Twelve Black Code Monkeys

In The Omnivore’s Dilemm a, journalist and author Michael Pollan takes us on a journey through four of the main kinds of meals that are generally get eaten here in the U.S.: a fast food meal; an “industrial organic” meal; a meal from a non-industrial, sustainable, local farm (self-labeled “beyond organic”); and finally a meal for which Pollan provides the majority of the ingredients himself - by hunting and gathering. The book is not only about the meals and their ingredients and preparation, however. Rather, Pollan tries to take us from the very beginning of how the components of each meal, to the end product. Thus he traces the cow, chicken, or pig from its origins and life on the farm (or forest) to its slaughter, preparation for sale or cooking, and final preparation by the Pollan himself or McDonalds. He also traces other parts of the meal, most notably corn (for the fast-food meal) and mushrooms (for the hunter-gatherer meal). Along the way, we Pollan gives us the history of various kinds of agriculture, discusses much of our historical and prehistoric relationship to food through the anthropological record, and even how animal and plant species have evolved to defend against predation but also to survive with the help of humans or other animals. The book is not purely one of information, though, but also a very personal account of Pollan’s own journey as he immerses himself in the details of what most of us take for granted as simply the food we buy and eat every day.The title of the book refers to the fact that humans, like some other primates, rats, pigs, chickens, bears, and a bunch of other species, are “omnivores,” meaning that they (we) are generalized feeders that can eat both animal meats as well as plant foods for our nourishment. Other species have a more specialized diet, and can only survive by either eating meat (carnivores) or plant foods (herbivores). While being an omnivore gives distinct advantages, allowing for a wider assortment of nourishment, the flip side of this increased number of choices is the problem or dilemma of what to eat. Koala bears know they can eat eucalyptus leaves, and that’s it. Omnivores have to figure out what they can eat, making sure not to eat something poisonous, and also trying to determine the most nutritious animals or plants (or parts of these) so that they don’t waste their limited capacity to consume and fill up on ones that aren’t as very nourishing. Also, since we’ve developed culture, language, philosophy, and religion, we also need to deal with the decision of what we should eat. Should we eat meat, for example, or is that “immoral.” Should we eat by the rules of kosher or halal? Should we eat organic or conventional? Should we eat something that authorities tell us will eventually be detrimental to our health despite no immediate or obvious danger? These questions, although they perhaps only infrequently come up for most of us, are ones where we differ from other species, and Pollan demonstrates throughout the book that these decisions can be at times very difficult ones if one really chooses to contemplate them seriously.

The first section of the book details industrial agriculture. Specifically, it describes everything about the biggest single crop that the U.S. produces - corn, or more accurately the species zea mays. The history of corn is a fascinating one as Pollan tells it. He describes how in the last fifty or so years it has become part of an absurdist spiral that has bankrupted huge numbers of farmers, made the U.S. one of the most obese countries on the planet, and has usurped the vast majority of our arable land. Most of this, Pollan writes, is due to government subsidies that compel farmers to grow corn over anything else. Government regulations also favor corn, industrial methods of farming, and the largest of operations. These regulations are no doubt affected by the lobbying dollars spent, and campaign contributions given, to government officials on behalf of the manufacturers of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and huge industrial farms.

Corn has become such a cheap commodity, Pollan tells us, that new ways are constantly being devised to deal with the ever-increasing yields and surpluses that would otherwise rot on the silo floor. So corn goes into all processed foods for various purposes - bulking, sweetening, preserving, or adding this or that quality. Sweetening, of course, is one of its main functions, as high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) found in soft drinks and desert foods and in many other non-desert foods that one wouldn’t expect it to be in. The escalating consumption of soft drinks with HFCS has been proposed by many as a major causal factor in the U.S. epidemic of obesity and diabetes - especially childhood diabetes.

In addition to corn, Pollan also tracks a steer he purchases that will eventually be slaughtered in a factory farm, or has the industry calls it, a Confined Area Feeding Operation, of CAFO. The steer gets to have a happy few weeks with his mother, eating a natural diet of grass, after which he is shipped to the CAFO and subsequently made to eat a completely unnatural diet of corn, soy protein, and the fat from fellow slaughtered cows. Corn is the carbohydrate of choice, of course, because it is so cheap, but also because it fattens the cow very quickly (not unlike how it fattens us), and produces the marbling affect that the USDA uses one of its two main variables in how it rates rate cuts of meat. Such cows are routinely given antibiotics as part of their regular diet due to the unsanitary conditions of the industrial feed lot as well as their unnatural diet. They are also pumped full of hormones to speed their growth even more.

Aside from the humanitarian, health, and economic issues involved, there is even one of geopolitics. This is because industrial farming is based around petroleum, and according to Pollan accounts for 20% of the United States energy expenditure! Not only does this industrial system involve shipping food products across the vast distances of our country, but the fertilizer itself requires a great deal of petroleum to produce. While technology like genetically modified organisms and new farming methods have made the yield per acre of corn very high indeed, the efficiency of producing it in terms of resources needed is still low. According to Pollan, it takes something like 50 calories of energy (mostly from oil) to produce a single food calorie from corn. Of course, all this government subsidizing, and hence cheapening of corn, means that corn and the animals raised on it have become much cheaper to eat. But, Pollan argues, there is a tremendous hidden cost, or costs, the two major ones being public health and our increased dependency on foreign oil.

The second part of the book is devoted to “industrial organic.” This might seem like a contradiction in terms and Pollan argues that this may be the case. He describes the origins of the organic movement in the 60’s and 70’s and how part of the tenets of the movement was about “sustainability” - the ability for a farm to sustain itself without a significant amount of outside “inputs” - chemical fertilizer, pesticides, etc.) The first farms of this movement grew haltingly, but eventually took off, mainly in the 1980’s, after which their products were in such high demand by national chains like Costco that their demand could not be bet via the original ideals of organic movement. So a more “industrial” approach was adopted. Still, neither the animal feed nor the crops grown for human consumption via industrial organic can use chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Antibiotics can only be used in case of an illness rather than as a preventative, and hormones cannot be used at all. While this takes care of many of the problems of pure industrial farming, it does not deal with the problem of sustainability that was a major part of the movement’s initial focus.

The third part of the book centers around the self-labeled “beyond organic,” movement, which aims to reinvent the original movement’s ideals, although some of its origins hark back even further to the 1940’s, when industrial farming was really starting to get started, and chemical fertilizers and pesticides were starting to be used. The movement preaches sustainability and imitating nature in the closest way possible within the confines of a managed system. The practice is exemplified by the colorful farmer Joel Salatin in his 100-acre farm in Swoope, Virginia, about two and a half hours west of me here in the Washington DC suburbs. Salatin has been a tireless crusader for the rights of small farmers like himself, who are often given the short end of the stick because they do not have the lobbying dollars of the industrial organic sector, let alone the non-organic industrial. Pollan actually spends a week working at Salatin’s farm, “Polyface ,” for a week, involved in many of the aspects of farming, even including the slaughtering of chickens. As Pollan describes it, just about everything at Polyface is sustainable. The Cows graze on a given pasture and fertilize it with their manure, then they are moved to another pasture and chickens are brought in as a “clean up crew” eating the larva that has been growing in the manure. The chickens in turn deposit their own waste, and in another day or two the grass has grown back to the point where another group of cows can be brought in to feed. This cycle where different plants and animals participate in a system that helps all involved without the need for external materials or forces (except the farmer to move the animals) is such a huge savings in terms of fuel, raw materials, etc., that one can really see how incredibly wasteful the industrial systems are in comparison.

The final part of the book concerns itself with Pollan’s efforts to make a meal that he has hunted and gathered himself. A friend mentors him both in hunting feral pigs as well as finding wild mushrooms. Much of this portion of the book is devoted to Pollan’s own philosophical and moral meanderings about whether he can justify killing an animal and eating it. Pollan corresponds with Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation , and has debate both with Singer and with himself about whether eating meat is justifiable. He does end up going on his hunt, and we get to experience the exhilaration that this brings, as well as the disgust when it comes time to dress his kill. Foraging for mushrooms, does not elicit any moral dilemmas, but does provide some interesting information about an organism completely separate from both that of the animal and plant kingdoms, and one which we apparently know comparatively little about.

On the whole, The Omivore’s Dilemma is a fascinating book that will make many people rethink their entire relationship with food. The vast majority of us think little about food other than perhaps the cost, the calorie content, the taste, and occasionally the number of grams of fat or carbohydrate contained in it. This book provides some great insights into aspects of the food chain that most of us know little about, perhaps enough to prompt those who read it to start thinking and caring how the food on their plate got there enough to ask more questions about that food, be it from a grocery store or a restaurant. Perhaps some will even start to demand more from the restaurants and food shops they patronize. And perhaps some will even ask themselves more about what they are willing to sacrifice in an effort to eat what they think will be healthy for them, the country, and the planet.

As much as I enjoyed The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I did have a couple of problems with the book, and I’m apparently not alone, given some of the reviews on Amazon.com . Let me first mention that I listened to this book as an audio book downloaded from Audible.com , so my experience is, I’m sure. slightly different from those reading the book in paper form. Nonetheless, one of the main complaints about the book I would have to agree with - I think Pollan could have gotten his point across within 3/4 of the pages it actually took, perhaps even less. The first parts about industrial non-organic, and industrial organic, are very informational. In the third part, Pollan puts himself into the story, which in itself is fine and gives us some of his personal insights by letting us experience what he did on the farm, but at a certain point, especially around the issues of killing, Pollan becomes so entangled in his own conflicting emotions and tortured thinking about it, that eventually gets repetitive and you feel like you are reading the diary of a tortured soul. This continues and perhaps even worsens in the final part of the book, where Pollan debates vegetarianism with himself and with Singer, tries to deal with the guilt over having fun while hunting and killing his pig and his revulsion during the dressing of the animal. Although these moral musings aren’t prevalent in the chapters on hunting for mushrooms, Pollan seems to find other things to wax philosophic about, fluffing the pages out way beyond what they should be, especially at the end of a long book.

Aside from the length issue and some inaccuracies and inconsistencies pointed out by other reviewers on Amazon, my other major issue with Pollan’s book is one that might not be an issue for most. It relates to Pollan’s ridicule of restricted carbohydrate diets - Atkins in particular - and disdain for fat in general and saturated fat in particular. I find it disappointing that Pollan can debunk so much of the standard line about food, even about the “organic” label that marketers would have you believe is the healthiest food there can be, yet he seems to accept all the old dogma about low-carb and saturated fats despite there being tremendous evidence that supports the healthfulness of that way of eating. Instead he more or less calls Atkins a “quack” and bases this, it seems, on the oft-repeated erroneous claim that Atkins eliminates an “entire food group” - by which he means carbohydrates. This of course is incorrect, but Pollan, like many, seem to have a bias against diets, and specifically towards Atkins that clouds objectivity and careful research. This bias seems to infect other ideas of Pollan’s. The most blatant example of this bias (perhaps also combined with some sloppiness that Pollan shows elsewhere when dealing with other technical subjects) is when he claims that the human brain can get glucose only from carbohydrates. Any first-year biochemist will tell you that this is false, and that protein can easily be converted to glucose as well - Eskimos have survived for hundreds of years on a diet of pure protein and fat (from seal and caribou) for hundreds of years.

Finally, as at least one Amazon reviewer points out, Pollan doesn’t really fully deal with the issue of the price of doing things in an organic and sustainable way. Organic, and “beyond organic” foods are generally much higher in price than their conventional competition. That’s not to say they aren’t worth that price for those who can afford them, but Wholefoods, CSA’s, and Farmers Markets are often more patronized by those on the upper end of the income scale. Those who make minimum wage, or even a bit more, would probably have to spend a huge portion of their paycheck in order to buy most of their food as organic. They simply don’t have much choice in the matter. Pollan suggests that Pollyface’s customers didn’t seem like the well-healed customers of Wholefoods. Still, Swoope is a pretty rural part of Virginia, and so those more well-to-do people just aren’t there in large numbers, and those who are probably are not trying to stand out as such.

