Tin Foil Toque

The High Cost of Cheap Food: Burgers Are Made of Pink Slime

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Cascio) — Tue, 15 Oct 2013 13:00:00 +0000

"Warning: May contain a slurry of scraps off the slaughterhouse floor, washed with ammonia." A label that appears on no burger, by USDA decree.

If you haven’t heard of it, “lean finely textured beef” is big business. As the Young Turks explain, “lean finely textured beef,” or LFTB, is made of a slurry of scraps off the slaughterhouse floor and enough ammonia to kill the bacterial nastiness with which its imbued. McDonald’s and most other fast food chains were using this mechanically extracted, nutritionally weak filler in their American “all beef” burger patties, until Jamie Oliver ignited a consumer backlash. Until this point, the food industry lobby vigorously defended the practice of secretly including "pink slime" in ground beef patties and taco fillings, and was supported by the FDA, which still does not require the ingredient to be disclosed.

Where in previous decades, American beef was consonant with luxury---the Japanese word for steak is “bifusteku”---today, our use of LFTB has spoiled the image of American beef abroad. In East Asia, signs in American fast food chains proudly proclaim, “No US beef” in their products. Meanwhile in the US, “pink slime” is unavoidable to the average, thrifty consumer. Though restaurant chains have been quick to announce when they've discontinued using LFTB, it’s still found---unlabeled---in restaurant fare and institutional food, including school lunches.

Cooking at home is no guarantee you’ll avoid “pink slime,” either, because LFTB may be sold at your grocery store, where it may constitute up to 15 percent of ground beef without being labeled as containing anything other than plain old ground beef. In agreement with Jamie Oliver, Colleen Vanderlinden at TLC Cooking says we are “literally eating garbage” when we eat this stuff. Instead of calling drive through burgers “fast food,” we should be calling it “trash food.”

Image credit: felixtriller./Flickr

The High Cost of Cheap Food: Fast Food Is Made of Poison

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Cascio) — Wed, 02 Oct 2013 13:00:00 +0000

It's no exaggeration to say that toxins---including RoundUp weed killer and liver scarring sweeteners---are everywhere in processed food. How many toxic ingredients are in that fast food meal?

The majority of the calories in a typical fast food meal come from corn, which is how Pollan concludes that his meal is essentially made of corn. However, the corn in processed foods isn’t just corn, anymore. The average American eats 1500 pounds of corn. Last year, 88% of corn in the US was genetically modified.

More than half of the corn that Americans ultimately eat was first fed to livestock. Cattle aren’t supposed to eat corn---it causes them extreme gastric distress---and changes their nutritional profile so the omega fatty acid ratios are no longer optimal for good health. Corn poisons the cattle, fattening it up in the process. This is why farmers feed cattle corn in the first place: because beef is sold by the pound, not by the omega 3.

If we are what we eat, then we eat our shame. A burger touted as “all beef” may contain 85% traditional ground beef and 15% “ground beef” that’s actually “lean finely textured beef” recovered through advanced mechanical means, and then disinfected (because so much of what is recovered is also most likely to be splashed with shit.) The finished product---poisoned cattle, disintegrated and mixed with ammonia---is known as “pink slime.”

Americans eat 152 pounds of sugar a year, much of that made from corn. "Maltodextrin," "lactose," "sugar," and "dextrose," all ingredients in "Cool Ranch Dorito" Taco Bell taco shells, are also all sugars. High fructose corn syrup isn’t just corn: its inflammatory, adversely affects the liver, and causes a heightened insulin response, contributing to the eventual development of type 2 diabetes. And it’s everywhere: not just in soft drinks and ketchup but on salad, in tomato sauce, even toothpaste.

What is in your food in smaller percentages is cause for even more alarm. Here's the entire list of what's in one of those new Doritos Tacos Locos Taco Bell shells, which are flavored to taste like another processed food---"Cool Ranch Doritos":

Ground Corn treated with Lime, Vegetable Oil (Corn, Soybean, and/or Cottonseed Oil), Water, Corn Flour, Salt, Maltodextrin (Made From Corn), Corn Starch, Tomato Powder, Sunflower Oil, Lactose, Whey, Skim Milk, Corn Syrup Solids, Onion Powder, Sugar, Garlic Powder, Monosodium Glutamate, Cheddar Cheese (Milk, Cheese Cultures, Salt, Enzymes), Dextrose, Malic Acid, Artificial Color (Including Red 40, Blue 1, Yellow 5, Yellow 5 Lake, Yellow 6 Lake), Buttermilk, Natural and Artificial Flavor, Sodium Acetate, Sodium Caseinate, Spices, Citric Acid, Disodium Inosinate, Disodium Guanylate, and TBHQ (Preservative). CONTAINS: MILK [Source: Taco Bell]

"Disodium inosinate" and "disodium guanylate" are salts, flavor enhancers similar to MSG, which is already present in higher amounts in this product than cheese. "Sodium acetate" is also a salt and flavor enhancer, one you can use in cool science experiments to make "hot ice." Malic acid and citric acid both produce a tart flavor; the "Natural and Artificial Flavor" could contain any number of ingredients. Ironically, TBHQ is highly toxic, but the label is required to warn us that Taco Bell Cool Ranch Dorito Shells contain milk.

The parts of your food listed near the end of the label---“natural and artificial flavors,” preservatives, and colors, include ingredients known to be highly toxic, like TBHQ. They’re permitted because, the argument goes, they’re used in such small quantities that individually, they don't pose a public health concern. But we know just about nothing about the cumulative effects of all of those trace amounts of antifreeze, flame retardants, and herbicides that, like HFCS, are everywhere in industrially processed food. How many of the conditions that plague Americans are traceable to our dependence on cheap, fast food?

The world may never know (Boiled beetle shells in Red #2.)

Image credit: Scott Ableman/Flickr

The High Cost of Cheap Food: Fast Food Is Made of Corn

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Cascio) — Mon, 09 Sep 2013 13:00:00 +0000

What's so bad about making food out of corn? Ask the people who invented it.

If you are what you eat, and especially if you eat industrial food, as 99 percent of Americans do, what you are is "corn."---Michael Pollan, “We Are What We Eat”

Corn is petroleum based.

In “Fast Food Nation,” Eric Schlosser traces a hypothetical fast food meal to its origins in a representative cornfield in Iowa. Further probing reveals that the fuel and fertilizers that allow vast monocropped fields of corn to dominate rural landscapes are made from fossil fuels. Modern corn is grown with so many petroleum inputs that we may as well call our diets “petroleum based” rather than “plant based.” Only by applying liberal quantities of fertilizer and pesticides, having fleets of trucks to transport the corn from those remote fields, and using more petrochemicals to disguise its natural flavor and texture, is the industrial food chain capable of transforming rows of maize into the thousands of products lining supermarket shelves across America.

We sure wouldn’t buy more than a ton of corn, per person, per year if we had to figure out what to do with this much corn as a dry commodity. But disguised as everything from cake mix to Value Meals, Americans eat and drink 1500 pounds of corn per person, annually.

Why do we eat so much corn-based “food”?

Corn is a commodity.

One reason is because it’s less expensive than real food. Value Meals exist because of the subsidies we pay farmers to keep them producing commodity crops like corn and soy, which are then turned into a dizzying array of industrial foods. These products aren’t good foods to base your diet on, and particularly not the versions sold today. Michael Pollan, tracing the same route as Schlosser, has concluded that the 2.5 times corn production has increased since the 1970s is the consequence of US farming subsidies---welfare for Big Food---and that all this corn is the cause of an ongoing epidemic of obesity. The exact mechanism is uncertain: whether hyperpalatability simply drives us to eat more calories, or something more sinister---highly processed and possibly dangerous ingredients, irradiation, trans fats, carcinogenic rancid oils, genetically modified foods---is to blame.

Most corn is now genetically modified---patented, and possibly unsafe.

The vast majority of corn grown in the US---88% last year---is genetically modified to resist applications of herbicides and/or pesticides, resulting in increased use of these products. Worldwide, 30% of corn is genetically modified and increasing, a practice that threatens small farmers because of their cost and the aggressive way seed producers “protect” their patents by suing farmers in whose fields GM seed has landed. Legislation in Argentina favoring industrial farming practices represents a threat to subsistence farmers there, in the second largest producer of GM crops after the US, while in Mexico, peasant farmers see the incursion of Monsanto as “looting” the genetic diversity of native seed.

The Wikipedia page on GMOs describes the controversy over foods as one of labeling, and in which accusations of bias have been made against regulators. That the FDA has a “revolving door” at the top has been widely documented; GM seed has not so much been tested as declared not significantly different from hybridized counterparts. And while Monsanto tested their corn as animal feed for only 90 days, longer tests on rats have revealed that Roundup Ready corn causes organ damage in rats.

We could all have pellagra, and not even realize it.

Another danger of eating a diet largely made of industrially produced corn is that the corn is not nixtamalized. Corn requires nixtamalization to be eaten as a staple food because it’s imbalanced as a source of amino acids for human health. The principal storage protein in corn is zein, an imbalanced source of amino acids; the nixtamalization process reduces zein, but this protein is prized by food industry. Corn’s amino acid makeup is low in tryptophan, which is converted to niacin in the liver; niacin is an important B vitamin and potent serum cholesterol reducing nutrient.

Traditional corn nixtamalization is a poorly understood process that makes it possible to use maize as a staple food for humans.

“Nixtamalizing turns the niacin in maize into free niacin, allowing it to be absorbed by the body and preventing niacin depletion. It also reduces mycotoxins. [Link is mine. JC] Minerals are absorbed from the lime---especially calcium---which can be increased by 750%. The protein zein is also reduced, enhancing the balance of amino acids. And of course nixtamalization greatly enhances the taste of the maize. Yes, it’s most certainly worth the effort.” ---Erda Kroft’s blog entry on Nixtamal.

When corn has been grown as a staple crop without the accompanying knowledge of how to correctly process the grain, the result has been outbreaks of pellagra, a disease of niacin deficiency. Native Americans, who created modern maize (it does not self pollinate and is very unlike its nearest native relative, teocinte), also developed the nixtamalization process, in which corn is soaked in an alkaline solution and hulled. Nixtamal, hominy, masa flour, and corn tortillas made from corn processed with lime---all traditional foods---can be eaten regularly without concern.

Corn as it’s used in industrial food, however, and regular corn meal, are not nixtamalized, and this is most of the corn we eat in the US today. Since we’re a corn fed nation once again, it’s worth asking whether we’renewly at risk of pellagra. Is our Fast Food Nation suffering widely from depression, high cholesterol, irritability, weight gain, an inability to concentrate, insomnia, and carb cravings because we’re malnourished?

Image credit: photofarmer/Flickr

The High Cost of Cheap Food: Fast Food Is Addictive

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Cascio) — Mon, 02 Sep 2013 13:00:00 +0000

When the red pill and the blue pill are the same, choice is an illusion.

Drugs in your food. What if it only appears to be a choice?

Second in a series on "The High Cost of Cheap Food."

The effects of the fast food marketplace, in which addictive food is sold without additional regulation---where in fact it’s easier and cheaper than real, fresh food---are reflected in our mortality and morbidity statistics. In the birthplace of fast food, the leading causes of death are heart disease and cancer, putting lifestyle far ahead of gun violence as a killer of Americans.

Addiction is a deadly force that alters animals' priorities so that mice will press the cocaine lever, ignoring food and water, until they die. Rats will endure electric shock for junk food. Human animals are wired much the same way; our intellect might save us, or simply provide more sophisticated forms of cognitive dissonance.

It’s back to school time, and adult humans with graduate degrees will begin passing out "Just Say No to Drugs" brochures to children who take prescribed amphetamines. Those same well educated adult humans will line up for their morning dose of caffeine and sugar from a big chain instead of making something fresh at home for breakfast, and fail again to see the irony in their lives, even if they caught it in the classroom. It’s why we shouldn’t razz Alanis Morissette too hard for failing to come up with actual ironies for her song; most of us couldn’t spot the ironies in our own lives, either. The response to irony in our lives is cognitive dissonance more often than it’s enlightenment and the desire to change.

For good health, “a combination of regular exercise, healthy diet, smoking avoidance, and weight maintenance” is Johns Hopkins Hospital's sensible advice that's free to take. No one would dispute that personal health is very important---even priceless. Yet the number of dollars we spend positively destroying our health---including on packaged, junk, and fast foods---is enormous; when you add in the amount wasted on products promising us health and freedom from addictions---and failing to deliver--- the combined figure is incalculable.

Our actual priorities place “what's good for us” farther down the list than we care to admit. We know what is good for us , but choose what feels good, especially when it’s easier. Fatty foods, sweets, and salty foods are what we crave, and junk and fast food deliver: full of vegetable oil, unnatural sweeteners, and excess salt that, by hitting our “bliss points” reliably, alter our biology in much the same ways that highly addictive drugs like cocaine do. A Happy Meal is My First Drug Paraphernalia.

When it comes to our food, the problem isn’t simply that we lack willpower to avoid addictive and unhealthy foods; it’s that the system is designed around a particular lifestyle: one in which we work long hours, shop, and go home, efficiently and in relative isolation from other people. In this system, people eat what is manufactured, and eat it quickly, on the go. The system is designed to make us more efficient workers and consumers, not happier, more self-actualized human beings.

All the packaged foods you see advertised are designed to be addictive. The mission of any fast food restaurant is to make theirs your favorite. This can be achieved best, in a zero sum game of “stomach share” in the marketplace, by making you consume far more than you need---even designing foods that make you feel hungrier than when you sat down to eat them. “As a culture, we’ve become upset by the tobacco companies advertising to children, but we sit idly by while the food companies do the very same thing,” says Yale University professor of psychology and public health, Kelly Brownell. Even worse than these advances in junk food technology: the changes that they make to our bodies may be passed down to the next generation.

Coming next in this series: Fast food is made of petroleum.

The High Cost of Cheap Food

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Cascio) — Fri, 30 Aug 2013 13:00:00 +0000

"The High Cost of Cheap Food" is a new series on the hidden costs of feeding a nation---and increasingly, the world---on an unsustainable slurry of scraps and toxins.

1. A fast food diet is an unhealthy diet.

Fast food is not a healthy food choice, to say the very least. As long as we buy our food, cash, and only pay for our health care indirectly, if at all, we will continue to believe that value meals are a bargain and health care is expensive. People buy food on impulse, often when we’re hungry, from companies that indulge our tastes for salt, sugar, and fat. If people shopped for their food as carefully as they do for insurance, or even if the health of our food were as well regulated as insurance, we would all eat better.

For nearly all of us, nearly all of the time, Big Food decides what we eat. They control the market, so that even though it looks like a lot of individuals expressing their freedom to choose, in reality there are not enough differences among the choices, and high quality foods are available in far fewer places. The fast food industry sells us an abundance of food made from cheap, refined, low quality ingredients, like “pink slime” and Coca-Cola, foods that are proven killers. This irregularity of regulation in a country that licenses drivers, pet owners, and hair stylists, is explained by the “Amazing Revolving Door” among industries and the agencies that regulate them.

