Ghosts Before Breakfast, by Hans Richter.

The final cut of the next podcast is complete and the computer needs some time to itself— 4 or 5 hours— to turn it into a Quicktime file for uploading. A few notes I feel like taking note of:

• The fourth podcast, A Head’s Tale, will shortly have had 1000 viewers at Vimeo. (It’s been stuck at 998 all day, frustratingly. I don’t normally watch things that closely, but— go to 1000, dammit! UPDATE LATE MONDAY NIGHT: Finally!) This is the kind of milestone that really encourages me to keep doing this— 1000 people watching it all the way through. Cool. (As opposed to the 4 or 5 who read this blog.)

• Interestingly, the second podcast, Duck School, also had a big boost in viewership recently. A thread on LTHForum recounted Sun Wah’s recent temporary closing by the Health Department (not an unusual thing in Chinatown— personally, I think Sun Wah is MUCH cleaner than it used to be). Some people were reacting rather harshly to this news, so I linked to the podcast and said “You want to see how clean Sun Wah’s kitchen is?” I figured two or three people might go watch it. The actual number was 81. The first day. Over 100 new viewers checked it out as a result in the last 3 days (typically it would draw one or two viewers a day by now). A little insight into what drives traffic, I guess….

• Week before last, I went to Green City Market on its last day of the season in the park before moving indoors to shoot some footage for what, at this point, will probably be podcast #8 in February. It’s about Oriana Kruszewski, the little Asian lady who sells pears, paw paws, black walnuts and some other oddities in her own inimitable fashion. (The pears are wonderful, I had some that had gotten a little old in the fridge and made an aigre-doux, a form of sweet pickling with them.) Anyway, while I was there I saw another camera crew— not an unusual thing there— probably students from Columbia College or the like, a young woman directing, a couple of guys hauling Canon XL-1s around for her, and various other people doing sound or being key grips or who knows what.

It struck me that one of the things that everyone seems to do is feel like they need to turn film or video production into, well, a big production. The young woman was clearly enjoying expressing her vision in the form of commands to her crew, the videographers were busy getting just the right shots, and so on. Meanwhile, there I am just walking around, camera in hand and bag on my back, getting what I need with no fuss in much less time and, I feel certain, getting enough pretty footage of pretty food in sunlight that there will be a certain visual grace to my rough and ready production. I really like that the low cost and low weight of my style production makes it possible to just grab and go and shoot what I need so easily; if I were the teacher of these kids, I wouldn’t be sending them out in a pack of 6 with two cameras, I’d send them out by themselves with a single camera and make them rely on themselves and find their own subjects and be part of their movie the way I am. It’s a pen, write with it, don’t have a scribe to write for you and two bearers to carry it….

• It’s a small food world #1: I was shooting the next podcast at Blackbird and the pastry chef, Tim Dahl, mentions that the dessert will include Asian pears. Mike Sula, who’s working on it with me, says “Are they Oriana’s?” They were. (Mike did a piece on her in the Reader a couple of years ago.)

• It’s a small food world #2: I’m standing at Oriana’s stand, getting a panning shot of the Green City Market, and suddenly a guy in my frame turns and looks at me and waves. It’s Paul Virant of Vie— who’s another one of the chefs in my next podcast.

• A little about the next podcast: it’s about the mulefoot pig dinner that the Reader arranged with Paul Kahan of Blackbird, who recruited several other notable chefs such as Virant to participate. Sula has been writing about mulefoot pigs for 18 months and so he recruited me to tag along and shoot everything— the farm, the slaughter process, and as much of the cooking of the meal as we could get access to. Kahan and company were really great about allowing us so much access and being gracious about it in the midst of busy times (especially for The Publican, which had just opened to much more business than they were quite ready for).

One of my goals in doing these podcasts was to keep them under 20 minutes. That seemed a good maximum length. So I cut each individual segment for this one, and put them together, and I found I had slightly exceeded that maximum.

By 16 minutes.

36 minutes. Yikes. Not an insane amount of time for the subject— it’s less than an hour-long Food Network show minus commercials— and considering that I had three podcasts’ worth of subject matter here— farming, slaughter, cooking— not a self-indulgent amount, I feel sure. But I really doubted whether my audience would sit for that in one go. It seemed like it would scare people off, just the running time alone.

There was another issue. Slaughter is an emotional subject, an emotionally charged one, a viscerally affecting one. If I followed the story chronologically, slaughter would come in the middle somewhere, and make everything that followed look barbaric. I also felt my subject had something to do with the fact that it’s too easy to separate meat from animals, to mentally disassociate a square of meat from a living creature, and that honesty demanded that I keep the reality of the animal’s life and death in the story, not let the viewer push it out of mind once it’s done and we’re on to more congenial cooking subject matters.

So I came to two decisions. One was, to break the saga up into two parts. The second was, to jumble it up chronologically, so that you’re always conscious of meat-eating when looking at cute piggies, and vice versa. So part 1, which will go up later this week, runs just under 20 minutes (whew!) and bookends our (quite charming) visit to the farm with footage about the handling of the meat at the restaurants. Part 2, which will go up next week, will include the slaughter sequence, again in the context of the restaurants as they work on the meal. (We weren’t allowed to shoot the moment of death, but I got everything else about the slaughtering process, believe me.)

