There’s a lot more to it than just eat what I want when I want. I spend a lot of time being mindful of what I eat. Am I really hungry or am I bored? What am I craving? Etc And, as I said further down there are certain foods that make me crave more vs ones that don’t and, for health reasons I’ve learned to avoid them as best I can.

*Initially I wasn’t even aware I was losing weight. When it was pointed out to me by someone else I was legitimately confused because I was eating what I wanted when I wanted. I actually thought I had something medically wrong with me and saw the doctor about it. A year later and, he wanted to know how I did it I replied I don’t know, but if I did I patent the idea, write a book … I’d be rich! he chuckled. I really wish I could drill it down to some sensible plan that works for all. I know what a struggle it can be, is something I’ve been battling with for over half my life.

I’m not so sure. I think there’s truth to what Dr. Kessler says about how food is produced to create the trifecta of taste bud bliss in all that salt sugar and fat. Whether food manufacturers are cognisant of how their manipulating our biology or, if they’re just making food that will taste good on a large scale (more sales) is up for debate I think.

I know on a personal level there’s a lot of truth to the idea of how certain foods can be more desirable aka addictive. I started becoming really aware of how what I ate had a huge impact on how I felt. Not entirely sure how I figured it out or, why it came so easily (something I’m trying to currently understand so, I don’t wind up being as fat as I once was or, back to being a chronic migraineur with hyperglycaemia), but one of the things I’ve discovered about myself is refined carbohydrates are the spawn of satan. If I eat too many I feel sluggish, cruddy and, they contribute to the number of migraines I get. Ironically, once upon a time I would’ve told you you can take the refined carbs from my cold dead hands Now there are months where I won’t touch a single slice of the baguette I once so loved and, I don’t miss it.* I noticed if I eat more of them I crave them more so, I try to limit them in my diet.

The other part of it was being put on Topamax for my migraines which caused anorexia. I have ADHD which means for me at least binging, overeating even though I’m full, obsessing are part n parcel of my life. Not so when I was taking the medication. It was a HUGE eye opener for me and, made me realize I might not be in full conscience control of the decisions I make. For the first time in my life I only ate when hungry, ate ’til I was full and, didn’t obsess about food all day long. If I didn’t have other, more troubling, side effects from the drug I’d still be taking it.

I think maybe in a sense people are conflating desirability, craving, obsessing, not feeling in control of their decisions to mean addiction, but I don’t doubt that there is something unconscious going on that contributes to not being able to exercise control over what goes into my mouth.

*I’m not on any particular diet plan I just noticed a correlation between what I ate hugely impacted how I felt and, made changes.

I tend to be a bit lighter – not heavier – when I’m being more puritanical about my eating, though.

And I absolutely hate those “0 carb” “0 tran fat” claims… all super misleading!

One of the things I learned about myself was if I made certain foods bad and, others good I would invariably set myself up for failure when I ate something “sinful” And, if I denied myself an indulgence I’d crave it, obsess about it and, eventually cave in then eat more of it than I normally would. I was a bad bad person for wanting/having that.

I’m not sure when (or how) it clicked for me, but somewhere along the line I decided not only was there no such thing as bad food, but I was going to try new foods and, new ways to cook. The weight I had managed to gain (don’t know what it was but I had a 41″ waist) has peeled off. I now have a 29″ waist after a year and a half. I’ve had key lime pie (yum!) Almond Roca (swoons), chocolate, cake from the Chinese bakery that sells them buy the slice (divine) … a very long list of foods I once considered were to road to damnation and, the weight continued to come off.

Its still a work in progress, but the way I think about food has drastically changed because I stopped moralizing food.

Aaah, the things we consume as kids have special places in our hearts…

Thankfully, in a democracy, all of us have the option to vote, or to write our representatives, or even to demonstrate and raise awareness and call others to join the political action. I think this is probably a better strategy than trying to eat our way around the issue. Though I certainly wouldn’t tell people who wanted to boycott certain foods to not bother — that is entirely your choice. But don’t make it everyone else’s responsibility as well.

The way in which food is produced is manifestly NOT morally neutral, and I never said it was. In fact, if you look up there at the actual post, I did add a brief disclaimer to this effect when I said “And, setting aside the very-interesting-but-not-to-be-had-right-now discussion of ethical and religious foodways…” by which I meant to include not just vegetarianism for the sake of animal rights, but also choosing food on the basis of how it is produced.

I still maintain that food itself, however, is morally neutral. Because no one becomes a bad person by eating food — no matter how it’s produced.

I mentioned this coffee maker up above, but I’m mentioning it again, with the disclaimer that I have nothing to do with the company that makes it, get an AeroPress coffee maker, it makes completely awesome coffee.

http://www.amazon.com/AeroPress-Coffee-and-Espresso-Maker/dp/B000GXZ2GS

That is one of my favorite things you have said so far.

<3

So yeah, health-based food marketing and should NOT be aimed at kids.

Be it eating or exercise.
I.E.:

Eating-too much of the “wrong stuff” (i.e. the stuff that makes food taste good, basically –sugar, salt and fat). Exercise–not enough, not ever enough, no matter what you do and how much you do it. Drives me crazy.

I think it’s a little scary how we do have a tendency to justify what we eat in terms of how “good for us” it is. I’m sure you know a lot more than I do about the beta carotene/cancer connection and that debacle of an experiment. When I read that, I just decided to eat food and be done with it.

Oh, and drink coffee. Black as night and sweet as sin in True Java Purity, you heretic, you.

I’m thin. Really thin. It-takes-active-effort-to-gain-weight thin. Low cal foods probably aren’t the best for me.

This whole ‘you should eat this, not that’ culture frightens me, because it’s about generalities. We’re not taught how to choose foods for ourselves, really, so we don’t know how to decide what’s best for us–just what society thinks is ‘best’. I felt guilty buying chocolate covered granola bars for a while, because of this. Eventually I got over it, and now I buy them partly as a ‘f*** you’ to that aspect of our culture.

(For fun, I tried the high protein ones. Yuck)

I have Crohn’s disease with multiple small-bowel strictures, which means that I’m basically a bran muffin away from a life-threatening intestinal blockage. I’d love to “eat mostly plants,” but I can’t digest them. It’s a luxury of health as well as class to be able to choose a diet based on environmental or moral concerns. Is a cherry Pop-Tart good for me? No, but it won’t result in hospitalization, so in that sense, it’s much better than a banana.

I’ve never seen this topic addressed — that most food guidelines are for healthy people, and sick people are ignored. And the result of that is that I get a lot of lectures and dirty looks for eating junk food. I don’t love junk either, but: I weigh 93 pounds. I can usually only manage one meal a day. Some days even that doesn’t stay down. So when I CAN eat, I need calories, not tips on becoming a locavore. My body knows that, and I’ve learned that it will tell me what to do. If I’m craving sausage gravy over biscuits, it’s because I need protein, carbs and fats to keep functioning. (Also, they’re fucking delicious.)

Seeing this fact acknowledged — by an expert, no less — made my day. Thanks Michelle!

Diet coke/preservatives/artifical food colorings/etc. cause cancer and the like. No. That’s ridiculous.

I’m with you for the most part on this one except when it comes to Aspartame in Diet Coke. I’m including a link below which has numerous links to articles, studies, and FDA information regarding the poisonous nature of aspartame.

http://www.321recipes.com/aspartame.html

Honestly, I am so tickled that GF chex is so clearly labeled. It makes my job of eating a gluten free breakfast that much easier.

Also, if you look at the side of the box, near the bottom, you’ll notice a little blurb about being endorsed by the Celiac Foundation.

I think you’re actually misreading…the whole of everything I’ve ever written, if you think that I’m putting blame/responsibility on the individual for systemic problems.

Perhaps we actually agree? What a thought.

To be honest, I found your comment confusing on first read, and on another read, I still do. Can you explain a bit more what, exactly, I’m missing?

On second thought, I’m really brain-fogged right now. I’ll come back tomorrow or the next day and give it another go + more thought. Today I’m just fagged.

But it’s amazing to me how people react when I say I let my kid eat what she wants. People say “if I let my child do that, she’d eat nothing but saltines and ketchup!” Or they berate me because do I really want my child to be fat like me? Don’t I know how bad it is? It’s very very difficult for people to understand that by letting her choose her own food and how much to eat, I’m trying to teach her to feed her body well without all the shame and value judgments that so often go into food.

Also, people often assume that I’m fat because I eat junk, but I grew up in Alaska, where a Pollan diet is pretty much assumed. I ate fish and moose and caribou and veggies we grew in our garden. (As an aside, I always kind of want to smack Alice Waters when she talks about eating what’s in season–that’s a lovely idea when you live in a climate like Northern California’s, where strawberries and tomatoes are both in season for much of the year. It’s quite different when eating what’s in season means four months of nothing but fish and about two weeks of berries. Preserving food so we can eat out of season is a wondrous thing). Having eaten the Pollan diet for the first 18 years of my life, I can tell you that it can be pretty monotonous and unsatisfying depending on the climate.

Ever wonder why animals are willing to gnaw their legs off to get out of a trap?”

This pretty much perfectly sums up why I’m a vegan…

Can individuals put some pressure to bear on that change? Yes. Should individuals who have the means (material as well as mental) to do so make individual changes? Yes. But I don’t believe that is the entire solution to the problem, and I don’t think it is right to charge individuals with the responsibility of changing things that are far beyond their immediate control.

And, if your assertions are to be believed, then it’s especially difficult for people in the current food environment to stand outside it in order to make “moral” choices about food. All the more reason to change that context, rather than blaming people (which brings with it the nasty complications or orthorexia and eating disorders and general anxiety about food being poisonous) for making choices that get them through the day.

You’ll note that, nowhere in this post or on this site, have I ever said the food system shouldn’t be changed. What I’ve said is, individuals shouldn’t be blamed for it. And the cost of putting the burden of change on individuals has had real casualties, in the form of undermined eating competence and even frankly disordered eating.

Bottom line: we eat to survive. You can’t hold someone morally responsible for eating what’s available to them in order to survive.

We’ve thrashed our way through the issue a dozen different ways in the 150+ comments here. And shit’s starting to get abusive. I like a lively debate — check out any of my other threads. But this place is intended to be more of a salon du muse, and less of a mud-wrasslin’ pit.

If anyone’s got something to say to continue the conversation, go ahead and blog about it and trackback. I might even link you in a separate post if it’s interesting.

But I’m going to close this down now cause it’s getting messy.

(CLEARLY I HATE MICHAEL POLLAN AND ALL FRESH FOOD!!!!!1!)

I’d also like to add: Walkerton, Ontario. People died. Charming!