Fast food does not nourish, because it’s designed to be made from a minimal number of the cheapest ingredients available, by people who’ve received very little training---the better to afford the massive turnover of the fast food industry, which pays a starvation wage to its employees. And neither the government nor the marketplace forces corporations to do a better job of feeding the country.

We as consumers are not the end of the line. Everything works in circles---cycles that provide feedback at every step. The marketplace currently prioritizes cheap food over nourishment, quick meals over Slow Food. The entire model for fast food is unhealthy at every level, and getting worse. The good news is that by demanding freshness, diversity, transparency, and justice from the food systems that serve us, the benefits of healthy eating become not just personal, but social. Making better food choices improves the health of the workers, animals, and ecosystems that nourish us, by creating demand in the marketplace for products that are sustainably raised and harvested, and fairly traded.

Next week: The Leading Causes of Death

Image credit: Νick P/Flickr

How do you want to eat when you grow up?

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Cascio) — Mon, 05 Aug 2013 10:00:00 +0000

I grew up eating white bread in the suburbs.

When my parents got married and had me and my little sister, they were not yet very experienced at feeding themselves. Dad wouldn’t learn how to do much more than simmer water for a baby bottle until our mother went back to work in the early ‘80s, forcing comparisons to “Mr. Mom.” His own father lived his whole life never learning to cook for himself, always catered to by Grandma and before that, no doubt, his own mother.

My mother says her own mother was a lousy cook, and that dinner hours were fraught, plagued by lumpy mashed potatoes and spilled milk. Between them, these two Baby Boomers, our parents, decided that when they had kids and a home of their own, they would make dinner more pleasurable: they would eat what they damn well pleased. No liver. No spinach. And no more lumpy mashed potatoes.

At least one of the problems was that neither one of them had much interest in cooking. My mother was expected to take on the responsibility, so she learned to make a ragu from an Italian girlfriend, and set to burning toast and making too much macaroni and cheese from the box for her new husband for the next decade or two. Christmas morning pancakes came from a Bisquick box. In second grade, my teacher, Mr. Conway, hosted a breakfast potluck in the classroom because he wanted us to taste real maple syrup, only he couldn’t find any. At home, weekday dinners were Shake N’ Bake pork chops or chicken, or a London broil that set off the fire alarm, with sides of boxed au gratin potatoes and frozen broccoli. When I was little, we’d have Jell-O chocolate pudding or gelatin with Cool-Whip for dessert.

My parents only liked a few vegetables---corn, broccoli, green beans, potatoes---and always prepared them in the same few ways. Green beans always came French cut from the can, served cold with a vinaigrette. Salads were composed of iceberg lettuce, cucumbers, and tomatoes, and maybe some carrot shavings, croutons, or fake bacon bits from a shaker.

I didn’t like raw tomatoes as a kid. (I do, now.) I didn’t like a lot of other raw things, because they were served year round, without regard to season. I didn’t know that a ripe Bartlett pear is yellow, not green, and so to wait for it. I didn’t know when to anticipate tomato season.

On first taste, I didn’t like homemade macaroni and cheese, preferring the kind that comes from a box. I preferred cakes made from a mix to those from a bakery, or from scratch. (Who made a cake from scratch? I didn’t even know how. No one I knew made them.) My taste in cheese hasn’t strayed very far from the flavors of my childhood. I still don’t like them very smelly, or with visible mold (and yet Gorgonzoloa remains so trendy), or too tangy. I stick to the soothing textures of ricotta and Cheddar; for dash, a sprinkling of queso fresco, or a grating of Romano.

Someone told me about their childhood of eating only white food: white bread, white pasta, Saltines, chicken breast. I was saved from this fate by other people. Besides the parents of friends and classmates, and teachers eager to broaden my horizons, we went to restaurants where I was allowed to order off the adult menu from an early age, and I had neighbors, and grandparents who liked strong flavors, things like smoked eel, steamer clams, calamari, mashed turnips, and pickles. I associate the smell of sauerbraten with my maternal grandmother’s kitchen. Her parents kept a bowl of mixed nuts in the shell in their parlor, and I always wanted to play with them and eat them: to use the nutcracking tools, or just to sift my hands through the bowl, feeling their smooth and rough shells. My father’s mother made spicy sauces, kept a broad array of charcuterie on hand for snacking with crusty Italian bread, and served a traditional seven seafoods meal on Christmas Eve.

Except on holidays, I never ate turkey, fish, sweet potatoes, or olives. If it wasn’t too much trouble, and was wholesome, my mother might indulge me in odd requests. I asked for spinach after watching “Popeye” and got it, out of a can, with butter. I’m surprised I ever went back to it. (Thank you, saag paneer!) Once I tried prunes, I decided they were a superior version of raisins, and started snacking on them. I was still too young for my peers to tease me about their association with old age.

After school, I would watch syndicated sitcoms and eat American cheese slices folded into quarters, atop Saltine crackers. In the mornings I had cold cereal with milk. School lunches were mystery meat, more bread and milk, granola bars or bakery cookies, ice cream. Sometimes I ate a piece of fruit or some raisins. Treats came wrapped from the store, bought for guests or with allowance money: candy bars, cookies, cakes.

When I got a job in a supermarket as a teenager, I bought myself other treats: olives, root beer, fried potato sticks (in a can), herbal teas. I was trying new things as well as indulging old comforts, finding out what I liked and who I was, which I thought of as being more or less the same thing. Some of what I tried in my twenties didn’t stick, but a lot of it did.

There are a few foods here and there that I still get the same comfort and enjoyment from as I did---ice cream and cheese are at the top of the list---but for the most part, I eat different foods from what I ate as a child. There are the things I didn’t like and do now, but mostly, there are the foods I wasn’t exposed to very often or at all, that I’ve developed a taste for and now enjoy.

The first time I ever tasted lamb was at a friend’s house when I was eleven. Her mother offered me a platter of cold chops so casually, I didn’t realize that they are expensive. It was delicious, but I mostly forgot about it until many years later, and had the resources to learn to cook lamb at home. Now I can’t remember when I first bought it, but I do remember the one time we bought a whole lamb from a farmer and it was handed over fresh and whole, not frozen and butchered into roasts and chops and ground meat, like we usually get. When we were done, we ate the mysterious breast roast, broiled with salt and pepper, that we had hacked out whole and researched later. I’d get another whole lamb just to have that roast again, the one I can never find in grocery stores.

A platonic boyfriend took me to my first Indian restaurant (my first favorite: saag paneer, spinach with homemade cheese), and then my first Vietnamese restaurants. He had more than one favorite: there was the proud chef with a small restaurant in a strip mall, who served both Vietnamese and French dishes, and then the large place, very popular, where I ate a memorable dessert of red beans over chipped ice. A girlfriend introduced me to Ethiopian cuisine. My first mother-in-law taught me volumes about Southern food. With my full faith in her abilities, she served me the first liver I ever ate. At her table, I’d learned that even okra can be delicious. I am confident that I don’t like liver, as much as it would fit my ideal of myself to enjoy organ meat.

I began to knit together what I knew: the relationships among Greek and Turkish and Italian foods, and in the other direction, Italian and low country French. Why Ethiopian food was so familiar to me, the first time I ate it: because Southern food is in large part African. It happened to me again when I had Nigerian food that reminded me of Cuban, Ecuadorian, and Puerto Rican meals I’ve eaten: yellow rice with peas, fried bananas. When I branch outward culinarily, geographically, from the Mediterranean into the spice blends of north Africa and Asia Minor, I think of India, and trade routes. I learned to make sausage while working a meat counter, and made more connections: the need to preserve meat, the trade routes again---Rome, and the word “botulism,” which derives from the Latin for “sausage”---and the spices that recur: ginger, cinnamon, black pepper, coriander, and the most important of all, salt.

I make my own yogurt, and ginger beer, and pickles: not always, but I know how and can do it, for fun, the ability to customize, or to control the quality. I can make dishes from my childhood that I want to recreate, or make with better quality ingredients than is available in their store-bought alternates---lasagna, beef stew, chocolate pudding---but they’re not the bulk of what I eat. I eat brown rice, beets, pickles, lamb, duck, fresh herbs, arugula... I never ate any of these until I was an adult.

Thanks to market forces, there are foods in the world now that simply didn’t exist in my childhood: innovations in fast food, energy drinks, genetically modified foods. I avoid these in favor of the discoveries I’m still making, in the world of traditional foods I’ve yet to discover or master. I had my first tamales at a high school potluck. A classmate’s mother made them, and I was partway through my second when someone told me that you don’t eat the cornhusks. (That’s how good they were.)

Projects like making sausage, or trying tamales for the first time, or harvesting tomatoes for a pot of sauce, can be learning experiences that lead to more change, or one offs, blips in the stream of your steady diet. Sometimes I have to learn to make something more than once. White sauce was one, for me: a friend taught me to make Alfredo sauce, and then I forgot again, until I learned again to make a cheese sauce for baked mac and cheese. It was worth trying again: like tamales. You risk destroying long-held assumptions, as when I learned from Mark Bittman that one of my old favorites to order in Italian restaurants, shrimp scampi, isn’t an authentic Italian dish: “scampi” means “shrimp.” Losing the magic is a small price, in my book, for gaining the power to make a dish myself.

“Shrimp served in the style of shrimp” is one Bubba missed

What did you eat when you were a kid, and was it good? Do you still eat like that, or has your diet changed? For better or worse? How do you define “better” or “worse”---is it flavor, convenience, nutrition, or something else?

What I eat is what I’m made of, and it’s what I sit down to. I face it, then put it in my face. I identify with the food I eat. My parents got an extra freezer so they could take deliveries from the Schwan’s truck. Our extra freezers are for deliveries from the local farmers who raise our meat, and where we tuck extra servings of farm share vegetables, put up fruit from the u-picks, and keep homemade cookies we bake ahead, and give away at the holidays. I’m proud of what’s in my freezer. Our values are in there.

For some, the image of success is an individual who hardly needs to eat: someone who lives on Red Bull, or salad, or who only eats when it’s elegant and convenient to do so. For others, success equates with hedonic reward: the boss is the one who gets to have whatever he wants for dinner, and dessert, too. Do you still eat the way your parents ate? Do you eat the way other people think you do? Do you eat what you want, when you want it? Do you eat the way you want?

The Food Economy of Cities

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Cascio) — Fri, 26 Jul 2013 13:00:00 +0000

Is it a waste of resources for urban foodies to garden on their rooftops?

Will Boisvert points out to locavores in “The Breakthrough” that transportation is only 5% of the energy used, on average, to get food on your plate, reducing the locavore dilemma to one of choosing between being a “rather cultic” farm share owner and accepting the efficient solution of factory farmed produce from California. But there’s more value in getting close to your food sources than simply saving fuel, and you don’t have to move to the country to get some of the benefits.

Harvesting your own food, even occasionally, gives you more respect for the land and the people who do farm labor. It’s satisfying on an animal level to see and smell the soil and air, and to taste what they yield. It inspires confidence to serve---and is actually more nourishing to eat---foods that you know well and enjoy. Meeting food where it lives advances that knowledge and pleasure.

Boisvert says he’s an environmentalist, not an agribusiness executive, but the ways in which the author of “A Locavore’s Dilemma” ignores the differences between conventional Red Delicious and heirloom Belles du Boskoop in comparing apples with apples, makes him sound more like the heartless businessman behind institutional cuisine than a passionate foodie. Just as focusing on transportation costs in food production is a red herring to environmentalists, focusing on efficiency in food production is largely irrelevant to people whose priorities include health, social justice, and flavor.

The author is correct that a city’s efficiencies force certain lifestyle standards on people in the city that give them smaller environmental footprints. 24 hour subway service is an efficiency that works for the most populous city in the United States, not so well for the Pioneer Valley. But why not encourage city folks, as Shel Horowitz suggests, to use spaces that wouldn’t be otherwise used? New Yorkers are not likely to drop off the grid entirely. They’re going to grow a few salad vegetables, and hopefully take ownership of their diets in a new way.

Consider those rooftop greens a gateway drug to lining up like “junkies,” as Boisvert describes those of us with farm shares. Some items in the reasonably priced (for organic) share box will represent a challenge at first, but the lifestyle changes of eating locally have made us more resourceful consumers: better educated, more confident, with more real answers to the question, “What’s for dinner?”

Instead of having respect for the people who produce his food, Boisvert thinks that growing your own arugula is work properly done by “Mexicans”, middle class urbanites who do it for the vegetables and a sense of accomplishment are suckers, and CSAs are “the worst food deal imaginable.” He imagines fresh produce as no more nutritious than canned , and a hydroponic operation in a Brooklyn warehouse as locally grown food. But canned food is cooked, which destroys nutrients in fruits and vegetables, and hydro is more factory than farm.

In hydroponics, there’s no terroir to convey the distinctive flavors and nutritive qualities of the soil, making locale irrelevant, and there’s no sun as a free energy input for plants. Instead, there are grow lights and vitamin solutions: micro-factory farming. This is convenient for restaurants and grocers that want delicate greens delivered on a just in time basis, year-round, but as Boisvert points out, it’s not an efficient use of energy to produce food. It also doesn’t teach city folk to respect the origins of their food, but to expect it to conform to the same control and mechanization as other aspects of city life.

Every solution has to be localized, even if it partakes of global solutions. In New York City, foodies seeking ingredients from upscale groceries and farmer’s markets can add local hydroponic salad greens to their options. As well as scouring the city for goods, aspirant urban locavores have their rooftops on which to grow, although there is the concern Horowitz raises, that the air up there is no cleaner than at ground level, and not as clean as the air in California, or the Hudson Valley.

But rooftop arugula and hydroponic mache are additions to, not replacements for, what feeds the vast majority of New Yorkers: the fields of not just California, but the world. The U.S. may be self-sufficient in the staple crops that make industrial food, but the foods we eat fresh, livestock and produce, are increasingly grown in other parts of the world. The USDA puts very little emphasis on the importance of fresh, raw, and green vegetables in our diets, as reflected by the tiny percentage of USDA subsidies that go to garden crops, and the gradual de-emphasis of vegetables in dietary guidelines.

Which brings us to the real issue at hand, the priorities on which we base our lifestyle choices. True urban locavorism may be science fiction (or a future dystopia of vat food), but urban food production on a small scale is currently being practiced, if not for its efficiency, than for other qualities important to people, such as freshness, nutrient density, flavor, and novelty.

---Image of NYC rooftop garden credit: Jeffrey/Flickr

What is food?

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Cascio) — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 13:00:00 +0000

Let me ask you: does this look like food to you?