Watch for Part 1— officially Thursday, actually Wednesday night.

Trailer for Sky Full of Bacon 05 from Michael Gebert on Vimeo Music by Kevin MacLeod.

Eater Chicago is dead.

Yeah, what’s that? you ask. Eater is a group of online blogs about doings in the restaurant industry, with locally-focused editions in NY, SF and LA.  The name suggests a sort of gossipy thing like Defamer or Gawker, which are surely the models, although it all seems rather tamer and less trashy than such celebrity-oriented, what’s-Lindsay-snorting-now stuff.  Chicago was supposed to be the next stop, with one Ari Bendersky (ex of UR Chicago) as the blogger.  But the current environment of economic spookedness means that Eater has pulled out of the market.

To be honest, and with no disrespect meant to Mr. Bendersky, whose efforts we never got to see and can’t judge, I can’t say that I find this a huge loss, because I can’t say that I find the concept all that interesting.  It’s not like it’s been that tough to keep track of new openings (hey, I hear that Publican place is worth checking out).  If someone were to do real digging into the workings of the industry, that might be fascinating— I’m convinced there’s no end of rich material there— but such depth is unlikely to come out in a format aimed at producing ten newsy little blog items a day.  Look at this typical example, from Eater NY:

EaterWire: Ed Witt’s Chef’s Table, Jawn Chasteen in at Sea Grill, Plywood, and More

EAST VILLAGE— A little pre-plywood news over on Grub Street: Cru’s chef Shea Gallante is applying for a liquor license for the old Sea Salt space: “Orhan Yegen had trouble clinching a full liquor license before he ejected from the space earlier this year, and the CB has been no-nonsense about the Sin Sin zone (think Mercury Dime), but if anyone can charm them at the November 12 meeting, it’s a Michelin-starred chef…” [GS]

Pulse quickening yet?  There may be a certain audience for this kind of information about the latest hot places, but I find it hard to see why this kind of news of routine business transactions should be any more interesting to me than the “Heard Around the Injection-Molder” column in the latest issue of Plastics & Polymers Today.

Perhaps that’s an especially dull example.  But the attempts to gin up celebrity-sighting excitement by chronicling every movement Fergus Henderson made in New York are not really any better; it doesn’t tell you anything about Henderson (a genuinely interesting guy), it just flatters you that you’re in the know about… a guy in the foodservice industry who 99.99% of America has never heard of.

But Mike, you say, you spent years fostering an environment for exactly the dissemination of such minute foodie trivia at LTHForum.  And how can you say you aren’t interested in the doings of chefs and restaurateurs when you’re devoting so much time to a video podcast series about them? Are you saying you wouldn’t love to sit down with Fergus Henderson?

In the case of LTHForum, the news is much less what’s opening than what there is to eat there.  The focus is on the wonderful things people uncover at restaurants, which I can then go try for myself.  Yes, that’s sort of the same impulse that leads people to want to know about hot new places, but for me, at least, there’s much more interest and intellectual heft in going to a nowhere middle-eastern restaurant because some really cool authentic dish is on the menu than in going to Jerry Kleiner’s latest place just because it’s Jerry Kleiner’s latest place.

And in the case of Sky Full of Bacon, yes, I do it to get to talk to chefs and farmers and folks and observe them in action, but that’s because the action itself is interesting to look at, and I’m intrigued by the way that how they fix food and share it with others reveals their philosophy about food.  I’m interested in what they think about pork, not in their plans for expanding into Oakbrook.

What it comes down to for me is that Eater seemed to have carved out exactly the perspective on our food scene that is least interesting to me, most hype-ridden and PR firm-driven.  I can pick that info up peripherally while reading a blog like Menu Pages’, which is still focused more on what real people out there think and write about food than on what permits have been applied for.

Personal blogging is an escape from the strictures of publications that want the latest news and the five tips for this and that and a focus on the TV-famous. (Rocco DiSpirito on the 7 Ways To Drive Your Man Wild During a Post-Thanksgiving Tryptophan Drowse!) Corporate blogging, too often, isn’t an alternative to such trivial approaches but an even more extreme example of them, designed to grab attention quick so the eyeballs can be counted for advertisers. Anyway, I will miss Eater Chicago far less than I would any number of blogs written by real people who really care about food as food, not as a reason to feel trendier than the next person with the in-the-know stuff you know.

My mom has been here for a week from Kansas, and as you will be absolutely surprised to learn, meals were a prominent part of her Chicago experience. Here are her comments on some well-known places:

Smoque: “Terrific! I thought that was great barbecue. Good fries with skins on.”

Art of Pizza: “Little too much dough to my liking. But tasty overall, a nice fresh taste.”

Lao Sze Chuan: “I’m glad we didn’t order intestines and frogs, because what you did order was very tasty.” (Chicken crack, stir-fried pea shoots, tea-smoked duck.)

Pasta alla Genovese (made at home): “Wouldn’t have thought of putting pasta and potatoes together, but it was wholly satisfying with the new potatoes from the farmer’s market.”