There is *no* municipality in America where you cannot obtain clean drinking and cooking water for your family.

Except, say, Crestwood Illinois where the water was tainted with toxic chemicals for over 20 years, the local government covered it up, and cancer rates in that town shot up. Yep, it’s all hooey!

(I know this is a closed end of the thread Michelle, but this was too easy not to knock down.)

Your tone, the entire way through, has been pretty insufferable, and you’ve repeatedly defended Pollan as though the very *mention* of his name constitutes an attack. Conflating my opinion with Chris Gregory’s is pretty annoying to me. I like the guy, but Jesus, I’ve also told him to knock shit off in the past. The difference is, he respected my wishes.

I actually enjoy a good argument, and I encourage them here. But entering someone else’s space, guns blazing, is never a good way to do things. Try diplomacy next time, and you’re more likely to be given a hearing.

But I’m afraid you’ve struck out with me.

And I’m afraid, Alfonso, that you’re like the blind leading the blind.

I’m only responding with equal cynicism, lady. You seem to enjoy it when he gets snarky with his faux-scholar sass, yet take issue when I respond in a less cutesy but equally snarky manner?

So much for open discussion.

And Mr. Gregory: I’ll gladly take your willing ignorance of the discussion at hand (limiting yourself to a self-serving elementary school-worthy mocking) as indication that you simply have nothing else to offer this discussion. Not that you offered much to begin with, other than a few names to drop and quotes to misinterpret.

Have a great week, everybody!

Wait, what?

And to assume that I disagree with the “real food” message is pretty patronizing. I never said I didn’t agree with parts of it. But I am saying there is a certain context here that seems to be underconsidered.

And wow, “some people.” Just wow.

This thread is getting very thread-shitty despite my attempts at keeping it…not thread-shitty.

Again: I’ve never said that “food cannot be understood through a knowledge of organic chemistry” and —in fact— I heard Pollan address just such an accusation on numerous television interviews. The point isn’t that it can’t be understood, the point is that currently we don’t wholly understand food and how our bodies use it.

If we do, if the current reductionist dogma that has been the basis of how the US has fed itself for over half a century is accurate, then how come we have diet-related diseases today that we never would have imagined fifty, sixty years ago? How come Americans are heavier today than they were in the forties? It’s not just because of reductionist nutritionism, of course. There’s also the culture of excess that has characterized post-WWII America. But if all this reductionist theory is so correct, and we understand food as well as you imply, why-oh-why are people getting sicker? If everything is so cut and dry and explained perfectly to us, why do people who spend their time, energy and money on following these rules fail not just at getting healthier, but at even maintaining their already excessive weight?

You’re all over the place, man. On the one hand, you criticize Pollan for supposedly telling people that they should spend more money on what the industry calls “health foods”, which couldn’t be farther from the truth. On the other hand, you defend the authority with which the industry tells us that they know how to engineer better foods than nature could possibly provide, the very same authority with which they then try to tells us to spend more money on “fat-free” and “diet” food products. It’s either one or the other, man. You can’t eat your cake and have it too.

Again (part deux): Pollan does not say that we mustn’t know what our food is made of. What he does repeat over and over is that we don’t necessarily have to be experts in food science to have a complete and healthy diet. Thus, his “system” if you want to call it that: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. It makes sense. Until relatively recently, humans had spent millenia eating real food that they scavenged, not a whole lot of it, and mostly? Yup: Plants. So our bodies are best suited to that kind of diet. (There are exceptions to this, of course, like the Inuit, who pretty much eat meat all of the time and have very limited access to plants (a few berries, some weeds). But they don’t eat what Kraft Foods calls “whale”; they don’t consume a “walrus-like product”. They go out, kill and eat the real thing.)

Of course, someone who dares call himself an “intuitive eater” while completely ignoring the myriad cultural, corporate and media influences that shape what he calls his “intuition” can’t be expected to pay much attention to common sense. In fact, it goes very well with your apparently absolute faith in what science currently has to offer. (Ironic, since science is —by its very nature— never absolute, always questioning itself and always looking to prove itself wrong, in the pursuit of a better understanding of the world around us. A humility your rejection of any kind of questioning disregards completely.) You, sir, are blind to your own condition. And for arrogance, nothing beats the pot calling the kettle black.

On a similar note, I made Skittles vodka for my birthday party…skittles (separated by color) dissolve in vodka over night, and then you filter the stuff (which is messy and takes forever!). The resultant syrup is mixed with club soda or ginger ale or something resembling 7-up. It tastes exactly like you would expect it to–like skittles…and vodka. LOL

They stopped putting gelatin in Skittles just within the last year. All my vegetarian and vegan friends did a happy dance. I hadn’t eaten skittles in over five years, and they were always my favorite candy!!

I haven’t taken ‘Pay more, eat less’ out of context. He’s used the phrase repeatedly. Somehow I am not allowed to make specific references, because you say that constitutes taking him out of context. What is the context? If we bother to look at any of his actual claims (which I’m quite happy to do), they stand up about as well as the more coherent sections of Erik von Daniken’s ‘Chariot of the Gods?’

I’m not kidding. He refers to Ancel Keyes as the father of the lipid theory, which he says a couple of times was proposed in 1950. If that’s true then Ancel Keyes had a time machine, because the lipid hypothesis was proposed exactly one hundred years earlier, in 1850. That’s the level of research – half-arsed factoids poorly understood. And I’m afraid, Alfonso, that you’re like the blind leading the blind.

I’m genuinely impressed by your sheer lack of reading comprehension. Pollan criticizes food science, sure, but not for understanding food chemistry. He very clearly states that his problem with food science in the western world is its reductionist view of food. Food is reduced to nothing more than nutrients, period. And with this view of “food is nothing more than the sum of its chemical parts” is how the industry has been able to sell us on the idea that they can come up with better foods in a laboratory than nature can produce on its own.

I don’t understand what your problem with Pollan is. I’ve read other posts of yours elsewhere, and it seems like you have a vendetta against this guy. But all he’s saying is that so-called health foods are unhealthy, and that we should concentrate on eating foods that are naturally grown. Your affirmation that poor people need to have the definition of “natural” and “real” spelled out for them is a perfect example of your inherent underestimation of a whole economic class based on the perceived notion that “poor” somehow equals “defenseless idiots who wouldn’t know any better even if you tell them better”.

Do yourself a favor: Go to Whole Foods one day, and check out the center aisles. You’ll see plenty of obviously-not-poor-nor-middle-class people buying processed “health foods” developed in labs where they are laced with extra nutrients in unnatural ways, so they can load up on anti-oxidants or omega 3 fatty acids or whatever the latest reductionist craze is. Does the fact that they actually have the money to burn on that crap somehow give them a nutritional advantage? Seriously. It’s like you insist on ignoring the simplicity of Pollan’s argument: None of that processed shit is healthy. Are you angry because only “the rich” get to pollute their bodies with this stuff?

As for the “pay more, eat less” fallacy you described, it is a classic example of pulling a bite-size quote out of its context and blowing it up into a heavily distorted version of itself. Since we started choosing meat from grass-fed mammals and free-range hens, we do spend more per unit, yet we need less of it. After a few months of experimenting with quantities and how our bodies and minds were responding to them, we realized that in reality we’re spending about as much money as we used to spend when we ate industrial meats, we simply require less of it.

Why do we require less of it? In part because the wholesome nature of these meats truly translates into a more efficient use of its nutrients (thus, one’s body actually responding very well to lower quantities of it), and partly because we’re also consuming our proteins through other, less-expensive means (chick peas, quinoa, yogurt, lentils and legumes in general, as well as eggs and milk). Therein lies the gist of the argument: you pay more per unit, yet eat less because your body requires less.

I don’t expect you to understand this, though. Your inclination towards the misleadingly-named “intuitive eating” would suggest that you can’t fathom the idea of letting your “intuition” be influenced by any kind of reasoning that might make you think more about the food you eat. It’s as if your “intuition” wasn’t being influenced by the world around you. Please. Real intuitive eating is: You’re hungry, you go out and find whatever you can to eat, like a mushroom, or a fruit, or —if you’re lucky— a small rabbit you can share with your family, bring it home and make the best of it. There is no such thing as unadultered intuition in the western world. Not when food is available in packages designed to appeal to certain sensibilities, and multiple media (such as this blog) discussing our consumption of food. Your “intuition” is not just yours, it is the product of the world you live in, and when you “intuitively” crave that Twinkie, that’s the industry and their chemicals talking, not your intuition.

So, of course, it would make sense for you to so adamantly reject an idea that suggests that you may be harming your body unknowingly, or that education about the food we consume will help us —ALL of us, poor, middle class, rich— make better choices. Because an educated decision is not an “intuitive decision”.

Soylent green is people, dude. Didn’t you hear?

Michael Pollan states, quite emphatically: pay more, eat less. I don’t see how I am misinterpreting him.

Your argument that healthy food is more expensive on purpose and that Pollan is somehow just another cog in that huge profit-generating machine we know as the health food market relies on the presumption that what the industry sells under the “health food” moniker is the same thing that Pollan calls “real food”. This I could understand if it came from someone who read a mediocre blurb on the back of a book somewhere, but from someone who claims to have read In Defense of Food, it surprises me. Both in his writings and on interviews, Pollan is —in my opinion— very adamant about distinguishing foods labeled as “health foods” (the kind that cost you three times as much as their presumably less healthy counterparts, and is ridden with lab-developed ingredients) from “real food” (the kind that grows in the ground and is gathered out of healthy, well-fed animals; the kind that isn’t processed in unnatural and unnecessary ways).

This difference seems to have eluded you for reasons I cannot fathom. But they are not important. Just know that you kinda missed the point there, OK? Real foods are not more expensive as a general rule. My wife and I spend approximately $28 more per month on food than what the state would give us if we were to apply (and be eligible) for food stamps. Yet we manage to eat beef from grass-fed cows and bison, eggs and meat from free-range hens, clean greens from organic growers, non-homogenized milk, and lots and lots of grains. We also make our own yogurt and are looking into homemade butter, as well as homemade cat food. By our current calculations, these additions to our homemade roster will help us reduce our food budget. If circumstances ever forced us to depend on food stamps, we may have to eliminate a organic greens and vegetables, perhaps buy regular (homogenized, ultra pasteurized) milk and rely on more grains for protein to limit our meat consumption, but we’d still be avoiding processed foods laced with high-fructose corn syrup and a lot of other unnatural substances.