Michael Pollan says to “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Yet some non-foods fill the shelves of “health” emporiums and websites. Sites, books, and articles that purport to be about and for good health can’t even get the “food” part of Pollan’s advice right. How do they screw it up so bad?

What is food, anyway? Food isn’t just whatever you can swallow that won’t kill you on the spot. Food is a biological necessity and for humans, it’s a cultural necessity, as well. Everybody eats. And before the advent of industrial “food,” everybody ate food. It was as easy as that. Now, we have to trace our food back to its origins to be sure it is 100% food.

Food is necessary to life, and food is made from living matter. Pollan says to eat “mostly plants.” Besides plants, there are fungi and animals we can eat. The other substances we must ingest regularly to survive are water, sodium chloride (sea salt), and sunshine (or vitamin D). Everything we need to live can come from a diet of living things in our environment: this is what we have always eaten, for more than a million years.

Today’s industrial diet includes multivitamins, energy drinks, and countless foods containing chemical flavors, colors, and preservatives. The very plants and animals in these foods may be genetically modified organisms, or raised on them. Corn, soy, and other animal feeds are among the most common GMOs on the market, and GM salmon is being considered for approval for the US market. Some foods are irradiated, including fresh meat, seafood, eggs, and produce, sprouting seeds, and spices. The US government does not require labeling for GMOs. It does require labeling for irradiated food; the US label for irradiated food is called a “Radura symbol,” and looks like this:

Radura: see "Healthwashing", "Greenwashing"

Vitamin pills include synthetic versions of naturally occurring elements, that are not identical to the natural forms: they are isomer, or mirror images, of the naturally occurring versions. Close, but not so close that the body does not treat them differently, or that they do not have a negative effect on the body when they are incorporated as if they were the real thing. Doctors selling expensive vitamin supplements will happily explain some of the toxic synthetics that they do not use in their pills. Naturally Occurring Standards for vitamins are being proposed by the Organic Consumers Organization.

But supplements aren’t just in pills: this post from The Healthy Home Economist contains info on the dangers of cheap synthetic vitamins added to nut milks. Check for yourself to see if your fortified breakfast cereals, energy bars and drinks, and dietary supplements use these toxic versions of nutrients. Niacin, riboflavin, ascorbic acid, and other common nutrients are synthetic, and not identical to their naturally occurring counterparts.

Activists have been increasingly noting how industrial food and the pharmaceutical industry are becoming less distinct from one another. Carlos Monteiros, writing for the World Public Health Nutrition Association website on industrial food that makes health claims, notes: “In 2010 Tang delivered 20 billion servings in 90 countries. It is very profitable, at 37 per cent, the kind of return usually associated with successful pharmaceuticals.”

With one hand, Kraft Foods and other giant food manufacturers sell us “health foods” like Tang that are secretly toxic, and with another hand that is twice as large, Kraft sells us snack foods that we know are bad for us, but we eat anyway. We think we’re being good when we drink our Tang (or Red Bull, or Slim Fast, or Vitamin Water), but we’re actually drinking poisonous chemical slurries to wash down the rancid, genetically modified, refined products we call “fast food” or snacks. None of this is food, and it’s not simply unhealthy: it’s killing us.

What are the health risks of eating such a diet? Cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes... the big killers are industrial foods. And who stands to benefit when the majority of people have nothing else to eat but food that causes disease? Other than food manufacturers, it’s pharmaceutical companies who stand to profit from our misery. Which brings us to another category of non-food: antibiotics.

The word “antibiotic” means “against life.” Antibiotics kill other living things. We use them medicinally to kill bacteria that cause disease. But when they’re used broadly, they breed resistance into the organisms that harm us. Despite the long term implications, farmers continue to use broad spectrum antibiotics and give them routinely to all their livestock, whether they’re healthy or sick, to prevent illness and increase the size of their animals. A short term side effect of antibiotic use in this fashion is that it makes the animals bigger when they don’t devote any resources to fighting infection. The same appears to be true of plants that are routinely sprayed with pesticides. Though we have won regulation for organically raised plants, the USDA has given up on restricting antibiotic use in livestock, leaving it up to the consumer to seek out meat, fish, and dairy that haven’t been fed antibiotics.

Food is made from living things. To be healthy, eat a life based diet. Consider foods from the sea, dark leafy greens, fats, cultured foods, and other fresh foods that are highly nutrient dense as alternatives to your multivitamins and energy drinks, and for breakfast and snacks, the meals we most often eat from packages. Work a little for your food. Know what you’re eating. And keep looking for alternatives to the industrial diet. Maybe you don’t think you like anchovies and kale yet (Kale, Caesar!) But how could anything taste worse than Red Bull?

Image credit: stevendepolo/Flickr

Living Foods

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Cascio) — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 16:09:00 +0000

Micro-farming holds new meaning in the kitchen where bacteria, yeast, and plants are encouraged to take root.

Since Kevin stopped eating gluten, I’ve stopped making my own bread, but I used to be in the habit of raising colonies of bread yeast, just to the point where they must have thought they had built quite the civilization, and then popping their whole world into a piping hot oven until it was crisp and steaming through.

A couple days ago, I made yogurt in the crock pot. I do this every ten days or so, when we run low on milk. I make sure to reserve enough yogurt to culture the next batch before heating, then cooling half a gallon to a gallon of milk in the crock pot in preparation for enculturation. I add yogurt to the warm milk and wrap the crock up warmly in a towel, allowing the colonies of bacteria to grow, and thickening the milk overnight to the consistency of pudding.

I keep compost and let organisms have their way with it, assuming they all know better than I do how to turn my kitchen waste back into soil. There is, in fact, a magical heap of rich black dirt in my back yard that used to be banana peels, cabbage cores, and other vegetable detritus.

A few years ago, I made ginger beer using the recipe in Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions. I’m getting ready to do this again, because it’s hot out and I’m craving this beer. It’s mildly alcoholic and very spicy. It takes about a month to make, and begins by setting out a mash of ginger, sugar, and water to culture. Wild yeast from the air will find it and turn it into something else. The first few times I did this, it worked like a charm, so when it didn’t come out right a time after, I could tell from the dearth of signs of life: no bubbles, no good odor, and the color turned gray and dark.

I still fail at my micro-farming on occasion. A jar of beans intended for sprouts will moulder, instead, and have to be thrown away. On rare mornings, I unwrap the crock pot and the cultured milk has not thickened. Kitchen-sized is just about the level of agriculture I can manage: a cup of sprouts, a heap of compost. I have farm shares, but no garden in my tiny yard; not yet. For now I’m happy to divert compostables from the garbage stream, even without having a use for soil enrichment. I only have time to indulge so many of my obsessions at once.

Every once in a while I am caught by surprise by my own cooking, and am reminded of the several steps I mastered to be able to create this dish that I used to have to go out to get any version of. It happened last night as I ate the last serving of sprouted, spicy chickpeas with rice and kale and yogurt for dinner. It is a good example of what I consider comfort food today: we’ve been eating this spicy chickpea dish for years and know that it always tastes best after it’s been in the fridge for several days, letting the spices sink in. As I ate it last night, it was spiced and cooked to my taste, nourishing to my own idiosyncratic and exacting standards, and made fresh from local ingredients. I brought the kale home from the farm, sprouted the peas, roasted the cumin seeds, cultured the milk, steamed the rice. I know it takes exactly 40 minutes to get perfect brown basmati rice from one particular saucepan and precise measures of grain and water. I’ve got the yogurt down to a science, too. All combined, it is indistinguishable from magic. Arthur C. Clarke would approve.

Photo credit: little blue hen/flickr

Meat and potatoes

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Cascio) — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 15:31:00 +0000

Meat and potatoes have gotten a bad rap over the years, and they don’t deserve it. I’ve changed how I source and prepare my food so that I can be sure it’s good, healthy food, all the way to its source. Your meat and potatoes are probably going to kill you, but it’s not for the reasons you might think.

Frying potatoes in freshly rendered suet

Let’s start with the potatoes. How do you take your spuds: pre-fried and then individually quick frozen? Pre-fried, frozen, and then refried? Mash from a box? Unless you’re buying organic, chances are your convenience potatoes are grown with an eye for convenience to the supply chain rather than nutrition and flavor. Conventional agricultural practice requires so many toxic pesticides that potatoes are on the EWG’s “dirty dozen” list of vegetables you should never buy from conventional growers. Who does buy from conventional growers are the commercial producers of potato products: the companies that sell you frozen fast food French fries, hash browns, potato chips and other industrial potato products. And it’s not just the cheap meals that are made with conventional potatoes: just about every restaurant uses conventional produce and frozen convenience foods. Whether you’re washing down drive-thru hash browns with coffee, having a bag of chips with your sandwich, or order a baked potato with your steak dinner, the potato is likely to have been conventionally grown in a monoculture of Russet Burbanks that are sprayed with poisons, as well as being genetically modified to make their own pest killing chemicals.

Doesn’t that sound delicious?

Then there’s the frying oil. If you’re old enough and were raised within a few miles of a McDonald’s, you can remember what potatoes fried in beef fat smell like. According to “Fast Food Nation” author Eric Schlosser, for decades McDonald’s used a mixture of mostly beef fat with some cottonseed oil to fry their famous shoestring potatoes. In 1990, they switched to pure vegetable oil, although they still add “natural flavor” from “an animal source” to their French fries to evoke that beefy flavor and odor. Vegetable oil might be a step up from shortening, which really will kill you, but it’s still several steps back from the healthiest frying choice: their original, beef fat.

People have only started using large amounts of vegetable oils recently. In antiquity, we ate oils from fruits like the olive, which are evidently oily to the casual observer, and can be pressed by hand. The kinds of vegetable oils used today in great quantities, like canola and cottonseed, are extracted from tiny, hard seeds using pressure and heat, changing the chemical structure of the oil and generally making it rancid. Rancid oils are carcinogens. Wellness Mama’s blog post on why you should never eat vegetable oil or margarine includes a flow chart the describes the process of manufacturing vegetable oil. Margarine is typically made from hydrogenated vegetable oil (like Crisco) and has had its fats warped in such a way that they are recognized as harmful: New York City banned trans fats in city restaurants in 2008.

Dr. Mercola points out that Crisco was originally developed for candlemaking, but when that industry declined in favor of electric light, they began marketing it as a healthy alternative to saturated animal fats. Suet has also been used in candlemaking. It is very firm and waxy, and once rendered, is snowy white in color. Old-school cooks in the South and elsewhere swear by rendered animal fats for the flakiest pie crusts and light, crispy fried fish.

Two hundred years ago in Ireland, a family could support itself in good health on an acre of potatoes and a milk cow. Potatoes are a nutritious food, not only energy dense, but full of potassium, vitamin A, protein, and fiber. Raw dairy supplied more protein and other vitamins, as well as the saturated fat essential to life.

Traditionally raised and prepared pork ribs, collards, and fried potatoes

A hundred years ago, people ate virtually no vegetable oils, and the average American ate about 18 pounds of butter a year. Today, people eat half that amount of butter, but have added 70 pounds of vegetable fat a year to their diets.

The idealized diet in the West now looks like a meal you can buy at McDonald’s: a small amount of lean flesh from grain fed animals (like a chicken breast or beef patty), and the rest of the diet being made up of high-density vegetable fat, like cooking oil, and carbohydrates from vegetable sources, either naturally dense or made so with refining: the white flour bun, soda, and fries. This is a long way from a buttered roasted potato, as it was commonly eaten and enjoyed two hundred years ago, in every regard: ratios, sources, methods, the length and complexity of the chain from soil and sun to dinner plate.
This week, I made a dinner of French fries fried in freshly rendered beef fat, and slow-cooked pork ribs, with a side of slaw. The next night, I ate the leftovers with some garlicky collard greens. The fried potatoes were surprisingly light, not greasy, and the scent reminded me of how fries used to taste when I was a kid. The ribs, from a locally raised pig that foraged, were strong in pig flavor and muscle fiber, not mushy like grain fed pork can be after slow cooking. The meat was delicious and tender and pulled away from the bone cleanly.

This weekend, having ground beef, bacon, mushrooms, Cheddar, suet, and potatoes all on hand, I will probably make a gluten-free equivalent of the fast food classic: a beef burger with all the fixings, and a large serving of French fries. The meat isn’t going to kill us, any more than the fat will, because we’re supposed to eat animals that lived naturally. The ground beef and tallow both came from a grass-fed bull. I might eat some kale with it, but I don’t need to add greens to redeem this meal. Food made the right way, all the way back to its origins in the Earth, will nourish, and I can trust my senses to tell me when I’ve had enough of any part of it. A restaurant meal can end in bloat and regret, but this never seems to happen when I make it myself from scratch.

A meal of conventionally raised meat and potatoes can look identical to one prepared with the right ingredients. Thanks to the flavor industry, you may even be fooled into thinking they taste very similar. Yet the two meals can be different in every important and measurable way, from its genetics, to the health of the organisms when they were alive, to its current chemical composition and nutritional profile. These differences extend to including whether the two meals in question---one produced traditionally, the other, produced industrially---will feed you or poison you, and in what measure they will satisfy and nourish, or discomfort and deplete.

Industrial Imperialism: Exporting the Flavor of America

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Cascio) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 17:09:00 +0000

In Japan, children are taught about healthy eating from early school age, in a unit called shokuiko, or “food education.” Last year it was reported that McDonald’s, home of the Happy Meal, now produces food education materials used in schools in Japan. According to Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, family physician and health blogger, the American fast food giant is hoping that Japanese school children “will associate McDonald's branding of their healthy eating classes, and hence McDonald's as a whole, with healthy eating.”

McDonald’s is selling the values and flavor of the West: America’s most important export. In China, McDonald’s presents its food as being of the highest quality. Given the recent history of food recalls from China due to tainting and corruption, (would you buy organic from China?) it would be ironic, if not for all of the victims who are taken in by the commercial food producers’ claims.

There have always been dangers inherent in food. We must eat or we die, but eating the wrong thing, once, can be a fatal mistake. Worse is when we eat something continuously, sensing no harm, only to find out that the dangers accumulate over time with few or no symptoms. Smoking a cigarette won’t kill you. Smoking a pack a day for ten years won’t even kill you. But we know that cigarettes contain dangerous toxins, and that people who smoke for decades are much more likely to develop certain diseases. Saccharine, Red #5, and other famously toxic food additives didn’t taste like poison to fans of Tab and the old red M&Ms.

Products with known health dangers, like tobacco cigarettes and infant formula, were once far more popular in the US than they are today. In the 1970s, more than half of adults smoked cigarettes. Breastfeeding, once the only choice for feeding infants, came to be regarded as practically unnatural once infant formula became widely available. A new cultural wave of breastfeeding awareness and celebration has been breaking against that corporate front for more than a generation.

