Michael Pollan is coming to town!

I'm so excited! Wednesday the Lakeview Libary and Community Groundworks at Troy Gardens is having a potluck and discussion in the evening to discuss In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan as a kickoff event to his visit this week.

I'm getting up early tomorrow before work to bake an apple crisp (not low-carb, but reduced sugar, at least) made with apples from a co-worker's home orchard and from Green's Pleasant Acres, where Jennifer and U and I made our annual pilgrimage this past weekend. On Thursday, the man himself is speaking at the Kohl Center on the UW-Madison campus. On Saturday morning, it's REAP Food Group's annual Food for Thought Festival, where Pollan is the keynote speaker.

I've been a Pollan fan ever since I read his eloquent "Naturally" when it appeared as the New York Times Magazine cover story in 2001. I swooned over every beautiful word in The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World.

I don't agree with Pollan on everything, but if more people turned on to what he's saying, wow, this would be a better place. I wish Obama had taken his advice to turn those manicured acres surrounding the White House into sustainable farmland growing veg for presidential family meals and state feasts! What a message that would have been.


My main gripe – my only gripe, really – with Pollan is his anti-meat, anti-saturated fat stance. It irked me whenever it came up In Defense of Food. He consistently treated the unhealthfulness of saturated fat as a given, even though in several passages he spelled out evidence that it is not. He says humans can live healthfully without meat, but not without plants – but surely he must be aware of the Inuit and the Masai, whose traditional diets included little to no plant food.

His main arguments against eating meat turn on arguments against industrially produced meat – but every one of those can also be used as arguments against all industrially produced food, including his beloved plant leaves. Which, by the way Mike, ya can't live on eating mostly them! Environmental, ethical – all of it. The recent book The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice and Sustainability by Lierre Kieth (a fellow ex-vegetarian, and a feminist – I haven't read the book yet, but I like her already!) spells out the horrific cost to animal life – in greater numbers – that factory farming exacts. Woe to the wildlife that crosses the path of a harvesting machine, for instance.

That's why I'm staying up tonight making a shirt that sasses back at his famous dictum, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Gee, I hope someday I come up with a famous dictum that people quote all over the place. In the meantime, here's the design. And, for readers who aren't familiar with it, here's the cover of his book which I'm spoofing, with Pollan's oft-quoted manifesto printed on the yellow band around the romaine. (Bibb?)

To that I say this: "Eat food. Mostly cheese."

That's my Wisconsin manifesto.

What if everyone went low-carb and cooked from scratch?

Here's something I posted on Low Carb Friends today. Someone wrote, a bit tongue in cheek, that if everyone quit buying processed, industrialized food -- junk, that is -- the result would be the "[c]omplete collapse of the nation's economy and the end of the world as we know it."

I don't find that idea terribly farfetched, and I wrote this about it:


Economy is based on commerce, which is the exchange of goods, which is only possible when there is a storeable surplus, which is made possible by agriculture, which always begins with the cultivation of storable starch crops and quickly leads to hoarding and the development of hierarchy -- including wealth and poverty, bosses and underlings.

This is why Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs and Steel has said that the development of agriculture might be the worst mistake in human history. A tremendous book for looking at starch foods through the lens of history, by the way.

The end of starch- and sugar-based living would indeed be the end of today's economy as we know it. It would be a transformation -- possibly a collapse, if it weren't properly managed -- more profound than I think most people realized.

If that were coupled with most people eating mostly whole foods (that is, cooking everything from scratch ingredients), growing a good portion of their own vegetables and raising their own chickens for meat and eggs -- entirely possible (theoretically) for nearly everyone -- the impact would be devastating for a huge portion of modern industry.

I just read an article (in the NY Times, I think) that said England exports 15,000 pounds of waffles annually, and also imports 15,000 pounds of waffles annually. The writer was making the point that a lot of food importing and exporting amounts to a waste of fuel and other transport costs. I noticed a larger point: nobody needs to buy a waffle. I don't mean no one needs to eat the starch; I mean waffles are easy and cheap to make from scratch.

Intermittent fasting and the aquatic ape

I think about the Aquatic Ape hypothesis of human development a lot more than I write about it. In fact, it informs close to everything about the way I see human life. I've wanted to write about it for years, but it's so big for me, that the task is overwhelming.