What I do find way more important about your argument, though, is your particular mention of Brillat-Savarin, an outspoken defender of home-cooking who advocated for a low-carbohydrate diet as a means to address obesity, a health topic he dedicated quite a deal of time and energy into researching and writing about. In fact, I dare say that, were Brillat-Savarin to live today to experience modern-day food consumption in the US, he would agree with Pollan: the excess sugars, flavor-enhancing substances and preservatives used to make the expensive “health food” we all see at every supermarket are quite possibly the very worst ingredients we could ever subject our bodies to. I think he’d also agree with Pollan’s insistence on eating whole foods that haven’t been tampered with.

One thing he did have, that Pollan lacks, is a romantic flair for describing food. Brillat-Savarin captured in prose the beauty and joy of eating good food in ways that can only be described as poetic. And perhaps it is Pollan’s more clinical, journalistic tone that puts you off. Judging by your comments on this post, you seem to be the kind of person who enjoys food fully (as do I) and I think I can understand why Pollan’s writing may seem boring to you, especially in comparison with a writer the caliber of Brillat-Savarin. But you seem to have allowed your dislike of Pollan’s writing style to get in the way of understanding what he is trying to communicate.

Finally, I fail to comprehend the “Michael Pollan hates freedom” bit. It’s amusing and great fodder for the kind of nice little mindless quotes that people not inclined towards critical thinking will eat up like a bag of Doritos, but really, it makes no sense at all. Michael Pollan does not want you to stop eating bad food. He wants you to know what is in your food, so that if you’re gonna harm your body, at least you will do it knowingly. Because when laboratory-made products are labeled as a “health food” in packaging designed to make you feel like you’re making a good, healthy choice for you and your family, it is empowering to inform people what effects these faux ingredients have on our bodies. That is all he, and many others like him, are offering: information. And nothing —NOTHING— is more conducive to freedom than the propagation of information. Your argument suggests that personal choice is hindered by the information Pollan has to offer, that “democracy in a nutshell” is best described as misinformed people led to believe what the food industry wants to pass off as food. If the food manufacturer’s claims (the information they provide) is conducive to this democratic system, why is the information offered by Pollan oppressive?

In the end, it is only information. Do with it what you will. But arguing that more information and more perspective are somehow not conducive to a better democracy is a fallacy.

:)

Also: I checked David Kessler’s book out from the library, and I tried, oh God I tried so hard to read it. It sat on the back of my toilet for two weeks. Then it had to go back.

Which reminds me, the Bible says you shouldn’t eat anything with a cloven hoof, and we’re just cooking up a wild camel stew. There’s been a surge in feral camel numbers up near Alice Springs and an enterprising Halal butcher talked the government into letting them slaughter wild camels for commercial sale. It’s very exciting…I’ve had hump meat before, but there’s really nowhere (in the first world) you can get wild, flavourful old slow-twitch muscle like this anymore, unless you’ve killed it yourself. The colour is amazing, almost purple.

I’ve been meaning to write up a series of short pieces, one a day for each of his seven or eight food rules and then finishing with a rule of my own. Maybe I’ll get to it this week.

Oh you said John THORNE. For a second I thought you said that John Zorn wrote a cookbook. And I was going to buy it.

I lol’d.

Michael Pollan hates freedom, it’s as simple as that.

I lol’d x 2.

But seriously, thanks for the advice.

I’ve been writing about food and bioethics since the early nineties, I guess, and back then if you said to people that food was a very political issue they’d look at you blankly. Now everybody talks about food politics, of course, but not in the way I meant (or hoped).

Probably the classic texts on taste and class are Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (which you can download on Gutenberg) and Pierre Bordieu’s Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste (which is coming out in a cheap new edition in the next few weeks). I find Veblen hysterically funny, but for most people it’s a slog. There’s also a great book about the history of the environmental movement, which was traditionally associated with efforts to manipulate food prices to benefit landowners over the peasants, called Green Imperialism (written by Richard H. Grove) which is a monster slog and also expensive…

I think you can get a lot from fiction, actually. Babette’s Feast by Isak Dinensen is the most conspicuous example. And then there’s books about food which aren’t cookbooks that are opposed to the sorts of values that someone like Michael Pollan espouses. Outlaw Cook by John Thorne is a good one. Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste. Trader Vic wrote some great books as well, which were sort of cookbooks but were sort of philosophy as well.

What it gets down to is this: until the early seventies, when people had only limited access to food beyond what was required for subsistence, they ate what they liked, what they enjoyed. But that’s a personal criteria, a matter of taste. People like Foucault would argue that society controls individuals by exerting control over their bodies, by deciding for them what they do and how they act. And there are various groups who have interests in controlling what people eat and how much, and they exert their own influence.

By making what should be a matter of personal taste into a public health issue, the various interests can fight over who gets the spoils. At the moment there are people like Michael Pollan who are doing a good job of mobilising middle-class interests, which is expensive food sold with large markups by small businesses. Historically, this is pretty much how you end up with a fascist state: middle-class revolution driven by moral panic and pecuniary self-interest.

So people no longer eat for pleasure, they eat to be ‘healthy’, health being defined by outside forces with pecuniary and ideological interests. Pleasure is the enemy: how you can control people if they just do what feels good? Pleasure has to be denied.

Health at any size and intuitive eating are positive forces because they stress the independence of the individual over the interests of the state, which is democracy in a nutshell, the pursuit of happiness and all that self-evident stuff. Michael Pollan hates freedom, it’s as simple as that.

I remember walking 45 minutes each way to my minimum wage job because I couldn’t afford to buy groceries if I bought a bus pass. My food for the day might be a bowl of rice with a handful of frozen veggies and maybe some tuna, or possibly a peanut butter sandwich. I was supporting myself and an alcoholic abuser, paying the rent and the bills because he inevitably would drink his share of the rent away. And yes, I know there are people who will say I should have left him–I challenge those people to do that in a strange city with nowhere to go, to admit to yourself that maybe what’s happening to you is actually really messed up and go to a shelter, or even to figure out even how to untangle the fear from the love that I somehow felt. I was poor, hungry, scared, and young. I had no money and no way out that I could see. I certainly didn’t have a garden plot or even a balcony to grow food for myself. I had a kitchen, but that’s not much use if there’s no food in it.

So yeah. I would like to tell people who say you should just pull yourself together and make it happen to go to hell, or maybe that they learn what it is to live with perpetual, gnawing hunger, not just for one day, but for days on end. You can’t even think straight, you can’t see anything beyond getting something in your stomach, and you don’t think about nutritional content when you’re just trying to stay alive.

And I knew what good nutrition was. I grew up with parents who cooked and learned to make meals for the family, and my grandmother was a nurse who was very keen on good nutrition. All of that meant precisely nothing in the face of hunger, when all you want is anything to eat at all.

Potential commenters from Metafilter: I leave you in Chris’ capable hands. I’m going to do something enjoyable with my day off.

But manipulating food prices by retarding their prodution and increasing their cost benefits the same people who advocate spending more money on food. Higher markups means greater profits. It disadvantages the poor, obviously, so people like Michael Pollan are needed to rationalise it as a moral and ethical imperative and not just blatant self-interest (which is how imperialism has always worked).

I agree, and I have absolutely no doubt that Pollan intends this, and understands the differences, etc. I actually respect a lot of what the guy has to say, though I take a few pot shots at him here and there (what can I say? Big game is more fun to hunt.)

What’s bothered me, and inspired posts like this one, is the way in which a lot of his readers misinterpret and then misapply his message. It often comes out in the form of moralizing about food, in the first place, and then attempting to apply certain precepts to people who aren’t operating in the same context, with the same privileges and resources. I don’t necessarily think Pollan himself is doing this (though some would argue he is), but I also think we have a smidgen of responsibility for how our messages are likely to be interpreted. (I’ve certainly been held to account for the “Framing” of certain posts on Metafilter — and also here — that apparently caused readers to think I meant something different from what I did. Words are hard. And they mean things.)

It may not be what he ever intended to happen — and I can totally sympathize with one’s message being taken out of context or misapplied. But I do like to talk about those (mis)interpretations and try to muddle through them.

Anyway, thank you so much for your considered comment.

FWIW Michelle, this formerly that poor (and still rather poor) person wouldn’t have and doesn’t feel patronized by your post in the least.

I also was raised well under the poverty line by a single mom, and yes, my Momma was creative at making nutrition work and every other bloody thing work out, too.

Note. There were things we didn’t deal with: racism, mental illness, addiction, physical illness. There were resources we had: a farming history, literacy, my mom’s own informal education at the knee of her family, a sense of confidence in her own competence, socialism enough that we could find cheap rent and have doctors, and the energy and physical ability/constitution to work and go to school and rent a garden plot and put food by and bake and bike with her tow mechanism to where the specials were and generally kick ass at life. My mom wasn’t a housewife – she worked, went to University full time, and sustenance farmed, cooked from scratch, and made us clothes. She was scared out of her head the whole time and it caught up with her later: but she also had the privilege of seeing it wasn’t forever.

(What my mom sacrificed was sleep, yeah? That’s not healthy, either.)

People with moms like us should get down on their knees and thank our mothers for their abilities and privileges, and we should be happy for life putting us in a place where they could do their miracles – but deciding this grants us the right to be smug about other people who are struggling is disgusting. No two poor people are exactly the same or have the same situation; the middle class person can suck at carpentry or cooking and it’s a trait, but when the poor person does it it’s a personal failure?

Horseshit.

Sure, education and resources and help are never a bad thing. They give people more to work with.

But “My Momma did X” doesn’t mean anything; it’s self-satisfaction, no more.

I honestly don’t think that Michael Pollan is writing for the people who live in food deserts. I think he is fully aware that they don’t have the same choices he (and other privileged folks) has access to. He does acknowledge that our system is so fucked up that the unhealthiest food choices are the rational choices because of cost, access, etc. His message is meant for the people who have the dollars to vote with; for the people with the education, access and means to make a difference.

I think about this a lot because I’m a Personal Chef in New York City. I went to culinary school at the Natural Gourmet, and I cook for very wealthy people. For them, having a Personal Chef is really a luxury — they could have the time and the means to learn to cook for themselves, but choose not to. I think about food access — how buying a variety of vegetables and good-quality proteins should be a viable option for all people. But, then, I think about this: let’s say that by some miracle, nutrient-dense whole foods were suddenly easily available to people of all income levels, but nothing else in our social system changed. Low-income families now have all this nutritious food that still needs to be cooked. Now what? Who’s going to cook that food? The heads of these households still probably work two (maybe even three) jobs just to pay their rent and utilities, and have some food in the refrigerator. When I was in culinary school and working full time, I was lucky to find the energy to cook for myself once a week. Cook for one person. Once a week. I was going to a health-supportive cooking school at the time, and I started eating more poorly than I ate prior to starting the program simply because cooking really good, nutritious food for myself was too taxing in addition to having to work full time and going to school (school to learn how to cook health-supportive, healing foods). It’s a truly systemic issue and education is just a small fraction of solution.

