APÉRO HISTORY
Peasant food and food dowsing
12 February 2025
Café culturel La Cafetière, Aurignac, Haute Garonne (FR)
Dominique Barés, a member of Eth Ostau Comengés, has been invited to present his research on the theme of Pyrenean peasant food. The presentation is the fruit of his observation of family eating practices, as well as of his collection and extensive documentation work. His life’s work is also marked by a personal experience of farming with an ecological vision and respect for living things. Some of the key facts he has revealed to the public include the low proportion of bread, or the fact that it was virtually non-existent even in the 19th century, the omnipresence of millet and legumes and the low proportion of meat in the diet, the basic rules for combining cooking and raw food, and a way of eating that echoes the traditional agro-pastoral practices that were in use in the 19th century and were still in use between the two world wars.
Faced with the dangers to our health of today’s completely irrational way of eating, but also with its very serious repercussions on our environment, Dominique has endeavoured to demonstrate the urgency of food resilience, which involves understanding and reintegrating a number of traditional food practices.
As you will have realised, the aim of this conference was to remind us of certain fundamental and ancestral food practices that enable us to favour a living, local diet. He insisted on the importance of ingesting living foods: a living food that is nourished, a dead food that is filled, plumbed, and consumed in excess, has perverse effects on the proper functioning of our organism.
Every living thing, every food, emits a magnetic field. The more a food is abused, processed and industrialised, the more it loses its magnetism until it becomes completely dead.
It’s a simple fact: it’s better to have organic carrots produced 10 or 20 km from where you eat them than organic carrots that have travelled dozens or even hundreds of kilometres, spent time in fridges and wrapped in plastic before ending up on your plate.
Building on previous work, Dominique Barés will shortly be publishing her book Playdoyer pour une alimentation vivante (subscription underway).
At the end of the presentation, Dominique demonstrated his point by testing the reactivity of a number of foods with a pendulum. The audience was able to try their hand at it too, and test their own magnetism.