Three Favorite Rules from In Defense of Food

This is the promised follow-up to the discussion of Food, Inc. 

Three Favorite Rules from In Defense of Food:

 

·         “Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”

 

I have a pretty good idea of what my great-grandmother thought was food because I have two of her cookbooks: the 1946 Joy of Cooking and City Mission Cook Book: Favorite Recipes of the Women of Greater Lawrence. She may not have been exposed to the ethnic cuisines that are popular today, but I’m confident that she could have been educated in this area. Breads with 20-something ingredients, high fructose corn syrup and McFrankenchicken would certainly not have qualified.

 

·         “Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.”

 

Most supermarkets are set up so that the fresh foods and foods that require refrigeration – produce, meats, fish, dairy, etc. – are set up along the edges of the market. This is supposed to be for better temperature control (but I always thought it was so you had to travel across the length of the store to get all your typical items, allowing the store more chances to market to you). The middle is where you find the four or so aisles devoted to junk food, soda, and packaged food along with other aisles of assorted crap. The only caveat to this rule would have to be the aisle(s) with the rice and other grains, oatmeal and dried beans. And sometimes you need to buy spices, toilet paper, a mop, etc. Most of the rest is crap, or not-food-your-great-grandmother-would-recognize.

 

·         “Get out of the supermarket whenever possible.”

 

We are one week away from our first CSA pick-up of the season. Last year, I rarely went to the supermarket. And, there’s a food co-op market down the street from the pick-up site, so I could go there to replenish my supply of rice, millet, black beans, etc. It might be an interesting experiment to see how long I can go without going to the supermarket at all. Hmmm…..

 

 

Responding to Morning Edition and "Food, Inc."

My original post with the link to the broadcast is here.

Here's a link to the trailer (it won't embed for some reason) here. 

The film, Food, Inc., premiered last week in NY and comes out today in select theaters in NY, LA and SF. It will be here in Boston (Cambridge, actually) on June 19 at Kendall Square Cinema. As a reader of Michael Pollan and a supporter of locavorism, organic food, humane and sustainable agriculture, I am eager to see this film. It looks like it will be a good depiction of some of the wisdom found in Pollan's books put into an audio-visual format. 

There is a book, here, which I haven't read yet. Might have to be next on my list.

In the broadcast, which featured a brief interview with author, Michael Pollan, and the film's director, Robert Kenner, I didn't exactly learn anything that I didn't already know from The Omnivore's Dilemma or In Defense of Food, but a few points from the exchange are worth noting:

•  the lives of animals in industrial farming are half as long as they used to be before CAFOs and are far more brutal.
  
• most of these farms employ illegal immigrants who are easily exploited -- just like the animals.
• 90% of Americans say they want some kind of GMO labeling on their food, yet Congress has yet to engage such legislation because of the lobbying success of the big seed companies and food factories (like Monsanto).

Critics of the film and industry spokespeople will make such defenses: that this kind of intense agriculture provides, "a lot of food on a small amount of land for a good price. Now, what could be wrong with that?" Pollan counters this argument well in pointing out that while the industry has been successful in meeting these objectives, they come at a cost -- a cost to our health, to our integrity and values as a nation and to our environment. Industrial farming uses tons of fossil fuels (and I don't need to elaborate on the need to be critical of this, I believe), and lots of antibiotics and genetically-modified organisms. It promotes worker abuse and exploitation of migrant workers. It abuses animals. Furthermore, the fact that the individual industries are self-policing prevents any real oversight and breeds an insular culture of cynicism.

In my follow-up to this post, I'll be discussing my favorite rules from Pollan's In Defense of Food. 

NPR discusses new film, Food, Inc.

Here's the link to the radio broadcast.

More after I finish listening . . . 

Olive Oil: Cancer-Fighter or Carcinogen?

It is nearly impossible for me to imagine my kitchen without extra-virgin olive oil within reach of the stove-top. I have other oils, but, honestly, they are for occasional usage. I can do almost all my cooking, from sautéing to baking, with olive oil. Since I started my foray into self-taught, gourmet cooking by way of Italian cuisine, my reliance on -- and love for – olive oil makes sense.

