While my wife was pregnant with our kid, I became a vegetarian. Kind of like in Friends when MATT LEBLANC becomes a supporter of LISA KUDROW’s character who is craving meat.
When the baby was born, I didn’t feel like I’d missed a huge amount by not eating meat. It’s been a little over two years now since I last ate meat.
While I’m certainly not religious about it (I opt for bone broth at a Ramen stop but have tofu instead of pork in the broth), I definitely enjoy the lifestyle. Occasionally, I fancy a bockwurst but beyond that, I mostly don’t miss meat at all.
Around the same time as I chose not to go back to eating meat although my wife’s cravings were no longer around, I also read MICHAEL POLLAN’s In Defence of Food.
If you’ve never read a POLLAN book, he’s well known for being pretty unapologetic about things he’s tried in life. In this one, he mostly doesn’t try anything new other than avoiding the American diet.
A lot of books about food are dogmatic and unrealistic. This one is honest and warm. I appreciated that.
In a time when roughly a fifth of all eating among Americans age 18-50 takes place in the car, and when obesity is pretty common wherever you go in the world, it’s books like this that have the potential to create meaningful change.
Bon appétit!
Marc
P.S. The list of people receiving this grew by about 25% this week without me doing anything to promote it. If you’re one of those people, I’d love to know where you found this. Just hit reply!
Morsels for your mind
What a brilliant and depressing problem to have.
The U.N. recently announced that the number of people in the world suffering from the problems of “overnutrition” has for the first time exceeded the number suffering from undernutrition.
The book pretty much boils down (lol) to this manifesto:
AN EATER’S MANIFESTO Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
I did not expect to discover that the word vitamin was so new
This observation led to the discovery early in the twentieth century of the first set of micronutrients, which the Polish biochemist Casimir Funk [editor’s note: that is an amazing name], harkening back to older vitalist ideas of food, christened “vitamines” in 1912 (“vita-” for life and “-amines” for organic compounds organized around nitrogen).
I would have liked to have seen pink margarine:
Many consumers regarded “oleomargarine” as just such an adulteration, and in the late 1800s five states passed laws requiring that all butter imitations be dyed pink so no one would be fooled. The Supreme Court struck down the laws in 1898. In retrospect, had the practice survived, it might have saved some lives.
We’ve talked about Dr Kellogg before in a previous newsletter. I am thinking of searching out a book just about him. I can’t keep reading things like this about him and not investigate:
The two diet gurus were united in their contempt for animal protein, the consumption of which Dr. Kellogg, a Seventh-Day Adventist who bore a striking resemblance to KFC’s Colonel Sanders, firmly believed promoted both masturbation and the proliferation of toxic bacteria in the colon.
This sounds reasonable
AVOID FOOD PRODUCTS THAT MAKE HEALTH CLAIMS. For a food product to make health claims on its package it must first have a package, so right off the bat it’s more likely to be a processed than a whole food. Generally speaking, it is only the big food companies that have the wherewithal to secure FDA-approved health claims for their products and then trumpet them to the world. Recently, however, some of the tonier fruits and nuts have begun boasting about their health-enhancing properties, and there will surely be more as each crop council scrounges together the money to commission its own scientific study. Because all plants contain antioxidants, all these studies are guaranteed to find something on which to base a health oriented marketing campaign.
Bonus
Here’s an interesting article on foods that are ‘banned in the USA’ (Someone hire that headline writer pronto.)
My favourites are:
Reasonable things to ban like Haggis or an Italian cheese that’s infested with maggots. Seems legit.
Kinder Eggs – because they contain a non-food item inside them. I wanted to find a list of other non-food items contained in food items because I was sure there would be a load of weird things in the world. But alas. I could not find that list.
Ackee Fruit which is banned fresh but allowed canned.
BONUS BONUS
The Black Power movement and dietary ideas
One of the most fascinating food movements is the movement started by the Black Panthers in the 1960s. They created some of the first well known Free Breakfast programmes for kids.
I love that. Their idea was that free breakfasts were a route to equality. This makes sense because blood sugar levels effect your ability to take on new information in school or perform in the workplace.
Later on, the food justice ideas that started with the free breakfast programmes evolved into conscientious consumption ideas.
Here’s an academic paper on that topic.
I have always loved this track by Dead Prez which outlines some of these ideas: