We've had a strong - perhaps unhealthy - focus on food for many years in this country, maybe because we have such an abundance and variety compared with most of the world. That focus has changed in the last few years from gourmet meals and the latest trendy recipes cooked up by the foodies to a concentration on local and healthy, driven in large part by authors like Alice Waters and Barbara Kingsolver.
The latest food guru is Michael Pollan, a professor of journalism at the University of California Berkeley, who has just produced Food Rules. Some examples:
#19 If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.
#36 Don’t eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk.
#47 Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored.
#58 Do all your eating at a table.
#64: Break the rules once in a while.
His earlier books are In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, winner of the James Beard Award, and The Omnivore's Dilemma, which was named one of the ten best books of the year by both the New York Times and the Washington Post; a young readers' version of The Omnivore's Dilemma: the Secrets Behind What You Eat; Second Nature, The Botany of Desire, and A Place of My Own. Pollan appears in Food, Inc., a documentary film on the food industry, and The Botany of Desire, recently broadcast on PBS. He is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine.
Pollan doesn't like the dependence on corn as an ingredient in many prepared foods, he does like local production and buying and farmers like Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms in Virginia, another foe of industrialized farming. There's a good recent interview with Salatin at http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jan/31/food-industry-environment
Our damaging dependence on oil has much to do with the current shift in food concerns. It's estimated that much of what we eat travels 1500 miles to our tables, a huge consumption of energy that might be better used to heat and light our homes.
An epidemic of obesity is also a huge factor, with fast food being blamed for much of it. Morgan Spurlock's Super-size Me, about his very fattening month of eating only fast food, was a breakout hit at the 2004 Sundance Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award.
This year, the Los Angeles Times says Robert Kenner's Oscar nominee Food, Inc., evokes the muckraking advocacy journalism of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. That's because some of the problems with early 20th century food production haven't gone away, he said. "It's shocking to see how far backward we've gone" in policing what we put in our mouths, he said.
A casualty of the new foods sensibility has been Gourmet magazine, shutting down after 70 years.
At the very least, the new food rules should give us second thoughts about what we snack on at the movies.
Just went to a long movie, Avatar, that hits you over the head with the green message, though if it's effective with young people, that's wonderful. I feel Pollan is almost too much a household guru, though I agree with all he says. Our corn and corn syrup addiction is horrendous, ruining us. Good piece you wrote on the subject. Barbara Baer
ReplyDeleteI hope Pollan plays as well throughout the country as he does in NorCal. I love the tip about don't eat cereal that changes the color of the milk. common sense, easy to follow rules.
ReplyDeleteWhat does it take to get people to realize that what manifests in their bodies is a direct result of what they put into it? Just waking up to the fact that funny-foods are not nutritious is like saying we didn't know cigarettes were harmful until the Surgeon General put a sign on the pack. Good grief. My grandmother - born in 1880 - called them coffin nails!
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