Theoretically if the government would stop subsidizing corn and instead used that money to support small sustainable farmers so that their food could be sold less expensively and locally(but without the regulatory requirements that often come with such funding), the food supply might be turned on its head. This of course, is a pipe dream. I’d love for it to happen, but how practical is it in a country as large as ours? Can all the farmland be reconverted into lots of Polyfaces that could serve the entire country? Even if it could be done, the monumental market forces needed for getting this change to occur just aren’t there. It would take a huge rethinking on the part of most of citizens of this country about the food they eat. Even if everyone read Pollan’s book (which I don’t think is a bad idea), there would still be plenty of hold outs who simply don’t care about their own health, let alone the health of others, the environment, or the health and well-being of the animals they eat. I think the best we can hope for, at least for the foreseeable future, is just a level playing field, where small farmers are given the same rights and opportunities as the giant industrial ones and still get to produce their crops and livestock in the way they choose with as little regulation from the government as possible. This is all that Joel Salatin wants, according to Pollan, and I don’t think it’s something unreasonable to ask for, even from those who couldn’t care less about “organic,” “beyond organic,” or any other fancy label we might choose to give our food in the future.

I’ve been doing a bit of research lately on fish and thought I’d share some insights. Fish is a great source of protein and it’s one of the few foods that almost all people will agree is good for you – except some vegan extremists – with the caveat that you have to be careful about where the fish comes from and what kind it is.

So, the benefits that are ascribed to fish is that it is high in protein, relatively low in fat (except for a few fatty varieties), and high in Omega-3 fatty acids. Omega-3 fatty acids are praised by just about everyone. They are so called “essential fatty acids” because your body can’t create them on its own, but needs at least the building blocks, and even then it is better to have the actual DHA and ALA instead of making your body do the additional work.

The main problem with fish is the toxic contaminants that fish absorb from the water. This is mainly the pollutant dimethyl mercury, although I’m sure there are others. Mercury has been linked to cognitive problems, especially when eaten by pregnant or nursing women and young children. Autism and Alzheimer’s disease have also been linked to mercury ingestion by some.

When it comes to figuring out what kinds of fish are best to eat the two factors I list above (Omega-3 and Mercury) are of prime importance, but a third critical issue is that of whether the given fish is endangered in any way. There are lots of groups out there monitoring various fish populations and how the fishing industries are overfishing or using good management practices. A great site to get info on this is stuff is the Monterrey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch.

As for Mercury, the current theory holds that the higher a fish is on the food chain, the more likely a fish will have mercury. This is because not only does the fish deal with the mercury in the water, but also with the mercury in it’s food supply, and I guess mercury is absorbed and held by other fish much more so than plant or other foods that are not fish. So, smaller fish generally are better in this regard, with the smallest being the best – sardines, anchovies, and the like. But the other factor is where the fish comes from, since mercury content differs from location to location. It’s hard to find an exhaustive and easily digestible (no pun intended) chart of where the most and least contaminated areas are, but the closest thing I found was a fact sheet put out by the EPA which has advisories by state. Unfortunately this doesn’t cover the large amounts of fish that isn’t caught within a state, but rather in the Atlantic, Pacific, or even foreign countries like Iceland. I did find this page on Dr. Mercola’s site which references the Environmental working group, but I am not familiar enough with this group to be able to vouch for them, and you always have to take things on Mercola’s site with a grain of salt.

The other facet of the fish industry which I haven’t mentioned yet is the whole distinction between wild-caught fish and farm-raised fish. The mercury concerns are only for wild-caught fish as fish farms are able to provide water without any contaminants. The main problem with farm-raised fish, however, is that they generally have much lower levels of Omega-3 fatty acids, thus removing one of their key benefits. In addition, there are concerns that pollutants find their way into salmon via their food, which is basically ground pellets made up of other fish. Other concerns relate to the inbreeding that could be creating a genetically inferior fish prone to disease that if allowed to escape to the wild could contaminate the wild fish gene pool.

In some ways it’s a discouraging situation that doesn’t offer a lot of good solutions. There are fish populations that look to be managed well and free of mercury, such as wild Alaskan salmon, and again, probably sardines and anchovies are ok, but eating any of these more than a couple times a week may not be without some risk. One way to get around this a little bit is to take a supplement that provides Omega-3 fatty acids. Flax seed oil is consumed by some, although I’ve heard both plusses and minuses about flax seed, which does not provide the actual essential DHA and ALA but rather the “building blocks” for your body to make it. Fish oil capsules, while ok in some cases, according to Dr.’s Michael R. and Mary Dan Eades, authors of various diet and fitness books including Protein Power, it can also go rancid, and there’s no way you will know because the telling stink of rancid oil is shielded by the capsule. Rancid oil can actually be really bad for you health. The Eades recommend a fish-oil or cod-liver oil that you take in liquid form with a spoon. This may sound horrible to some, but they actually now come with flavoring that hides almost all of the fishiness. The brand the Eades recommend is Carlson’s wich apparently is highly rated and known for it’s lack of fishy taste.

There’s a concern that the mercury and other contaminants will even get into this fish oil and with that in mind, this one lab tested 21 different brands of fish oil supplements and found no unsafe levels of various contaminants (mercury, PCB’s, and dioxins), although I can’t tell exactly what they were specifying as safe and unsafe – you need to subscribe in order to see the full report.