Since then, both of these products have been more aggressively marketed in other countries, where the common wisdom had not yet developed against these new dangers. Rising middle classes, like the ones in India and China, want what has been so successfully sold to the middle classes who existed before them. A Big Mac and a Marlboro is the flavor of America. Even infants can suckle at rubber teats full of chemicals, and their mothers convinced that this is better.

Don’t look down your nose at them: we were convinced to do exactly the same things, here. Look at pictures from the 1970s and be reminded of how, in the course of an American century, cigarette smoking went from uncommon to ubiquitous and back to uncommon again.

Today, a similar war is being pitched against fast food. New York City bans trans fats, and San Francisco bans Happy Meals. Yet, most people still eat fast food in this country, still wash it down with carcinogenic beverages. (Again, are you surprised?)

They’re clamoring for them, say the multinationals who sell poison, cheap and tasty. The people want caramel color made using ammonia and that causes leukemia. If they didn’t want it, they’d buy something else.

Are you buying it?

Photo credit: nelo_hotsuma

Paula Deen Is Not Your Mom

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Cascio) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:43:00 +0000

Paula Deen, food entertainer, has recently revealed her relationship to Victroza, a diabetes drug

“Honey, I’m your cook, not your doctor. You have to be responsible for yourself.”---Paula Deen

“Let your medicine be your food and your food be your medicine.” ---Hippocrates

Caveat emptor---let the buyer beware---is Paula Deen’s warning regarding her portrayal of Southern cuisine.

Deen’s food entertainment empire began with her restaurant in the city of Savannah, Georgia, where she lives, and has grown to include TV shows, cookbooks, endorsements, and product lines. Fans of celebrity chefs like Deen are encouraged to consider the similarities between cooking at home and cooking for a living. But home cooks have different concerns from restaurant chefs. A home cook’s main or only job isn’t making dinner, but home cooks feel responsible for the health of the people they cook for, not just their enjoyment of the meal.

If you are lucky, there is at least one person in the world who cares about your health enough to cook for you accordingly. Make no mistake: Paula Deen is not that person. She is not your cook, not your doctor, and unless your name is Jamie or Bobby Deen, she’s not your mom. She is an entertainer, and her media empire now extends to speaking on behalf of Victroza, a drug she takes to manage her diabetic condition.

Paula Deen has recently admitted that she has insulin resistance, or type 2 diabetes. In The Washington Post, Jane Black describes Deen’s condition as “eminently avoidable” and “usually brought on by a combination of unhealthy eating, excess weight, high blood pressure and a couch-potato lifestyle.” A more nuanced explanation is available courtesy of Dr. Stephan Guyanet, a science blogger who breaks out the following factors causing insulin resistance in a series on his website: excess energy, or calories in the diet over those expended, inflammation, your brain, micronutrient status and the macronutrient composition of your diet.

Paula Deen’s image as a Southern cook is distinct from how she conducts her private life. As she has said repeatedly, the food she cooks as part of her public persona is for entertainment purposes. We can judge whether the food she prepares on TV is the basis of a healthy diet---and many have criticized her offerings---but we can’t say what part bacon and butter had in causing Deen’s medical condition.

If you cook from a Southern tradition, you probably don’t cook exactly like Paula Deen, either. There are regional and class differences among home cooks, as well as a range of personal tastes. Compare Deen’s food to the French-inspired Southern menu of Frank Stitt’s restaurant in Birmingham, or for a different kind of French influence on Southern food, the spice and humor of the late, great Cajun Cook, Justin Wilson. There are clear African influences in Southern food, from collards and sweet potatoes, so like African yams, to the pit barbecue. While the exported images of Southern food may more often fit the mold of Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles than of The Pink Teacup, there are cuisines that are recognizably Southern that are less energy dense, have less vegetable fat, fewer processed ingredients, and more vegetables, than is imagined by people whose image of Southern cuisine is based entirely on media, rather than on personal experience in the homes of Southern cooks.

Tamar Adler, in her essay on Paula Deen and balance in the diet, celebrates another home cook whose approach to “normal” Southern home cooking is of a sort I recognize from my years in rural Florida, with green beans and plenty of pork. She writes about Edna Lewis who, in her country cookbook, described hearty breakfasts followed by lunches of greens.

Rural Southerners learned to cook what flourished in the South, to feed people who did hard physical labor under grueling conditions. These cuisines survived for generations because they met the needs of the people eating it. It tastes good, can be prepared from available ingredients and time, and sustains health. Some of it was dense fare, but part of a home cook’s responsibility is to serve an array of good, fresh foods in proportions that can be eaten in good health by all members of the family: sedentary, active, young, and old. While our idea of what is “real” may translate to what has survived most unchanged by time, all of these cuisines, including Deen’s, are authentic Southern cuisine. The challenge is in discerning what of the new should be embraced, and what of the old discarded, if anything.

We all used to eat traditional diets, but today, our culture changes so quickly, and people move away from where they grew up, so the foods we used to eat are no longer available, and in addition to that, our needs have changed. Most of us do less physical work, and contend with more environmental stress and pollution, than our forebears. Modern people are always having to find new ways to feed ourselves, based on what is available in our changed environments. One way we do that is by looking around at what other people are eating.

Cooking programs like Deen’s are a part of that landscape, but like other marketing images, they mislead us into consuming much more food than is healthy, and into eating foods that are highly rewarding--hyperpalatable foods full of sugar, salt, and fat--rather than the natural range of flavors we were designed to discern and enjoy.

Deen is not a good example of Southern cooking, or of comfort food, or of home cooking, because she doesn’t demonstrate how to make healthy meals that are inexpensive and simple to prepare. She doesn’t use local ingredients except incidentally, or traditional methods or equipment. The food she prepares and sells is all-American, based on nationally available commercial products, and soothing (read: numbing) in its hyperpalatable way, but not healthy.

While we may hope to learn something from them, the expectations we bring to cooking shows may poorly match what is provided. Entertainment cooking programs don’t teach you how to choose or prepare ingredients for cooking, and the cost of ingredients, waste, seasonal availability, and geography are not considerations. The show’s producers compress the perceived prep and cooking time to fit the show. They may take advantage of your ignorance as a viewer, and misrepresent a regional cuisine with which you are unfamiliar.

Here in western Massachusetts in January, the “Winter Warmers” episode of Paula’s Home Cooking sounded most appealing as an introduction to her program. Paula cooks from a home that, in exterior shots on the show, has a palm tree waving from the front yard and green grass growing; in other words, nothing like the view from my window, of bare tree branches and snow on the ground: land that could use a “warmer.” In this episode, she makes a seafood gratin, a fried veal cutlet over spinach, and an apple cookie bar dessert. She never mentions where any of her ingredients come from: the shrimp and scallops, the spinach, the apples, and everything else, must all just come from a Savannah supermarket, indistinguishable from a supermarket in Akron or Phoenix, and where these ingredients are always available, year-round.

The meal, while fairly rich, is also very expensive to produce, but not inventive in its use of unusual or expensive ingredients. Her ingredients are alternately inordinately expensive, or cheap and nutritionally weak. In the gratin, she covers flavorful, expensive scallops and shrimp with a cheese sauce. Even conventionally raised veal is very expensive and can be hard to find, but she fries that up in butter cracker crumbs. These might taste good, but Deen’s dishes are examples of gilding the lily, not hearty country fare. This isn’t what people in the South eat in their kitchens after climbing off a tractor: this is what Brooklyn hipsters wearing ironic John Deere caps eat in comfort food diners.

The ingredients are all prepped in advance: the shrimp are peeled and deveined, the apples peeled, cored, and sliced. This isn’t unusual, but it is a missed opportunity, if the cooking show star has some basic skills to demonstrate. Martin Yan has made a long career of cutting up chickens at lightning speed and mincing onions faster than the eye can follow, with his signature cleaver. When Deen finally handles a raw ingredient, her onion chopping is crude and she reams a lemon, seeds and all, right into her finished dish.

Deen’s meal ends with the production of a dessert bar made of cheap, energy dense, commercial products, including at least one--Philadelphia Cream Cheese--that Deen is paid to promote. The dishes in this episode appear to be easy to produce, and look like they would taste good, but not amazing, and not good enough to compensate for their poor nutrient value, the cost of the ingredients, or the time it would take to prepare. While the end of the “Cajun Cook” always left me feeling a little hungry for Wilson’s dinner---and he ended every show seated at dinner with a glass of wine---imagining eating Deen’s “Winter Warmers” makes me feel queasy. My body tells me that eating whole meals like this every day would make me very sick, indeed.

Even if a strong causal link could be made between Gooey Butter Cake Bars and type 2 diabetes, Deen’s body is not a matter of public health, and her choices regarding diet, exercise, and medication are none of our business. Dr. Hyman warns that Victroza could be the next Avandia: a popular diabetes drug that caused heart attacks. Victroza is not only potentially dangerous, but is also an expensive drug, too, as Nestle points out. Yet while Deen promotes her medication of choice, she also tries to play the class card by saying that we can’t all afford to eat prime rib. Of course, Deen can afford to eat whatever she wants, but that was never the point.

Carol Plotkin writes in "Paula Deen and the Fallacy of Moderation", “To say ‘all things in moderation’ to me seems like an excuse to maintain the status quo, which arguably is average.” If the average diet is an unhealthy one, leading to an epidemic of lifestyle-related diseases, there’s no reason any of us should emulate what we see on TV. Deen and similar food entertainers are not, or should not be, a goal toward which home cooks strive.

There are class reasons why the average experience for most people in the South is to be overweight and to develop type 2 diabetes. Not Southern cooking, but stress, food deserts, and poverty, are to blame for the poor health of people living in the American Southeast. Tamar Adler says we risk demonizing butter, bacon, comfort food, or Southern cuisine when we rush to demonize Paula Deen. Deen’s cooking “is not a good representation of comfort food,” Adler writes. “It confuses too much for a good, delicious, soulful amount.” The line of Paula Deen desserts available at Walmart is not an oasis of Southern hospitality; it’s one of the mirages of the food desert.

Do you eat like a lab rat?

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Cascio) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 21:28:00 +0000

Like you, Rattus norvegicus enjoys snack cakes

Are you living the rat race? If you labor alone, yet have little privacy, find your work unrewarding, and your lifestyle stressful, get little exercise, fresh air, or fresh food, and find your weight is also slowly climbing, you might be living like a lab rat.

Rattus norvegicus 101

Rats are not mice, and mice are not men. Lab rats are larger than their wild relations, and much larger than house mice. Wistar rats, one of the most common lab rats, weigh 300-500 grams on average as adults, depending on their sex. By comparison, a typical house mouse weighs only 10-25 grams.

Lab rats live in boring, confined, sedentary, lonely conditions, where food is the only constantly available reward. In controlled studies on diet, standard lab rats are typically fed ad libitum, or free-fed, on a standard rat chow. Under these conditions, rats steadily gain weight.

In a fifteen-week study on the so-called “cafeteria diet,”[1] rats fed ad libitum on standard chow gained almost their entire starting weight, from an average starting weight of 300 grams to over 550 grams (see Fig 1e).

Rats living in the wild are rarely found weighing over 500 grams. The weight gain of lab rats on fairly boring, but unlimited diets is the baseline effect of living like a lab rat. So what happens if you switch to a low-fat formula?

Messing with the formula

Rats fed either a high-fat chow (HFC), or a low-fat/added sugar chow (LFC), both gained weight more quickly than the rats fed a standard formula (SC). You can see by the graph that, while both the high-fat and low-fat fed rats gained more weight on average, the tight clusters in the chart spread out noticeably on both of these modified feeds. This means that there was more variation among individual rats in their response to being switched from standard chow to a new formula. The new formula was either higher in fat or in sugar, suggesting higher palatability.

Those eating the LFD ate the most sugar, even more than rats with unlimited access to snack foods. The researchers also noted that the rats initially eat more of the new food, but by week two, their consumption declines to a level of mild overeating that remains steady through the remainder of the study.

What is the “cafeteria diet”?

But this study wasn’t just on what happens when you change the standard chow. The real test group in this study were those receiving what the researchers call a “cafeteria diet” (CAF). This group of rats got standard rat chow, ad libitum. They also had snack foods, more than they could possibly consume. Three different kinds of snacks, rotated for variety (a full list of the snacks, which included items such as wedding cake and Doritos, is here), were available each day in large quantities. As the researchers write, “this diet engages hedonic feeding.”

The rats in the CAF group naturally disdained most of their standard chow in favor of the tastier snack foods. They ate markedly more food than any of the other rats, and continued doing so even after the two modified-feed groups (HFC and LFC) adjusted their food intake after the second week. Those eating the CAF diet of standard chow plus snack foods continued to eat about half again as much food by weight as those on standard chow alone, and gained weight at about twice the rate. That’s some energy-dense food. These were the heaviest rats at the end of the fifteen weeks, averaging around 750 grams: two and half times their starting weight, and half again as big as the largest wild rats.

What happens when you put humans on a cafeteria diet?

Human volunteers—lean, adult men—allowed to eat whatever they wanted from refrigerated vending machines overate by about 50-60%, just like the rats. The resulting weight gain was about five pounds for each of the volunteers in a one-week study. [2]

As in the rat study, the humans were confined, had few opportunities for recreation, and were constantly observed. The rats, like the humans, were confined in pairs. The humans typically ate alone; no mention is made of the social dining habits of lab rats.

The food that they ate was not exactly the same. While the so-called cafeteria diet that the rats were placed on in the Obesity study was made up of standard rat chow plus an abundance of snack foods, the humans were not offered any kind of standard human chow: no rice, kale, and beans or poached chicken breasts over green salad; no meal replacement bars. Instead, they got all of their food from a set of refrigerated vending machines, stocked with commercially prepared foods. A full list is included in Table 1 of the 1992 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition study: note that the only fresh fruit or vegetable the human volunteers got all week was apples. The foods available were items such as white bread and chicken pie, as well as rat-approved snack foods like cake and Doritos. There were no green vegetables in any of the meals, and very few vegetables or fruits in any form.

Of rats and men

Among the differences between the human and rat studies above, the first, of course, is that humans are not rats. The second is that there was no standard chow available to the humans, only hyperpalatable food, while the rats had access to both. The third is the duration of the study.

Presumably, humans will also adjust to their diets, even if they are eating from vending machines. No one could maintain a lifestyle in which they gained five pounds a week for very long: that’s a hundred and ten pounds a year. Since it’s so difficult to get human volunteers to agree to longer studies, it hasn’t been well documented whether laboratory humans will make the second week adjustment the same way that laboratory rats do.

What’s the difference between your rat race and a rat’s?

Studies on the so-called cafeteria diet are really on the effects of food deserts and the stress of confinement. When all we have is food to reward us in our dingy, artificially-lit cubicles, we gain weight and overeat. Switching from standard commercial fare to a low-fat version, or even to a high-fat version, doesn’t help matters. And when we have really sweet and fatty food as our only reward in life, we eat even more of it.

