http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/magazine/11food-rules-t.html
The Food Issue
Rules to Eat By
By MICHAEL POLLAN
The New York Times
October 11, 2009
Every trip to the supermarket these days requires us to navigate what
has become a truly treacherous food landscape. I mean, what are we to
make of a wonder of food science like the new Splenda with fiber?
("The great sweet taste you want and a little boost of fiber.")
Should we call this progress? Is it even food? And then, at the far
other end of the nutritional spectrum, how are we to process (much
less digest) the new, exuberantly caloric Double Down sandwich that
KFC has introduced? This shameless exaltation of dietary fat actually
redefines the very concept of a sandwich by replacing the obligatory
bread with two slabs of fried chicken kept some distance apart by
strips of bacon, two kinds of cheese and a dollop of sauce.
Deciding what to eat, indeed deciding what qualifies as food, is not
easy in such an environment. When Froot Loops can earn a Smart
Choices check mark, a new industrywide label that indicates a
product's supposed healthfulness, we know we can't rely on the
marketers, with their dubious health claims, or for that matter on
the academic nutritionists who collaborate on such labeling schemes.
(One of them defended the inclusion of Froot Loops on the grounds
that they are better for you than doughnuts. So why doesn't the label
simply say that?) Making matters worse, official government
pronouncements about eating aren't necessarily much more reliable,
not when the food industry influences federal nutrition guidelines.
But even when the "best science" prevails, that science can turn out
to be misguided - as when the official campaign against saturated fat
got us to trade butter for stick margarine loaded with trans fats, a
solution that turned out to be worse than the problem.
If we can't rely on the marketers or the government or even the
nutritionists to guide us through the supermarket woods, then who can
we rely on? Well, ask yourself another question: How did humans
manage to choose foods and stay healthy before there were nutrition
experts and food pyramids or breakfast cereals promising to improve
your child's focus or restaurant portions bigger than your head? We
relied on culture, which is another way of saying: on the accumulated
wisdom of the tribe. (Which is itself another way of saying: on your
mom and your friends.) All of us carry around rules of thumb about
eating that have been passed down in our families or plucked from the
cultural conversation. Think of this body of food knowledge as
samizdat nutrition: an informal, unsanctioned way of negotiating our
eating lives that becomes indispensable at a time when official modes
of talking about food have suffered a serious loss of credibility.
Earlier this year I began gathering examples of these rules, or
personal food policies, for a short book I'm publishing in January.
My premise is that for all the authority we grant to science in
matters of nutrition, culture still has a lot to teach us about how
to choose, prepare and eat food, and that this popular wisdom is
worth preserving - perhaps today more than ever, in this era of
dazzling food science, supersize portions and widespread dietary
confusion.
In March, I posted a request for readers' rules about eating on Well,
Tara Parker-Pope's health blog on nytimes.com. Within days, I
received more than 2,500 responses - more than any Well post had ever
received. My aim was to collect genuinely useful, and nutritionally
sound, examples of popular wisdom about eating. I found some for my
book, but I also found something else - a banquet of food policies
that even when they made little, if any, nutritional sense (and
therefore didn't belong in the book) nevertheless opened a window on
our current thinking about food: the stories we tell ourselves, the
games we play and the taboos we invoke to organize our eating lives.
Some of the rules have stood the test of time and have been confirmed
by science, but all of them have something to teach us about our
continuing efforts to pick a healthful and happy path through the
minefields of the modern-food marketplace or restaurant menu.
Click here to see the rules.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/10/11/magazine/20091011-foodrules.html
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
***********************************
* POST TO MEDIANEWS@ETSKYWARN.NET *
***********************************
Medianews mailing list
Medianews@etskywarn.net
http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
