A Good Food Book

In between frantically writing, learning electroosmotics, and praying to the various callous gods of candidacy, I have been reading Michael Pollan to unwind. He's actually quite brilliant.

In the muddle of diet fads where entire food groups or macronutrients are excluded in a usually futile attempt to eat healthier and/or lose weight, Pollan takes some time to unscientifically un-muddle how we eat and explain why our Western dietary habits are screwing us over. I don't much like nutritionists. With respect to my friend R. (who is a fabulous cook, incredibly healthy individual, and the relatively new mother of a giant baby - I'm not kidding; her little man is HUGE), the field of nutrition relies on a lot of well-disguised hand waving and recovering anorexics.

First, a short anecdote that describes many - not all - nutritionists. R. went to NYU with me, and she went through the NYU nutrition program. One night at fencing practice, she told me how her classmates had turned away from their salads and yogurts with a mixture of horror and drooling jealousy to watch as she ate a slice of pizza for lunch during lecture. She ate one slice of pizza, not three. It wasn't unfrozen reconstituted chain pizza, it was actual pizza made from real pizza dough, sauce, and cheese from the pizza place on the corner.

Honestly, what were they looking at?

(Author's Aside: One time, R. and I bought young coconuts at the organic market up the street from our dorm. You know, the ones that are white on the outside with the shell shaved off? Anyway, we crouched on the floor of R.'s dorm room with hammers smashing them open to get at the water and the cream inside for a snack. It was fun. And tasty. And I'm sure there's an easier way to open them, but we lacked a hack saw.)

Anyway, a diet of salad, yogurt, and carrot sticks every day for lunch is impossibly monotonous, simply impossible for an athlete, and unpleasant to eat on a cold day. Pollan doesn't buy into the starving/deprivation thing to tell us how to eat right. He doesn't even explicitly tell us how to eat right. It's brilliant! He promotes eating real, actual, unprocessed food to get what you need to live and be healthy and happy.

One great point he makes is we need to look at cultures that have been around for a long time, and take notes from them. Why does he say that? Because in order to be around for a long time, you need to SURVIVE. Obviously, if you've survived for thousands of years, you've got a good thing going nutritionally because you have the strength - as a culture - to reproduce a lot. And reproduction is very energetically costly.

Another noteworthy Pollan point is "we are what what we eat eats."

I'll give you a second to parse that.

In other words, if our cattle eat things they aren't designed to eat (like corn instead of grass), they'll pass on their nutritional deficiencies to whatever eats them. That would be us, folks.

Think for a minute. Everyone's on about omega-3's these days. So we're told to eat fish, right? Well, where do you think the omega-3's in fish come from? From what the fish eat, photosynthetic plankton. All the fish do is concentrate the omega-3's because they're higher on the food chain, and they eat the plankton.

Moving back to cattle, beef used to have higher levels of omega-3's and less crap because they ate plants, and the ultimate source of omega-3's are plants. Now that cattle are fed on grain instead of the leaves they evolved to eat, not only do they require antibiotics to survive long enough to get to the slaughterhouse, but they don't get the full battery of nutrients they're evolutionarily designed to get. And, as a result, neither do we when we eat mass-marketed industrial beef (Pollan really delves into this in "The Omnivore's Dilemma"). So simple and so smart.

Speaking of smarts, Michael Pollan isn't a scientist, but he uses a very powerful tool many of us have forgotten, observation. We're so obsessed with finding the one magic compound that'll cure all ills. It's kind of amusing, really. Think about the new revelations about cholesterol; all of a sudden, the low cholesterol orthodoxy is being overturned. Maybe high cholesterol does NOT implicitly equal heart disease... maybe the whole system is more complex and relies on feedback systems we haven't even started to uncover. In a way, it's kind of comforting.

Check out one of my favorite passages, from "In Defense of Food." It pretty much sums it up:

"Indeed, to look at the chemical composition of any common food plant is to realize just how much complexity lurks within it. Here's a list of just the antioxidants that have been identified in a leaf of garden variety thyme:

"alanine, anethole essential oil, apigenin, ascorbic acid, beta-carotene, caffeic acid, camphene, carvacrol, chlorogenic acid, chrysoerial, derulic acid...[I'm cutting the list short; it's long enough to make the point]...

"This is what you ingest when you eat food flavored with thyme. Some of these chemicals are broken down by your digestion, but others go on to do various as-yet-undetermined things to your body: turning some gene's expression on or off, perhaps, or intercepting a free radical before it disturbs a strand of DNA deep in some cell. It would be great to know how this all works, but in the meantime we can enjoy thyme in the knowledge that it probably doesn't do any harm (since people have been eating it forever) and that it might actually do some good (since people have been eating it forever), and even if it does nothing at all, we like the way it tastes..."

I have to say, it's comforting to know there are things that are so complex, we don't have a prayer of understanding them at the moment. On one hand, knowing there is no one right answer means we could be horribly wrong, but on the other hand, that means there are so many more ways to be right. Me? I'd rather explore the ways to be nutritionally right, which in Pollan's view means eat diversely. Yum.

The thing is, fads will come and go. Soon everyone will be off protein, or something and taking yogurt enemas again. (Yeah. Yogurt enemas. And this dude's name is on a huge number of cereal boxes in American homes these days. Heh, little do they know he was a great proponent of yogurt enemas. Go ahead. Click on it. You know you're curious.)

(Another interesting fact; Oneida, the silverware company, another American mainstay, had quite an interesting beginning as well. We are SO closeted as a culture, it's amazing. Australia got the convicts, Canada got the French, we got the Puritans, and we've never really gotten over it.)

Imagine how they'll laugh at us someday. In the meantime, read Michael Pollan (I suggest "The Omnivore's Dilemma" or "In Defense of Food"), and contemplate eating similarly to non-Americanized Greeks and Japanese.