Humans can insert consciousness, as my therapist likes to say. We can examine our motivations for eating out of pleasure or emotion rather than hunger, and decide whether to proceed or not. Whether to pull the emotional lever. Rats can’t do that. They will go for it, every time.

You can get out of your maze. Your food doesn’t have to come out of vending machines. Your only food options are not chain restaurants and commercial packaged foods, with the odd highly-shippable iceberg lettuce wedge or conventionally grown apple thrown in as a concession to health. You can cook your own food from fresh ingredients. You can exercise and seek out other stimulating activities that engage your hedonic circuits.

You are not a rat, and you are not trapped.

Pick a new plate: how MyPlate fails

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Cascio) — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 15:15:00 +0000

Choose MyPlate.gov for healthy commodities

At no time in history have we had more access to information, and yet as modern people today many of us don’t know anything more about how to feed ourselves than bringing it from plate to mouth. Every day, millions of people eat food that they don’t know how to make. They don’t know what the ingredients are, where those products come from, or how they’re manufactured. We have lost traditional knowledge of how to make food, but also, we’ve lost the larger knowledge of what our diets should look like. Food that used to be regional, seasonal, and prepared and eaten in particular ways, have been replaced with mass-produced products, even fresh produce, that doesn’t vary throughout the year, or from place to place. For guidance on eating these foods, instead of family and community, we have central authorities and credentialed experts. Foremost among these authoritative institutions is the United States Department of Agriculture.

To begin to understand why the USDA is a suspect place to get nutrition information, begin with the USDA mission statement. The USDA’s mission is to promote commodity crops: grains, meat, and dairy; and, to a far lesser extent, garden crops. A pie chart of subsidies from the USDA to the various food industries looks like this:

Subsidies to commodities

Compare the subsidies the USDA gives to the largest producers of these cash crops, with the USDA's official recommendations on diet to individuals. Then look at other sources of advice on diet that do not share the USDA’s ethical issue of being in the business of supporting business as well as being tasked with promoting the health of Americans. The bias becomes clear. MyPlate is skewed in favor of keeping legacy food groups that are commodities, like dairy and grains, on the plates of Americans, and creating new groups, like “Protein,” to encourage us to eat the new industrial food commodities, including refined soy and whey proteins.

Someone at the USDA is probably very proud for having thought up the “Protein” food group. It seems so inclusive, like a nondenominational blessing. It caters to several belief systems about food at once: industry-friendly nutritionism, the “plant-based” diet continuum from flexitarian omnivores to completely vegetarian vegans, and fat phobia. Unlike “meat,” “nuts,” or any other real food containing protein, “protein” itself is refined and treated as a commodity. MyPlate reflects the belief in a plant-based diet as health-promoting, while doing nothing to promote fresh produce. Highly processed foods like breakfast cereal, skim milk, and orange juice are included in its food groups.

Yet the USDA finds fault with fatty meat from a pastured animal, and with whole, raw milk: neither of these are part of an industrial diet, and their industrial counterparts are both correlated with disease. Because the USDA does not recognize the differences between industrial and natural foods, like the more balanced omega fatty acids profiles or other vitamins and enzymes present in pastured animal products, these healthy foods are not part of MyPlate, and their consumption is actively discouraged: the meat because it is fatty, and the milk because it is unpasteurized.

Dairy is still promoted, of course. A round plate should be a pie chart, but there’s an extra plate--or MyGlass--off to one side, full of "Dairy." And although the proportions are clearly intended as a guide, the shape of this pie chart makes it difficult to read. How much of each of these food groups is in a healthy diet? Should we “eat 120%”? Why isn’t MyGlass instead a salad, a cup of bone broth, a pickle plate, a glass of wine, or plain water? Can MyPlate even be modified into a proper model, or should it be scrapped in favor of a whole new shape?

While bone stocks and fermented beverages are also important traditional foods, they are not commodities, and their protein sparing and enzymatic benefits are simply not recognized as significant to the nutrition scientists or public health professionals who created MyPlate. Collard greens have almost exactly as much calcium as milk, cup for cup, but few people know it, because there’s no “Got Collards?” campaign educating the public, and there’s no “Dark, leafy green vegetables” group on MyPlate, either. This promotion of commodities is far reaching and very effective. Children learning about the food groups for the first time are introduced to milk, but not to collards. Which is enshrined in the school lunch program? Which deserves to be?

Milk isn’t even a necessary food. While Americans certainly drink lots of milk, traditionally, the people of the Americas didn’t drink cow’s milk. Throughout Asia and much of Africa, people don’t drink milk. Milk doesn’t need promoting as a food.

There should be more food groups on MyPlate dedicated to vegetables. Of all of the food groups on MyPlate, no group contains more diversity than this one quarter of the plate.

The “Vegetables” group, like the “Protein” group, lumps together foods with very different properties. Orange or green, starchy, fibrous, sweet, bitter, and sour, they all have different traits. Most traditional diets include some raw vegetables, and a fermented vegetable dish or two, like kimchee or sauerkraut. Raw and fermented foods provide many benefits worth promoting on MyPlate. Dark, leafy greens, and pod and flower vegetables, are important enough to merit their own, separate food group, and should be consumed often. Pretending that all vegetables are equivalent, from acorn squash to zucchini, raw kale salad to French fried potato, is just as gross an oversimplification as putting all “Protein” foods in one group.

Seven food groups promoted by the USDA in 1943

One of the original seven food groups was butter. Fats and oils, particularly the fats found in meat and dairy from animals raised on pasture and forage, are critical to human health. Once the pinnacle of the food pyramid, butter, lard, and other healthy fats are not anywhere to be found on MyPlate. The Weston A. Price alternative guidelines, based on foods included in all traditional diets, has just four food groups, one of which is Fats and Oils. Fat is a macronutrient, like protein, and just as essential to life. But MyPlate, with its disdain for traditional knowledge and exaltation of nutritionist dogma, fatphobia, and magical thinking about dietary fat, doesn’t include a “Fats” group at all.

The Food Pyramid of 1992

Then there’s everything else about food that nutritionism, and MyPlate, completely ignore, because it’s too hard to produce on an industrial scale, like the enzymes in raw foods. Nutritional guidelines from the USDA do not assign any value to a food for its environmental sustainability. They avoid any suggestion that fresh, organic, locally grown food in its season is preferable in any way to commercially prepared, conventionally grown alternatives. MyPlate does not suggest any of the synergies of traditional, complementary food pairings with its groupings. It doesn’t provide guidance on making meals suitable to different bodies, stages of life, or cultural norms. MyPlate doesn’t suggest a social setting, or the value of sharing a meal with family or friends. And even as MyPlate promotes a plant-based diet, it provides insufficient guidance to vegetarians and those with common food allergies to wheat, corn, soy, and dairy.

The most gaping flaw in the MyPlate model is that it does not provide enough guidance to be properly nourished. Since its only objective is to guide Americans in eating a healthy diet, it appears to be a failure. If, however, its real purpose is to uphold the USDA mission to promote commodity crops, it appears that MyPlate is a success.

Doubly SADD: The Standard American Dieter’s Diet

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Cascio) — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 20:08:00 +0000

What’s wrong with the way Americans eat?

The way most Americans eat, and increasingly, the way more people in the world eat, is SAD. SAD is an acronym for the “Standard American Diet,” a generalization of how people in the most highly industrialized nations eat. Depending on who you ask, the problems with the SAD may include:

too much meat
too much fat
vegetable oil
refined flour
refined sweeteners
chemicals
foods denatured by excessive heat
not enough plant-based foods
not enough fiber

However, not every one of these factors has a clear relationship to how much energy storage we carry in our bodies, or to our health. The changes to our diet that have correlated with the obesity epidemic have not been in how much meat we eat, but in how cheap and highly available vegetable oil and high fructose corn syrup have become in our diets since the early 1980s. The Standard American Diet is undoubtedly a highly processed diet, relying on the produce of conventionally raised plants—grown in depleted soil, genetically modified, grown with pesticides—animals raised in abusive conditions, on unnatural diets; and industrial chemicals. The SAD is not natural: it’s manufactured using modern technology, and the resulting diet is unlike anything we ate in any other period of human history.

The Standard American Diet is made of cheaply produced foods that have been modified to appeal to our senses so that we will buy more of them. They are a product first, not an essential of life. Purveyors of SAD food want you to keep buying their products. Your wellness is not their primary concern.

For most of human history, the ability to store fat in times of trouble was an advantageous feature that helped us survive, not a defect that threatened our well-being. The Standard American Diet takes advantage of loopholes in our feedback systems of satiety and satiation, rather than being optimized to most healthfully feed our human bodies and psyches. The SAD provides much more calorie-dense food than any we naturally had access to through most of history, but is otherwise nutritionally inadequate. People living on food like this will tend to eat too many calories, because no matter how much bad food a person eats, the body never gets its other nutritive needs properly satisfied.

What’s wrong with Standard American Diet food?

A huge percentage of people in America, and increasingly, the rest of the world, are on weight loss diets, either now or at some point in their lives. Even those of us who aren’t on a diet right now often have some idea of what would be a healthy diet, and how close our own diet is to that goal. “Diet food” is very often as bad or even worse than what it replaces, because its qualities are based on faulty assumptions about what causes people to gain or lose weight, and on a highly simplistic view of the relationship between weight and health. Our concepts of diet for weight loss are punitive, classist, and feed a cycle of shame that precludes healthy attitudes about our bodies and what we eat.

Willpower is not infinite. Many diet foods suggest that they take the willpower out of the equation by providing a technological marvel such as “fat free cream cheese” or “sugar free, calorie free sweetened beverages.” Of all of the tricks that industrial food plays on our senses, diet food plays the worst tricks of all, by pretending to be more food than it is, with thickeners, added flavors, and artificial fats and sweeteners simulating calories. The reason these tricks can be played at all is because we have two feedback systems in our bodies for regulating food intake: one for satiety and one for satiation. Satiation has a quicker response time, quick enough to tell us to stop eating. It’s a heuristic for satiety, which takes longer to report to the body, because food has to be at least partially digested and absorbed for the body to know for sure what it contains and what the body may still need.

Diet science is junk science. The reason all of these tricks are played is a belief in the so-called “calories in, calories out” model of body weight that, like the Body Mass Index, is made up of some numbers that make bad superstition look like good science.

The BMI is the calculated ratio of your height over your weight. The CDC claims that it is a reliable indicator for most people, yet this ratio doesn’t actually tell you anything about an individual’s actual body mass. It makes the assumption that not just most people, but you, specifically, will have the same ratio of body fat to lean mass as other people of your height and weight. It also assumes that, even if we knew what your lean to fat body mass ratio is, that it would tell you something important about your health. Clearly, this is all bullshit. Even people who’ve never heard of Health at Every Size can see that a highly active athlete and a couch potato can have the same BMI, and enjoy vastly different states of health.

The “calories in, calories out” model presumes both that we can accurately know how much nourishment you get from your food, and how much you expend. Even under laboratory conditions, we have isolated a number of factors that change how much of different nutrients people absorb from their food, from how palatable the food is to whether the person has an innate inability to properly digest the food. In the real world, other factors affect how much we eat, and these methods are studiously applied to us every time we eat at the home of the endless soup bowl. We’ve only just begun to understand the role of our gut flora in nutrient absorption, and that each of us has a different makeup of the many species of bacteria that live in our bodies and without which we would not exist. We know for sure that not everyone gets the same benefit from each food, each time they eat it. Calories are measured by burning a food to ash, not by observing their effect in human bodies, and not in yours, particularly. This measurement on the “Nutrition Facts” label doesn’t guarantee that the food in your package precisely matches the sample that was measured, or that you will absorb the nutrients listed. Being able to accurately measure not just the potential nutrition you ingest, but what you actually absorb and how your body uses it, is beyond our abilities to scientifically measure.

Therefore, we can conclude that there are healthy ways of eating that are older than our concept of the kilocalorie. Luckily, we still have our bodies to tell us what to eat, how much, and when, as long as we don’t game the system with industrial foods, including diet foods.

How weight-loss dieting damages health

Industrial food can never be the basis of a healthy diet.

It isn’t just that food that is manufactured is not fresh, or that it’s unbalanced compared with what we evolved to eat. It costs society more to allow industry to “add value” to food, including allowing industry to add the value of “diet versions” of the same foods, than it would be to ban all of it and revert to earlier ways of feeding people: fresh food, grown locally and prepared to meet personal tastes and requirements. The costs aren’t all in one place, and many of the costs are born by our bodies, which labor under the sufferings caused by bad food.

Chronic stress levels keep cortisol levels high, which drives us to eat, especially starchy foods. Dieting is a willpower-enforced famine condition. It’s profoundly unnatural and very difficult to sustain. It is a chronic condition of not getting enough calories, of baiting-and-switching the satiety/satiation feedback systems in the body. The stress of chronic malnourishment and exercise of rigid willpower drives up cortisol levels, which only serves to increase the drive to eat carbohydrate-rich foods. Eventually, the body asserts its needs for food, and the dieter falls off the diet.

Instead of realizing the actual factors that are causing the epidemic of obesity---an increasingly industrialized food chain, stagnating quality of life, increased stress---we persist in this notion that systemic problems should be fixed with individual willpower. Willpower is like spoons, or socks: we don’t all have a lot of them, some of us have to make careful arrangements not to run out, and the people who are hurt the most are the ones most in need and have the least. Asking people already laboring under the burdens of an unhealthy society to increase their personal expense to fix the same health problems that chronic stress and injustice cause is victim-blaming, judgmental, and unfair. It also doesn’t work.

What is really making us fat

So we know that calorie-counting doesn’t work for eating. “Calories out” is just as fuzzy a number as “calories in,” and for the same reasons: it’s practically impossible to know exactly how much energy a person expends in an activity, even one that has been measured in other people, because we differ metabolically. One example of the differences among people’s metabolisms is that some of us who may be described as metabolically tending toward obesity burn glycogen, which is our quick go-to energy source in the body, at much higher rates than people whose metabolisms do not incline them toward obesity. Not only do those of us with this metabolic tendency burn through our glycogen faster while at rest, but also when exercising. Additionally, we may be less “metabolically flexible,” meaning that our bodies are less able to shift to burning energy from fat stores than the “metabolically lean.” This makes it perceptibly more difficult for some people to do exercise.

Another factor that tends to keep people fat is one of insulin resistance. Eating a diet that delivers huge jolts of sugar to the bloodstream, several times a day, makes the body’s cells resistant to accepting insulin. Since insulin is what brings energy to our cells, we’re starved and exhausted at the cellular level. The energy goes into fat stores, not into the cells that need it.
Historically, when humans were chronically stressed, it was in conditions of famine and other physical hardship, and having the ability to use less energy and store it in our bodies, instead, was an advantage. The world we live in has so changed that this stress response is no longer a helpful adaptation. This is most evident among the people with the least power to make non-mainstream choices. People who are poor, abused, lack transportation, live in food deserts, can’t cook for themselves, are institutionalized, have no safe places to exercise, live with trauma and other chronic, painful, and debilitating conditions, work in unsafe conditions, and live with other modern stresses, are the hardest hit by the effects of industrial food. Our modern, efficient food delivery system cures energy starvation, but instead causes diseases of overconsumption and malnourishment.