So now, whenever I do write a little bit about it, or have a thought, I'll put it here. Incomplete, hasty, unreferenced, and all. For now. It's a start.

I posted the following today on a thread about Intermittent Fasting. Much discussion of this topic seems to center around, or at least harbor, the assumption that Paelolithic and pre-agricultural humans, and proto-humans, would not have been able to eat at regular intervals. This is my contribution to the discussion, which can be found here.

Just a little background: The Inuit at the time mentioned (early 20th century) lived a traditional lifestyle and ate their traditional diet, which was almost entirely fish and water. They also ate some land mammal meat. They were known for their remarkable good health. No vegetables -- yet no scurvy, or other chronic diseases.

------------

In Adventures in Diet, Vil describes three squares plus a snack for the Inuit. Times he mentions for eating, or for beginning meal prep, are 7 am, 11 am, 4 pm, and for the snack, just before bed.

Now I'm going to bring up the Aquatic Ape again. That's the hypothesis that says many human features can be explained by a period in our evolution during which circumstances led us to begin to evolve into aquatic mammals, but the process was only partial. According to this, we can understand some things about ourselves by reference to other aquatic mammals or by reference to our affinity to aquatic and semi-aquatic conditions. (The big flaw I saw in the supposed refutation of this that someone posted a link to on another thread was that the guy pointed to all kinds of way that we are not totally like aquatic mammals. Well, no kidding. The hypothesis explains the ways in which we're [i]partially[/i] aquatic like. For instance... oh, I need to save that for another thread.)

Fish. Three times a day plus snacks. Pretty easy to come by. Even today, if a person dwells by open bodies of water, like a lake or a river. (Today, every person dwells by water -- we had to invent plumbing and wells to make that possible. But I'm talking about open water, including, human-made lakes.) Of course, there's pollution, unfortunately, that can make the catch toxic. But the point is, it's not hard to get enough fish to eat all day, even now.

When we think of pre-agricultural humans, for some reason we tend to think of them rummaging around on land, foraging (most people, not necessarily Bus riders) and hunting. And in that scenario, it sounds difficult to scrounge up three squares and a snack, day in day out. Exhausting. Time consuming. Bloody and messy, with fur and bones everywhere.

For some reason that I can't explain, people just don't put food from the water in a central place in the equation. But I assure you, if you were out in the middle of nowhere and needed to survive, you would find water, very quickly. You'd need it before, and more frequently than food. And in that water, you'd find things to eat far easier to catch and kill than anything on land. Except, of course, for bugs. And our primal ancestors were insectivores.

It makes sense to me that fish and other water critters are a missing food link between insects and big land animals. From the water is where we got enough protein and Omega 3 to grow brains big enough to figure out how to kill the animals we need considerable intelligence to kill. We don't have the teeth and claws and speed to hunt a gazells. We have the [i]brains[/i] to do it.

Back to the point. People think the Paleo folks must have had a lifestyle involving long periods between meals, including intervals of days. I acknowledge that there are more recent hunter societies where this has been known to occur. However, I disagree that it was a necessary, ordinary, universal feature of preagricultural human and protohuman life. Not when a meal is as near as the river, pond, lake or ocean.

Mindless weight-loss advice, courtesy US government

Below is a post I made on the lowcarbfriends.com forum this morning. Here's a link to that thhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifread, where you'll find responses to my post:

http://www.lowcarbfriends.com/bbs/main-lowcarb-lobby/528062-mindless-eating-author-fight-obesity.html

I wrote in response to the following USA Today article which someone had posted there.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-11-26-wansink-obesity_N.htm?csp=15

'Mindless Eating' author to fight obesity

ByNanci Hellmich, USA TODAY

Brian Wansink, one of the nation's top experts on eating behaviors and the author of Mindless Eating:Why We Eat More Than We Think, hopes that in his new federal job he can take a stab at reversing the obesity epidemic.

Wansink, who last week was named executive director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, wants to encourage people to "bump up their activity level." And he would like to work with registered dietitians and schoolteachers to help them teach others to use the government's nutrition tools, including the Food Pyramid (www.mypyramid.gov).

