Ellen Goodman hits the nail on the head with her piece in today's Boston Globe. She captures the current dilemma, or obsession rather, that Americans have with food. Not that we call it that anymore. Each item now represents its value - a blueberry is an antioxidant, the egg, once demonized, is now the super source of nutrients essential to healthy eyes.Ellen goes on to talk about the new book by Michael Pollan, author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma." His new book is called, "In Defense of Food." From Ellen's column:
"His tips for the land of the overweight orthorexics are rather charmingly simple. Among them: Avoid products made with ingredients you can't read or pronounce. Avoid products making health claims on the package. Yes, eat plants. (But not the sansevieria.) But the best of them is: don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food."
Emily Gedney, RD couldn't have said it better. In her Nutrition Boot Camp program at EVOLUTION, she is quick to point out the problem with artificial sweeteners. [The word artificial.] And she doesn't mince words about how she feels about High Fructose Corn Syrup, a product that did not exist in the early part of the 20th century. Trans fats, calorie counting, and meal replacement shakes are all things she shows you how to ban from your vocabulary. It's back to basics, but not to bland. A trained chef, Emily loves food and wouldn't think of turning meal time into a task to be checked of of your to do list.
Back to Ellen Goodman.
"How did it come to this? How did eating become a science rather than an art? How did food become conflated with medicine? We now have shelves full of boxes with bragging rights promising better eating through chemistry. Meanwhile, our uncertainty is growing as quickly as our waistlines."
The $36 billion dollar food marketing industry hopes that we never go back to basics. There's nothing glamorous in a carrot. Lentils are just lentils without MSG or artificial flavors. There's no fortune to be made by putting out an ad campaign praising the goodness of apples. If the powers that be can't convince us that they've packaged cures, then we might just win the war for our waistlines and our health.
And our children can say that they eat foods that their parents and grandparents recognize because we will have lived long enough to forget artificial sweeteners, HFCS and trans fats.
May it be so.
For Ellen Goodman's full column, click here: Hungry for some certainty
