I am currently preparing a lecture how chronic stress and symptoms and diseases of the digestive system are related. So this is the real-life background for contemplating about food, digestion and the innate wisdom of our bodies.

Why do we eat at all? Basically we need food for energy and we need the very elements to renew the tissues, particles, fluids and fabrics of our body. It is all about energy and matter, for the building blocks of all life are carbohydrates, fat and protein, as well as nucleic acids. They in turn consist of atomic particles, that can be broken down to even smaller particles – the quarks. Their names are – up, down, top, bottom, charm and strange. They spin and vibrate and they are the elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of all matter.

The quark model was proposed by the physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who received the nobel price for his work on elementary particles. He originally named the quark after the sound made by ducks. For some time, he was undecided on an actual spelling for the term he intended to coin, until he found the word quark in James Joyce’s book Finnegans Wake:

Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he has not got much of a bark
And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.

—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

The following is a very entertaining and insightful lecture of Murray Gell-Man on beauty and truth in physics.  What he says there is that all truth does not stem from the human mind but they are property of the fundamental law.

And in the end he summarizes the emergence properties of biological systems:

“You don’t need something more to get something more”

Sounds familiar…