He'll also be forming an advisory committee to create the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. These would be a science-based update of the 2005 federal guidelines, which are considered the gold standard of nutrition advice.

Wansink says it took about 30 years for obesity to get where it is today, and "it's going to take some time to reverse it."

He is taking a leave of absence from his job as director of Cornell University's Food and Brand Lab.

FIND MORE STORIES IN: Food | US Department of Agriculture | Brian Wansink | Dietary Guidelines

During the past 20 years, Wansink has conducted more than 200 studies of environmental factors that push Americans, sometimes unconsciously, to overeat. He believes that people are constantly "trapped" by their surroundings into consuming 100 to 200 calories more than they need or want.

He says Americans can trim a couple of hundred calories a day and lose 10 to 20 pounds a year by doing things such as avoiding open food dishes at the office, using smaller serving bowls and spoons, and leaving serving dishes on the stove instead of on the table.

His research includes the McSubway Project, a series of studies that examine the habits of fast-food customers. Much of the research compares foods at McDonald's and Subway, which advertises that it has more healthful options.

Wansink found that there's a "health halo" around a lot of the foods at restaurants such as Subway in which customers feel virtuous about their choice of meals. So, his research shows, they overeat in side dishes and grossly underestimate the number of calories they consume.

Thanks for the post.

Wansink is obviously well meaning. Too bad his ideas are totally off-base. What we've been doing for the past 30 years is:

• Cut down our intake of dietary fat
• Increase our intake of carbs
• Include the liver-pummeling, belly-fattening high-fructose corn syrup that's now listed on practically every food product on the shelf.

The myth that shaving 100-200 calories a day from our diets will translate to fat loss over the course of time is exactly that: a myth. It's never been documented or demonstrated. On the contrary, what science shows is the the body simply adjusts to maintain its state.

The activity myth is also just that. People today are less active than they were 100 years ago, but more active than 30 years ago, when it was considered eccentric, rather than virtuous, to go for a daily run or belong to a gym. Is Wansink unaware of the studies in which obese individuals trained and completed marathons without losing pounds? For those individuals, his advice to "bump up their activity level" is clearly off-target.

The target Wansink misses is carbohydrate, whether simple or complex. That's what drives fat accumulation. To borrow a phrase from Dr. Michael Eades, it's a "one-way street" -- the pathway from sugar and starch into the fat cells via insulin. HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) is even worse. It's doesn't cause insulin production, but goes straight to the liver, from which it is stored as fat, mainly in the tissues surrounding the organs.

The Food Pyramid concept on which Wansink pins his hopes for America's slimming was introduced about 30 years ago -- just around the time that the obesity epidemic began. The rate of overweight had been more or less stable for decades before that. Before "lowfat" was declared the universal dietary standard for everyone age 2 and over. Back when the common wisdom held that pasta, bread and lollipops are fattening.

Wansink wants to reverse a 30-year trend, but he wants to do it by intensifying the very approach that 30 years of experimentation have proven wrong.

How many more bodies and lives must be sacrificed to obesity and chronic diseases before authorities look at what the science shows, and call an end to this devastating experiment in public health?

My rant against macrobiotics

I posted this today on a message board at lowcarbfriends.com, in the following thread:

	Low Carb Friends > Eating and Exercise Plans > Other Plans
Macrobiotic Diet...thoughts

I'm posting it here, too, because I'm kinda psyched about finally writing out some of the things I've been kicking around in my head, and ranting about verbally, for so many years. The first part, in QUOTE tags, was posted by someone who was responding to another LCF member who had harsh criticism of macrobiotics.

...
While Nero's proposed eating plan may be considered macrobiotic, that doesn't mean he can't follow it's general guidelines with success...
...
I still believe it's a workable framework
.....

This is a reasonable point of view. But in this case the general guidelines aren't worth a hill of adzuki beans. Let's take a look at those guidelines and what they're based on.

The macrobiotic diet is a sublimated expression of a xenophobic, racist worldview. The food itself is modeled after an idealized version of monastic Zen dietary practices of the 19th century. Japan was forcibly opened to the West in the 1850s; macrobiotics, in my reading, is part of the inevitable cultural backlash, as it favors all things Japanese are pure and superior.