The effects of metabolic inflexibility and insulin resistance make it increasingly difficult to exit a spiral of sedentary lifestyle and obesity. Add chronic stress, limited food choices, and few socially acceptable ways for fat people to exercise, and it’s easy to see how modern life makes people fat: not because we lack willpower, but because it’s unreasonable to expect people to expend energy as if it’s unlimited, to overcome the obstacles placed there by the same institutions that are supposed to make health easier to achieve.

Eating well is for every person

Health isn’t measurable through a BMI. Health is a subjective measure of one’s well-being and includes physical, social, mental, emotional, and spiritual factors. It’s not just your risk of developing a serious illness, but how well you feel each day.

The dietary model of willpower and calories doesn’t work for weight loss. More industrial food, harmful misinformation about eating and health, and victim-blaming exacerbate the health problems that industrial food has wrought on society: malnutrition, overeating, guilt, poor esteem and health. The Standard American Dieter’s Diet relies on the false science of calories and nutritionism, and the false assumption that willpower is an infinite resource. It assumes that our systemic problem is actually just a lot of individuals with willpower problems.

It suits the diet industry for their diets to convince you of their efficacy, but continually fail you. A beguiling promise that makes you their convert, and their consumer, is a cash cow. No one stands to make much money encouraging people to eat home-cooked meals together with their families. But everyone in society stands to benefit from increased well-being, which is why public health is properly publicly funded work, not contracted out to McDonald’s. It’s time to remember what the covenant of civilization is supposed to be for: not to make a few rich, but to give everyone a level of freedom and security in pursuit of their natural rights.

The cycle of bingeing, starving, and failed attempts to gain control over one’s life through willpower, is bad for every aspect of one’s health: self-image, nutrition, and energy levels. What is needed is not more willpower for fat people, but a unified model, universally embraced, of competent eating that includes a healthier attitude about food, treating food as a right and a pleasure instead of drudgery, more complete knowledge of how our bodies work, and a better food system that actually meets our needs for health first, rather than the corporation’s bottomless pit of desire for profit.

How to eat: hunger and its satisfaction

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Cascio) — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:54:00 +0000

Hedonism Bot knows what hedonic circuits are

The concept of eating according to my desires and trusting my body to choose what I need, and only as much as I could use, was first introduced to me as a new parent. Folk wisdom derived from Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility in Feeding came down to me as a method to feed small children. Based on this trust in the wisdom of the body, Satter encourages caregivers to provide regular meals including a variety of healthy foods, but not to worry about which foods the child eats or rejects.

Years later, on the Beyond Vegetarianism website, I read about Anapsology, or the Natural Hygiene movement. Like others in the ancestral health movement, these people attempt to mimic the prelapsarian conditions in which we thrived. “Instinctos,” as Anapsologists are also called, eat only one food at a time, in its unseasoned, uncooked state. They choose the food by following their desires, and eating attentively until they no longer want any more of the food. They describe the sensation of a food suddenly becoming less palatable as a “stop.”

The “stop” is also known as “satiation.” J. Stanton’s educational series on hunger and its satisfaction was a revelation for me, beginning with its vocabulary lesson in Part I. Not only were the subjective experiences of my body important and discoverable, but now I could talk about them with specificity. My hungers were not just my problem, or shameful. They were clues that I could use to satisfy my needs. Free-feeding from a healthy selection wasn’t just for small children: adults are also designed to eat according to their body’s cues.“Hunger is not a singular motivation: it is the interaction of several different clinically measurable, provably distinct mental and physical processes,” Stanton wrote, and I realized that I was learning the very basics of how I could feed myself competently.

Not only is there more than one hunger, the body has two separate systems, satiety and satiation, that tell you when to stop eating. One system, satiation, is a heuristic that estimates the nutrition you’re getting from the foods you’re eating, based on everything from what the food tastes like, what else you’ve been eating lately, and how much other people seem to be eating, to the comfort of your surroundings at mealtime. Satiation is meant to be a good predictor of satiety, which is the satisfaction of our nutritive needs. Satiety is based on having digested the food, and knowing for certain what it contains. When we are sated, we have gotten enough energy, protein, fat, and other nutrients. We feel satisfied: replete.

The satiation system is accurate in a healthy person, offered a natural selection of foods, closely predicting the nutrition we will be able to get from the food we eat. Having a system that provides instant feedback at the moment we can use it is more useful than waiting the several hours it would take for satiety to occur. Satiation prevents us from chronically overeating until we feel sated. If we can't feel the "stop," we have to rely on other clues to tell us to stop eating, or eat until we are uncomfortably full.

The unhealthy effects of food deserts that limit our real or presumed choices, industrial foods that are designed to be highly palatable, large serving sizes that fool us into thinking this is what people typically eat at a sitting, and unexamined attitudes and beliefs about the relative value of different foods, all sabotage the hedonic circuits that translate food reward into future satiety. Our satiation systems, guessing at what will ultimately sate us, are led astray by hyper-rewarding food. When we eat quickly, eat foods that are bland, or drink high-calorie beverages, we take in the food too quickly even for our satiation signals to tell us to stop before we’ve had enough to sate. On the other hand, when we eat foods that simulate starch, fat, sugar, or salt, the satiation messages we receive do not match the foods’ abilities to sate. In either case, we may eat to satiation but not be sated, if our food doesn’t contain what we need.

Creating a lifestyle that supports healthy eating means correcting the environment, as much as possible, so we receive realistic messages about what we’re eating and can “hear” what our bodies want. The Instinctos do this by limiting their definition of food to what could be found and eaten in the wild, where we presumably thrived before civilization. Other traditional diets manage the environment by using the tools of civilization to regulate food supply and demand. Customs limiting the foods one may choose from, or the ways those foods are combined, or when they are eaten, are used to impose healthy limits. Satter’s program, as it is applied to adults, employs traditional methods like having regular meals and sharing them with others, as well as listening to the body’s cues for hungers and their satiation.

Being able to eat competently requires confidence that we know what is good to eat, that there is enough food, that it will be offered at frequent and predictable intervals, and that we can eat according to our pleasure and senses. An important step toward achieving this level of confidence is developing trust in our hunger drives, and being trustworthy in satisfying them.

What is ancestral health?

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Cascio) — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 02:38:00 +0000

The vegetarian movement is gaining speed. Walking into the local Whole Foods Market this summer, I noticed a large banner hanging inside the entrance that recommended a “plant-based diet.” A New Yorker interview with co-CEO, John Mackey, suggests that the vegan at the head of the company would like to lead Whole Foods shoppers away from the meat counter. One of my food heroes, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who once killed a chicken on live television, has recently declared himself a mostly-vegetarian.

My own dietary practice is guided by a belief that people have always eaten meat. While I share a concern for animal welfare, I believe the ethical answer must include satisfaction of our animal needs. A fear of meat suits the industrial food complex, frankly: it’s cheaper for them, and has a higher profit margin, to sell you an overprocessed “burger” out of the freezer case than to make truly healthy meat—properly raised, humanely slaughtered, and untainted—available to everyone. The industry moves slowly, so while they’re turning their barge around, they have some cash crops to unload on the consuming public. I’m even cynical about the health news cycle. They all chant in chorus, from fad to fad: first fat was bad for us, then carbs, and now protein. Eventually, they’ll have to cycle back around again, or there will be nothing left to eat.

The plant-based approach has a challenger in the ancestral health movement. “Ancestral health” is an umbrella for practices that attempt to closely emulate the way people ate and moved a long time ago, with the aim of curing or preventing diseases of civilization. Although there are varying interpretations, the general assumption within the ancestral health movement is that for most of our history as a species, people ate a diet that met our nutritional needs quite well, and that diet has never come in a box or a can, had a nutrition facts label, been manufactured, or been entirely devoid of animal products. Where those in the ancestral health movement begin to disagree with one another is on the matter of how long it’s been since we ate the right diet for human health.

According to those who advocate the “Paleo diet,” our ideal diet is the one we evolved to eat, fifty thousand years ago. People who follow it vary in the strictness of their interpretation, generally deferring to Dr. Loren Cordain’s book (and blog), "The Paleo Diet," as the first and most orthodox guide. Internet discussion tends to concentrate on certain pet topics: what kind of exercise people regularly got in the Paleolithic, and whether some agricultural food or another is permissible on the diet, are common subjects. Paleo is popular with the CrossFit crowd. My other friends, the ones who shop at Walmart and BJ’s, and even the ones who shop at Whole Foods, have mainly never heard of the Paleo diet. I start by explaining the basics of the Paleo diet. You can eat meat, fruit, and vegetables (but no nightshades), and nuts. No dairy, grains, beans or lentils, on the assumption that before agriculture was invented, ten thousand years ago, no one ate dairy and wild grains were too small and sparse to be a significant food source.

After the Paleolithic era came the Neolithic, with its revolution of human innovation: farming was the first of these technologies, and its benefits gave us more leisure, food security, and hence, more people, to invent even more things, including ways to feed even more people.

Haven’t we managed to find any healthy ways to eat in the last ten thousand years? Dr. Weston A. Price was a dentist who traveled around the world, looking at people’s teeth. He found some commonalities among the many different indigenous people who still ate pre-industrial diets in the early twentieth century. They had terrific teeth, for starters. They also lacked certain malformations that we think of as perfectly normal today: narrow faces, overbites, crowded teeth, wisdom teeth that have no room in which to erupt. In some of these cultures people traditionally ate only dairy, or had very little meat, or ate a lot of seafood. All of the people in the cultures Dr. Price found ate animal products, some nearly exclusively. They all had cultured foods in their diets, and ate at least some of their foods raw (including raw animal products). Those who ate grains and legumes soaked, sprouted, and fermented these foods before eating them.

It would appear that, for at least some people who are gluten or lactose intolerant, some of the staples of agricultural diet are undigestible. Even greater numbers of people suffer ill health from eating sugar, factory-farmed meat and dairy, and refined flour. Both the Weston A. Price people and the Paleo people believe that industrial foods are bad for your health. They disagree on whether to accept the compromise we made ten thousand years ago.

Nutritionism: a fabrication of the Industrial Age

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Cascio) — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 20:57:00 +0000

When Spaniards brought maize to the Old World, they failed to import the traditional wisdom for processing the corn to make the niacin bioavailable. Wherever corn consumption spread in Europe, a disease called pellagra became endemic. Hundreds of years later, when the cause of the condition was proven by Western science, instead of using the ancient method of nixtamalization to process corn meal, niacin was added.

The way nutrients were first discovered was through industrial food. White rice, flour, and sugar started off as luxury goods. They were “refined” in both senses of the word: undesirable matter was discarded, and the resulting product was smoother and more appealing. At first only the rich could afford them, but as demand grew for the refined foods, scale of production increased and prices dropped. When these industrial foods were produced on a large enough scale that everyone could afford them, they became so cheap that they became staples of the very poor. And that is when we started to see how poor these new foods really were, because people who lived on them developed diseases of malnutrition.

Diseases of malnutrition don't always have very obvious signs, so it took a while for scientists to piece together the clues. When people living on white rice developed a range of symptoms, including difficulty walking, sufferers called it “beriberi.” The condition was cured with thiamin, which is found in rice bran, but which is removed from white rice. White rice was adopted by industry because it stores for longer periods than brown rice, so instead of switching people back to brown rice, with its shorter shelf life and lower profit margin (corporations make money by "adding value," i.e. processing, to raw ingredients), they solved the problem more cheaply and profitably ("Now with thiamin!") by fortifying white rice with thiamin.

And so it went, learning from one mistake after another, and then finally through concentrated study, what parts make up food, their functions in the body, what in food can be dangerous, and how much and what kinds are needed for health. "Nutritionism" is the belief that our need for food can be deconstructed into a finite number of irreducible and replicable substances called “nutrients,” which may be assembled in any order convenient for manufacture. For many years now, ready-to-eat breakfast cereals have been supplemented with vitamins and minerals, justified by the tenets of nutritionism. The additives in Captain Crunch are typical: niacinamide, reduced iron, zinc oxide, thiamin mononitrate, pyridoxine hydrochloride, riboflavin and folic acid. Many are in forms chemically distinct from the forms found in food, and in some cases, we even know that the body doesn’t use the synthetic, supplementary nutrient in the same way as when these nutrients are found in our food.

Under nutritionism, any compound in a food can be isolated, separated, and either concentrated as a nutrient (i.e. soy protein isolate) or discarded as undesirable (i.e. fat-free milk). Which nutrients we value, and which we abhor, change like trends in politics and skirt lengths. Fiber wasn't valued by those who refined rice, considering it an inefficiency in getting enough energy in one's diet, but today it's added to foods as a supplement. In the 1980s, everyone feared fat and dieters ate big plates of pasta and baked potatoes. Since then, the tide has completely turned on carbohydrates, while we retain fear of both fat and calories. It creates anxiety around food to be afraid of most macronutrients, a fear that industry nurtures and is glad to assuage with their highly processed offerings.

The ultimate faith act in nutritionism is to attempt to live on nothing but industrial meal replacement. But to do so would be folly: the evidence suggests that industrial food is causing a whole new set of diseases today, from diabetes to cancer. The pace of change in our diets has grown exponentially: so quickly that we can’t even reliably look to our oldest living relatives for a model of a sustainable diet. Nutritionism sells peace of mind, with their certainty that science has just unlocked the nutrient you need to add to your shopping cart.

We won’t find the answers to our health care crisis in the industrial model, because the machines of capitalism don't back up: they can only plow forward, doing what machines do, which is make more products to sell. Just as industry's answer to beriberi is fortified, sugar-sweetened, chemically preserved grain flour, they have an answer equally appetizing and easy to manufacture for heart disease, breast cancer, or diabetes. They'll even sell you food for obesity. As Michael Pollan points out in his famous essay, “Unhappy Meals,” the fact that an industrial food product has a label and makes health claims should make it suspect. It's a product first, not a food.

What we know about nutrition may be wrong, and is certainly incomplete. However, we know a great deal about food.

So: Eat food. The rest is commentary.

