Food for thought
When I was 20 years old, I somehow came to own a used copy of Adelle Davis’s groundbreaking book, Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1954). It forever changed the way I view food, diet, human nutrition, and physical activity.
Ever since, educating myself about optimum health through nutrition has been a lifestyle. Although Adelle’s book is timeless — disdaining white sugar and flour and heralding whole grains, good fats and proteins, and vitamins and minerals — there have been continuing changes in the science of nutrition over the years.
Chapter 1 of Eat Right to Keep Fit starts with this: “Your nutrition can determine how you look, act, and feel; whether you are grouchy or cheerful, homely or beautiful, physiologically and even psychologically young or old; whether you think clearly or are confused, enjoy your work or make it a drudgery, increase your earning power or stay in an economic rut.”
To this day, I believe this is basically true. But presently, there is even more thought that needs to go into every meal.
Two years ago while on a camping trip, my family had nightmares as I read them excerpts from Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (Harper, 2005). We haven’t eaten corporate fast food since.
More than 50 years ago, Adelle Davis’s book ended with a chapter entitled, “Is Our National Health on the Down-grade?” As we all now know, the answer to that question was, and is, yes.
The book recently added to my all-time favorites’ list is The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan. Another groundbreaker, Pollan personally follows four types of meals from source to dinner plate.
The meals that have their origins traced are: a McDonald’s feast eaten in a car on a freeway; a plethora of “Big Organic” ingredients purchased at Whole Foods Market; chicken and side dishes from a self-sustaining Virginia farm that uses no pesticides, antibiotics, or synthetic fertilizers; and the most basic of banquets consisting of ingredients Pollan hunted, gathered, and grew.
At the risk of revealing the climax, the McDonald’s meal proves severely lacking in both nutrition and eco-sustainability. The Whole Foods meal contains the unwanted ingredient of corporate compromise. The small-scale farm meal was delectable and eco-friendly. And the hunter-gatherer meal was down-to-earth with a side of guilt.
Then again, this book could also be titled, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Corn But Were Afraid to Ask.” The beginning of the book is a meticulously researched exposé on corn, which isn’t just the innocent, all-American summer vegetable anymore, but an exploited, government-controlled ingredient that finds its way, in one form or another, into almost every food and beverage we ingest (it makes up 13 of the 38 ingredients in a Chicken McNugget).
Before reading this book, I thought I was a conscious grocery-shopper and an intelligent eater. I’ve been forced to re-examine some of my strategies.
Writes Pollan: “Perhaps most discouraging of all, my industrial organic meal [from Whole Foods Market] is nearly as drenched in fossil fuel as its conventional counterpart.”
And food really has become a dilemma. Big organic has sold out; industrialization is here to stay; not everyone can be self-sustaining and off the grid; small farms are priced out of the industry because of regulations, subsidies, and processing; and wildlife and wild plants couldn’t support an entire population that went foraging for its supper after clocking out at the office.
In this book, it is explained that food has become much more than sustenance; it has political, economic, psychological, moral, and public health implications. Because of this, we’ve created what Pollan calls a national eating disorder.
“How could it come to pass that a fast-food burger produced from corn and fossil fuel actually costs less than a burger produced from grass and sunlight?” asks the author.
In the end, the omnivore’s dilemma is two-fold: what we choose to eat and how we allow that food to be produced. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t provide a clear-cut answer but it reveals the true cost of food.
www.kaweahcommonwealth.com
Ever since, educating myself about optimum health through nutrition has been a lifestyle. Although Adelle’s book is timeless — disdaining white sugar and flour and heralding whole grains, good fats and proteins, and vitamins and minerals — there have been continuing changes in the science of nutrition over the years.
Chapter 1 of Eat Right to Keep Fit starts with this: “Your nutrition can determine how you look, act, and feel; whether you are grouchy or cheerful, homely or beautiful, physiologically and even psychologically young or old; whether you think clearly or are confused, enjoy your work or make it a drudgery, increase your earning power or stay in an economic rut.”
To this day, I believe this is basically true. But presently, there is even more thought that needs to go into every meal.
Two years ago while on a camping trip, my family had nightmares as I read them excerpts from Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (Harper, 2005). We haven’t eaten corporate fast food since.
More than 50 years ago, Adelle Davis’s book ended with a chapter entitled, “Is Our National Health on the Down-grade?” As we all now know, the answer to that question was, and is, yes.
The book recently added to my all-time favorites’ list is The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan. Another groundbreaker, Pollan personally follows four types of meals from source to dinner plate.
The meals that have their origins traced are: a McDonald’s feast eaten in a car on a freeway; a plethora of “Big Organic” ingredients purchased at Whole Foods Market; chicken and side dishes from a self-sustaining Virginia farm that uses no pesticides, antibiotics, or synthetic fertilizers; and the most basic of banquets consisting of ingredients Pollan hunted, gathered, and grew.
At the risk of revealing the climax, the McDonald’s meal proves severely lacking in both nutrition and eco-sustainability. The Whole Foods meal contains the unwanted ingredient of corporate compromise. The small-scale farm meal was delectable and eco-friendly. And the hunter-gatherer meal was down-to-earth with a side of guilt.
Then again, this book could also be titled, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Corn But Were Afraid to Ask.” The beginning of the book is a meticulously researched exposé on corn, which isn’t just the innocent, all-American summer vegetable anymore, but an exploited, government-controlled ingredient that finds its way, in one form or another, into almost every food and beverage we ingest (it makes up 13 of the 38 ingredients in a Chicken McNugget).
Before reading this book, I thought I was a conscious grocery-shopper and an intelligent eater. I’ve been forced to re-examine some of my strategies.
Writes Pollan: “Perhaps most discouraging of all, my industrial organic meal [from Whole Foods Market] is nearly as drenched in fossil fuel as its conventional counterpart.”
And food really has become a dilemma. Big organic has sold out; industrialization is here to stay; not everyone can be self-sustaining and off the grid; small farms are priced out of the industry because of regulations, subsidies, and processing; and wildlife and wild plants couldn’t support an entire population that went foraging for its supper after clocking out at the office.
In this book, it is explained that food has become much more than sustenance; it has political, economic, psychological, moral, and public health implications. Because of this, we’ve created what Pollan calls a national eating disorder.
“How could it come to pass that a fast-food burger produced from corn and fossil fuel actually costs less than a burger produced from grass and sunlight?” asks the author.
In the end, the omnivore’s dilemma is two-fold: what we choose to eat and how we allow that food to be produced. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t provide a clear-cut answer but it reveals the true cost of food.
www.kaweahcommonwealth.com
posted by TKC Online | 12:33 PM
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