It was formulated, not by a doctor, scientist or traditional healer, but by a Japanese philosopher who fancied himself to be following in the footsteps of Kaibara Ekken, an influential 16th century neo-Confucianist naturalist and botanist.

As jem says, everything in macrobiotics is seen through the filter of yin and yang. Correct diet is a nurturing balance of polar opposites. Understanding how different foods have different qualities of yin and yang is the essence of the macrobiotic diet. In fact, diet is (supposedly) just a single aspect of macrobiotic practice. It's also about your physical activity, your emotional state, the climate where you live, the season, your relationships with others.

For instance, someone who does manual labor (yang) in Canada (yin, cold) would need a difference balance of yin and yang in their diet than someone who has a sedentary lifestyle (yin) in Florida (yang).

The foods that are available in a given place and time also fit into yin and yang. Fruit (yin) grows in the summer (yang). Tropical fruits (super yin) grow in the tropics (more yang than a temperate zone summer).

Since the world is so big, and the range of human activity is so great, and there are so many kinds of natural foods, you might expect a wide range of dietary possibilities. As long as you create a harmonious balance of yin and yang in daily life -- which includes diet -- you're practicing macrobiotics. Right? Wrong.

In practice, there is a very narrow range that is sanctioned as good, balanced eating. In fact, the word "wide" is commonly used in macrobiotic community parlance as a synonym for "bad"; correspondingly, "narrow" is used to mean "good."

At any rate, everyone's individual dietary balance of yin and yang, even when determined by a "macrobiotic consultant" who reads the lines on your face and shapes of your features to figure out what you should and shouldn't eat, comes out looking pretty much the same. Mostly grains, a lot of beans, a little fish, some pickle, seaweed, vegetables. By the way, the percentages are generally done by volume, not caloric contribution. 25% vegetable means that a quarter of your plate is covered in kale, for instance. Or, in winter, the same volume of butternut squash. (But not spinach -- spinach is bad. So are regular button mushrooms. Too yin. More on this sort of thing later.)

And, by astounding coincidence, it all just happens to consist of traditional Japanese food. The best grain for you: rice. Should you eat animal protein? Some fish is OK.

By another astounding coincidence, all of the foods that are bad for you come from Japan's traditional cultural enemies. Here are some of the foods that are overly yin: tomatoes, potatoes, red peppers. Corn is not so great, either. Notice what these have in common? All are "New World" crops, forced into Japan in the 19th century.

Garlic and red pepper are considered far too extreme for human consumption. Note that garlic and red pepper are an important part of the cuisine of Korea, which has long been looked down on as inferior by (the worst part of) Japanese culture.

Yet, wasabi (that superstrong Japanese horseradish) is good. Even though it's at least as "extreme" to eat as garlic and red pepper. Wasabi cleanses toxins. It's a powerful healing food. Ask why wasabi is good and red pepper is bad, and you get a complex answer about their individual yin/yang makeups. It's like this all through macrobiotics. The answer comes first, and the justification follows. And every single time, the bad thing is not part of Japanese tradition, but the good thing is. (New world beans and squashes are a notable exception -- although Japanese adzuki beans and Hokkaido pumpkins coincidentally happen to be the most healthful beans and squashes of all.)

Raw salads: Bad! Very yin! Rice? Good! Wheat? Better left out entirely. The worst way to eat wheat: as bread. Beef, milk, cheese: Terrible, the worst! They leads to all kinds of disease. Based on what? They're all way too yang. What makes them more yang then salty fish paste? Or pickled plums? Oh, by the way, all the bad things listed here are part of the European culinary tradition. What a coincidence!

The justifications for the macrobiotic guidelines are just incoherent. Brown rice turns out to be the perfect food for all humans, wherever they live, through every season. Even though one of the stated foundations of the diet is local and seasonal food, somehow rice manages to transcend these boundaries. In the U.S., rice grows in the southern states, like Carolina and California, but not in, say, New England. So why did the macrobiotic leaders in Boston live primarily on rice? Why did they counsel my spiritual community in Pennsylvania to base its diet around rice? I asked. The answer: because we're at the same approximate latitude as Japan, where rice grows well. So, I asked, people in southern Mexico would not base their diet around rice? Same with people in Iceland? The answer: they should eat mostly rice, too, because it creates the best yin/yang balance in the human body. But I thought we were balancing with our environment and physical activity level? The answer: Oh, yes, absolutely!

