider, the alien. He is also the tramp, the beggar, the slave, the street dweller, the drifter, the transient. He is an everyman who is also often a nobody, the man who has fabulous stories to tell but who is at key moments in his own story not worth seeing or listening to.

He’s all around us, of course – not just in the giant posters advertising Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster but down at street level in the corner of our eyes where we see shipwrecked people adrift and wandering, dreaming of the place that is the ultimate goal of all journeys: home.

How Ireland got hooked on ultra-processed foods – and the only viable solution

 From Irish Times

Francis Finucane

Norah Campbell

There has been a lot of discussion about the public health impact of ultra-processed foods in recent times. First Chris Van Tulleken’s bestseller Ultra-Processed People, and more recently the pre-eminent medical journal The Lancet published three papers on why UPFs are harmful to human health. It summarised the results of more than 100 studies that showed associations between ultra-processed food and an increased risk of 12 chronic diseases, including obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, Crohn’s disease, depression and dementia. It also zeroed in on what we can do to reduce the harm: not more consumer education, but rather to clamp down on the “corporate political activity” of the food industry which blocks the development of policies to limit the production and mass normalisation of UPFs.

Dramatic changes in how we produce food have been driven by an understandable preoccupation with food security and the avoidance of famine after the second World War. Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for inventing a strain of wheat with a shorter stem that made it easier to grow and harvest. It saved a billion people from starvation. This and numerous other developments in food production and processing have been good for humanity. Nobody is saying that extending shelf life and reducing cost and scarcity by freezing, tinning or pasteurising foods is bad. Nobody who is worried about chocolate breakfast cereals for six-year-olds has a problem with pickling gherkins. That’s because processing is not the same as ultra-processing.

Three things put the “ultra” in ultra-processing. Firstly, when bulk commodities such as maize, wheat, sugar cane and fat are extracted from their whole sources and chemically modified by processes such as industrial heating, fractionation and extrusion, the resulting product has a substantially degraded food matrix. So, if you eat an orange, you are getting a lot of things from that whole – the cell structure, the fibre, the pith that’s full of bioactive compounds. That “matrix” is lost in an orange cordial, even if it is fortified with zinc and Vitamin C.

Second, the bulk is enhanced with flavours (usually to disguise the unpleasant taste from the first process) and texturised to improve the feeling in your mouth with bulking, gelling or foaming agents. You know you’re eating UPF when that crunchy, moreish feeling turns quite suddenly to a gluey string.

The biggest criticisms of the science of ultra-processed food are that there’s no food that is “good” or “bad” – moderation and balance are what count. That is 100 per cent correct, and it misses the point entirely. The point is that the nutritional science model and the business model exist together. You cannot separate them. So a UPF firm and its scientists of course say to eat in moderation, that balance is important, that fortified food is good for you and so on. But its business model is laser-focused on making sure we eat more of that food, year-on-year.

This drive to grow displaces less processed food, and that is the entire point. In 2018 it was estimated that UPF food accounted for 45.9 per cent of all food we ate in Ireland.

Critics will often revert to the age-old advice of “energy-in-energy-out”; one of the many problems with this advice is that UPFs affect the entire body; the strongest evidence in UPF research is the link between UPF and anxiety and depression. Eating this food is not making us happy.

[ New study claims ultra-processed food increases risk of health issues, including obesity and depressionOpens in new window ]

We ourselves recently researched the business model of supermarket baked goods over a 30-year time span. Why did we choose baked goods? They are a key “boundary food” in the global debate on UPFs – sliced bread is an affordable staple in most of our diets. Supermarket bread is certainly not the worst UPF. The point is that most supermarkets producing bread also produce cakes and tarts, doughnuts and muffins, savoury pies and Viennoiserie (croissants, pastries and brioche), categories that have grown the most in Ireland’s UPF consumption. It’s a key strategy known as “led by bread” where bread acts as an initial draw and casts a halo over the category.

The reality of baked-goods production is far from the imagined connotation of a traditional homely kitchen. We found that the lurch to ultra-processing by producers of ultra-processed baked goods has been driven by a growth imperative and a need to return a greater profit for investors than the previous year, every year. It is no wonder that the raw materials must get cheaper, the products must get even more hyperpalatable, and the lifestyle claims must get more sophisticated.

