Signs of Life

As an editor, many newly published books cross my desk. Here are a few worthy recent additions:

New Good Food: Shopper’s Pocket Guide to Organic, Sustainable and Seasonal Whole Foods by Margaret M. Wittenberg (Ten Speed, 2007) — When this book first crossed my desk, I thought, “Well, whole foods are whole foods, right? What else do I need to know? I can already tell the difference between a squash (whole) and a Twinkie (slightly less than whole). But this book has a treasure trove of valuable information. It gives all the nitty-gritty details on identifying, preparing, and storing whole foods staples.

Need to know if preparing French green lentils differs from preparing Spanish pardina lentils (or mung beans or split peas on yellow soybeans)? This book’s got the answers in an easy-to-refer-to chart. Can’t keep Soba and Udon noodles straight? Check the book. Want to try baking with ultra-nutritious Teff flour? Book’ll tell you how it’s done.

Go Green, Live Rich: 50 Simple Ways to Save the Earth and Get Rich Trying by David Bach (Broadway, 2008) — Bach has authored a series of “finish rich” books, but this one focuses on how to build your wealth while also saving the earth. While the tips struck me as more useful for befriending the earth than bolstering the wallet, they’ll help out with both.

What I liked most about the book was the “Go Green Action Steps” Bach provides in each section. They direct readers to websites (primarily) for more information or getting involved. All the websites I visited from this section were actually really helpful (so many sites are not). And, call me old-fashioned, but I like gleaning new websites from books or print magazines and newspapers instead of someplace else online.

Also, the book has beautiful pictures and is well designed. I know I’m not supposed to judge a book by it’s cover, but it’s fun to peruse something pretty.

In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan (Penguin, 2008) — This book is great, great, great. Pollan chronicles the modern history of American food, which sounds much less interesting than it is. What’s happened to our food system in the last 40 years is the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy. Pollan exposes the many sins committed in the name of food and then gives guidelines for eating well in the modern age.

Even if you’re not a stitch interested in food, I recommend this book for it’s pure phraseological beauty. Pollan’s prose is bewitching, with sentences that are hearty, soul-enriching comfort food and whipped (grass-fed) butter all at once.

It seems like everywhere I turn these days health is for sale.

Take Airborne, the self-described “effervescent health formula” that purports to “boost your immune system to help your body combat germs.” The product’s claims (though recently outed as overblown) are all about the preservation of pristine health: Every time you’re about to get on a plane or go to show-and-tell at your daughter’s germ-infested kindergarten, goes the message, Bam!, down some Airborne and you’ll be immune to colds, the flu, and, implicitly, every other manner of illness and disease.

Then, of course, there are the “probiotic” yogurts, which are said to boost the immune system and aid digestion, about a billion other fortified foods, and still other “edible food-like substances” as Michael Pollan describes them.

Now welcome the rise of immunity-boosting restaurants (?!), toss in a feng-shui styled McDonalds (meant, I guess, to promote serenity and better digestion while you slurp down fries), supersize yourself a fortified soda that millions of lobbying dollars fought to get into your (and your elementary school children’s) hand, and you’ve practically got picture-perfect health being handed to you in a bag at the Drive-Thru window.

It’s as though a critical mass of companies finally caught on that more and more consumers are concerned about health, so they’re packaging up the promise of it, slapping on a shiny label, and selling it back to us at 100-times the price of the exponentially healthier experience of, say, walking through the woods while drinking filtered tap water with a slice of lime. (Cost of entire adventure? Around $.15 for the lime slice.)

Even some of the sacred territory in the legitimate health-food matrix — the idea that whole, real, organic, local, foods are the true best friend of good health — is quickly, if silently, eroding. Large corporations are waking up to the power of the “local, organic” brand to sell products and are buying up small farms [Check out this amazing and scary interactive graphic (courtesy of a professor at Michigan State University) that shows the corporate buyout of organic products. For more specific info on which dots mean what, click here]. What these giant companies are destroying in the process are the very real health, environmental, cultural, social and economic benefits inherent in locally-produced food.