You can't manufacture food security

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Cascio) — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 17:51:00 +0000

This has been a good time to talk shit about the food industry. In California recently, raw milk sellers were arrested: it reminded me of when the medical marijuana dispensaries there were raided by the feds, as a battleground in the war of states’ rights. At the same time that fresh milk and dried herbs were being seized and destroyed, food-manufacturing giant Cargill was regularly selling meat that the USDA knew contained salmonella. No one died or even allegedly got sick from drinking raw milk from the California suppliers, but as one blogger astutely noted, if they had, it would have been easier to trace the bad milk back to its source. Cargill, on the other hand, is so big that they deal with other giant suppliers. Back in 2007, one of their beef suppliers sold them beef adulterated with E.coli strain 0157:H7. Right after the 2011 turkey recall, it was announced that Cargill is suing that supplier.

The USDA doesn’t consider salmonella a contaminant and only considers one strain of E. coli—the antibiotic resistant strain called 0157:H7—to be an “adulterant,” even though any strain of E. coli in your food can make you wicked sick. The difference in the worrying strain with all the extra numbers is that we don’t have a good treatment for this new strain, yet. This is the danger of the arms race against bugs: we come up with a spray or a pill that kills a bug that plagues us. We start using it all over everything, like people washing their hands with antibiotic goo that they keep in their handbags and on wall dispensers. Since there’s no where else for the germs to go—some of them need us as hosts, or to breed—the bugs evolve to resist our efforts. The game has just stepped up a notch. We see it as the problem of resistance against common sprays like Roundup, and germs that sicken humans and livestock, like E. coli and salmonella.

We can’t actually sterilize the planet against bugs we don’t like. I have the normal revulsion against icky things, including bugs, that lots of my peers do, with what we consider the privileges that protected us against a certain amount of suffering: we drank and bathed in clean water, and if we picked up parasites, our parents had us quickly deloused, dewormed, or otherwise dosed. The world is and contains within it robust, complicated systems that include these bugs. It’s part of the big plan of life that we will get diseases and sometimes die of them. It’s why I say it’s good that we want to reduce suffering, but we can’t imagine that there will be a world without disease or death. Our lives depend on the deaths of others, and even on our own deaths, and on the lives of those that depend on our deaths. Not just bacteria need us dead: our children need us to clear out to make room for them and our descendants.

I think my society’s attitudes toward life and death are at the root of our unhealthy food systems. It’s why we have no problem seeing everything we do as progress, and that more of the same will solve the problems that remain in the world. It doesn’t see our resources and how we prioritize them, or conceive of our problems and set about solving them, as being directed by any values. The only thing we seem to value is money, because it’s the one thing we consistently measure, and we translate every other cost—health care, environmental cleanup—into dollars in order to compare them.

I think people are very uncomfortable with choosing answers outside the mainstream. Usually, it’s a winning strategy to go with the herd. But sometimes the herd is wrong: sometimes the leaders have other agendas and priorities. Local councils representing the interests of a group of food producers are made up of people: they have families who eat their products, too. But the business interests of a farmer are much like yours: money’s tight, and you want a sure thing if you can get it. You don’t take risks you don’t understand. You grow what you have a buyer for. And so your interests become aligned with your employer, or with whoever’s buying your product and therefore calls the shots. A farmer who wants to be big and successful will embrace the model that the infrastructure already supports: cash crops, grown by conventional methods because that’s what the big buyers buy and what the loan officers at the bank want to hear, too. It makes cash sense to do this, and it makes the same kind of sense on up the line.

Put yourself in the mindset of the CEO of a corporation, beholden to make his stockholders money every quarter. The USDA thinks that it’s taking care of eaters because it’s taking care of farmers, because the farmers are convinced that their needs are as capitalists, and not as people who eat food. What’s for sale has nothing at all to do with what’s good to eat. It has to do with supply chains and the security of huge scale and inertia.

But you, cooking for you and your family and friends, do not make food decisions like Cargill. You can change how you eat today. Can you imagine how long it would take for all of those supply chains to change? We see how it changes when something ripples down from Washington DC. It can happen from a more local change, as when California or Massachusetts or New York leads the way by creating some local law: no saturated fats, or San Francisco causing the Happy Meal to sprout half a conventional apple. McDonald’s wants to be the same everywhere it goes, so even if you’re in Dubuque, you’ll get half an apple, too. Whole Foods Market is a national chain, and if you go in there looking for local flavor you’re going to be disappointed. You can start shopping at your farmer’s market, or the co-op, or an independent grocer. Making this change will have rippling effects on your life, too. You’ll cook more. You’ll learn about foods you hadn’t considered eating before, and ways to buy it you didn’t imagine, either. You can learn how to find your own, personal food security.

What is sustainability?

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Cascio) — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:01:00 +0000

It sounds so simple, and the good news is, it is. Like art, sustainability resists definition and yet, to the person who knows and cares about it, given an unobstructed view, it’s obvious what is, and what isn’t. In other words, “I don’t know sustainability, but I know it when I see it” may represent our best effort to define and control sustainability.

That’s not just me: that’s the experts. Frederick Kaufman, at a TEDx conference in Manhattan on food, is a consultant to those who would commodify sustainability, and he says that when industry tries to measure sustainability, all they’re really tracking are costs. Those sustainability measures on fish at Whole Foods Market, or on bottles of detergent, are a marketing tool. Like the “nutrition facts” label, “sustainability” labels are the facts that food industry have agreed to present on their labels.

Even our recent hypervigilance about common food allergens is brought to you by the same government that does not require disclosure of GMO products. The government is not looking out for you, or for starving people halfway around the world. At best, they’re trying to reduce health care costs. If we had single-payer health care, our government would finally be incentivized to fix the systems that feed most people in America.

A recent effect of the lobbying efforts of food manufacturers and retailers, is the promotion of some of the most odious chains as saviors in the food desert. It’s popular to all pile on to Walmart, which deserves every kick to the groin and kidneys it gets, but let’s not overlook the other chains the Obamas are praising. I don’t think there’s food for me in a Walmart, or a Walgreens, and they don’t think there’s food for me at the local, independent grocer. Walgreens is a pharmacy, not a grocery store, and Walmart is a discount department store. Their expansion into food does not in any way reflect connections to foodways that I value. Its “foodways” are traveled by 18-wheelers, and come from manufacturers, not farms.

The other industrial food megolith the mainstream health press wanted us all to cheer along with was McDonald’s, for it’s inclusion of apples in Happy Meals. To say I’m cynical about McDonald’s is putting things mildly. It’s becoming more well known that apples are one of the very highest sources of pesticide and other toxic substances in our conventionally grown fresh produce, so taking all things into consideration, the health claims of apple slices over French fries are slim. Obviously, McDonald’s has been working hard to reform its image, but its food remains industrial. The company has tremendous buying power, and can command any change in their chain they want. If it was a good business move for them, McDonald’s would start selling us grass-fed beef. But they don’t sell premium, and expectations have been set by the marketplace for conventionally raised, grain-fed beef. McDonald’s sells the minimum that people who eat drive-thru will accept.

I don’t agree that conventionally produced food is good enough for anyone to accept on a regular basis. Some foods have less poison in them than others, but it all grows from depleted soil. The USDA can tell you that all apples, or all potatoes, are essentially alike, but they don’t keep statistics on organically grown produce. Why not? Because then people would clamor for them? It suits large industry to keep people responding just as slowly as they do to new health concerns in society.

The small farms and stores that were driven out by big business, and which are not even marked on food maps because they are small, are flexible and highly responsive. I can walk into the stores (or up to the folding tables in the farmer’s market) where I regularly shop, and talk directly to someone who can make the changes I suggest, and answer my questions. Wouldn’t you rather have a relationship like that with the person who sells you your food, than to have no idea where it comes from and, when you have feedback, have to deal with someone with no power, working in the lowest rung of a corporate hierarchy? Walmarts in every town, and the destruction that has caused to small towns, is what America has bought for our narrow, short-term focus on “everyday low savings.” We didn't value the small business as much as saving a few dollars each week. Few tried to calculate the real cost of doing business that way.

Kaufman says that when industry measures sustainability, it is actually measuring inputs and outputs that can all be described by their costs in money. He says that whoever can answer the question of how to measure sustainability will be answering an important one. So this is how we fix the problem. You make all dollars sustainable dollars by making it so industry has to follow rules—laws that government makes to protect the environment and people—so that they are sustainable. So they don’t abuse workers or animals, or pollute. That’s how we do things in a democracy: you don’t leave it up to industry to decide to do the right thing, any more than you leave it to plantation owners to abandon the practice of slavery. If something is wrong, it’s wrong even before it becomes untenable. Haven’t you heard that corporations are sociopathic? Did you know that if you act like a corporation and aren’t already a sociopath, it’ll just make you unhappy?

If you believe in fundamental consumerism, everything is truly worth what it costs. Similar belief systems allow people to accept “nutritionism,” the belief that a multivitamin truly contains all they need to stay healthy, or that following government dietary guidelines will offer protection against disease.

Government agencies say that GMOs pose no danger. Experts say that we can’t prove a threat. Why is it so easy for me to identify the threats of GMOs, if there are none that are provable? Are they even studying the right things? The arguments of GMO apologists are that its a utopian fantasy that we can feed the growing world population without using genetically modified organisms. The so-called utopians want scalable solutions; the futurists see only top-down solutions. But top-down thinking is what allows us to clear cut forests, strip mine mountaintops, build nuclear power plants and fertilizer manufacturing facilities. The Dot Earth piece is saying that since big governments see no harm, there isn’t any, and anyone who says so is alarmist.

This is bullshit. First of all, the reason people starve has nothing to do with the fact that there’s no fancy, delicate GMO rice rich in beta carotene, with a “suicide gene” that prevents saving seeds to sow the next year.

"Unless I'm missing something," wrote Michael Pollan in The New York Times Magazine, "the aim of this audacious new advertising campaign is to impale people like me—well-off first-worlders dubious about genetically engineered food—on the horns of a moral dilemma... If we don't get over our queasiness about eating genetically modified food, kids in the third world will go blind. [Source: HuffPost]

If we’re actually concerned about human suffering, the answer is the same as it has always been: value feeding people over money. There's enough food now, and people go hungry because they can't buy food, not because it doesn't exist. The whole point of civilization is to work collectively to help the whole world, not to enrich a few people who manage to turn the workings of the world into a series of gambles. Monsanto has spent more money trying to convince us to let them go about their business, making money, than it has actually feeding anyone. The root cause of hunger and malnutrition, now and always, is greed.
Conventional farming is not sustainable. GMOs, which require their patent holders and technology to reproduce, are even less sustainable, and will contribute to hunger, not eradicate it. Anyone who cares about food, or people, or suffering, can see that. What do we want to sustain: business interests or the interests of people?

Eating food: how to tell if you're doing it wrong

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Cascio) — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 17:33:00 +0000

In my first post, I wrote that when it comes to food, many people are doing it wrong. I imagined the defensive hackles this could raise. How can I say “your diet is wrong”?

It boils down to this: Whether you have goals or not for your diet, if your diet isn't supporting your well-being, if your diet is poisoning you, and you don't feel well as a result, then you are eating wrong. A well nourished, healthy person not only feels a greater sense of well-being, but is also more sensitive to the body's cues, making it easier, over time, to choose well for continued good health.

There are reasons why we eat what we do. We eat for energy, to satisfy hunger and cravings. We eat to feel well. Before humans even knew what a vitamin was, we knew enough to seek out the foods we needed to be healthy and strong, just like all other living things do. We eat what is available to us to eat, and what we know from experience will satisfy us. It’s a quality of successful organisms, being able to find and eat the right kinds of food.

Besides the physical cues, there are social reasons for our food choices that can seem more important, especially if we’ve been conditioned to assume our bodily processes are beneath our notice. We eat because it's dinner time, because we have company, because we're watching TV and want something to do with our hands and mouths. We eat what we have learned to eat to be healthy or to lose weight, as well as what to eat in celebration and pleasure. We eat what we think we deserve. There is the food we eat that reflects our favorite views of ourselves, and what we are ashamed to admit to eating. We eat in a hurry, with no regard, while doing something else, and we eat in rituals. We eat alone, and with family and friends. Sometimes we don't eat, even though we are hungry: we fight our urges because we want to appear, to ourselves and others, more beautiful and strong-willed, more worthy of blessings.

Somehow, as a species, we all managed to eat sufficiently good diets that we’re still here. Wherever we lived, humans found a way to prosper on the local wildlife. If a diet worked, the person thrived; if it worked less well, the person made it, but not so comfortably; and if someone was truly getting diet wrong, the person was soon dead. Over the millennia, humans came up with ways to make it easier to satisfy our hunger. We grew energy-dense plant foods, and herded animals that we also ate from. We learned to preserve food, make it more dense for transport, cook and culture food to make it more nourishing.

Today, economic pressures have replaced hunger as the driving force behind innovations in food production. Companies flourish, not by making their customers healthy, as humans have done for themselves for thousands of years, but by making them want to buy more of the products the companies sold. Other “health” industries flourish by making nutrition seem difficult to achieve by eating food, or the knowledge of what you “really” need so complicated that you end up "needing" an advanced degree to understand why you need it.

Maybe you’ve heard, as I have, that if you present a very young child, such as a baby who is just starting to eat something other than milk, with a variety of healthy foods, the kid will naturally select enough of the right kinds of food to stay healthy. This kind of practical guidance has kept many a parent from stressing out too much about the occasional all-carrot or all-chicken diet that children will rotate through.

It’s true that this sort of approach works very well, as long as you start with a healthy body free of addictions and damage, which can express its needs in a way you can perceive and respond to, and only as long as you don’t stack the deck and include foods that contain psychoactive properties, like the vast majority of industrial foods do. In fact, you can define what a drug is by looking at what people choose that is out of balance. Add sugar to the buffet, and no one—not the children or the adults—will make the best choices. Make sugar most of the choices, and you see what we get: lifestyle diseases, the most widespread of which can be directly traced to a diet high in refined carbohydrates. Not just diabetes, but heart disease, and even cancer, can be caused by the Standard American Diet. It’s appropriate that what most Americans eat is described by an acronym that means “unhappy.”

Now we are sold food that has been broken down and rebuilt, with each nutrient that we discover catalogued in a nutrition facts label that does not distinguish foods by breed, soil, time since harvest, flavor, growing method, or any of the other factors that people who know how to produce food have used for hundreds of years to assess food value. And drugs have been added to our food: chemicals meant to replace vitamins that have been leached out by processing, or meant to mimic flavors and textures of the foods they imitate, as well as chemicals known for their psychoactive properties, like caffeine and sugar. The total effect of industrial food is of a simulacrum of food.

Modern industrial foods have been engineered to hack our biochemistry, and the balanced systems that regulate our bodily needs and urges. Just like recreational drugs, highly available food energy overwhelms us with too much of a good thing. Yet we call these drugs “food,” and eat them according to cultural and bodily cues as if they were equal in every important way to the real foods they replace. They crowd out what we used to eat, satisfying our pleasure centers, but leaving us feeling vaguely ill. Another bump of the same drug becomes the only conceivable way to feel better.