Like many of my readers, I’m sure, I’ve had an ongoing battle with weight, but I also have done extensive reading on the subject. I’m not just talking about diet books, but also studies, articles, and interviews, debates, etc. on diet, nutrition, health, and even anthropology. I can’t call myself a scientist because I don’t have the hard-core grounding in proofs and research skills, but I can at least claim to be somewhat educated on the differing points of view surrounding these topics, in addition to simply being a fairly good observer of attitudes of those around me regarding this stuff. That being said, I thought I would ramble a bit about what I see as the issues we face but more importantly how to try to get around them. It’s a multifaceted topic to say the least. If it were simple we might have already nipped it, but it is complex and fraught with confusing contradictions and competing interests. I hope this litany will at least start to delineate individual items of attention and separate some of the major areas to work on.

The Issues:

1) Mind over Matter? As many of us know from countless attempts to lose weight, only to regain it later, the goal of losing weight and keeping it off is a very challenging one. For those who haven’t had to deal with obesity, a very easy assumption may be to blame the dieter for simply being too “lazy.” There are certainly those who can overcome the desire to slack and keep weight off for extended periods, so these exceptions to the rule are held up as the paragons that everyone could and should strive to emulate. However, despite the desire to simplify issues (which I’ll examine more closely below), it’s not always simply a matter of personal responsibility or will power. This isn’t an effort to make “excuses” but to look at the reasons why things have become so difficult.

a. One part of this is the so-called evolutionary argument that it is in our genes to overeat whenever possible. Hunter-gatherer ancestors dealt with a constant threat of starvation. Up until the agricultural age when humankind learned to preserve food with salt, and eventually bottling, canning, refrigeration, vacuum packing and irradiation, the only way we could “store” food was to eat it and have it accumulate in our personal biological “stores” of fat tissue. Because of this, some would say, we are compelled to eat as much as we can even though there is no threat today of starvation. Some of us have been able to override this urge most of the time, but given the opportunity, as with the “all you can eat” buffets, it can often be incredibly challenging not to stuff yourself.

b. Part of this may be due to simply not doing it “right.” In other words, the effort to work hard at losing may be there, but the results do not show. This may be because the dieter is doing something that they were TOLD was the correct way to eat and/or exercise, but it turns out to actually be deleterious to their goals.

c. Yet another issue is societal and cultural realities. Current U.S. (and perhaps at least some other westernized countries) suburban culture creates lifestyles that make it extremely hard to eat healthfully and get a decent amount of exercise. The car culture of the U.S. makes regular exercise something that one has to make time for instead of being an integral part of one’s day, and the busy lives of many makes this increasingly difficult. The prevalence of fast-food makes it much more appealing than the more time-consuming method of preparing one’s meals from scratch from whole foods, and such meals are not readily available ready-made, or when they are, they are considerably more expensive than the less healthy alternatives. Finally, while we have come to have a much greater awareness as a society of dieting these days, there is still a great adherence to eating things based only on what tastes best regardless of how healthy it is, and this can help erode the will of any dieter.

2) Simplicity

a. We crave simplicity – easy answers to complex questions. We hear about laziness a lot when it comes to people not wanting to do the “hard work” of exercise and eating right that are supposed to make weight loss possible. While there may be a very small subset of those who simply don’t want to do anything “hard,” I think much more prevalent is laziness when it comes to thinking about how to lose. Part of this is an educational issue where people unquestioningly accept whatever crap they read, whether it’s in a supermarket tabloid or the New York Times, without doing any critical thinking of their own. Many simply don’t have the tools to go about such thinking, but others do and simply decide to believe in one dogma or the other without questioning it or trying different approaches.

b. One Size Fits All – thankfully this attitude is slowly starting to change, but it is still something that most people believe applies in one way or another. Certainly we can agree that there are some universal truths that certain things are healthy for 99.9% of us and other things are unhealthy for a similar percentage. But the field of genetics has shown us that people do metabolize foods differently and have sensitivities and other issues particular to their ethnicity/genetic makeup. Instead we are given guidelines that are supposed to work for everyone. Even given one individual, they will react very differently to the same diet and exercise plan at different periods throughout their life based on many factors, such as how many times they have dieted in the past, what kind of health issues they have developed or haven’t, or simply their age. These concepts seem to be too confusing for many, or at least those who write books or articles have decided that they are too confusing, and so they dumb everything down into simple rules that over time harden into unchallengeable “fact” when they are really nothing of the kind.

3) Business and Government

a. We exist in a capitalist society where the “free market” reigns. Many of the large companies in such a system operate with the goal to get bigger which increases their stock and makes them and their stockholders wealthier. In doing so, altruistic motives often become of secondary concern and then only when they can coexist with the goal of making more profit. This situation can lead in more notorious cases to companies like the cigarette companies that profit on the addiction to harmful substances, but just as much to food and beverage companies that profit on the addiction to sugar, fast food, and junk food.

b. The U.S. Government is seen by those on the right and the left as being a spoiler in this area and others. For the right, the Government should have no place in telling people what to eat or how to spend their money. It should not be a “nanny” because it should be up to the individual to exercise their free will and be responsible for their own decisions when it comes to diet and health. For the left, the government is little more than a facilitator for big food companies, giving them corporate welfare and subsidizing huge factory farms that produce way more in the way of food then we can eat or even give away to countries in need. The smaller farmer interested in sustaining the land, producing a product that is healthier and more humane, gets marginalized if not eradicated.

4) Medicine and the Medical Industry

a. Pharmaceuticals have become a huge sector of the economy and due to the realities of the healthcare and insurance industries, the marketplace, litigation, and government regulations; they have turned into monstrosities of a sort. At the same time that they create drugs which prolong life for cancer patients, and even so much as cure other diseases, their drugs are increasingly seen as not having been adequately tested. They basically bribe doctors into prescribing as much of their drugs as possible with the unspoken threat that perks of free dinners and vacations will go away without high enough sales numbers. They need these huge sales numbers in combination with high drug prices that are ultimately paid for by health ever increasing health insurance premiums and the government (and thus your tax dollars), in order to make up for the huge costs of developing drugs and the potential risk of having a dud, or worse something that ends up eventually harming people and thus causing countless legal expenses.

b. Doctors have been accused of not understanding nutrition, and not wanting to pressure patients into eating healthy because they feel their pleas will be ignored. While there are certainly exceptions, many doctors have expectations for patients that are so low, they would rather prescribe drugs or even surgery over really urging a patient to eat better or exercise. Their slavery to the pharmaceutical industry makes it even harder for them to resist the temptation to simply prescribe a drug for a given symptom. Many patients are afraid to do the hard work of figuring out what the underlying cause of a symptom is and experiment with possible solutions (although this is getting easier with the internet and being able to communicate quickly with those who have similar issues), but doctors have much more background in science that should enable them to do this work faster and more efficiently. However, again the realities of the profession mean that it is a lot easier and more profitable to see a patient for a few minutes and sign a prescription for something that will allay some symptoms for a while as opposed to getting to the bottom of the problem.