Cirtus fruits were verboten: too yin. I asked, how about people in Florida and California -- they can eat citrus, right? Answer: no, because it's an introduced crop in this continent. I asked: Like rice? Answer: well, here in the U.S., there are types of wild rice. Me: But they're botanically very different from the rice we're eating. Answer: But the yin/yang balance is very similar. So, the people who live where citrus comes from, can they eat citrus? Answer: very, very small amounts. It's very yin and extreme.

It's like a complicated equation that, no matter what you plug into the front, it always comes out the same on the other end.

So. Guidelines? You want guidelines? Macrobiotics has plenty of them. A "workable framework"? Sure, if you overlook the fact that it's not built around any of the nutritional understanding that we take for granted on these boards. If you're looking for guidelines that make any sense, you could do far better elsewhere. You might check out Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions, for instance, if what appeals to you is whole foods including whole grains, with an introduction to many nearly forgotten, but eons-old, preparations.

Is there anything good to be gained from looking into macrobiotics? Actually, yes. Many of the dishes and cooking techniques are really quite excellent. Many of the ingredients open up a lot of culinary possibilities. Also, macrobiotic followers have kept alive many traditional Japanese food products that, in mainstream Japan, have been replaced by artificial analogs.

For example, tamari and miso. I never seen good ones in Asian groceries, and I've been looking for decades. It's sad, but all you can find there is caramel-colored or quick-aged soy derivates, often with artificial flavorings. But at the natural foods store or aisle, you can find the real thing, aged for months or years, according to traditional methods.

Another wonderful thing to learn from a macro book or cooking class: a wide variety of vegetable cutting techniques and preparations. There are so many cutting shapes, and each has its own name. It's very Japanese, in a beautiful way. It's one of those intricate, precise cultural arts, like origami, sushi or flower arranging.

Nero, I hope some of this is helpful. In your first post, you presented a description of macrobiotics. Did you write that, or where did that come from?

Hooray for real food - and common sense!

Here's my Amazon.com review of this book, which I haven't read yet. I discovered it poking around on the site after reading most of The Way We Eat by Peter Singer -- which I plan to write about on this blog. I saw this book, and that it had only 19 reviews. Mostly I just wanted to say a word or two and do the good deed of making the number of customer of reviews 7% longer. But of course I got carried away.

Real Food, by Nina Planck
Bloomsbury USA
ISBN: 1596911441
My one-line summary: If you need a factory to make it, it's probably not real food -- and really not good for you.
Link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product//1596911441/ref=cm_rv_thx_view/102-3621894-2157723

Hooray for real food - and common sense!, November 15, 2006
Reviewer: Vesna Kovach "duonexus" (Madison, Wis. USA) - See all my reviews
Hooray! I'm thrilled that there's another voice crying in the wilderness, joining the likes of Sally Fallon (Nourishing Traditions) and Uffe Ravnskov (The Cholesterol Myths) in promoting real food over the fabricated analogs so in vogue in modern health literature.

So much dietary advice comes at us from all media these days, and much of it just seems founded in bizarre suppositions: the idea that we can be so darn certain about the long-term effects of food products and eating habits that are, relatively speaking, brand new.

For instance, we're told that a certain nutrient is essential, but that it's impossible to get enough of it from its natural food source. Three bushels of kale, 1200 tomatoes, that sort of thing. So we should eat some factory-made product that's fortified with the proper amount of the substance. Now, how could this possibly be? How could our bodies require any dosage that has been, for all but the last five minutes of human history, technologically impossible to ingest?

Here's another. The mainstream recommendation today is for low-fat dairy products for everyone who has reached the age of two. But consider this. I was a child only a few decades ago. No kid was subjected to low-fat anything. Low-fat versions of this, that and the other thing didn't even exist then. Yet, it was very unusual for any kid to be overweight. There would be one or two obese children among a given age in an entire elementary school. Today, children are increasingly fed low-fat (read: fake) versions of everything, and childhood obesity rates continue to climb. If full-fat dairy makes kids fat, why isn't it the reverse? Why didn't the childhood obesity epidemic occur when children ate full-fat products?