ABSTRACT
Fortunately, in the recent decades, the food industry has done a lot to relieve us of any further need to struggle and from the burden of all moral responsibility. It has produced foods and foodstuffs that help us live according to the ascetic ideal without hardly having to change our eating or drinking habits at all. We can go on eating just like before and still our diets become almost ‘ideal’. One could for instance say that the remarkable change in butter and whole milk consumption observed by the Finnish nutritionists during the 1980s was not caused by any conscious acts of abstinence. People could still go on eating their voileipä (bread andbutter – theFinnishnational dish) asbefore. And theycould still goondrinking milk with it. What changed was that instead of whole (‘red’) milk they now drank low-fat (‘blue’) or skimmed milk and spread margarine (in daily parlance often still referred to as butter) or a butter mix on their bread.
