Year 9-3
“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
That’s how Michael Pollan starts his book, “In Defense of Food.” He continues, “That’s more or less, the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.”
Why is eating so complicated today? Why do we need a book – a best-seller even – to tell us what we have to eat? People throughout history never had that problem. I think the reason is that, ever since we have become dependent on a food production system more concerned with the appearance of food and long shelf life than nutritional value, we have had trouble sorting out the very basics of life, not only food, but the essence of what our existence is all about. Pollan suggests that we go back to the way our great-grandparents ate. Perhaps we will be forced to.
Sorry to sound somewhat self-righteous by using my own diet as an example, but that’s the only one I know. So what do I eat to be fit enough in my four-score years to bike or run an average of 10 km per day?
We have oats for breakfast, prepared in a slow cooker the night before. In the morning I add frozen blueberries and ground-up flax seeds. At coffee time I eat some cooked beans, pinto, black, white, or brown. For lunch we have, three times a week, a salad-mix with an egg, chopped up carrot, onion, garlic, kohlrabi and cabbage, plus cherry tomatoes and cooked red beets, with a lemon-olive oil dressing; twice a week a potato meal with some vegetables, most of it home-grown; on Saturdays spaghetti and lots of sauce and on Sundays just a plate of soup. For supper I have one slice of home-made pumpernickel bread: a mixture of bran, 7 grain cereal, molasses, rye flour and water, with a bit of butter and honey. For snacks some roasted almonds, whole milk yogurt with maple syrup both home-made and occasionally some dark chocolate. That’s it.
No meat.
So, even before I read Pollan’s common sense book, we followed his rules: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” He also writes in his introduction that “eating a little meat isn’t going to kill you, though it might be better approached as a side dish than a main.”
Good food and happiness go together. Here’s a line I found somewhere else: “Happy people spend a lot of time socializing, going to church and reading newspapers — but they don’t spend a lot of time watching television”. That too fits us. We often visit our extended family: this column comes from St. Paul, Minnesota, where our youngest daughter lives.
That some 40 percent of people are now either overweight or obese is a clear sign that something is wrong in society. When I grew up nobody dieted. I never saw runners in the streets in those days, nor were there weight-loss clinics. Everybody walked and biked and ate real food. Of course, there were a few overweight people: my father was one. He smoked. We all did. I quit in 1959. There was a little ditty in my youth which said “you’re not a man if you don’t smoke”. My father, a small factory owner, traveled each day by car – perhaps that’s why he was overweight – to sell his products. It was my daily job to buy 2 packs of 20 cigarettes and one box of 10 cigars, which served as an introduction in his approach to his clients: a good prospect a cigar, the lesser ones a cigarette. He died of lung cancer at 78.
Back to “In defense of Food.” Writes Pollan: “You are better off eating whole fresh food rather than processed food products.” His main point is that, if we are concerned about our health, we should “avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.” And where is the real food found? “Shop only at the outer parts of the stores, where the vegetables are displayed and fruit.”
“Eat in company”. When I grew up, and when our five kids were at home, we always ate as a family: meal times were social events as well. And more. Writes Pollan: ”Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.”
Affinity to nature comes from growing your own: no food is better and tastes better: it makes food spiritual, something to pray for, something to give thanks for, something to delight in, a rare ray of hope in troubled times. So “Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly Plants.”