Thanks, Michelle, for this post.

As somebody who has been so poor that I lived for weeks on end on nothing but rice and peanut sauce (cheap – peanutbutter, water, soy sauce, spices) I can say that, um, yes. Sometimes you literally CAN’T afford fresh or even frozen produce, and towards the end of that particular monetary draught you literally dream of vegetables and fruit, of juice and potatoes and other healthy stuff, but you have to wait until you have money. Well, it’s either that or writing a bad check, and that is never a good solution.

Also, when I lived in the U.S. I was seriously bothered by how expensive vegetables are, especially compared to less nutritious alternatives. Pointing that out is not victimising. It’s the truth.

Thanks, Michelle, for writing such an awesome blog.

I’m sure I’ve worded my post here simplistically enough that it could come off that way — that’s one flaw of my writing style. And that’s why I appreciate some contrarian nuance being added here by experienced commenters.

At the same time, however, we risk going too far in the other direction and back into simplicity by insisting that the solution to poverty is a black-or-white solution (either “individual effort/education” or “social sponsorship.”)

I sincerely believe it’s a mixture of the two, and I never said differently in either my post or the comments I’ve added to it.

THERE I GO BEING HUMAN AGAIN.

My favourite saying applies here, as always: Reality Is Complex.

But it seems, to me, far more common to encounter the kind of bootstrapping I-did-it-so-can-you rhetoric you’re engaging in, because it is a far more comforting thing for the richer among us to believe in, than to think that YEAH — some people’s lives really are that difficult. And maybe we should all pitch in a little to do something about it.

Do I think poor people (for the entire range of “poor”) are helpless? No. Not by any mean. Humans can be incredibly resourceful, and we’re all programmed with a will to survive. But do I think some circumstances exist wherein it is unfair and uncompassionate to just say “BUCK UP AND DIG YERSELF OUT, CHAMP”?

Yes.

I’m trying to inject a little compassion into the discourse here. Not everything I write can cover every nuance of every topic — I can only hope to add one voice (mine) to the overall cacophony.

It’s bound to be somewhat biased; I never said it wasn’t. But it’s mine.

ETA: “You think a poor person feels better when a middle-class person tells them “Oh you poor person, poor you, sure you can’t!”.

I’d like to point out that I live below the poverty line, and have done for a while now. So please don’t make assumptions about anyone else’s income or social status here.

Good job!

But it, alone, is not enough.

And I think I’ve stated this about 7,000 times now in this comments section. It’s getting a bit tiresome. I’m going to start cutting and pasting my previous comments every time someone brings up this same point again.

This is more than a single blog post. We have very involved discussions in the comment section of this blog. I would suggest you read them. Especially before coming in here and posting a comment with a fighty-sounding Seriously? at its start.

In addition to being a very involved comments section, it’s a very civil one. You risk sounding boorish when you come in with something like this.

Yeah, that’s a pretty good description of every cooked grain ever, at least until I put butter on it.

A Chinese market not near a bus station? Buy a smaller bag. Get together with a friend and split the big bag.

> I don’t have space to store that

Get rid of more things. Or any of the above.

> I have mice in my house

Contact your landlord. If he or she fails to respond, contact the local housing authority.

> I can’t afford that up-front

Follow one of the first suggestions.

> Others in my house will steal my food

Buy the smaller bag and take it with you every day.

> I don’t have a pot to cook that in

$1 at Goodwill will likely buy you a pot sufficient for anything you need to do.

> I don’t have a stove

Check Goodwill again. Find a propane burner.

> I don’t have anything to measure with

People starved to death before the advent of accurate measuring devices? Guess. You will get a feel for it eventually.

> I have no safe water

If they live anywhere in America and make this claim, they are lying. There is *no* municipality in America where you cannot obtain clean drinking and cooking water for your family.

> My kids won’t eat that

They’ll eat anything, eventually.

> I can’t cook safely with all the chaos (meth fumes, domestic disputes, close quarters)

Buy a propane stove and take it outside.

> I’m too tired to cook when I get home

Cook before you leave for the day and refrigerate it. Or just stop focusing on the negative and cook when you’re hungry enough.

You seem to be framing your argument entirely around ‘destitute’ rather than ‘poor’. Poor is a huge range of individuals and circumstances. There are a tremendous many people of class ‘poor’ who exercise poor judgment in purchasing and preparing food. This is reflective and formative of their poor education and environment.

In other words, there are plenty of people who would be helped by targeted PSAs and programs to educate them in nutrition, as well as how to purchase and prepare food for their family.

Fat Free
Cholesteral Free
Zero Calories
Zero Carbs
Sugar Free

etc. etc. etc.

However AFAIK either mineral water, or a coffee spoon of salt per large bottle (2l) of anything can pretty much do the same job…

Is this for Olympic athletes without kidneys? Because I am so not understanding the benefit here.

It’s very surreal to see… athletes doing their thing and then drinking …. beer. non-alcoholic beer, but beer.

Here’s a non-winter sport ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2mCRgSLZes

Voiceover translation, quick and dirty:
“100% performance. 100% regeneration. Isotonic, vitamin-rich, calorie-reduced. Erdinger Alcohol-free.”

I’m glad you found your way out, sincerely. You’ve obviously dealt with a lot of hardships and practiced amazing resourcefulness. But that’s not going to stop me from thinking that systemic changes are in order, or make me believe that education and a little gumption is all it takes to solve all the problems for all the poor people in the world, nor am I going to start blaming the victims of those systemic problems for their own fate.

People vary. People have different circumstances and different capacities to cope. Even poor people.

Basically, the turning point came when I developed a pretty serious case of bulimia. I’m 5′ 3″, and I went from 120 pounds – hardly a giantess in any sense – to 90 in the course of a month, and then did everything humanly possible to stay in the double digits. It was, in retrospect, a totally humiliating and degrading process to inflict on myself. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone I know or care about. Like you, I met my long-term partner while I was thinner and he probably wouldn’t have dated me if he’d met me at my current weight (169); like in your case, he clearly doesn’t mind the weight gain and values the relationship on a level that I never thought I would experience personally. I am very lucky.

And yet I remember the intoxication of walking into a room and immediately knowing on a visceral, gut level that I could command the attention of everyone there, and it was an insipid, indulgent thing to gain pleasure from to be sure, but I miss it still.

I mean, having said that, for the most part I don’t care that I’ve gained weight. I’m happier now, and much, much, much healthier, and live my life in a much more fulfilling and rewarding way. But every now and then – like when I develop a crush on someone and realize that, at my former weight, it would definitely have gone somewhere but that I’m now completely undesirable as a cultural object of beauty – the knowledge of what I’ve lost stings. I’m still struggling to get to the relief. All my ardent feminist beliefs and ideology quail in the face of knowing what I used to have – and maybe that’s the most insidious thing about the societal construct of beauty.

Phew, sorry to go on so long. I could have said all that in a sentence: long-time reader, coming out of the ether to say that this post from over a month ago really struck a chord with me, thank you.

Everyone’s body responds differently to foods, of course. What’ll set my bladder a-bouncin’ is probably perfectly fine for you. :) I have one cup of coffee per workday, and boggle at folk who can knock back cup after cup… but hey! We’re all built different. Good for them.

I think it has. It would take a lot of convincing to make me think otherwise. I think it’s reached a fever-pitch of sheer ridiculousness.

In fact, I just love Coke. I love soda pop in general, like I love candy. In certain situations, it’s awesome. But I tend only to drink it at certain times — like when I’m eating at a restaurant, or eating delivery pizza. Cause it can make me feel sleepy and weirdish. And I don’t like the sticky feeling on my teeth afterward either.

When I was 12, I used to drink Cherry 7-Up after golfing with my grandma, while she had a beer. It was our ritual.

I’m thrilled, myself, about Chex being gluten-free. But it is interesting that they don’t mention celiac/gluten intolerance on the package. I’d have to see it myself, though, and I haven’t because I don’t think we have Chex in my area.

I’m curious how you think someone in that situation would cook rice without clean water or would keep a 20-lb bag from being eaten by mice and attracting more mice. Any solution I can think of costs money, possibly enough to offset the usefulness of getting the big cheap bag of rice in the first place.

I wouldn’t trust a Brita pitcher on unsafe water unless I could get a sample of the filtered water tested, and replacement filters aren’t cheap. Neither is bottled water.

I’d wager that someone with mice in their house already has traps out and wouldn’t recommend getting a cat to someone who is having trouble feeding their family. Getting an exterminator is apt to be pricey.

“BARLEY is low sodium. Diets low in sodium
MAY REDUCE THE RISK
OF HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE.”

And, yes, my package of sugar informs me that it is naturally fat-free and only 15 calories per teaspoon.

Has health-based food marketing gotten sillier in the last couple of years, or am I just more aware of it?

When I worked in an office downtown, there was a cafe a few blocks away that had cold-brewed coffee all summer. They kept in in a concentrate. I used to have them dilute it with soymilk instead of water. I was so hooked on those for a while.

I almost *never* drink soda other than that. It makes me kinda queasy.

But on long bike rides? GODSEND. Obviously I might be thirsty, but the sugar and caffeine are definitely part of it. Nice little energy boost when you’ve been riding a bike (loaded with stuff) for thirty miles or so.

Would you like to take a shot at convincing me otherwise?

That is…that is possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.

I reckon that as well as a get out of jail free card, the label is like a holy symbol or a magical rune. It promises quasi-magical health-giving properties on the part of the product. This is the one that is Good For You. This is the one that Prevents Cancer. This is the one that has been blessed. You can be healthy by association with this product.

“Part of the package of virtuous self-denial included giving up coffee (and diet soda, and and and…whatever not-particularly-harmful or not-particularly-nutrition-impacting thing someone enjoyed just for the sake of it. ”

I love love love Pepsi Max – I wasn’t allowed to drink soda when I was a little girl, so diet cola (in all forms) has become one of my guilty pleasures. “Guilty” pleasures, mind – because guilt is exactly what I feel when I drink it, since it’s supposed to be “bad for you”. Interesting.

I teach a class on food budgeting (how to feed your family on food stamps) and have had to change my lesson plan several times when my students explained why my ’simple solution’ won’t really work for them. I’ve had to set up community resources for transportation, equipment, bulk-sharing, storage, and childcare because not everyone has the things I take for granted from my middle-class priviledge.

