Food is the enemy.
When I was little, my mother came home one day with a canister that looked very much like the one salt came in. Look at this, she said, beaming. It was called “Salt Sense” and it looked and tasted like salt, but with 1/3 the sodium of nasty old Morton salt.
Wow, I said. What’s that mean? And my mother went on to tell me about the dangers of salt and blood pressure and heart disease. At the age of 11, I was whisked away to have my cholesterol tested: I failed. My mother began to obsess over the amount of cheese I was eating (which has always been a lot). I started reading “Eating Well,” a healthy cooking magazine with recipes like mousses made with gelatin and evaporated milk, and the phrase “canola oil” wherever you’d expect to find the word “butter.”
Even the great Jacques Pepin was counting grams of saturated fat back then. In fact, it may have been his healthy PBS cooking show “Today’s Gourmet” that started him on the path from being merely one of the best chefs and cooking teachers who ever lived to being the rockstar who took over for Julia Child. I wonder how cooking ever survived it.
Since then, of course, I’ve read Nina Planck’s book Real Food, not to mention The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and have simply made the unscientific but personal observation that people who eat whole, wholesome foods in balance with nature live longer, healthier lives than people who don’t. Every can and box in my mother’s house says “Low Fat,” “Low Salt,” “Tastes Great” or “Less Filling.” She’s had every ailment and has taken every medication you’ve ever heard of, major and minor: glands, growths, hormones, you name it. There aren’t any cans or boxes in my friend Anita’s house- who’s older than my mother- and she’s healthy as a horse. She’s eaten more or less only fish- in terms of animal flesh- and whole foods (philosophically, not the store) since before I was born. She gets her produce from a CSA in the next town over from my mom at a fraction of the cost of supermarket shopping. She’s no prude, though. We tore into lentil soup in a restaurant together once. I watched her with baited breath once I realized the soup was [deliciously] smoky and laden with ham. She laughed when she tasted it, and ate the whole bowl, only remarking afterward that she hadn’t had ham since the seventies. It was great soup!
People say they’re “misbehaving” or “getting away” with something when they eat butter or cheese. They then reach for something that was made in a laboratory, as if *that’s* the key to health.
I’m sick of hearing foods referred to as “decadent” or “sinful.” Real food is neither. What’s sinful is food that’s not food: it’s alimentary material made in a laboratory so that more people can profit from what we eat. The evolution of commodity processing has extended shelf lives beyond anything occurring in nature. In some cases, this has been a boon, for the poor and hungry both at home and in far off places, not to mention the ability to store for emergency or famine. But let’s face it, we’ve been processing food for these reasons for thousands of years: corn and lime, drying wheat, treating acorns. We’re no strangers to processing food. But never, ever, in history have these methods replaced fresh, wholesome foods in our diets. Only since World War 2 have we seen people spend their lives avoiding the things that humans have been eating since the dawn of our time.
At first, it was a matter of convenience. Look, asparagus in January! Of course, people have been canning since antiquity, but now you don’t have to do it yourself! Who needs a vegetable garden and canning party and root cellar, when you can pick up cans, ready to eat, at the new, exciting **Supermarket**? Jello! A sweet dessert ready in seconds with boiling water! Holy shit!
As our population reorganized itself out of denser urban centers and rural enclaves into subdivision after subdivision, supermarkets became part of the system. When a place has no history, its economic vacuum is easily filled by entrepreneurs from neighboring places expanding existing businesses. There’s no corner market to force out of business, because the corner hasn’t been built yet. The corner is now built with a Walgreens already in it. Centralized businesses want centralized supply chains. Centralized supply chains strive for uniformity and the longest of possible shelf lives. Have you ever seen an organic tomato plant? How uniform do the tomatoes look?
Honestly, I think these things happened by accident. A free market system in a country bathing in success, expanding rapidly and leading the world in development of technology, science and culture; who was looking at the changes philosophically? (I’m sure somebody was, but I don’t know whom.)
The problem, as I see it, really compounded in the 70s. A whole foods counterculture had sprung up, mostly on the coasts, as usual, but in little places here and there as well. There’s a 30+ year organic farm in Williamstown, NJ- a place you’d never to think to find one, even today.
Before this movement could really take hold, though, we entered the age of modern illness. Cancer and heart disease began to spread like wildfire, and new diagnoses and research pointed the finger foodwards. By the eighties we knew some truths to be self-evident: Saturated fat gathers around the heart and gives you a heart attack; cholesterol gathers into plaques in veins that lead to high blood pressure and heart attacks; salt increases your blood pressure and gives you a heart attack; ditto booze and let’s not even discuss smoking. And rather than examine those relationships too closely, we took those observations and made them Cardinal Law, despite the fact that- for example- the cholesterol hypothesis is widely believed to only be relevant in terms of oxidized cholesterol- the kind you get from margarine. Conversely, it’s widely believed that natural, unoxidized cholesterol may not have any adverse health effects at all.
Despite that inconvenient fact- one of many- the food companies were back to the rescue. Mayonnaise went from something made entirely out of fats to being “low-fat.” Cakes suddenly had 50% less sugar, or maybe no sugar at all, thanks to aspartame or saccharine (which kills lab rats sometimes in minutes). Processed food went from killer to savior overnight. It was a new age of Better Living Through Chemistry.
*This, people, is how you arrive at a terrified eleven year old boy who is convinced that he is about to drop dead of a heart attack at any moment because he ate too much cheese.*
Do you know what my cholesterol count is now, that I’m nearing 30? I don’t know. I don’t know and I don’t care to know, because I don’t eat hydrogenated fats, and I don’t believe that net cholesterol has any effect on my health. Go ahead, ask your doctor to test your oxidized cholesterol only. He’ll look at you like you’re nuts. And you can bet your HMO doesn’t cover that test.
Likewise, if you think the government is looking out for us, let me remind you: The FDA is made up of people who came from the food and drug industries. Family farming isn’t really a part of that industry. The USDA is the same. When it puts together an advisory panel (like the one for [NAIS]( http://animalid.aphis.usda.gov/nais/)) it selects people from the *industry* of farming, not the vocation of farming. Organic farming is often represented in USDA panels by entities like the [Organic Trade Association]( http://www.ota.com/index.html), a group made up of national-brand producers and retailers: **no one** who has a stand at a farmers’ market, or who represents someone who does. USDA organic is a lie on its merits and has been from the start.
If you lived to be 18 in 1900, you’d most likely live well into your sixties, if not seventies. We didn’t have margarine, high-fructose corn syrup or statins, and people lived and lived, to within 5-10 years of their life expectancy now, in a world where cancer can be treated and infection can be cured by a trip to the corner store (in places where there are still corner stores).
You call this progress?
