Eat Food

I just finished reading Michael Pollan's new book In Defense of Food. It's a quick read and brings up some interesting points about what he calls "nutritionism", which has been the fairly recent rise of science in deciding what we should and should not eat. Pollan claims that many of the "western diseases", such as cancer, diabetes, etc. are due to eating processed foods and not following traditional diets. Most people who follow a traditional diet (regardless, it seems, as to what that diet includes) seem to be healthier than people who have a western (ie. American) diet. Another interesting point was that science is telling us, for example, that the Mediterranean diet is particularly healthy (my doctor just told me this). But we don't know what it is about the Mediterranean diet that makes it healthy. The food industry would like to find some specific thing -- say olive oil -- and just add it in to our regular foods, but outside of the context of the traditional Mediterranean diet, olive oil alone may not have the same (or any?) benefit.

Pollan's advice is to "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

I love this advice. He distinguishes between food and food-like products. Food-like products are most of the products in the grocery store. For example, fat free cream cheese. How is that possible? Or a cereal bar with a white line of "milk" running down the middle.

Pollan defines "food" as:

• something your great-grandmother would recognize. (Hallelujah! My great-grandmother would recognize chocolate, wine, bread... :) )
• something that has less than 5 ingredients & has recognizable ingredients.
  
• Something probably found on the periphery of the grocery store, not in the middle aisles.
• Preferably, something not found in the grocery store, but in a CSA box or at the farmer's market.

One way to be sure that you are eating food is to make it yourself. He gives a great example -- would you make a spongy snack cake, inject it with cream filling, and clean up all the mess just so you could have a Twinkie? Probably not. So give it a miss.

My family has been eating more and more "food" lately -- we make all our own bread, thus ensuring whole-grain bread without a lot of weird ingredients and preservatives, we only buy organic peanut butter (I love this... I looked at the ingredients and it said "Peanuts"), we changed yogurt brands because I decided that the old kind was too artificial. BUT I have a hard-core pastry habit (from a store that I know uses trans fats.. not from a real bakery) and I put Splenda in my coffee every morning. Many things in the cupboard probably have high fructose corn syrup (would great-grandma recognize this? Probably not! Would she recognize the bag of potatoes? Yep!)

So, as of tomorrow, we are going on a week-long Eat Food Challenge. We will be eating food. Actual food. Not "food-like products". I will put sugar in my coffee (gasp!). I will either make my treats myself or buy them at a real bakery that uses real ingredients (which would involve a longer bike ride than the current source). I will continue cooking dinner, but not use funky mixes or frozen fish sticks. This is a week-long experiment because I want to see what the problem areas are. I know there will be a big adjustment, but we want to give it a try.

The kids?
That might be a problem. They eat school lunch, which is a total nutritional disaster. The menu reassures me that the hot dogs are made of low-fat turkey (which I refuse to eat after reading about turkey farms)... and that's just a start. There is also still some Easter candy, which I know I could not reproduce in my kitchen (what exactly IS the cream filling in a Cadbury egg? Don't know, but it's like a drug! Must be a "food-like product".) I think that most of the after-school snacks (with the exception of fruit) would also fail to qualify as food. But, my kids love home-made muffins and I found a recipe for granola bars...

Making these changes at home and taking away school lunch might cause a revolution. So, we'll start with home. By the end of the week.... who knows?

How about you? Are there any food-like products that would be particularly hard to eliminate from your diet? Or do you eat food all the time?

*I love that "food" now has a special meaning :)