Food and Books and a Few Short Musings

I just finished reading another food book: Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods by Gary Paul Nabhan. It's a book I'd bought over a year ago and which I'd had trouble getting into. I thought this would be the perfect time to try again.

It's similar in many ways to The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, whom I find to be the more accessible writer of the two. Both get into the ills and evils of industrial food production, the craziness of our over-reliance on King Corn, the process and personal moral dilemmas of slaughtering fowl, and the many benefits of eating locally. Nabhan actually does take the reader through a year of his own local eating experiment, which is very interesting and informative. I just had a hard time relating because he lives in Arizona, which is a very different geography and foodshed than my own.

I'd like to write soon about meat-eating and vegetarianism. It's been on my mind a lot since reading Pollan's book and since beginning culinary school. There's a young woman in my class who doesn't seem to be a vegetarian, although she has shown remarkable reluctance to eat animals one might think of as "cute," like bunny and lamb. She also was fairly repulsed by having to clean fish a couple of weeks ago. I'm wondering how she's going to make it through the five weeks of Butchering Seminar that follow Sanitation. Anyway, it's all gotten me thinking...and thinking about writing about my thinking...but I can't do it today, so you'll have to wait a little while longer.

I may also write here more about the Locavore movement - the movement to eat foods grown and produced within 100- (or 150- or 200-) miles of one's home. That is, after all, what Nabhan's book is all about and it is what Pollan comes to see as the most sustainable way of eating. And it's where I'm coming down, too, in terms of my own food ethic. Pollan's book really helped me make more progress in sorting out my own dilemma of whether it's better to eat "organic" or "local." So, more on that, too, coming soon...

My Other Favorite (Food) Writer

Once again I find myself having great cause to say, "It's been too long." November 23rd was the date of my last post. I left you with a favorite essay from the prolific Wendell Berry on the ethics of eating.

My plan, as of yesterday, was to post some reflections on The Omnivore's Dilemma, written by this ball-capped guy to the left who's holding the piglet. Michael Pollan is his name and he is fast becoming my "other" favorite (food) writer, taking his well-deserved place alongside Wendell Berry. I finished reading TOD this afternoon, having started it only last weekend, and having managed to get through all 400 plus pages of it in only a week. Or, more to the point, I managed to put the book down long enough to actually get done the rest of the things I had to get done this week, which was truly the greater accomplishment, by far.

I've got quite a lot to say about the book and all that it contains, and I still hope to share some of my reflections on it here, since that kind of thing is exactly the sort of thing we do here at The Reverent Eater. But first, it seems appropriate to get back into blogging mode by sharing a quick summary of another more recent piece of Pollan's writing, which is actually reminiscent of the contents of my last post by Wendell Berry. This one is from last Sunday's New York Times Magazine (January 28, 2007) - from an article called "Unhappy Meals," the sort of subtitle to which reads, "Thirty years of nutritional science has made Americans sicker, fatter and less well nourished. A plea for a return to plain old food."

I commend to you the whole article, which I'm sure can be found over at www.nytimes.com. The list that follows is my summary of Michael Pollan's summary of what one might call his own Wendell-Berry-like ethics of eating. So, here we go:

1. "Eat food." By which Pollan means "real food," not processed food products. Or as he explains it, "Don't eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food." Which is a lot.

2. "Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims." Those that claim to be healthy often are not. Instead, they are often highly processed. Don't let what, as Pollan calls it, "the silence of the yams" fool you. Fresh fruits and vegetables are your friends. Even though they don't have highly paid and highly vocal spokespeople.

3. "Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number - or that contain high fructose corn syrup." 'Nuff said. That's been one of my rules for years.

4. "Get out of the supermarket whenever possible." Or as he says elsewhere in his writings, try to buy food without barcodes.

5. "Pay more, eat less." Good food costs more, no doubt. But you get what you pay for. And even more importantly perhaps, so called "cheap food" carries with it an overwhelming number of hidden costs - oil for transportation, pollution, the devastation of local economies, etc. Besides, Americans used to pay close to 25% of our income on food. Nowadays we pay closer to 10%. Most of us can afford to pay more, and we should - not only for ourselves and our families, but for the welfare of the rest of the world. Oh, and eat less. Yes. We can afford that, too.

6. "Eat mostly plants, especially leaves." If you eat meat, you might be better off thinking of it as a side dish, suggests Pollan.

7. "Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks." As Pollan argues elsewhere, Americans have no consistent food culture of our own, and that gets us in trouble by making us more vulnerable to food fads. In fact, it may matter more HOW we eat than WHAT we eat, which is precisely what an intact food culture would tell us if we had one. "Let culture be your guide," writes Pollan, "not science." Makes good sense to me.

8. "Cook. And if you can, plant a garden." Doesn't this sound like Wendell Berry? In a sentence that this student of the culinary arts deeply appreciates, he writes, "The culture of the kitchen, as embodied in those enduring traditions we call cuisines, contains more wisdom about diet and health than you are apt to find in any nutrition journal or journalism." All the eggs, butter, and cream notwithstanding, I think he's on to something.

9. "Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to your diet." Here he is singing the praises of diversity. To paraphrase Pollan, the greater the variety of the foods we eat, the more likely we are to get all the many and varied nutrients we need.

So, there you have it: Michael Pollan's ethics of eating. Someday soon, I'll share some of my thoughts on The Omnivore's Dilemma. In the meantime, it's time to start reading a new book, which I think will be...Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods by Gary Paul Nabhan. (And no, I haven't forgotten that I promised you a summary of Zen Master Dogen's Instructions to the Cook. I'll get to that...don't worry...all in good time...)