Who am I to say that “fortified soda” isn’t a health panacea? (Okay, well, I AM a health editor so I think I do get to comment. And my comment is: “Of course they’re not!” followed closely by, “Blech!” And if you aren’t willing to take my editorializing as evidence, check out this recent study on the link between diet sodas and metabolic disease.) But the packaging up of health seems a phony and misguided endeavor because health, by it’s nature, can’t be sold. It isn’t a thing you can buy, it is a pursuit, a way of living, a set of choices and conscious decisions. It runs deeper and wider than eating yogurt that supposedly helps you poop.

Here’s Pollan again in an interview with Tara Parker-Pope on the better way to think about food and health:

“I think health should be a byproduct of eating well, for reasons that have nothing to do with health, such as cooking meals, eating together and eating real food. You are probably going to be healthy, but that is not the goal. The goal should just be eating well for pleasure, for community, and all the other reasons people eat. What I’m trying to do is bring a man-from-Mars view to the American way of thinking about food. This is so second nature to us — food is either advancing your health or ruining your health. That is a very limited way to think about food, and its’s a very limited way to think about health. The health of our bodies is tied to the health of the community and the health of the earth. Health is indivisible.”

So while we’re free to buy all the “health in a bottle” we want, its not likely to do us any significant health favors in any real and lasting way. What good WILL buying all these products do? Make this guy rich.

My everyday routines are so deeply ingrained that I almost never think of them as choices.

For example, I don’t always put a slice of lime in my water glass, then fill the glass approximately 1/3 the way with star-shaped ice cubes, then top the glass off with filtered water, then chomp down all the ice, and only then drink the water because it’s what I choose to do. No, no. I do it because that’s how water is drunk, of course!

The severity of my “routine blindness” caught up with me the other day in the grocery store. I’d been watching a podcast of the irrepressible Michael Pollan (a food journalist and one of my personal heroes) lecture at Stanford about his new book In Defense of Food and about the reductive nature of “nutritionism,” the notion that individual nutrients and vitamins are the healthiest part of a food and, hence, can be isolated and repackaged in bottles as “Vitamin A” or “Beta Carotene” or what-have-you with the same healthy effets.

As EL has covered (“The Whole Thing” from the March 2008 issue), and Pollan and others continue to report, nutrients in isolation don’t appear to do our bodies any health favors.

Tara Parker-Pope writing in The New York Times (“The Case for Real Food,” November 5, 2007) summarizes the research findings of David R. Jacobs, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health on the failings of nutritionism.

“Dr. Jacobs believes that nutrition science needs to consider the effects of “food synergy,” the notion that the health benefits of certain foods aren’t likely to come from a single nutrient but rather combinations of compounds that work better together than apart.”

So, anyway, with all this on my mind, I was cruising the aisles at The Wedge and thinking “Gosh, I need to eat more fruits and vegetables.” Yet my next actual thought was: “Well, crap! Now how in the world am I going to do that?!”

I’m so set in my ways — even at the grocery store — that it didn’t even dawn on me that the answer to eating more vegetables was, ahem, buying more vegetables.

Instead of moving through the produce section and grabbing what I always grab (bananas, apples, limes, mandarins, garlic, onions, cauliflower, carrots and parsley), I could grab — gasp! — anything else I wanted. Lettuce? Sure! Cabbage? Of course! Broccoli? Yes! Fennel? Why not! I could even grab more of what I already grab. (Sometimes big discount stores put limits on that week’s specials — No more than six supercheap and really sugary juice packs per customer, please! But no one’s going to stop me from buying 10 bunches of carrots if I want to!)

So mechanized was I at the grocery store that I’d stopped even seeing other fruits, veggies and foods. I’ve been going to the same co-op three times a week for 6 years and last week I had to ask where the scallions were (pretty embarrassing).

So now I’m trying to go to the grocery store at least once a week at a time when I’m not in a hurry. I make sure the dogs have been walked and I’ve gotten a handle on household chores and any other pesky life detritus, and then when I go to the store I’m able to just order the world’s best chai from the deli and then leisurely stroll around and really, really SEE the foods I’d been ignoring in my zombie-like state and everyday haste.

It’s actually made grocery shopping fun, and I’ve made some marvelous-tasting discoveries — crisp new varieties of olives (not just the Kalamatas I always get), tangy Miso, brisk pink and gray sea salts with delightfully nuanced flavors. And the bonus? It’s healthier, too.