The ways that we sin against ourselves in the realm of our diets are in denying ourselves, and accepting the lies we hear and repeat to ourselves about what we eat. If we don’t acknowledge all of our drives, and all of the food that we eat, we keep from ourselves the tools we need to change our lives. Denial—of what we really want, as well as of what we actually eat—is a blind spot born of defense. What we aren’t prepared to deal with, we don’t look at.

The most obvious way to interpret "you're eating wrong" is to assume that our conscious goals in selecting what to eat are not being met by our food selections. We may seek food that is hot, cheap, and tasty. Or we may tell ourselves and others that we're "on a diet," meaning we’re intending to reduce our net energy levels through caloric restriction. Or we may have yet another class of conscious goals for our diets: to avoid animal cruelty, injustice, or environmental degradation, or to conform with a spiritual practice. These are only a few of the dietary goals that we know how to talk about. There are others that, once we become aware of the lack in our lives, can take priority. If you are used to feeling run down and tired, expect that rashes or migraines are just a part of life, or regularly suffer in some other way that is not adequately explained, perhaps your diet is responsible. You may never have considered that good health is to be expected, that your suffering is exceptional, and that it may be alleviated by eating properly. Whether you seek pleasure; energy deficit; allergen avoidance; good health; communion with family, friends, or a higher power; or to save the planet by your food choices; if you find, upon examination of the evidence, that your diet is in opposition to your fulfillment, then you must change your diet, or remain unsatisfied.

I don’t waste time beating myself up for having eaten white pasta for twenty-five years; I simply became a convert to whole wheat. Now, I prefer the taste of whole grain, and find white bread pasty and unappealing. I wasn’t ready to make the switch on first taste, and that’s understandable. We’re creatures of habit, but we also have free will, and with some effort we can impose will on our habits. I wouldn’t ask you to do it for invisible, indiscernible reasons; I wouldn’t do it for reasons I didn’t care about, feel, or understand. It was only when I had my own moment of epiphany that I felt any urge to change how I ate.

Perhaps you've heard something like this already: that a diet should be something that you eat all of the time, not something you get on and fall off of, like a wagon. Diet is a part of lifestyle. There’s no guilt in this definition. We can describe diets. We can change diets. We can even eat bad food. But we cannot irrevocably fail at dieting, unless we stop eating long enough to die at it. Karen Carpenter? She failed at dieting. You? Not a failure at dieting. Because diet is an inescapable part of being alive. And like everything else that's really important in life: sleeping enough, clean water and air, having good sex, and moving around, finding good things to eat is easy enough for just about anybody to do, and well worth the trouble for the reward.

Why I eat meat, and other living foods

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Cascio) — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 16:44:00 +0000

In essence, I eat meat because I really, really like to eat meat, and see nothing particularly wrong with eating meat. I’m a living thing, a cow is a living thing, and so is a tomato plant. All of our lives are precious to ourselves, I assume, while knowing that consciousness is subjective and that I can’t ever really know what it is to be a plant or another animal. We’re all going to die, and death is not the enemy: without death, there wouldn’t be life. If no living thing ate another living thing, there would be no room to evolve. We’d all be single-celled organisms that live on sunshine until either we cover the Earth and smother one another—to death—or we rely on some of us to die off so the rest of us can get enough sun. While we all have the right to try to thrive—to pursue life—there are limited resources, including the limits of our own bodies.
And we don’t get to choose to be amoebas or trees, anyway: we’re humans, a different animal, one designed to thrive on a diet with regular inputs of animal protein. There are cultures where the people live on animal products almost exclusively; there are people who are allergic to dairy, or wheat, or nuts; there are no vegan societies, and there are no people who are allergic to meat. I accept these as scientific facts: that humans thrive on a diet that includes meat; that all human diets result in the deaths, directly and indirectly, of plants and animals; and that death is a necessary part of individual and collective life on Earth. Based on that, eating animals is fine. To say it’s okay to kill thousands of plants and insects, but not a single vertebrate, is a perversion of respect for life. And while I respect the desire to avoid killing, it’s impossible, because it defies nature. We should do what we can to limit suffering in the world, but we should not try to limit death: the 1:1 ratio is sustainable; life without death is not.
A happy life is one in which you are in concert with your desires. Pretending you don’t have a desire, always subverting and tricking it, shoving it underground, and never satisfying yourself—none of that is healthy behavior. You’d know it about any other area of your life, so don’t play games with your food. Respect your animal body, the vigor of drives that keep us alive, and the pleasures that make life worth living. Feed it properly, and listen to it.
We’ve made changes in our diet and lifestyle over the course of human history. The people I know, by and large, do not ever squat, and squatting is arguably the most natural human movement; before chairs and indoor toilets, it was something we each did, many times a day. But the people I know, they don’t do many of the kinds or intensities of exercise that humans have historically done, and hardly even any walking. Our bodies are heavier: we eat much more food, which is much more energy dense and much easier to get: we rarely fast or endure periods of deprivation. Most people pay no attention to their cravings, indigestion, or bowel movements, and these are all irrelevant to how most people choose what to eat and when. They don’t sleep enough. They live and work in isolation from other people, nature, and their own bodies. They worry too much, and are exposed to all kinds of toxins: prescribed medications, chemicals in the food, water, and air; they carry devices that emit tetratogenic rays.
Our bodies may be incomparable to what they were in our beginnings as a species, despite the genetic similarities. It’s not a given that what made a human healthy even 10,000 years ago will work on an adult raised in a post-industrial society.
We’ve made compromises to our ideal diet, and adapted to them: somewhat. Many people can tolerate dairy and wheat, recent additions to our diets. Some people don’t get sick on industrial diets, either. You may not realize you’re even sick, if everyone around you feels the same way. I take a much more conservative approach to the more recent innovations to our diets like refined foods, than to agricultural products some of our ancestors have eaten for millennia. The agricultural compromise early farmers made in leaving the nomadic lifestyle and adopting as staples foods like potatoes, lentils, corn, and rice brought some costs with them that, as a society, we’ve accepted with not too many problems. We’re shorter, and if we don’t include enough animal products we become malnourished and deformed.
By comparison, the Standard American Diet, the latest revolution in human diet, has brought an epidemic of disease that threatens to overwhelm society. Maybe there’s a compromise suitable to the 21st century, an amount of plant-based food that is ideal, not just for me, but for ensuring everyone has enough to eat and that the Earth can sustain our food production. I’ve been researching it for months, trying to determine the costs to health and available resources required to make enough high quality food for everyone. I am just not buying the line that we can’t feed all of us if we don’t go GMO, or all go vegan, or adopt Quorn or Chickie Nobs or whatever actually does come next. We agree on many points about what qualifies as food, but I don’t even necessarily agree with Michael Pollan’s famous dictum to eat “mostly plants,” when historical evidence suggests a meat-based diet is more natural to us.
So I keep reading, trying to get to that place of deep knowledge, so I can confidently tell you to go eat meat and, as well as knowing that it’s the best thing for you and me, know that it’s the best thing for everyone: today, into the future, for people, other living things, and the whole living world.

Food (in)security

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Cascio) — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 18:32:00 +0000

“Food security” is one of those buzzwords organizations throw around when they’re fishing for grant money. Now that I think about it, I might even go fishing, myself, because one of the most important ways that I flex my giant humanitarian love is by teaching people how to become more food secure.

“Food security” means different things, depending on your perspective. The average policy wonk thinks “food security,” and immediately starts thinking infrastructure, cash crops, and preventing terrorists from taking pictures of feedlot cows. Your locality might be concerned with its food deserts, and their costs to the state. And your own idea of food security might be to wonder what there is to eat within delivery range.

If you rely on industry to serve your food needs, you are less food secure than if you can feed yourself from alternate sources. This means finding your food in the places that aren’t represented on government food locator maps: farmer’s markets, your own garden, the woods. It means genuine freedom of choice among actual foods suitable for human consumption, not from a dozen varieties of the same ultraprocessed product. It means drawing on a personal encyclopedia of knowledge and experience in recognizing foods, wherever they are, and knowing their qualities: what they taste like, how satisfying they are, how to cook them. It means valuing the rituals of preparing and enjoying food with others, not just the numbers on the side of the package.

By contrast, the American standard is eating the meal that is served to you, in restaurants that rely on deliveries of frozen provisions. It’s supermarkets, the one place where even food desert denizens know they can go for real food, are mostly full of pre-packaged, highly processed food products. Even evidently natural foods have no seasonal availability, or provenance. Milk is pasteurized, meat is stripped of recognizable animal origins. Squeamishness, fear, and ignorance are encouraged: industrial food promises to be free of dirt, raw flesh, and microbes. This is the food of denial: denial of ordinary human desires, of our connections to the Earth through what we eat, of the importance of quality food to our well-being, of the differences between food produced in harmony with nature and food that strenuously opposes nature. This is how American food insecurity starts.

People who are insecure will cling to the mob. It makes a certain kind of sense: in our confusion, we think, “all those people can’t all be wrong.” But sometimes, they are. Sometimes the landscape is controlled by forces too large for the mind’s eye to encompass. Consider the food desert, and why it is a pernicious environment. When all you see are a certain, limited range of choices, wherever you go in your daily travels, day after day, it eventually limits what you think of as your choices. After all, this is your actual, imperfect, modern life, not a stock image of breezy, healthy living. This is where you live, and these are the only things you see to eat. If you live in a food desert, all you see are unhealthy choices, but they’re normalized. Eventually, you believe things that allow you to make the same, poor choices: that this is how other people in my situation eat, it’s all I can afford, all I can drive to, and that it’s not so bad. Defenders of bad food are technically correct when they claim that people are free to eat what they want, and that they should be allowed to choose good food or bad. The danger of the food desert is in growing to accept its offerings.

It takes conviction and sustained effort to break away and do things differently. You have to have confidence in what you’re doing and why, to buy vegetables you’ve never eaten before, to go out of your way to buy food, to be the only one who brings a boxed lunch to work every day instead of going out. And it has to be rewarding to live like that: not only do you have to like this new image of yourself, but you have think the extra effort is worth it.

Most importantly, you have to like the taste of your own cooking. The very last thing I would ever lie to you about is whether something tastes good to me. I care about gustatory pleasure, and do not waste my time eating things I don’t like. I don’t like beets or beef liver, so I don’t eat those things, and that’s okay. If you like them, you should totally eat them, because they’re really good for you, but it’s not worth it to choke down disgusting food.

If you want to learn to enjoy real food, I can help you with that. The first step to enjoying natural foods is to wean yourself from industrial food. The salt, sugar, and chemicals mask toxic elements, off flavors, and even rancid oils, in industrial foods, drugging you instead of supplying a genuine food experience. When you get away from the cycle of craving and release, and you can begin to appreciate the foods people have eaten and enjoyed for thousands of years. You’ll finally be able to clearly understand what your body knows about what you’ve eaten and what you need.

Real food is your birthright as a human being.

If we don’t take a revolutionary step in favor of embracing our animal selves, rather than denying ourselves and trying to fake ourselves out, we stand to join the stampeding mob into what amounts to the shittiest virtual reality that industry can manufacture. Too many of us have surrendered already, choosing “Farmville” over u-pick tomatoes, Wii Bowling over rental shoes, and “chocolate pudding” flavored soy protein isolate meal replacement bars over meat and pudding.

Don’t do it anymore. Don’t volunteer for “The Matrix.” I swear, the food is much, much better out here.

Welcome to the Tin Foil Toque

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Cascio) — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 14:49:00 +0000

Someone on the internet is wrong... about food. Here on the Tin Foil Toque, everything you learned about food (and we know that most of what you learned, you learned on the internet) is wrong. But it's okay: we're here to help.

First rule of Tin Foil Toque Club: Do not don the Tin Foil Toque. It is not for wearing. It is also wrong.

The "Tin Foil" part is wrong. We call them "tin foil hats," but they're actually made out of aluminum. And far be it from me (not) to start an internet religious war, but the "pastafarians" (or at least this one) are also wrong. You should never wear a metal colander on your head, or a metal hat of any kind. They conduct heat: no good in a kitchen. They also conduct electricity and other electromagnetic waves, allowing the government to control your thoughts. It's like the black helicopter thing: a fringe culture united in paranoia is represented by the symbol of the feared entity. So put the foil down. We're not afraid of food, here, or of being wrong.

The "Toque" part is also wrong. Chefs wear toques, like nurses wear those nurse's caps. It's like a uniform, or a coat of arms: it is a garment that means something, and a toque means you are a chef. I am not a chef. I am a home cook. Chefs and home cooks have different concerns. A chef wants to lure a well-heeled crowd to his dining room. A home cook has a captive audience and a (usually) more limited budget. A chef is not concerned with your nutrition or health. A chef just wants you to enjoy your dining experience. A home cook does not offer limitless choice, but a home cook will also cater to your special needs without spitting in your food. A home cook just wants you to clean your plate: the ultimate expression of approval.

What I serve company is the closest I get to what I chef does, and the skill set I cultivate in the kitchen is the one I use daily, to feed myself and the people who are at my dining room table most nights. I'm concerned with my pleasure, and with what my husband likes. I'm also concerned about gout, hypertension, diabetes, cancer, depression, and every other disease that does or could affect us, and over which I exercise what power I have. And being a comfortable American with a laptop and a college education, I read a lot of articles and recipes, and cook the foods I want to eat, with few practical limits on what I can afford to eat. Most Americans spend a very small percentage of their income on food, compared to other countries and to all people, historically. This is not an unalloyed 'good thing.' For starters, even with all of that information, so many people are still anxious about what they eat, are doing it wrong, or both.

I don't have a degree in a health science, or in any science at all: my undergraduate degree is in technical writing, so when I have a burning question, I use the tools in my toolbox, and I research the answer. I've been researching food for years, and my inquiries have led me to walk a line that acknowledges many truths without embracing one gospel with full faith. I started this blog to share some of the ways that people have been told to eat, and the many bizarre, earnest, fraudulent, insane, and amusing ways there are to be wrong about food. The number of wrong things people believe about red meat and potatoes could keep me blogging for weeks. This is going to be the special place I have for poking stupid ideas with sharp sticks.

I'm not really a mean person; it's just that I'm scathing when I know I'm right. I come from a place of love, not just for food but for people, and I want to make you laugh and also, over time, make you consider eating better. I've always wanted a little cult of my own, and I imagine being a sort of cross between Jon Stewart and Jamie Oliver, reporting on the so-called news and spreading some empowerment tools around, since I have lots, and a desire to share and be listened to. If you just want to read about tasty things that I put in my mouth, and occasional good news about local food in the Pioneer Valley, read my food blog: Justin Wants to Feed You. If you like tart humor and black cynicism, put the Tin Foil Toque in your blogroll. But please, note the second rule:

Second rule of Tin Foil Toque Club: We recommend that you do not chew the tin foil toque, as it is an unpleasant sensation.