Being Reminded How to Eat
So, after reading about it in numerous blogs, I finally got my hands on Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food. This is the book in which he boils down eating guidelines to seven words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Past reading, especially w/regard to historical conceptions of beauty and critiques of fat prejudice, had already led me to understand that nutrition science isn’t quite as scientific — or objective — as the ideal. You know that too, because almost certainly you’ve joked at one time or another that everything we believe is unhealthy for us now will turn out to be healthy for us in the future. We all remember the dietary flip-flops on eggs, red meat, red wine, and carbs, right? They’re bad — no, good — no, bad — no, good in moderation —
So Pollan didn’t have to work hard to convince me that a “nutritionist” perspective on eating is intrinsically flawed and that we eat most healthfully when we eat a wide variety of mostly unprocessed foodstuffs rather than seek to isolate the chemical keys to health in a few fortified foods. However, he provides a number of citations to scholarly material to buttress his argument, which I appreciate, as a professor. And at the core he’s saying something with which I think most people would agree — that the industrialization of agriculture, dairy, and livestock has caused serious problems in the environment and in our health.
Now, I’ve been more or less eating as Pollan advises for the last few years — I don’t like cooking meat, so I only eat it a few times a month, usually when I’m out — but reading his book gave me fresh impetus to review my cupboards and eating habits.
Eat food: Pollan expands this a bit, most memorably with the line “don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”
I ran through my cupboards and frig and took stock. Not bad. My major processed food bad habits are diet caffeinated sodas and Crystal Light-type powders. I could probably ditch the latter, but the former may be with me to stay — sorry, Great-Grandma. I figure it’s a relatively harmless vice, though I suffer some guilt over using so many aluminum cans. The dry soups that I use as a foundation for getting rid of aging veggies probably don’t count as “food,” either. I have a nice book on soups that I bought two years ago and have never used; maybe it’s time to break it out. I’m not sure where condiment sauces stand — my ‘frig contains Szechuan sauce, gyoza dipping sauce, Korean chili sauce, Tabasco, Tapatio, jalapeno sauce, wasabi in a tube, and numerous other “let’s give this meal some kick!” condiments that my great grandmother might have regarded with some doubt.
I figure the canned and frozen stuff passes: canned tuna, canned chiles, canned black beans, frozen fruit and frozen meat is all recognizable as food, except maybe the ground beef. Did people grind meat in Great-Grandma’s time?
Not too much: I need to work on this guideline a bit more. I know all the rules for portion sizes and understand the problems Americans have with portions (you’re done when the plate is empty, right?), but I’m not as good about it as I could be, especially when it comes to cheese. A serving of cheese the size of a 6-sided die? I don’t think so. My solution at the moment is to buy less cheese. If it’s not around, it can’t tempt me.
What’s ironic is that I’ve read and been intrigued by extreme calorie restriction diets. As much as it intrigues me, though, I couldn’t do it. Someone would wave a pint of Blackthorn Cider under my nose and the whole project would collapse right there….
Mostly plants: I wasn’t a big veggie eater as a kid, but I’ve definitely grown into it as I’ve matured. There’s chicken, ground beef, and spicy sausage in my freezer, but it doesn’t get pulled out very often, especially over hot summers. My meat consumption rises a bit in winter, when cooked meals seem more attractive. Mostly during the summer I live on salads, corn chips and fresh salsa, veggie-laden Top Ramen, and the occasional fruit smoothie. I’ve mulled over the idea of going vegetarian, which for some reason provokes all sorts of teasing/sarcastic reactions from my family, but I’ve never settled down to it. I guess I’m what people are now calling a “flexitarian,” although I find the term a bit silly.
Since reading this book, I’ve stocked the frig with a wider variety of vegetables and some foods that had dropped off my shopping list in recent years, like broccolini, smoked wild salmon, and flourless bread. Pollan reminded me that I like eating a variety of meals — I just seldom bother to buy what I need to make them. Last night I happily made myself a veggie sandwich (two slices of flourless bread, spicy mustard, alfalfa sprouts, microgreens, a sliced vine-ripened organic tomato, some crumbled goat cheese) for the first time ever. It tasted good, although it’ll be even better once the avocados ripen up…. Mmm, avocados.
Still, it’s hard to kick the nutritionist mindset. I still buy skim milk for my morning bowl of cereal (homemade granola, yeah, I’m like that) because I’ve absorbed the now-being-questioned “reduce fat” rule of nutrition — and the only reason I drink dairy milk instead of soy or almond milk is because my doctor told me to kick up my calcium consumption. I also take a multivitamin and calcium supplement despite research showing that while people who take supplements are healthier than those who don’t, the supplements themselves seem to have nothing to do with it. (It’s probably a matter of correlation rather than causality; people who take supplements lead healthier lifestyles altogether.) And I can’t help but think of calories when I’m cooking or working out on the treadmill.
So, although I appreciate Pollan’s book a great deal, it might be a long time before I can stop thinking in terms of chemicals and calories when I look at food….
drupagliassotti @ July 29, 2008