5) Dieticians, Nutritionists, and “Experts,” oh my!

a. Our growing problem with obesity and obesity-related health issues has not only created a huge market for what most recognize as the today’s charlatan snake oil salesman equivalent of this diet pill or that fad diet, but it also creates a market for those with more recognized certifications and ostensible respect in the professional community. These so called experts dole out advice with confidence and do this in the place of the medical doctor who has largely given up this role.

b. Dieticians and nutritionists, and even personal trainers have generally been giving the public what they have been asking for. An expert to tell them what to do and how to do it. Unfortunately, these professionals practice a “science” which is not hard and fast the way, say, physics is (quantum mechanics not withstanding!). The theories behind weight loss and healthy eating aren’t as simple as these experts make them out to be. Very little if anything has been “proven” in studies, but these studies all the same are used as “proof” to back up the standard party lines. These lines become more solidified and more rigorously defended over the years. As it’s been said, if you repeat anything for long enough, it becomes accepted as fact. When dieters follow the advice of their “expert” but do not see any improvement, the patient is often the one who is blamed for doing something wrong, or even for cheating. Even if the patient convinces their expert otherwise, instead of causing the expert to question their foundation of knowledge (assumptions), they patient is labeled an anomaly (usually genetically speaking these days) and told to pursue a remedy in prescription form. Since their standard advice is useless and they cannot suggest something that goes against that advice.

Solutions

Ok, so, as you can see, the situation is a complicated, convoluted mess. Can we make any sense out of it? As cynical as I may sound above, in the sense of the upcoming New Years’ resolutions, here are just a few personal and collective goals I can suggest. Some of them will be hard, if not all but impossible but I don’t see anything wrong with having such goals as long as there are others that are more achievable or achievable faster. The harder ones give you something to work towards after all the easy things are out of the way!

Suggestions for the individual:

1) Stop following and start thinking.

a. This really relates to a lot of the issues above. Really all I mean is to not just listen to what the so-called “experts” are saying, but to do your own thinking. Think about what makes sense regarding what they tell you, and what doesn’t. You’re smart enough and at least have common sense to know that some things that “experts” tell you to do don’t make sense, or at least don’t for you.

b. Get other opinions. Just as with politics, diet, nutrition, and exercise have their fare share of differing camps. Low carb vs. low fat vs. calorie counting, aerobics vs. weights, etc. Read about the different approaches, but more importantly try them out. If something doesn’t work, after giving it a fair chance, try something else. Is this going to be hard for some people? Sure! But there are plenty of communities on the internet that will help you understand the different issues. Instead of relying on a “expert” to tell you what to do because that’s been drilled into them as a party line, talk to your peers and ask them what works for them. Get suggestions and have a dialogue, not a one-way list of orders that you can’t stray from at the risk of dire punishment.

2) Don’t listen to the Government.

a. At least don’t listen to what they tell you as far as dietary advice. Our society, economy, and government are centered on money and commerce. Officials rely on campaign contributions from wealthy individuals or large companies in order to get reelected and so are lobbied incessantly and successfully by factory farms and big food companies, and even by non-profit special interest groups, who all have their own agendas. The part of the government that currently makes dietary guidelines (the much-maligned food pyramid included) is the USDA. That is the US Department of Agriculture. Agriculture as in farmers. The USDA’s raison d’etre is to promote the interests of farmers and the agricultural industry in the U.S. There seems to be an inherent conflict of interest here!

b. The current administration is very pro-big-business at the moment and so they have a bias towards promoting things that help those big businesses, whether they are big food and beverage companies, pharmaceutical companies, or fast-food chains. So we will necessarily see recommendations and even laws supporting these businesses right now. That doesn’t mean you have to support them as well.

3) It’s not simple!

a. It’s not all about weight. Most experts would have you believe that weight is the paramount issue here, but that simply isn’t the case. Excess weight may be perfectly healthy if it is in the form of muscle and not fat. Most scales only measure total weight, at least until recently, and that one measurement has also been simple and convenient for the “experts” to obsess about. Body fat percentage is a much more telling measurement. Even with excess fat, there’s some evidence to suggest that maintaining a steady, albeit above average weight (with that excess weight being fat) over the long haul (especially if regular exercise is part of the picture) is much healthier than gaining and losing over and over even if half of your time is spent at some mythical “ideal” weight.

b. Don’t let the scare tactics get to you when it comes to cholesterol. Very often doctors will urge their patients to go on cholesterol medication because their LDL is too high or even just their total cholesterol is too high. However, there are pleanty of layman, scientists, and even doctors who have come to the conclusion that the current standard methods of measuring cholesterol are at best misleading, and at worst completely meaningless. Given the risks of taking serious medications like the cholesterol-lowering Statins, it’s extremely important to know whether there is a really good reason to take these.