I tell my students “buy a 20lb bag of rice from the chinese market, it’s cheaper’ and I hear:
I can’t transport a bag that big
I don’t have space to store that
I have mice in my house
I can’t afford that up-front
Others in my house will steal my food
I don’t have a pot to cook that in
I don’t have a stove
I don’t have anything to measure with
I have no safe water
My kids won’t eat that
I can’t cook safely with all the chaos (meth fumes, domestic disputes, close quarters)
I’m too tired to cook when I get home

So who is the ignorant and uneducated one here? Them? Or me?

I’m Canadian. It’s what we do best.

IT’S GOT ELECTROLYTES. IT’S GOT WHAT PLANTS CRAVE.

Thank you!

(Of course I don’t mind. I’m significantly thrilled.) :-)

A) This reminds me of Brawndo the Thirst Mutilator from Idiocracy
slogan: Brawndo’s got what [cows,babies,plants ...] crave! It’s got electrolytes!

B) just today at the engineering department cafeteria, where besides free tea, they have magazines, i read in the humorous part of New Scientist, how some “turkish delight” candy had a wrapper saying 60% of fat less , and always been so. It was chocolate coated and inspection of packet discovered that apparently the comparison was wresp to chocolate bars , as due to the coating it has more fat than other turkish deligt type candies.
So what they then thought about was whether chocolate is to be the new fat comparison standard – pork chops could then claim 20% less fat for example, or to go a step further, use fat itself – then apparently bacon has 50% less fat… I was LOLing in the cafeteria, now when i returned it is this…

C) How dare you insult black coffee! :D
I recognise both – black is a morning pickup when needed.
(another interesting point i have noticed recently although you will likely go ‘Duh!” is that if i drink about 0.6 l of water (two mugs) or else in the morning, i am much less sleepy even if i slept little)
and coffee-powdermilk, and load of sugar mixture to ressurect me at night (guess what i drink all day :D costing nothing [they have sugar too!])

My favourite was always the CHOLESTEROL FREE hype on things that couldn’t possibly have cholesterol in them, unless someone was adding it for some reason. Like, orange juice and frozen pees!

“…black coffee is an abomination unto the Lord and shall not defile this house”

ROFLMAO–and that is precisely how hubby and I feel about black coffee!

I have dried apricots, I have dark chocolate, I own a stove…

I am the happiest woman on earth right now.

I’m also glad I don’t read Russian, because I recently was gifted with a box of delicious, delicious dark chocolate covered dried apricots and if I’d been able to read something about how they were rich in antioxidants or a great natural source of fiber so I can poo, it would have just sucked all the fun out of eating them.

I hope you don’t mind, but I am totally adding this to the post!

But drinking pop always makes me MORE thirsty, not less, at the end of the day. Not sure what’s going on there — whether it’s an effect of the sugar or the caffeine — but I think of pop more like candy, and less like a way to hydrate myself. Unless I am recovering from food poisoning and living on 7-Up :)

Seeing the title in my feed widget, I thought you were going to give us a “Get out of jail free” card.

*sigh*

I hope you don’t mind, but I made my own.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/29548647@N00/4406309298/

But I remember buying a box of it once and on the side it went on and on about how Coke can rehydrate you on those hot summer days.

I’m not denying that Coke is a liquid with water in it, but I’ve never felt “rehydrated” on a hot summer day from it, in fact, it usually gives me a nasty stomach ache on those days. Don’t lie to me Coke! I would drink you anyway!

Thank Maude for smart kids!

I think there’s also a laxative and/or fibre one that specifically mentions the “lady poo” issue. Best ever.

http://current.com/items/89365020_sarah-haskins-in-target-women-number-two.htm

Adorable, and – fucking genius. As usual.

I finally quit when my apoplexy at Omega3 milk made me realize focus grouping was bad for my health. My eldest was actually taking Omega 3s at the time, and I knew their “price point” for, what, slightly fishy tasting milk?, was more expensive than milk and a bottle of fish oil capsules for similar dosages. And it was *every* new food they were sending me. Fibre in your yogurt! Probiotics in your hot dogs! Fish in your chocolate! Flax in your cookies! Gah!

I kept huffing in the comments about the cynicism of marketing food as medicine and using that to jack the price, especially when there’s not a dose in there anyway, and finally I had to give up the surveying…

I think I could comfortably move to Cuba for this reason.

Okay, that is hilarious. And ridiculous.

Candy is good for making me happy on occasion. There.

My favorite anecdote about coffee–I used to wonder if it was bad for my health, since I enjoy a morning cup (and sometimes in the afternoon) myself. But I’ve read since, that regular coffee drinkers have lower rates of depression and suicide. Correlation isn’t cause and effect, blah blah blah, but still: I love knowing that. Ironically, I have mild depression for which I take Wellbutrin….but whatever.

The other thing that erased any guilt about coffee: I used to work in a medical clinic for low-income people that included MDs, NDs, and acupuncturists. Everyone except the acupuncture students, down to a person, consumed ridiculous quantities of caffeine. Anybody who said, “I’m going out for coffee…” soon had a list and a handful of dollars. When drug reps came by, they often brought coffee. Especially the Lexapro rep. He’d bring tons of samples of medications (when you work with low-income people, they can really help) and a big thing of Starbucks coffee, every Tuesday. We liked him. LOL

Speak for yourself… clearly there are no Cubans in your household. My hubby’s whole family downs gallons of the stuff. They drink it from dawn until just before bed. Nothing like a ristretto nightcap. It’s amazing to behold. Personally I find coffee foul and prefer to mainline diet coke first thing in the morning (I’m diabetic, so regular coke is out of the question, despite my deep love of sugar and my objections to the “diet” label).

As for labels, my mustard proclaims itself to be “a fat free food!” Which is apparently what the powers that be decided they had to use when ALL foods of that type are the same. That is, so that one mustard doesn’t appear to be selling itself as fat free as opposed to all those OTHER Fat Filled Fatty McFattypants Mustards on the market. The day they put “fat free” on my diet coke is the day I throw in the towel.

You almost have to admire the audacity.

Also, I’m reminded of when I used to work at a wine shop – at least once a week I’d hear “Well, I don’t like red wine, but I’m trying to develop a taste for it `cause it has antioxidants.” Aaagh. It’s wine, of all things! It is for nothing but enjoyment!

I cannot drink hot chocolate without marshmallows. It’s like a crime.

I’ve felt this way every minute of the past 10+ years. This won’t add anything to the discussion, but this is the first time someone has put words to it. Thank you for writing about it. (Although if I were to speak honestly, I would say it might be more terrifying to read this than to try to not think about it.)

There are many times I do not have food in the house (like the end of the month when food stamps and social security have run out, i.e. now) and have to rely on creativity and the generosity of others. I may go a day without eating, and then find myself with enough food the next day (though little choice over what I eat). Many times I decide that I’m going to start eating regular meals and then find myself stymied by the fact that I have no breakfast at breakfast time, no snacks of any kind or maybe only snacks and no larger meals, etc.

I have been trained to expect hunger and not to have much control over satisfying that hunger. I might go half a month eating regular meals and half a month eating whatever I can get whenever I can get it. Now I have noticed that even when I have food and it is a time of plenty, it takes me a little while to adjust and I tend to overeat (which also means I run out of food sooner!). By the time my body gets on track with a regular schedule (which I agree is very freeing), the month is winding down and I have to mess it up again.

I think you’re onto something here.

The thing that really brought it home to me was something Kate Harding wrote: “We are mostly pretty normal people living in a culture that tells us eating — EATING — is a perilous, potentially deadly endeavor that the average human being can’t be expected to negotiate successfully without professional assistance.”

And I thought, “Yes. That’s exactly it.” Because we can survive — and given that nutrition, as a science, has been around for less than 1/10th of a percent of the lifespan of Homo sapiens as a species, it’s obvious that we HAVE survived — without nutritional information of any kind. And we’ve not just survived, but become one of the most prolific and dominant species on the planet.

The only reason I am doing the job I am doing now is NOT because people can’t be trusted to choose their own food. It’s because our culture has now genuinely messed people up around food so much, by telling them they can’t possibly be trusted with it, that it’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and people’s eating competence has been undermined.

People now believe they can’t trust themselves, and even if some of us get to the point where we intellectually believe we CAN trust ourselves, it is hard as hell to put into practice while surrounded by the messages and cultural climate we are. And it will take many people a long time, doing the work that I do or similar work, to help reverse that.

I’m kind of hoping I can put myself out of business eventually, but sadly, I doubt I ever will. If I do, I’ll be happier than you can imagine.

I guess what helped me was looking at the big picture. This food on my plate, right now — while I’m lucky to have it, and while many people in the world don’t — is not going to save anyone by my eating past the point of fullness. It is not going to help anyone directly. And, over time, doing intuitive eating stuff is only going to help me be a much better estimator of how much food to prepare so I get just the right amount, and overall, waste LESS.

The dietitian I was working with at the time, who counseled me in normal eating, also had a phrase, “In you, or in the garbage.” I’m not a trash compactor. Though I may regret throwing food away or “wasting” it, ultimately, it’s wasted anyway if I don’t actually need or want it in me.

But I am also saying that we are lucky to have food in the first place. We are lucky to be at a place where we can consider those changes rationally. We are, in a sense, as a society, pretty near the top of the Hierarchy of Food Needs, to the point where we can consider making “instrumental” changes to the food system that will impact the health of the species, and the preservation of the ecosystem that sustains us, long-term.

Reality is complex. So are these discussions.

I also can’t help but hear all this complaining about processed food and immediately think to myself “FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS.” We have an essentially reliable, basically functional food system that provides sustanence for millions of people.

I am a huge Pollan fan, because he is getting out the information on how disordered our Western food production systems really are. I understand your point of “First World Problems” – yes, we have abundant food. But what is the long term impact on our environment of this food. He makes excellent points in “The Omnivore’s Dilemna” (which is named after an ecological concept that when you have an abundant food source, like an omnivorous animal, how do you choose what is safe to eat and what is not. After all, a carnivore knows to eat meat, and herbivore knows to avoid it, but what if you can and should eat both – how do you figure out if a novel food is beneficial?) Our production of industrial corn – the crops made into all the corn derivatives put into processed food – is fueled by fossil fuels. The industrial growing of corn can not be sustained by the sun and traditional growing methods. Instead it requires petrochemical fertilizers. Not sustainable. Then add in the energy factors of production, packaging, and shipping, and the environmental impact of processed food on demand is pretty high.

We have no forbidden foods in our home. We are big believers in moderation, so yes, sometimes, we have processed food. But we are also raising our daughter to realize the environmental impact of her choices (food and beyond), something which is sorely lacking in much of our population. So eat what you want, but don’t fool yourself that your food choices only impact you and your health.

