Food "science"

[altivo]

Here is a really excellent essay on the golden calf that is nutritionism. (Link provided by herefox.) Yes, it's long. If you're the type who can't maintain an attention span for more than a few sentences, I still urge you to get through the first page.

Click here to read, from the New York Times Magazine.

This is a strong and reasoned indictment of the American "scientific" approach to eating that reduces food to nutrients and thus denies that there is any difference between highly processed foods and whole foods. The problem, as the author so aptly points out, is that science can only make recommendations for nutrients that it knows and understands (or thinks it understands.) Thus each new wave of urgent recommendations (the latest being the omega-3 fatty acids) is bound to be rebuked by the next "discovery." In the meantime, the mega-giants of the food industry just change their labels and stuff more artificial ingredients into their products.

The ultimate advice, to recognize nothing as "food" that your grandmother wouldn't have recognized, is probably sound. As herefox summed it up: eat less overall, and eat a lot more plants (though it really seems to be the leaves and stems, and the flesh of the fruits, that are the important parts.) Eating seeds and roots doesn't count.

This advice is bound to be rejected by most Americans, I'm afraid. It requires a different approach to eating, a different approach to food shopping, and a great reduction in the consumption of takeout and fast foods prepared by chain restaurants. To be more healthy, America must learn again how to cook, how to grow a garden, how to buy fresh produce. In my opinion, this can only be good, but to most people I'm afraid it is now anathema.

Comments

[altivo.livejournal.com]

But the rule of thumb was "What your grandmother (not great-great-grandmother) would have recognized as being food" not necessarily what she actually ate, perforce or by luck. My maternal grandmother lived from 1897 to 1977. She certainly knew what a pineapple was, and would have recognized that an avocado or even a breadfruit was probably food even if not familiar to her; but I know for a fact that she questioned vitamin pills, and food ingredients like lecithin or guar gum. She baked her own bread, or bought it from a bakery (not Wonderbread or equivalent.) She bought meat from a butcher shop or a meat counter where she could see the butcher at work, and refused to get it prepackaged or in ready to heat frozen packets. As it happens, she usually ate well because she gardened and froze or canned her own produce. She also preferred to buy produce from local farmstands or farmers markets in season. I think that is what this author means. The reason for choosing grandmother and not mother is that we're well into a second generation of people who have been raised on microwave meals and fast food and have no real idea of where food comes from or how it affects them.

What you choose to eat is your business and I'm not really trying to change that if you've thought it through at all. My reason for posting is that I think an awful lot of people today don't give it any thought at all.

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

I like the article for pointing out quite rightly, the problems of nutritionism. It does a good job there. And it is good to read something periodically that makes you re-examine what you eat - people eat every day of their lives (or they want to, if they can't) yet few give it a second thought.

But I just don't like leafy vegetables. :-) They could just never be a staple of my diet, and as I already hinted at, they could not have been a year-round staple for most cultures from which western civilization originated from... So there must be an alternative, and that alternative should be considered.