Suggestions for the medical industry, dieticians, etc:

I’m not sure whether such suggestions (even coming from someone other than myself who has credentials and real influence) could ever affect significant numbers within these professions because of the inherent forces within them that have caused the current status quo. Perhaps the only way of changing things in some cases would be to create competing bodies or professional associations that could somehow challenge the more mainstream ones. Such bodies exist currently in some forms, but sometimes these have their own issues because they are blinded by their own ideology as opposed to real science. In any case, here are my suggestions:

Look at the opposing point of view and look at it dispassionately. Those in the medical industry are supposed to be practicing science, but like scientists in other fields, a status quo is developed and anyone who challenges the ideas of that status quo is ridiculed, but, if their ideas truly have merit there may eventually be grudging acceptance and finally adoption into the accepted tenets of that science. Scientists are supposed to weigh (no pun intended) things dispassionately, but they are still human and as such unavoidably have biases and turfs they feel they need to defend. The growing amount of litigation and cost of insurance only make it harder for Doctors to go against the grain, and the “standard of care” solidifies this practice. But I would argue that doctors also need to look really hard at their Hippocratic Oath and ask themselves whether doling out pills and not suggesting anything that goes against standard orthodoxy is really helping patients, and if it’s not helping patients are you are in fact hurting them because you are preventing them from getting the advice that really would help?

Likewise, nutritionists and dieticians need to look beyond their training which accepts only a narrow dogma with little flexibility. Admitting that things we thought were true are subsequently shown to be false is much less painful than clinging to an argument that has really been proven false over time. It smacks of fear of losing one’s place as an authority and one’s job. With adherence to dogma comes inevitability of obsolescence since with progress we often learn new things that contradict what we thought we knew. Refusing to accept new evidence staring one in the face will only worsen an individual’s or entire profession’s reputation and hasten it’s demise. An old guard defending itself is never to be trusted to advance the interests of anyone but its own.

Finally, to the medical industry, I would suggest creating studies that actually mean something. So many of the “studies” that come out today really don’t prove anything. Part of the fault here goes to the mainstream media who sees a preliminary study on mice and extrapolates it to be proof or at least a strong suggestion of how things work in humans. But scientists should know this and refrain from talking to the mainstream press about studies they know are only going to get hyped into ridiculous simplified generalizations. Even aside from animal studies, there is simply a lack of good human studies especially when it comes to diet and health. Many of the studies I’ve seen are with very small groups for short periods of time, or they aren’t even studies themselves but rather “meta studies” which simply look at other studies and try to argue a point based on hand-picked literature that supports their cause – while ignoring those that don’t. If we really and truly want something approaching objective “proof,” we need to spend lots of money, and not the money of special interests. Perhaps a large fund, like that of Bill and Melinda Gates, could support something that would not allow for special interests to influence the results to any significant extent. Doctors would have to resign themselves to any conclusion, instead of starting with a conclusion in mind and writing off an unexpected result as some anomaly. The numbers of participants should be very large – in the thousands or even tens of thousands. All variables should be plotted, not just weight, height, gender, and age, but body fat percentage, previous dieting and exercise experience, ethnicity, medications, smoking, etc. Ideally participants would have to be confined to an area where there would be a fair degree of confidence as to what the participants reported were true. In other words, all exercise could be monitored and all food intake as well. Not just monitored so much as allocated. Different levels of macronutrients would be allotted to different groups. There wouldn’t be just a “standard group” and a group that differed to a moderate extent in one of their macronutrients like carbohydrates. Instead you would have a group that took in 80% of their calories as carbs, 10% as protein, and 10% as fat, another group which took in 5% of their calories as carbs, 65% as fat, and 30% as protein, and all the different combinations in between. The study would also follow the individuals over at least a three year period, but as many as seven years. As I implied, this would not be an easy or a cheap study, but satisfying all or most of these strictures will be the only thing that will convince the majority of people (experts and laypeople alike) that a particular method of weight loss works best for a person given their very particular makeup (ethnicity, dieting experience, medications, etc.). Perhaps computer modeling and genetic profiling will take a lot of the work out of this in the future, but for now, anything short of this full-on approach will be, as it has been in the past, meaningless except as something for scientists, doctors, universities and/or hospitals to get their names in print.

In a random remembrance moment I had this morning, a couple of food items that I really enjoyed, but only briefly, came back to me. It’s odd that I would remember such ephemera and I can’t think why I would right now except maybe for the added focus on food during the week of Thanksgiving.

Zeus Pasta Chips – Back when I was in college in Boston in the late 80’s, a small Massachusetts snack food company called Smartfood was making some waves, at least locally. Their cheddar popcorn was all the rage, but another snack by them didn’t quite make the big time. I remember buying Zeus Pasta Chips or just “Zeus Chips” a few times at a local convenience store. I was smitten with these chips, which were some kind of pasta that was fried and covered with a similar cheddar powder. They were crispy, but not tough and brittle like raw pasta. Smartfood eventually got bought by Frito-Lay who did not continue the Zeus Chips product, if it was even still being made by that point. A Google provided only one small bit of info about Zeus Chips and some other similar pasta chips by Bill Robert on this page.

Pepsi Kona – Much later than my affaire with Zeuce Chips, I came across this product at a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike. It was Pepsi that had been given a slight coffee flavor. Being a big fan of coffee, I was smitten. Unfortunately, as I found out later, I believe from Pepsi itself, it was a product that was being test-marketed in certain areas but apparently had not garnered enough good buzz to warrant an actual release. I would say that I probably had this drink somewhere between 1995 and 1999, but I can’t be any more exact. Ok, some further searching on Wikipedia says that it was released in 1997; however, this Geocities page (watch for popups - no pun intended!) has this to say:

Pepsi Kona was an innovative creation by Pepsi, being a mix of Pepsi and Coffee. In 1994, when this soda came out, Pepsi began to limit production of the lines that were just released; only selling 20oz and 2 liters. Also in the highly caffeinated arena, but in a different era, was Pepsi A.M. A.M. actually stands for what one thinks A.M. should stand for, being the period in the day before noon. In the mid 1980’s, Pepsi came out with A.M. to reach a lot of the coffee-drinking youth. Of all of the failed sodas, Pepsi A.M. was the only soda that I remember a commercial for. The commercial ended with a sunny window and Pepsi : The Taste of a New Generation in horridly bright white letters.