As an adult, I have felt tremendous guilt about throwing food away. The duty of finishing and not letting anything go to waste is such a moral burden. I have been making a conscious effort to give myself permission to stop eating when I don’t want to eat anymore. Sometimes I even feel giddy about throwing food away! One day I hope I can be “free” and not assign any moral weight to it at all.

I think it’s because we are hungry for rules or orders or direction – or, maybe, for a prescription – for what to do. For how to make A + B = C, C being the undisputably ‘good’ outcome.

And I think that’s because.. well, expert opinion has superceded things that used to depend on gut instinct in many aspects of life. Science has ‘better’ tools and measures than the average person. Its ‘answers’ are more accurate and therefore safer. So we became less and less the experts on our own lives.

That’s turning around, but … inconsistently. Like, I think there are many people who would assert their right to speak from their own experience on a social, philosophical, or even a psychological level, but still accept others’ expertise on things relating to the body. Maybe it’s just that.. a postmodern perspective hasn’t quite made it into how we view medical science, yet?

So, we take advice as a prescription because we think we need it to be prescribed. We are so desperate for this that we’re not even overly fussy about who is holding the prescription pad.

QFT

I may be too cynical and overly snarky, but I tend to translate “I don’t want to be mean” as “I want to say something mean without you thinking I’m being mean.”

Yes, but with qualifiers. For instance, if you’re sick or there’s some kind of underlying eating disorder or medical abnormality, you may have to override your internal signals or figure out how to work around them after a point, so you aren’t at risk of dehydration or malnourishment.

But for people in general, including children? Yes. Ellyn Satter’s division of responsibility specifically says that parents choose what to serve and when, and children decide how much to eat of what is offered, and WHETHER to eat at all.

A healthy body can be trusted to decide not to eat sometimes.

I am not saying that education is not part of the overall picture; I am saying that education, alone, is not enough.

People also tend to assume that those living under a bridge, or who are far more destitute than the average lower-middle class family, are some kind of anomaly bordering on nonexistent.

If you lived in my neighbourhood, you would not feel this way. My closest neighbours border on homelessness, and many of them are frankly homeless. I am aware that, at any time, their situation could also be mine. I have been so close to that situation that it’s scary, and I am just an average person in most ways. I am not some special case whose homelessness could have been blamed on some specific individual characteristic — and neither are many homeless people “special cases.”

That keeps me very aware of not just the money struggles of feeding onself, but the practicalities and access to facilities that go into that.

Very real, powerful systemic factors are at work that largely determine who has housing and access to food. Individual efforts, when they’re up against such huge institutionalized disadvantages, can seem ridiculously ineffective. You have to reach a certain baseline of access (a roof over your head; a kitchen; a grocery store; a basic amount of time, energy, and skill) before those individual efforts mean a damn thing.

To say that it is just a matter of individual will is completely marginalizing to, and blaming of, those who don’t have even what little you had, growing up. And there are plenty of people who don’t.

It’s not just about money. It’s about access and opportunity, too.

BTW, this a picture of my “diet” based on Pollan’s advice:
http://files.posterous.com/agarzola/VfNf3MYF1r0xDffMgcRa4rTkFgaT1gfhNMceDjpoTLLojmcGlmnvDepob0IP/costillar_de_navidad.jpg.scaled.1000.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=1C9REJR1EMRZ83Q7QRG2&Expires=1267140505&Signature=3ltzu2kZ0i2i%2Fvv8yix8nbzCVok%3D

But I still have a grudge against chicken fingers that I really oughta seek some therapy for.

Aah, you’ve said that you were raised on a diet different than the Western standard. That, I’m sure, is where the disconnect lies. In my experience, most people don’t react well to foods that they are not familiar with. If you’re not raised with a flavor or texture or seasoning, your first encounter with it is going to be jarring.

As a personal example, my first time eating sushi was scary. The nori that it’s wrapped in is… is… SEAWEED. It was a form of vegetable that I had no familiarity with at all. It was a taste and texture that I had never experienced. It kinda grossed me out a bit. But I enjoyed the stuff in the rolls and the stuff on the nigiri, so I ordered it again. And ate soups that my neighbor made with nori in it. And had nori done tempura style! And as I became accustomed to the food, I began to enjoy it more. On a more “junk food” front, I’m not fond of the flavors used in a lot of the snacky foods and candies at my local asian grocery. They don’t taste all that good to me. I don’t eat them, as a result.

Note that I said that they “don’t taste good”, not that they’re not “real food”. Because really, if it’s edible and not rotten or poisoned? It’s food. Really. It’s actually, honestly food. I have relatives and aquaintances that would look at nori, make a face, and go “that’s not REAL FOOD”. Simply because of a lack of familiarity/comfort/adventurousness. And they can go right ahead and do that, even if it irritates me on some level. If we’re allowed to eat what we want, we’re allowed to not eat what we don’t want. So avoid those chips! They’re not mandatory.

(Semi-relatedly, I never quite know what to do with an adult picky eater that only seems to subsist off of chicken fingers and ketchup. Or who only wants sandwiches with meat and butter. Is it really ‘disordered’ if folk aren’t eating a variety of foods not because of trumped-up health reasons but because they do not ever, ever want to have their palate challenged? Am I justified in wanting to bonk my personal Mr. ChickenfingerMonger over the head?)

I think about how a food makes me feel, and if I want to, I eat it anyway. But I make sure to remember how I feel afterwards, so I can take it into consideration next time. My tastes have changed drastically over a number years by paying attention to what feels good and what doesn’t. (Not going to give any examples, because it will look like a “should”. But suffice to say there are many things I seldomly eat and some things I just have no interest in anymore, ever. But it took as long as I needed, years, to naturally lose interest).

And with regard to your comment below, yes, the junky food was regularly eaten in the “junk food heavens” I’m talking about. Not just available but common. At least by the people I knew. YMMV

It’s not going to make those of us who are large enough to be “headless fatties” into normal weight people. Or even folks with a BMI of 40 or 35.

But it might make the folks who became overweight overnight “normal”.

Hee. I don’t have it because a) I don’t want a whipped cream mustache and b) it makes the mocha less drink-like and more cream-like. (Reason (b) is also why I have nonfat milk not whole.)

However, I also don’t see my reasons as “better” than yours, just mine.

Moms don’t need sleep or relaxation hobbies, right?

Yes–very snobby. Cooking is great when you can do it, but breaking yourself to make everything from scratch all the time sounds like a bad plan.

Where I come from, the soil is not very rich and therefore a lot of things don’t grow there very well – and therefore potatoes have been the most important crop there for a long, long time which meant people ate a lot of them and some of them still do. My dad actually starts complaining when my mum doesn’t cook potatoes for than two days in a row – and french fries, potato dumplings, etc don’t count. So while I personally can go quite some time without eating potatoes I still love them, and potatoes with “quark” (a very soft cheese in this case prepared with salt and herbs that we eat instead of sour cream) is still one of the most satifying foods I know. This means that I find the many claims that potatoes are “bad” for you (supposedly because they are too high in starch) are actually a little upsetting to me – how can a food that saved many, many people from starvation and that is so satisfying actually be deemed unhealthy?

I work full time outside of the home, and have a 2.5 year old child. How exactly am I supposed to have the time to constantly cook all our meals from scratch?

That sort of “it’s good because you made it, NOT good if you didn’t” is also snobby. Sure, I like to cook – when I don’t feel exhausted and pulled in 10 different directions. And sure, I enjoy the flavour of my home-cooked meals, WHEN I’M NOT TOO RUSHED TO.

UGH.

*fumes*

I love, love, love your blog & found it through Shapely Prose.

I’m interested in the discussion you had with Cassi above about understanding and responding to what one’s body “wants”.

I’ve been working on healing compulsive eating/dieting for about 20 years (!), mostly with a IE/demand feeding approach (though I wish I had known about Ellyn Satter sooner — maybe that would have worked better for me). Like you and many of your readers I like Pollan’s writing about the food system, but I’m annoyed and triggered by his “rules”. I actually have been trolling around FA sites to see their responses to his Eater’s Manifesto, and of course yours takes the cake (smile).

Anyway, I do mostly eat a kind of traditional/unprocessed/lots of veg/Mediterranean/Pollan-y kind of diet, because that is truly what I like and what makes me feel good and what fits my ideals of food justice and sustainability. I do still have occasional episodes, though, where I will eat crunchy, sweet-salty foods, and when I do eat them I eat MUCH more of them than makes me feel good. I think that I have truly “legalized” those foods, so I don’t think it’s a post-deprivation issue, but once I’m eating those foods, I feel like I’m in a trance, and I just keep going WAY past the point of feeling satiated. I haven’t read David Kessler’s book, (The End of Overeating?) but I’m suspecting that that is the mechanism that is at play.

Do you have a suggestion about this? I don’t love the idea of restricting, but I don’t feel like I’m being very loving towards myself with this. Do you have ideas about how to frame this that is about building self-trust and not about making these foods ‘bad’ (and therefore setting off my oh-so-rebellious nature)?

Thanks again for all your great work!

This cracked me up because it’s almost exactly what Frances the badger says in the wonderful children’s book “Bread and Jam for Frances,” in defense of eating bread and jam at every meal.

“There are many different things to eat, and they taste many different ways. But when I have bread and jam I always know what I am getting, and I am always pleased.”

She holds out for, I think four or five straight meals at which her mother cheerfully hands over the bread and jam before she breaks down and cries at the dinner table and is helped to some nice spaghetti and meatballs. The next day she brings a fabulous six-course lunch to school that includes a lobster salad sandwich and celery with a little salt shaker and dessert and two kinds of fruit.

It’s a very exuberant book.

After I moved back to the US as an adult, I was served potato chips at some barbecues as if they were potato salad or something, as a side dish for the meat, and boy did I feel weird after finishing that. (To me, that was kind of someone handing me a plate of cake and hamburgers as if it was the most natural pairing in the world.) I thought eating them would be better than nothing at all and I don’t think it was. I should have had another burger instead. So because I grew up considering chips not something you eat because you’re hungry, and because eating so many that I might get up there in hunger-quenching amounts makes me feel bad, I don’t feel (note the emotional as opposed to rational association of the word) that they are food.

When I eat potato chips, I do it because I think they would taste good, not because I’m hungry. If I eat enough to get fairly full I also feel funny. So I don’t consider them food.

My idea of food may be colored by how the word ‘food’ is used in Swedish and Finnish. (Attach the usual this-may-just-be-me disclaimer here.) To me edible != automatically food. I have two concepts – one of food, meaning something reasonably natural (i. e. not something you MUST have a factory to make all of) healthy to eat in large quantities on a regular basis for the express purpose of quelling hunger, and the other of.. uh… English word missing… livsmedel or elintarvike. Something edible that may be a whole food, a processed food, healthy, unhealthy, safe to eat a little or a lot of. Unspecified in all value respects except that it’s edible by humans and contains some sort of nutrients.

I’ve noticed my American husband talks about things even he doesn’t eat as part of a meal, like ice cream, as food. I can’t bring myself to call things a Swede or Finn or Chinese wouldn’t plop down on a meal plate food. I just call them what they are – chips, ice cream, cookies, etc, in lack of a word for them as a group. Perhaps that’s really my culture confusion problem rather than anything profound about what is and isn’t a food.

I think the information absolutely should be *available,* but I would include more than just fat/calorie counts. Vitamins and minerals, a full ingredient list, etc., would be nice, but those don’t conveniently fit on a sign. Usually what you see is the stuff geared toward weight loss and heart health: calories, fat, saturated or trans fat, sodium, maybe cholesterol. So, I’d much rather see full nutritional info available in a pamphlet that an interested person could grab than just the diet-related bits posted.

Knowing the fat/calorie content of a food is way different than knowing how “healthy” it is–it’s only part of that, but requiring fat/calorie counts conflates the two and assumes that everyone everywhere should be restricting their caloric intake. It also feeds into the assumption that less is always better when it comes to fat and calories when satiety might be a better measure than calorie-counting to tell whether you’ve had enough food.

I like your thoughts about leaving the whipped cream off because it doesn’t enhance your experience of the Frappucino. I do a similar thing with cheeseburgers–I don’t order bacon unless I very specifically want it; I don’t get it just because it’s there. The same thing with soda, too, come to think of it. The real stuff is marginally better than the diet, but not so good that all that sugar really enhances my soda-drinking experience. (I’ve also noticed that some real-sugar sodas are fantastic, but that they lose that fabulousness if you drink them too often. Jones Cream Soda is like liquid candy, but when I ran out of diet and drank 2 or 3 cans of it in a day, it became “meh” pretty quickly.)

This sometimes happens through taste.

For now, I know she has a webcast for health professionals about using eating competence in counseling — it’s $99 or $100: https://ellynsatter.com/commerce/workshops.jsp

Annie
Retraining one’s brain and body to want food when one is hungry instead of fulfilling some emotional need (including boredom, which is my problem), is difficult. It sounds like you may need a little coaching in addition to your own efforts. I’m not sure who that coach might be though, someone/something which would be comfortable for you. One thing that I saw on Oprah is slowing down one’s eating to actually enjoy what is being eaten. I have times when I more or less shovel food into my mouth mostly because I am mindlessly eating. I can definitely identify with where you are coming from.

I agree with Michelle’s response as well. There is a lot of misinformation even from professionals who know better because they don’t share ALL of the information. This is especially true in Diabetes Education. The old way was to list all of the starchy foods and say don’t eat them. Very uneffective. The new way takes into consideration portion size. Also, we must educate on how one can make some not so healthy choices better by a few modifications. I know that as a Dietitian, I’ll have to be very creative with my clients/patients to help them realize that they can make changes. Little things can make a big difference, e.g. “Mindless Eating”.

It just goes to show you can’t look at someone and know their story. Its a really huge waste of energy to even spend time thinking about other people for something so small as riding the elevator anyhow.

I would never make such a broad generalization that you are implying because I have also seen people making effort but still had a knowledge deficit. All too often, people are ostracized for being heavier, myself included. Such behavior is not helpful at all when information is not made available. Many people are clueless about what they need to do. Unfortunately, they are further confused by so much misinformation out there.

Same goes for tomatoes, capsicums (peppers), coffee, and tea, to name a few.

Frankly, not everyone wants to cook. And that’s a perfectly fine decision, because it’s a personal one, and really has no moral value one way or another. I like cooking, but at the moment I live with a tiny kitchen that doesn’t always encourage/accommodate cooking. So we eat some frozen stuff and some canned stuff, supplemented with salads and fresh fruits, and we get by just fine on that.

Not everything has to be a DO OR DIE proposition, but something about our cultural mindset leads us to interpret all advice as RULES or even COMMANDMENTS. I’m still scratching my head over why this is the case.

The problem? I’ve really never liked cooking. Every once in awhile I’ll get the urge to cook something serious (usually when I have excess free time on my hands over a long weekend), or I’ll throw together some tacos because I like how they taste, or I’ll put on some pasta because it sounds better than anything else in the house. But we’re lucky enough to have resources to eat out fairly often, and we buy frozen meals and frozen fish sticks and frozen pizza and all sorts of “EVIL!1!” things. (My mom regularly chides me for both eating out too much and eating frozen foods.)

But despite years of being told to cook more, guess what? Hasn’t happened. Eating out less because it’s “unhealthy”? Hasn’t happened. All that happens is that if I already feel like I’m being “bad” for eating out I’m more likely to rebel and make rebellious food choices rather than “what I want to eat” food choices. (I also spent a long time NOT ordering things that I could make at home, even if I wanted them, because it made eating out “a waste”). It’s interesting the rules I’ve managed to make for myself by interpreting the outside rule!

Just thought of a fun anecdote about eating “as much as you want”. We have friends who make the best cookies on the planet (in my opinion, of course). I had two cookies, and then was feeling pretty full… but the cookies were delicious. I decided that I wouldn’t have a cookie this second, but if later I felt unfull enough to have a cookie I would. I didn’t end up having another cookie because I was really full, and didn’t even realize that I had made the decision until we were leaving. (Although the next day I wished that we had taken some home, heh.)

Anyway, that’s my rant.

P.S. I really love this blog, one of my favorites on eating/nutrition.

(And yes, they are in the tuna section in my grocery store in the states.)

You’ve articulated why Jamie Oliver irks me so. He encapsulates the whole elitist framed as compassion food movement. I grew up on food stamps and food pantry donations which meant a lot of dayglo mac and cheese and canned beans. When my dad did have work, we ate canned soup and if it was a special holiday, we added Spam.

If someone like Jamie Oliver had come into our home to “help” us make better food choices, I bet my dad would have kicked him out on his sanctimonius arse while I clapped.

Thanks for that link!

I think I might be a food libertarian as well. :)

And you have a good point about seeing different foods as “snobby” based on where you’re at on the socioeconomic continuum. For people who really rely on rice and beans as staples, the more manufactured/processed foods may seem high-class and snobby. But for our upper-middle class contemporaries who might aim to return to a more organic diet, and pay a premium to do so, those same foods are going to seem low-class.

It’s all relative, apparently.

Recent doesn’t mean bad, necessarily, but it does mean it’s not traditional. A lot of recent foods may have some nutrients, but have low nutrient density–a low amount of nutrients for the calories provided. That’s OK but not going to maximize essential nutrients, phytonutrients, etc. I think that’s one reason for bias against more recent foods.

I was personally raised on rice and beans in large part for $$$ reasons as well as cultural reasons. Fast food, coke, sugar cereal etc were all seen as expensive treats that we couldn’t often afford. I can’t believe preferring the cheaper food would be seen as snobby!

But, the don’t yuk on my food rule is a good one. Point taken.

She didn’t really see that as being judgmental, just “honest.”

In my experience, this is true with people in training across (allopathic) health care professions, just the dietetics people are directly dealing with food, so the judgment comes off more clearly. So yeah, dietitians: bad rap for a reason.

I’m thrilled to see Michelle and other readers (myself among them, I am a four headed blue giraffe in medical school when it comes to these issues) offering a counter-narrative, but in my experience, it is counter, indeed.

The other great grandmother I know about did want for food sometimes, as did her children. Because of this, the older ones, especially my grandmother, were somewhat obsessive about food their whole lives. (And told they were bad people for wanting ice cream.) My great grandmother cooked what she could afford, which was usually not enough. She didn’t worry about its nutritional value — she was too busy trying to keep her family fed. When her family got through the hard times, I know exactly what that great grandmother cooked and ate: things like Swedish meatballs, mashed potatoes, sloppy joes, pickled herring, and (ugh) lutefisk. Oh, and she loved McDonald’s.

I am sorry that you have been judged on the basis of your cultural background and food preferences. But that doesn’t make it OK to say that another culture’s food is not food, and that those who eat such non-foods are less healthy. Suppose a person who was raised as a vegan were to say cheese is not a food, and people who eat it are less heathy than people who are not. Suppose I were to say to my friend, whose immigrant family ate goat for Thanksgiving instead of turkey, “Goat isn’t food, it is a pet (I used to have pet goats) and even if it was, turkey is healthier.”

I also don’t understand why you would say that potato chips are not a food, and that eating them makes you queasy—yet then go on to say that you do eat them and have done since childhood. Why would you eat a non-food that makes you feel ill? It doesn’t make sense.

I’m not trying to hurt your feelings nor denigrate your experience. I do agree with several of your comments above, but the ones I don’t agree with really struck a chord with me.

Yeah, I have similar observations about culture differences. Just because they’re not spike-in-your-eye glaring when you first move somewhere doesn’t mean they don’t exist and aren’t pretty serious ultimately.

I read your blog because it offers a fascinating view into Americans’ relationship with food. While I have consciously chosen not to automatically do everything the way people in my current country do things, I do want to understand why they do what they do. I want it to be a true choice.

Some of my college roommates ate things and in ways that I had seen in commercials but didn’t realize anyone actually did. It showed me that they thought of food and eating differently than I did. Thanks to you and other FA bloggers, as well as Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, and Greg Critser, I now know more about why that is so. (Two of my other homes are also industrialized, rich countries with food industries. Speaking of differences not being as subtle as you’d think. Along the way I also found out why parents in two of my homes never said anything about eating raw cookie dough or licking batter spoons while baking but parents in the US always did.)

Thank you for being friendly, and for helping so many people. Like Pollan (I hope you don’t take that as an insult), I think you can see beyond all the details of the 65426534 studies done on nutrition, exercise, and health with some common sense. You obviously also have the personal experiences to reach your clients in a way I for example couldn’t.

I am wondering the exact same thing. I can see every day that my environment set me on a very different trajectory when it comes to what my body wants compared to most of the people around me. I have also been in the position of the one who is conditioned to want more sugar than any ‘normal’ human being should want. I have directly experienced and seen that what a body wants depends on what it’s used to. I see few, other than Pollan, trying to explain that.

It’s hard not to wonder why you’re different from people around you though, so I keep thinking about it. I really think food companies have found addictive combinations of ingredients – as a poster below also describes – and that Pollan’s nutritionism feeds the confusion. Together, the effect IMO is a collective loopy and dysfunctional relationship to food as well as people’s bodies. There seems to be no solid ground to stand on and nothing and everything is normal. And that’s where the need for blogs like this comes in, I guess.
Michelle is clearly helping a lot of people saying what she says.