As Kevin Hall discovered, the problem is in the processing, as much as in the ingredients. In the old days we characterised problem foods as those with “high fat salt sugar” or “nutrients of concern”, and countries all over the world sought to cajole producers to reformulate: please pretty, please decrease the salt, sugar and saturated fat in your foods, but at your own pace of course.

Ironically this led to more processing to square the circle of making food salty without salt, or sweet without sugar. The problem is there is no such thing as a healthy reformulated food. With reformulation, “bad” ingredients are just replaced with more intensive processing and new types of ingredients, rather than with whole or minimally processed foods. We’ve seen the pitfalls of reformulation in the past: trans-fats, now known to be harmful, were intended to be a healthier replacement for saturated fats in the 1960s. That didn’t go well.

[ Bread, cereals and yoghurts: 11 foods you might not realise are ultra-processedOpens in new window ]

Reformulation will be about as effective as low-tar cigarettes or guns with fewer bullets – an inadequate public health strategy that suits commercial interests and distracts legislators and the public from more decisive, effective public action.

This is the part where it is necessary to say what consumers should do. Of course the answer is to eat less processed food, but doing that is not a lifestyle hack. It will require shifting subsidies to make organic fruit and veg cheaper, widening the sugar tax to encompass other food, giving citizens time to prepare, cook and eat food.

Consumers cannot shift subsidies, tax and so on. For this to happen, we have to think of ourselves less as consumers gazing at labels and working out lifestyle hacks from Instagram, and more as citizens who ask the politicians who come to our door what their proposals are to make cheap, healthy food a dedicated part of our daily lives.

• Francis Finucane is an honorary full professor in medicine at the University of Galway.
• Norah Campbell is an associate professor in Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin.

Is processed food bad for you?

 

The short answer is no. Some processed foods are harmful, some are not, but processing is often essential

by Eileen Gibney

Irish Times, 25 Nov

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Discussions about food processing and health made headlines following the publication of a series of papers on processed food in the Lancet last week. The authors called for immediate reduction of “ultra-processed” food production, marketing and consumption. Some of what they say makes sense, but not everyone agrees with their simplistic approach to a complex question.

Food processing is defined as any action that changes a food or raw material used to produce food. It includes actions such as chopping or heating, or complex processes such as pasteurisation or extruding. We can’t eat most raw materials until they have been processed (ever tried eating raw wheat in the field?).

“Ultra-processed foods”, meanwhile, are described as commercially-prepared packaged foods, containing ingredients you wouldn’t have at home such as colours or emulsifiers. They are produced to be tasty, palatable, convenient and profitable. To put it simply, bread made at home or by a local artisan bakery is considered processed, but packaged sliced bread from a supermarket is considered ultra-processed.

Processes such as chopping and cooking are necessary to make foods edible. More complex processes also offer benefits: fermentation preserves foods; milling breaks grains down into flour; pasteurisation of milk ensures it is safe for consumption.

But these techniques are not the ones attracting lots of negative attention on social media and elsewhere. Criticisms focus on foods with added ingredients. For example, typical snacks and sweet treats in our diet are high in added sugar, fat and salt – nutrients we are recommended to avoid. So, for these foods, there is no argument. Limit your consumption.

But the key thing to understand about processed or ultra-processed foods is that not all components added to food should concern us. Fortification, for example, is a process whereby vitamins and minerals are added to foods such as milks or breakfast cereals, and are an important source of nutrients such as folic acid and vitamin D. Adding compounds such as sweeteners, emulsifiers or stabilisers means a food is considered “ultra-processed”.

Some may not want these in their foods, but they are added to make food safe, reduce added sugar or calories or to look, feel and taste appealing – so again they offer a benefit. These compounds are rigorously assessed and present at levels well below any potential risk. Their use is assessed by the European Food Safety Authority and regulated by food safety agencies and their addition is indicated on food packaging.

For several years, evidence that links consumption of ultra-processed foods to the risk of chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes and hypertension has been building. According to this analysis, as consumption of these ultra-processed foods increases, so does the risk of disease. That much is not under dispute. However, this is where the two camps of this debate divide.