Further searching on the web “uncovered” the fact that I probably knew at one point but had forgotten that the company that bought Smartfood – Frito-Lay - is owned by the company that makes Pepsi, PepsiCo! Hey, there’s a connection!

Coke C2 has apparently made it to stores, or at least to Carbwire. For those who’ve yet to hear anything about it, it is Coke’s answer to the low-carb craze of 2004. Lets ignore the fact that diet sodas have zero carbs, Coke thought it would be a good marketing move to create a new soda specifically marketed at low-carbers. So instead of the zero carbs per bottle, you now have 24g per 16oz bottle. For most Atkinites or even more moderate plans such as South Beach or Protein Power, this would constitute all or most of your daily regimen of carbs. What a brilliant idea! Waste all your carbs on high-fructose corn syrup instead of fibrous veggies and fruits and thus become a walking stereotype of the supposed lack of nutrition of a low-carb diet. Aside from the harmful HFCS, C2 still contains all the phosphorus and carbonation, both of which could potentially promote bone loss, and lets not forget all the wonderful artificial preservatives and flavoring.

Some people have shunned diet soda because of the artificial sweeteners like Nutrasweet (Aspartame) whose safety has been questioned. A newer sweetener, Splenda (or Sucralose) shows to be a little more promising, but really there haven’t been enough studies to make it really clear that it is absolutely safe to consume it on a daily basis. But at least some companies, like the makers of Snapple and Diet Rite, have adopted Splenda over Nutrasweet. Still, as much as I like carbonation, that could be just as much of an issue over the long run.

The thing to do, of course, is to wean one’s self off of sweetness in general. Just as with most things, when you don’t eat something as often, or in as concentrated amounts, you tend to get more and more sensitive to the taste and to taste in general. After I stopped putting artificial sweeteners in my coffee (and almost everything else that was “supposed to be” sweet, I started tasting the natural sweetness in foods. You wouldn’t believe how sweet almonds can taste, for example, when you don’t consume sugar or artificial sweeteners on a regular basis. But of course this isn’t easy to do. Lots of stuff tastes pretty sour or bitter without sugar or artificial sweetener added to it, you just have to trust that this will fade eventually and taste buds CAN be retrained. A lot of people won’t have the patience for this and won’t except eating something that tastes bad even for one sitting, but all I can say is that if you can manage to suffer through a few weeks of not getting that sweet-fix, you will be able to get it continuously after that without any added sugar or artificial sweetener…

Coke is just trying to jump on the bandwagon of low-carb without offering a truly low-carb product, and with the additional caveat of offering a product which has pleanty of other potential harmful components other than the sugar. Even if you don’t try my “shock therapy” idea of sharpening your sweet-tooth, you still may find one thing without sugar to be pretty sweet. I find it very sweet. It’s a type of herbal tea called Good Earth. It’s the “original flavor” that has the spices that make it taste sweet. I steep it for a pretty long time, maybe 20 minutes or even longer, then drink it hot or put it in the fridge and make it iced tea. To me, anyway, it simply tastes like it has lots of sugar in it, but at least according to the carton it’s just regular unsweetened herbal tea.

Salt, by Mark Kurlansky, is a fascinating book about the history of, you guessed it, Salt. It’s amazing how something we take for granted because it is so cheap and on every table, whether at someone’s home or at a restaurant. It is given away for free at fast food restaurants, and is in copious supply in our vast oceans that take up most of the surface area of the planet. Yet Salt was not always taken for granted. Kurlansky talks about how for thousands of years it was a vital resource that played into economics, politics, wars, technological progress, and culture in general.

Kurlansky is incredibly thorough in his accounting of the story of Salt. However, at points the level of detail gets a bit too deep for me. Like other nonfiction books that treat a subject with lots of history, sometimes the relentless listing of people and places, and events get overwhelming. Salt also seems to jump around relentlessly both geographically and chronologically. I still found it very
interesting, just a bit bewildering at points! One thing that Kurlansky recounts which I think could have been left out is his recounting of recipes that somehow involve salt as an ingredient. These recipes go back thousands of years and they are sometimes fascinating, but they are all quoted from their original sources and thus use somewhat archaic language and ingredients that most would be unfamiliar with today. A few of these might have been good to spice things up, but Kurlansky probably includes a couple dozen or so of these!

All in all, it was a decent read, but one that I fear many may put down after a while or at least have to skim through. I actually listened to this book on Audible.com. The narration, by Scott Brick, was affective and kept my attention throughout most of the reading despite some of the problems with the subject matter as expressed above.

The Apprentice: My Life In The Kitchen is an autobiography of a French chef turned American culinary authority is a great read. Pepin grew up in war-torn

France and from practically puberty on was in the kitchen cooking for his mother’s restaurant. Thus began a life devoted to food and the culinary arts. We read about how Pepin goes through the grueling apprenticeship process in Parisian restaurants and somehow makes it through despite self doubts and a tendency for clowning that was sometimes very risky in the face of a strict hierarchical system

But as charming as the stories around his childhood and apprenticeship are, things get even more interesting once Pepin is drafted. Due to some great luck, he ends up as the chef for DeGaul. After working for the president for a number of years, he comes back to

Paris but eventually gets bored and comes to

America, and that is where things really start to get interesting. Pepin gets to be friends with some very notary people of the time, a time when gourmets and gourmands were still a very rare bird in this the

US. Such people as Jim Beard, Craig Claiborne, Julia Child, and many others were personal friends and colleagues of Peppin’s and we get to hear inside stories about all of them.

Peppin’s career, once in the

US, explored many different paths. He managed a popular restaurant that brought French bistro food to the New York City masses, worked in the management of Howard Johnson’s when it was all about serving mass-produced but high-quality meals, he gave personal and group lessons, he worked in television, wrote books, administered cooking programs at Boston University, and much more. The story is not just about a very successful chef expanding his career, but of a French cook trained in the French style and then being flung into the freewheeling U.S. and learning to not only survive but to thrive. To take the freedom and lack of formality and new foods and regional cuisines and running with them.

