Friday, February 02, 2007
Wave your fork if you’re fed up with food fads, pyramids, myths, scandals, and all those often-silly health claims and additives getting stamped on products like Captain Crunch. Good grief. Who can we trust any more? Unusually sensitive to the side effects of preventative meds like Arimidex, Fosamax, and statins, I depend on diet and exercise to stave off my high risks of heart disease, osteopenia and breast cancer. The question of food fidelity was one I had to answer.
So in the last six months, I’ve been reading up on the food fight in sources like Prevention magazine, health and medical websites, and recent and authoritative books. I’ve probably paced off a hundred calories this morning trying to figure out how to boil it all down to a blog, or how to articulate the slow-but-sure changing picture of what’s on my plate.
The real change started six months ago with The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. Pollan traces the ingredients of four meals to their sources, through their production, transport, and processes. I began to look past my neatly packaged steak on it’s Styrofoam plate, past my eggs to hens in small cages. I began reading beyond the nutrition labels into the small-print ingredients, especially for any of ubiquitous and unimaginable manifestations of high-glucose corn. Every page amazed me with life-changing insights and information. Pollan’s conclusion, among others, was nothing new, just freshly understood by me: Eat more fruits, whole grains, and vegetables.
Last week, I finished another hefty page-turner, What to Eat, by Marion Nestle, a professor at New York University. Mesmerized, I painlessly read through all 600 pages of eye-popping, brain-boggling facts about the foods Americans eat, where they come from, and how they’re processed. Nestle (definitely not associated with the food company of that name) took me through the typical American supermarket, aisle by aisle. Her assessments fit in with Pollan’s, but were a little closer to home and practical, and advised that, among other specifics, I eat more fruits, whole grains, and vegetables.
But it was last Sunday’s cover story, “Unhappy Meals,” by Michael Pollan himself in the New York Times Magazine, that has given me the courage to approach this overwhelming subject in something as short as a blog. The article, long by magazine standards but about 1,200 pages shorter than the total of the two books I’ve reviewed here, offers a superb springboard to further investigation for even the mildly curious. He elegantly sums it all up in seven easy words:
“Eat food,* not too much, mostly plants.”
A few days ago my oldest friend (we’ve been friends for 58 years now), a breast cancer survivor of 20 years, startled me with the news that she’d become a vegan. If I hadn’t done all that reading, I might have been shocked. A vegan? Wasn’t that a little extreme? No animal products at all? No dairy, eggs, poultry, meat, or fish? Sounded like deprivation to me.
So in the last six months, I’ve been reading up on the food fight in sources like Prevention magazine, health and medical websites, and recent and authoritative books. I’ve probably paced off a hundred calories this morning trying to figure out how to boil it all down to a blog, or how to articulate the slow-but-sure changing picture of what’s on my plate.
The real change started six months ago with The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. Pollan traces the ingredients of four meals to their sources, through their production, transport, and processes. I began to look past my neatly packaged steak on it’s Styrofoam plate, past my eggs to hens in small cages. I began reading beyond the nutrition labels into the small-print ingredients, especially for any of ubiquitous and unimaginable manifestations of high-glucose corn. Every page amazed me with life-changing insights and information. Pollan’s conclusion, among others, was nothing new, just freshly understood by me: Eat more fruits, whole grains, and vegetables.
Last week, I finished another hefty page-turner, What to Eat, by Marion Nestle, a professor at New York University. Mesmerized, I painlessly read through all 600 pages of eye-popping, brain-boggling facts about the foods Americans eat, where they come from, and how they’re processed. Nestle (definitely not associated with the food company of that name) took me through the typical American supermarket, aisle by aisle. Her assessments fit in with Pollan’s, but were a little closer to home and practical, and advised that, among other specifics, I eat more fruits, whole grains, and vegetables.
But it was last Sunday’s cover story, “Unhappy Meals,” by Michael Pollan himself in the New York Times Magazine, that has given me the courage to approach this overwhelming subject in something as short as a blog. The article, long by magazine standards but about 1,200 pages shorter than the total of the two books I’ve reviewed here, offers a superb springboard to further investigation for even the mildly curious. He elegantly sums it all up in seven easy words:
“Eat food,* not too much, mostly plants.”
A few days ago my oldest friend (we’ve been friends for 58 years now), a breast cancer survivor of 20 years, startled me with the news that she’d become a vegan. If I hadn’t done all that reading, I might have been shocked. A vegan? Wasn’t that a little extreme? No animal products at all? No dairy, eggs, poultry, meat, or fish? Sounded like deprivation to me.