When scientists reanalysed data, splitting ultra-processed foods into food groups, they found breads, breakfast cereals and plant-based foods had neutral or positive effects on health, while processed meats and sugar-sweetened beverages were associated with increased risk of disease

Those who want ultra-processed foods removed from our shelves say the health impacts are due to processing techniques that disrupt food structure and chemically modify food to produce long-lasting, highly palatable products. They argue that these foods displace nutrient-rich whole foods, and the commercialisation of our food is leading to a power imbalance between manufacturers and consumers. Those “against” the anti-ultra-processed foods argue that any link between consumption of processed foods and health has little to do with the degree of processing and is more likely to be caused by known nutrients of concern (salt, sugar, fat) and other features, such as food texture. They argue the debate should not be about removal of processing, but addressing the quality of such foods to ensure everyone has access to affordable, healthy and safe food.

I sit in this second camp for many reasons, but let me articulate a few. A term such as “ultra-processed food” puts foods such as breakfast cereals and sugar-sweetened beverages into the same group. While both are ultra-processed, they are clearly not the same. They have different nutritional composition: one high in fibre and fortified, the other high in sugar; one a staple food, the other a treat; one a food and one a drink. All these are important differences, so why consider them the same? When scientists reanalysed data, splitting ultra-processed foods into food groups, they found breads, breakfast cereals and plant-based foods had neutral or positive effects on health, while processed meats and sugar-sweetened beverages were associated with increased risk of disease. So, we can’t consider all processed foods the same. Crucially, these findings align to existing dietary guidelines.

This leads to a second important point. How would we use the concept of food processing in public-health advice? Can we advise people to remove all processed foods from their diet? The answer is no. Existing dietary guidelines – the food pyramid – provide adequate advice. Eat fruit and vegetables, choose wholegrain foods, avoid processed meats, avoid high fat, sugar, salty foods. Should we make this more complex and include advice about processing? I would say no.

Avoiding processed foods is a luxury requiring cost, time and know-how that only some can afford. Importantly, demands to remove or reduce food processing are also likely to make food production and consumption less sustainable, at a time when we need to consider how we support a growing global population with smarter food production and processing. Rather than demonise processed foods we should work together to make foods on our shelves as healthy as possible, including through proven reformulation programmes targeting nutrients such as sugar, fat and salt.

Is food processing bad for you? No, but some processed foods are, and some not – likely due to nutrient content, not whether they were made in a factory. It’s about balance: eat more of what is good for you and minimise what is not. What strikes me in this debate is we can’t look at food with such simplicity to say food processing is good or bad. I wish I had a simple answer, but it’s not a simple question.

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Eileen Gibney is professor of nutrition at University College Dublin, and director of the UCD Institute of Food and Health. She recently oversaw the completion and publication of a book her father Mike Gibney was writing before his death, In Defence of Bread, about ultra-processed foods and the problematic science that underpins the public-health advice related to them.

Lifeless vegetables, rushed lunch breaks, lack of oversight: How to improve hot school meals

 source: The Irish Times

While widely seen as a positive move, the scheme has had its teething problems. Ahead of its national rollout, we asked experts how to improve it

Following a pilot, hot school meals will be rolled out to every primary school from September. It is hoped that it will reduce hunger, improve attention and lift a burden from families. The scheme has largely worked well, but it’s not been without teething problems. So what has worked well, what hasn’t and where is there room for improvement? We asked four key stakeholders.

The parent: Paula White

‘It has been a disappointment’

I was delighted when I heard my son’s school would provide a hot lunch every day. We always have fresh, healthy meals at home, he’s not a fussy eater and he likes vegetables. But it has been a disappointment.

With this provider, the children bring their waste home, so I see what is and is not eaten. The vegetables are uniformly cut, lifeless, highly processed, cooked within an inch of their life and very unappetising. My son says that the potatoes are okay but the carrots, peas and other vegetables are slimy and soft. It would turn a child against vegetables. And the vegetarian options are mostly pasta-based.

[ ‘It’s kind of become our daughter’s cheat meal’: The view on new hot school meals programmeOpens in new window ]

I’ve seen the children get two breasts of chicken, more than is necessary, and I question how they can afford to put so much meat in it at such a low price point. I’d like more emphasis on vegetables and, ideally, someone who could chop them on the premises every day.

Children can choose from an online menu, but I would prefer less food of better quality, as there is huge waste involved.

I still gave him fruit and a snack to take in. It feels like it’s all about the cheapest option, not the best option, and I’d question who is overseeing the nutritional standards, as the food strikes me as relatively unhealthy.

The principal: Elma Young

‘I’d like to see more variation in portion sizes’

We started the free lunch programme in 2019 and introduced hot lunches in 2023.

We originally looked at lots of providers, inviting them to the school with samples of their food. Pupil voice is really important here, so the students had a chance to try them and vote on their favourite.

Providing hot meals on site means there must be ovens to heat the food. We’re not kitted out for that, so the provider came to inspect our site for a suitable heating area. They converted a storage area to hold the ovens and brought it up to catering standards.

Our provider provides the personnel, who heat and distribute the food to the classes, before collecting any waste at the end of the day. This ensures there is no additional work or stress for school staff.

We’re a Deis band-one school, and our experience has been very positive

Parents and children alike have been very complimentary about the variety provided by our provider, Glanmore. The children get to try foods that they may not normally get at home, such as cottage pie, Mexican burritos and tuna cheese melts. Children who might be picky eaters are more likely to try new foods when they see their peers eating it. Allergies and vegetarian options are catered for. Children also get a small morning snack, such as a rice cake, cereal bar or fruit.

There is quite a variety between providers, even in terms of how they kit out the space needed. My advice is that principals visit schools that already have this in place and see how it works. Food has an odour, so it’s best for the heating facilities to be near an open space or outdoor area. Some providers look after the waste, while others send it home with the children; the plus is the parents know what is eaten, but the minus is the risk of spillage in the bag.

I’d like to see more variation in portion sizes, as older children will often want to eat more than the younger ones. I’d also like if there was an option for a cold lunch in the warmer months of May and June.

We’re a Deis (Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools) band-one school, and our experience has been very positive. For parents it is convenient and reassuring to know their child gets a hot meal, and it frees them up to spend more time with the child instead of working all day and then coming home to cook and clean.

Elma Young, principal at Holy Spirit Primary School, Greenhills, Dublin 12

The provider: Ray Nangle

‘All suppliers vetted by a panel of qualified nutritionists’

Most of the school meals market is really good. But principals, who are not nutritionists or dietitians, are being asked to do the job of one in choosing a supplier.

Instead we should have all suppliers vetted by a panel of qualified nutritionists, removing that burden from the principal and ensuring that ultra-processed foods are off the menu.

We need to ensure children have time to eat these meals

At the moment, it is monitored by staff from the Department of Social Protection, who administer the scheme. They are there to check that the money went to the right place, but they’re not nutritionists or dietitians.

And this means that one supplier can provide a sample to a school that tastes delicious because it’s full of additives, salt, sugar and preservatives, and they may be picked over a healthier supplier.

We also need to ensure children have time to eat these. Without extending the school day or reducing break time, this is an opportunity for them to learn about food and nutrition as they eat, which would support the social, personal and health education curriculum.

Ray Nangle runs Fresh Today and Lunchbox, two of the largest school meals suppliers

The dietitian: Sandra Wilkinson

‘Locally produced, seasonal food should be included’

The roll-out of hot school meals across the country presents a real opportunity to improve the health of children if implemented effectively. We know from food consumption surveys that children in Ireland have nutritional deficits, and that these are more common in children from disadvantaged backgrounds. We also know that proper nutrition can improve children’s ability to concentrate and encourages attendance.

It’s not just the short-term benefits. We have seen in Japan how free school meals, accompanied by education, can help bring about a lifelong positive change by helping children to understand, from a young age, how to make healthier food choices. It can also expose children to different flavours and increase acceptance of healthy, locally sourced foods.

While providers are obliged to meet nutritional standards, there isn’t a robust system to oversee this, nor sufficient resources in place to support providers in challenging areas, such as catering for specific dietary needs. Ideally providers would work with a qualified nutrition professional, preferably a registered dietitian, to ensure that meals are as healthy as possible; some already are.

School meals should be low in saturated fat, salt and sugar. They should be broadly in line with the food pyramid, with a focus on vegetables and fruits, wholegrain cereals, potatoes or rice, followed by dairy, then lean meats and protein alternatives, such as beans and legumes. Portion sizes should be age-appropriate and increase for older children. Meals should be suitable for all children attending school. Locally produced, seasonal food should be included.

Successful implementation requires dedicated resources and a cross-departmental approach, so that the Department of Health and the Department of Education are involved too. The benefits will be society-wide.

Sandra Wilkinson, registered dietitian and communications manager with the Irish Nutrition and Dietetic Institute (INDI)