Although the French are often maligned by xenophobes here as being stuck up, snobby, and rude, Peppin seems the opposite of these. He applauds Claiborne’s culinary egalitarianism, he bemoans the lack of a decent number of African American chefs at cooking schools or kitchens, he admires all the different cuisines the

U.S. has to offer, rather than pooh-poohing anything that is not haute cuisine. He recognizes the cooking of women in

France as better in many ways than the very male-dominated system of chefs that populate the finer Michelin-starred restaurants. Peppin’s sense of humor and optimism shine throughout, even in the face of seemingly tragic events that might have ended his career if not his life. One also gets to hear his love of food and cooking throughout – so many events are talked about and always the food is described in such detail and excitement.

If you like to cook, love good food, or just a good story, The Apprentice – My Life in the Kitchen is a great read. I actually listened to the unabridged audio book version of this book, which is unabridged and read by Michel Chevalier, who does an excellent job.

Michael Ruhlman, a journalist, decided he wanted to write about what it was like to become a chef. So he went and enrolled himself in the Culinary Institute of America (CIA). The Making of a Chef is about his experience going through the institutes classes, working at it’s restaurants, and not only learning the skills one needs to cook, but actually the mentality that is required to become a successful one.

We first go through basic skills classes with Ruhlman and learn many basics with him. What is roux? What is Béchamel? How do you make a perfect consume from scratch? We then go onto to classes on bread-making, “garde manger” and many others. We pick up a few tidbits here and there about what these classes are about, what it’s like to actually be in them, and a few of the skills and information that is actually taught. Ruhlman also does a great job simply narrating his own experience not only learning the skills, but relating to the varied teacher chefs and fellow students. We get to know some of his fellow students quite well.

Ruhlman went through these classes in 1996, so I sometimes wonder how things have changed since with the advent of the internet. Listening to the book (I bought it through Audible.com), one can’t help to get excited about the CIA. Here you can go in a complete novice cook and within weeks you should have a mastery of at least many of the basics of cooking. In less than two years, you are ready to actually be on the line in a respectable restaurant. This is definitely boot camp for cooks, and from someone who has a very uneven knowledge of cooking it is enticing to think you could just go there and become a master… or at least proficient.

As tempting as this is, you also learn in this book (as I’ve heard elsewhere) how hard a job it is to be a chef. It is long hours of very physical work, on your feet most of this time. You work every holiday – in fact holidays are the only days you can’t take off – unless you are in the rare restaurant that doesn’t serve. You also have to keep up a relentless pace in order to keep customers from leaving due to impatience, and you have to do this and still put out a product that is basically perfect or very close to it in quality. The CIA, as Ruhlman describes it, prepares its students for this by the intensity of its classes, which give time limits for preparing everything and deducts points for the smallest imperfections. To want to become a chef, Ruhlman suggests (and I would tend to agree with him), one has to have it in ones bones. A dilettante like myself who gets excited by the IDEA of being a chef would probably very quickly end up bowing out due to these overwhelming pressures involved.

One word of caution about the Audio version of this book. It originally comes from Blackstone Audio Books, so they are most likely at fault, but I have complained to Audible who provide the book to its subscribers as well. There are some pretty bad problems with the audio. Nothing that makes in unlistenable, but still distracting enough to be annoying. The main issue one notes almost immediately is that somehow there is a lot of repeating of a sentence or part of a sentence. When I say a lot I don’t mean it’s constant, but it might be enough, if edited to knock 10-20 minutes off of the 12+ hour audio book. The narrator’s voice, which is not bad, keeps getting clipped off, only to start again after a pause. It’s almost as if they took a steady tape of the guy and chopped it at various points and inserted pauses intentionally. This also ads more time to it, and while distracting, also doesn’t make it unlistenable. Finally, it almost seems as if they recorded each few chapters with different equipment. The narrators voice gets louder and then softer and then higher and the lower, and then less treble, and then more treble. It’s pretty uneven, and yet another distraction. Hopefully Blackstone and Audible will clean up this recording and make it a much more polished product. Even given these inadequacies, though, I would still recommend it to any foodie, gourmand, or gourmet out there, or just someone who likes a good story and a look into a subculture that one would normally never get to see.

It was way back in the Spring of 1992. I was working for CIEE (Counsel for International Educational Exchange) at the time, as the Program Assistant or East European and Russian Programs. CIEE was kind enough to send me to visit their programs in Budapest and Prague as I was going to visit my sister who was studying in Scotland at the time anyway. I took the train from Budapest to Prague and decided to buy some snack in case I got hungry during the trip. I didn’t know Hungarian and I guess I just picked something in a can that looked like it might be meat or fish. At some point I got really hungry and opened the can. I think it was fairly dark, but I just remember what I at was white-ish and tasted kind of like fishy pate. I had no clue what it was, but it tasted really good to me.

Since then I remembered this once in a great while and wondered what the hell I ate. I hoped it wasn’t something really horrible! I would always peruse the isles of international food stores or gourmet food stores looking for something canned and unrecognizable that I could try. This went on for over ten years.

Today, my search ended! I happened across this international food store/restaurant/bakery in Alexandria very close to where I work. I would never have known this place existed if not for the post office right next to it being the closest to my office. I went in and was overcome by the amazing selections of products. The store is simply called “Mediterranean Bakery” but they have a website that’s called EastWestMart.com. I have not really looked at this site, but they take online orders. The prices in the store, in any case, were very reasonable, especially for international stuff, which is often priced in the stratosphere!

I came across this container among the scores of different ones they had there labeled simply Roland Smoked Cod Liver. This looked very promising! I mean, there was no picture, but this sounded like it was the closest to whatever I thought I had eaten back then. When I got home, I popped it open. It was indeed kind of white-ish non-descript blobs of stuff. Well, of liver, I guess! I crossed my fingers, got ready to spit it out if it was too vile, and took a piece. Yes! I had found it!

For those who haven’t tried this and aren’t squeamish about trying new things, or have a disli