If you haven’t read Pollan’s book, I suggest you do. It’s easy and quick to read. He’s not really saying anything new as much as he’s phrasing things well.

I think the crucial rule here is don’t yuck my yum.

That goes for all of us.

For what it’s worth, I’m also an insider-outsider American, since I grew up in the US, but have lived my entire adult life in Canada. People may not THINK they’re very much different, culturally and politically, but you’d be surprised.

“People are largely convinced that we are uncontrolled, reprehensible wild animals when it comes to food, and that, left to our own devices, we’d go swimming through a lake of Crisco. That betrays a severely distorted and cynical view about human nature. It is not compassionate or kind. Neither is it correct.”

This! It makes me crazy. I know a lot of smart friends who when the subject turns to food talk about themselves as if they’re these irrational wild beasts. They would never talk about themselves that way in any other area of their life. It’s not just body vs. mind, it’s nature vs. culture. I think that is one of the major reasons why when it comes to disordered eating restricting is seen as more acceptable than overeating.

Calling me a snob because I had a different set of experiences in childhood than you did makes me feel, well, bad. Nobody wants to be a snob. And you’re (probably inadvertently) casting me as an outsider in a country that I claim as my own. Unfortunately, this is a common response to things I (and other third culture kids) say when experience from another culture are involved. People take it as some sort of “look-how-well-traveled-I-am”, when it is the only frame of reference we have.

The rub here is that my life experience from being born and raised in a single country without any of this elitist, overclass, snobby moving around is, oh, from birth to 3 years of age. Therefore, my choices are to 1) stay silent about nearly my entire life or 2) deal with being treated as a snob on a regular basis. I choose 2, because I am who I am and because only then might there be change eventually. (Yes, there are third culture kid activists :) )

I hope that you might reconsider judging those who do not eat like you so quickly. There certainly are those Americans who love bringing up their all-organic, vegan diet, their fabulous taste in French wine and African coffee, and whatever else they think signals sophistication and/or being wise in the ways of the world. (If it’s European, it MUST be fancy, right?) But just because I don’t live off Big Macs and Coke and potato chips doesn’t mean I’m a snob. And my parents being born where they were and moving me around as a kid doesn’t make me a snob either, any more than army brats or immigrants are automatically snobs.

Also – if those who are not American or do not share a completely American frame of reference are not welcome to contribute their point of view – perhaps you might want to clarify that you are discussing American food from an internal perspective only.

I commented because the US is one of my home countries, but I also have other home countries to compare food experiences and Pollan’s advice specifically to – something I know not everyone can do. I thought that since I am simultaneously an insider and an outsider in the US, I could contribute something unique. Apologies for not making my point sufficiently clear. Also apologies for the long reply – I am trying to be more clear this time around. I do not know if it was all necessary, but better safe than sorry.

It may not be your experience, but I just wanted to throw it out there that people exist who already ate like Pollan suggests before the book was published and to those people, his book is obviously going to make sense. If you’re happy with how you eat and someone publishes a book saying that’s the right thing to do, of course you will like it and feel like there is truth to the book.

For the record, I do eat potato chips, and I even ate them as a child sometimes. I am not going to start eating something that makes me feel queasy pretty quickly just because I’m insufficiently “folksy” for American tastes. I’ve been down that road of trying to avoid negative reactions by ‘hiding’ my cultural mix many times before. No thanks.

I also like the point that nutrition is different for everyone. Athletes and sick people sometimes do need to cram as many calories as they need into their bodies, and different things affect people…you know…differently. This is why I hate, hate, hate the push for posting calorie and fat counts at fast food places. Heck, just assuming that everyone, or everyone within a certain height-weight range, needs the same number of calories is problematic.

As another example of nutrition being different for everyone, hypothyroid. My mom-in-law discovered that she would have thyroid issues when she tried to cook low-salt (you k now, that’s supposed to be so healthy) or forget to buy the iodized kind. (She ended up with Grave’s Disease, then thyroid cancer and had her thyroid removed, so hers was probably way more sensitive than most, but that kind of variation is sort of the point.)

I don’t know if this is common–I hope it’s not–but some of the horror stories from First Do No Harm combined with my own experience would suggest that some doctors ignore or deny medical causes for weight gain for whatever reason. Maybe it’s even well-intentioned, to “encourage” the patient to diet and exercise more “for their health.”

Obviously, I’m not saying that’s the case with Ana’s cousin’s doctor. I have nothing even resembling enough information to make that assumption. Just wanted to point out something that might be worth considering.

I live 1/2 a mile from an… adequate grocery store. It’s very small, but actually has a produce section. Not that it’s great, but it exists. It’s also more expensive than the grocery store I have to drive to.

That’s right folks, it’s cheaper to be affluent.

From Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett:

The reason the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in the city on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes “Boots” theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

Yes, yes, yes!

I was once on a usenet group where a bunch of people were very smugly dissing McDonalds and I and another old fart commented that those people had clearly never had to drive cross country prior to 1970 (or whenever the heck it became ubiquitous). When we did it in the 1950’s, yes each town looked more unique, each place had more of it’s own ‘flavor’, there was far more of that wonderful ’sense of place’ everyone so misses… but truth be told you never knew at any given stop if you were in for the greatest gastronomic experience of your life or a horrible meal and a nasty case of food poisoning. Predictability may not be exciting, but I’ll take it over the ‘excitement’ of salmonella any day. (Not saying there’s never been food poisoning at McD’s, but seriously… it tends to make national news when it happens.)

Covert Bailey (whose books I do NOT recommend AT ALL as they utterly drip with fat hate not to mention some seriously out of date info, but who happened to be on PBS one day while I was flipping through and was interesting until he got to the fat hate section of his lecture) told a story about how it was common in Ireland at the turn of the last century for widowers to start losing their teeth and getting other signs of scurvy… why? Because potatoes tended to be something their wives made and they stopped eating them when she was no longer there to prepare them (thank Maud for the microwave, before the microwave it took a while to bake or boil a potato). I don’t know where he got his stats, but I can tell you in my dad’s big Irish family, without the potato it would have been nothing but meat and whiskey breakfast lunch and dinner.

And I mentioned he’s 90 right?

One time, when I was in university, I was waiting for an evening class, and probably hadn’t had any dinner, and I went into a natural foods store and bought a bag of yogurt covered almonds.. I don’t know how big a bag… maybe a cup and a half of almonds, I’m guessing? And I ate them ALL.

Binge!

And one time, I was recovering from the flu, and craving vegetables and not able to get outside and get any, so I got really enterprising and ordered a Greek pizza with lots of spinach on it, and then I ate every single last bit of spinach (and feta) off that pizza before curling up for a nap on the living room rug.

Binge!

It’s just craaaazy to me that I went so long in my life looking at incidents like the above as examples of out of control, disordered eating.

They were anything but.

But, really, I know why I thought they were. It relates back to those food rules. I wasn’t following them. I wasn’t following them, AND, there was already something ‘wrong’ with my body – although, actually, I wasn’t fat during either of the above ‘Binge!’ incidents, but I was, maybe, 10 to 20 pounds above the ‘ideal’ – whatever that is – at the time I thought there was one. I know that seems laughable, but that 10 – 20 pounds weighed more heavily on me.. mentally, emotionally, than the ‘extra’ 60 or so pounds I’m carrying now.

So, there was already something ‘wrong’. And where there’s a ‘wrong’. there has to be a ‘fault’.. a cause of that wrong.

And the cause was… binge!

(not)

I remember Geneen Roth saying, in one of her books, that for her nowadays “two cookies can be a binge”.

I think that was where I got the idea.

*shaking head*

Agreed. In fact, it’s kind of funny when you look at it that way, because the most popular “diet and fitness” regimens are essentially working at cross-purposes — trying to get people to lose weight, while gaining muscle. No wonder it’s so damn hard to do long-term.

I know that ice crystals do destroy certain tissues in food — but that normally just results in a textural change, not a nutritional one. This sounds like a really technical thing, perhaps related to glycemic index.

If it is a GI thing, doing stuff like cooking pasta for a longer time raises GI as well. As does sprinkling lemon juice on starch — basically, because it helps to break down the starch a little bit before it even hits your stomach, therefore making it easier for you to absorb the glucose from it when you do eat it.

Some people are of the opinion that GI doesn’t really matter, in the long run, for blood glucose control and general health. They don’t even regularly teach it to diabetic patients because it’s too fussy and counterintuitive to use practically.

So making a statement that discourages people from eating frozen vegetables/fruits because they are supposedly of higher GI is not only snobby in the extreme, but questionable. And if people cut out good, convenient, accessible forms of f&v based on this advice, then it’s negligent and irresponsible as well.

There was a similar issue with canned vegetables and sodium, to the point where people who found canned vegetables more affordable felt bad for eating them because they were supposedly “bad” for them. Way to go, nutrition police!

Bottom line: when it comes to nutrition, the BIG PICTURE over the LONG TERM is what matters more for general health. Not some picky detail based on sketchy experimental data. Eating a wider variety of food is GOOD FOR YOU — and if that means eating stuff that’s accessible to you because it is frozen, or canned, or whatever, then fine. Anything in the service of variety.

If I amortized all the years spent thinking about this stuff, for each blog post…gah. I hate to think how long it has actually taken.

The urge to starve myself is never very far away, and just because of some really triggering shit that is going on my life right now the fight has gotten particularly brutal. It does not help that the entire freaking world is on a diet.

Reading your blog has been a much-needed dose of sanity. Thanks. I mean that.

I’ve definitely chastised him for his food preferences over the time we’ve been together, seeing myself as superior for having “healthier” tastes, but I have stopped since learning about FA. About a year ago I remarked to him that I didn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t choose a piece of fruit over a packaged fruit roll up and he patiently (he is very patient with me!) explained that from his POV, fresh fruit is unpredictable. He said he gets very annoyed when he bites into a piece of fruit and it’s all mealy or rotten. “I have never been disappointed by a fruit roll up,” he said. “They always taste just like I expect them to.” For the first time I heard a reason for why someone might eat more processed food that didn’t have to do with them being lazy, poor, gluttonous, or “not knowing any better.” At that point I realized, there is nothing wrong with wanting consistency, to feel like you’ve gotten your money’s worth, and to enjoy the taste of your snack or meal. Certainly, I understood the frustration of spending my hard-earned money on a bag of oranges, only to find them dry and tasteless. But I kept on buying them. How exactly did that make me superior?

This blog is great. This post in particular made something “click” for me. I feel like I’m finally taking the first real step away from disordered eating to … intuitive eating or guilt-free eating or whatever the term is. So thanks.

(I really, really love American food, can you tell?)