vi a servi ce - Finavia

a sudden overdose oF BeauTY Can MaKe You
JusT as sICK as an eaTInG BInGe WIll.
20 V I A HELSINKI
How does
food affect us?
Do you order “the usual” or vegetarian on a flight? Do you
think about what you eat? Do you eat healthily? Are there a
lot of additives in your meals? Do you choose low fat prod-
ucts, locally-sourced or organic food?
We constantly face such choices. We are drowning in a
sea of comestible data, but it’s inconsistent. Scientific find-
ings and recommendations change all the time with new re-
search, so we feel uncertain. Am I eating well? It is ever hard-
er to answer this question. There’s an increasing proportion
of additives and genetically modified or otherwise altered
ingredients in our diet and no one knows the consequences.
A completely separate question – but just as interesting –
is how the ingredients we eat or drink affect how we experi-
ence the world. Yet one thing is certain, they do have an im-
pact. Plant-derived sedatives and drugs have been around
for aeons and people around the world have used them to al-
ter their consciousness. Modern science does the same with
synthetic products in particular, such as sedatives and anti-
depressants. We also like to change our consciousness our-
selves and splash out huge sums on stimulants, such as al-
cohol. What does this tell us? Do most of us really want to
escape from our own lives and surroundings for a while?
Not all substances blur our sense of reality the way alco-
hol does, and the effect may be the opposite, heightening our
Capital Tastes
COPEnHAGEn 1 hr 35 min
the success story of Smørrebrød, the
danish sandwich, began in the latter half
of the 19th century, when the copenhagen
officers’ club created the first sandwich
menu. key to Smørrebrød is that you can
be imaginative and relaxed about preparing
them. and you can enjoy them as an
everyday snack, as a main meal, and with
a beer or schnapps. you can pile absolutely
anything you want onto a thin slice
of bread – vegetables, cheese, meat, even
chocolate, fruit salad and whipped cream.
awareness, at least if you believe essayist, novelist and social
critic Aldous Huxley. He became a guinea pig for a research-
er studying the effects of mescaline on the human mind and
on interpretations of external reality.
One May morning in the 1950s, Huxley swallowed 0.4 g
of mescaline in a glass of water. Huxley reported that that
minuscule drop of mescaline taken from the peyote cactus
drastically changed his perception of reality, of himself and
his body. He based his world-famous book The Doors of Per-
ception on his experiences.
Surprisingly, Huxley did not feel that mescaline fabricat-
ed reality but conversely, it helped him understand its in-
nermost make-up. Encouraged by his experiences, he asks
in his book whether we actually see the world as it is, at all.
Huxley explains that beluga whales, for example, perceive
the world in four dimensions and not three, as humans do.
In bats, hearing and touch are combined with sight, so their
awareness of phenomena is more comprehensive than ours.
He believed that the operation of human senses via the brain
and nervous system tended to eliminate rather than produce
sensation. So, we don’t perceive everything that exists. Only
part of it filters through to us.
In this other consciousness, the “ego” became less impor-
tant and Huxley says he felt more like a small part of a large
entity. Also, his relationship with his own body changed, as
though he had strayed from his body without identifying
with it. Different things now seemed important and he be-
came more interested in the deep meaning of things. Time
as a phenomenon disappeared, and he noticed he no long-
Helsinki airport is also a gateway to a world of flavours. The cuisine typical of the places awaiting you at the end of
ViEnnA 2 hr 30 min
a culinary speciality in the cafes of
Vienna is Sachertorte, a chocolate
cake flavoured with apricot jam. this
came into existence, like diamonds,
under extreme pressure. in 1832, Prince
Wenzel Clemens Metternich ordered
his kitchen staff to produce a particularly
tasty dessert for some unexpected
guests. when the head chef was taken
ill, his 16-year-old apprentice Franz
Sacher had to fill in for his boss. the
rest, as they say, is history.