            So, imagine my dismay when a group of friends at a wild plant foraging workshop discussed casually the carcinogenic dangers of cooking olive oil at high temperatures. Canola oil, they claimed, was the high heat oil of choice. Really? Considering both the presence of olive oil in the typical Mediterranean diet and the famously low instances of cancer among eaters of said diet, I was highly skeptical.  According to The Olive Oil Source, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are released when petroleum, petroleum products, coal, wood, oil and other substances are burned. Exposure to PAHs is pretty widespread, too. We breathe them in pretty much any time there’s smoke (including tobacco smoke), and we are exposed to them through asphalt, agricultural burning, waste incineration, creosote-treated wood products, cereals, grains, flour, bread, vegetables, fruits, meat, processed or pickled foods.  Of the over 100 PAHs identified by the EPA and The Department of Health and Human Services, a few of them have been found to be carcinogenic to lab animals with the assumption being made that they are probably (but not definitively) carcinogenic to humans. The same risk exists in eating charred meat as with eating burned oils. The fear is that heating oil above its smoke point could release PAHs that cause cancer. However, the studies show that the potential risks posed by PAHs in olive oil are no more than many other oils and foods. Since olive oil (and many other foods) contain antioxidants, the release of PAHs is somewhat compensated for until the oil is burned or spoiled.

            The studies mentioned above show that links between PAHs and cancer are not conclusive (and, in fact, do not isolate olive oil as more or less dangerous than any other oil or food). So, where did this olive oil scare come from? The simple answer seems to be Sheryl Crow. While there have been no studies to link cancer to olive oil, the singer claims that in her battle with breast cancer, her nutritionist warned her of the “danger.” Apparently, the authority of this “expert” was enough to set off a slight media panic, getting people all worked up about olive oil.

            Now, I’m not going to tell ANY cancer patient or survivor that the steps they take to ensure their health are in vain. It could be, that in being vigilant about her exposure to PAHs, Crow was able to boost her body’s immunity . . . but there is just no way to know for sure, and there seems to be no reason, in my mind, to stop cooking with olive oil.  The only reasonable advice seems to be to avoid heating olive oil (or ANY oil) past its smoke point. For olive oil, some sources say the smoke point is around 375 degrees F, others, 400. All I know is, if my oil starts smoking, it’s going to taste bad, burn the garlic, etc. Most people would not be so silly/extravagant as to try to deep fry with olive oil, but sautéing your veggies on the stove-top is not likely to burn the oil unless you’re not being careful.

 

So, how does a food myth like this one become sanctified wisdom repeated by well-meaning, health-conscious folks? I blame “nutritionism” – a term coined by Senator George McGovern in 1982 – and recently made (in)famous by Michael Pollan in his most recent book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Pollan describes nutritionism as the belief that eating is for purposes of nutrition, and that the nutrients in our food are what’s important.  As benign as this belief may appear at first, it’s actually reductionist . . . and wrong. In truth, we eat for a whole bunch of reasons, not just in order to obtain “nutrients” – taste, pleasure, social interaction, community, celebration, seduction, emotional soothing – all are reasons to eat.

            But, according to nutritionism, we’re supposed to avoid certain nutrients (such as saturated fats) and chug others (antioxidants, omega-3s) . . . right? Well, maybe.

            When we look at traditional cuisines, such as those of the French or Italians, we see the presence of all manner of foods that have been demonized by food science – fatty meats, cheese, butter, sugar, bread. If we were to trust nutritionism and its adherents and flame-fanners, then the French should have gone extinct years ago.

            Miraculously, the French survive . . . and so does their food. The same is true for Italians and their cuisine as well as those of many other Mediterranean cultures.

            Pollan and I concur: maybe it’s not the food scientists, nutritionists and celebrities we should be relying upon for our food wisdom, but upon, rather, the grandmothers – the memeres and the nonas – and other traditional cooks who have been feeding, and not killing, their families for years.