Muskie’s: “That was a hot dog and fries. Are we rating that too? Good hot dog and fries.”

Urban Belly: “I think some people must have a genetic disposition to Japanese and Asian flavors. And I’m not one of them.” (Editor/Favorite Son’s Note: I really liked the pozole-like pork belly and hominy, though.)

Hot Doug’s: “That was very interesting, all the different flavors. I liked all the many combinations.” What was your favorite? “The Thuringer, and the smoked fennel sausage with sage cheese.”

Mado: “No one expects the wild boar heart!” (Rob Levitt brought us that as a special treat to taste from his recent wild boar dinner.) “Lovely assortment of pates, I’m a big pate fan, and interesting twist with the pickled beets instead of cornichons.”

Smak Tak: “Great comfort food, close enough to what my grandmother used to make. I’m going to try to make the hunter stew, sauerkraut cooked in veal juices, and the pierogi are first cousins of vareniky, so it’s traditional comfort food for me. Really liked the sauerkraut and mushroom pierogi.”

Noon-O-Kebab: “Very good mideast food, but that’s something I’m very used to.” (Wichita has a substantial Lebanese population and a number of quite good restaurants.”

La Cebollita Grill: “I’m a spice wimp like I’m an Asian food wimp, I guess. But I really liked the Day of the Dead exhibit at the Mexican Fine Arts Museum.”

Oriana’s Asian pears at Green City: “I’m a huge new fan of Asian pears, especially since they’re good for wiping out your cholesterol. Nice subtle differences, with a little winey taste to some of them. Can’t wait to make a salad with little greens and gorgonzola cheese.”

Overall: “More meat than I’ve eaten in three weeks. Meat-O-Rama. So much good food that I hardly missed having tuna fish casserole or Jell-O with marshamallows.” (That last part was sarcastic. I think.)

Since I’ve pushed it off the first page, here’s a direct link to the current podcast, or see them all by clicking Video Podcasts at right.

We got a dog.  A beagle-pointer mix named Buster.

First thing he chewed up?  My copy of The United States of Arugula.

He said the parts about James Beard were tasty, but Alice Waters needed salt.

Otherwise, this’ll be quiet for a few days as I finish up the Mado-related podcast, which is going to be very interesting, I think. I’m also in production on one about foraging, and in pre-production relating to a certain event coming up which you may have heard about on pretty much every other food site in town. So it’s a busy Sky Full of Bacon, and I think you’ll be intrigued by the results.

David Tamarkin has an anti-locavorism piece up at Time Out, prompted by the current Green City locavore challenge, that very convincingly argues against… a type of person I have never met in real life. Maybe they exist, maybe there are doctrinaire locavores like there are militantly humorless vegetarians.  (No, I didn’t just say all vegetarians are militant and humorless, but I know those exist because they responded in the comments to this.)

As I say, maybe absolutist locavores exist. But I have yet to meet any.

Tamarkin’s argument is basically founded on this:

People who become localvores—whether for two weeks or 200—are likely well-intentioned, considerate citizens of the Earth. They choose to eat locally for two main reasons: (1) They believe it’s better for the local economy—the money spent on local food ostensibly goes to local farmers, thereby helping those farmers thrive and keeping the area flush with crops and money; and (2) They believe eating locally is better for the environment (in theory, local foods eliminate the need for long, gas-guzzling deliveries and high-emission plane rides). In short, localvores make sacrifices, severely limiting what they eat for the benefit of the land and the people around them.

Sorry, you lost me at your basic premise. Yes, locavores would like to do both of these things, and undoubtedly feel good (and sometimes smug) about it. But first and foremost, every high-profile locavore I know eats locally first because it tastes good. In-season fruit or vegetables grown a short distance away, as a class, taste 100 times better than stuff that’s been bred primarily to survive the flight from Chile in visually pristine condition. Farmer’s market eggs beat Jewel ones. Chicken tastes like chicken. Beef tastes like beef. Peaches taste like childhood. Grapes taste like wine. Without that, none of the locavores I know would follow it for two weeks. But the fact is, the principles underlying local eating are the principles that result in better-tasting produce. Far from being severely limited, locavorism seems fundamentally rooted in sensual pleasures.

That these principles do some good, kind of probably maybe, is a bonus. Tamarkin trots out some contrarian arguments suggesting that a peach that flies in on a 707 is better for the planet than one that drove down from Michigan. But even if that’s true, the peach will still suck. So put me on the record right now as someone who will still be buying local peaches even if each one kills a polar bear and melts a fjord.

But in fact, I find the contrarian arguments stoned-dorm-room-discussion sophomoric:

If the first goal of buying local produce is to help farmers in need, it would stand to reason that localvores should seek out the neediest farmers they can. If they did, they would not find them in an incredibly wealthy nation like ours. As philosopher Peter Singer and cowriter Jim Mason write in The Ethics of What We Eat (Rodale, $15.95), the profits a farmer in a developing country earns from selling his wares in America—even if it’s as little as two cents—will go further toward helping that farmer combat poverty than those profits would for a Midwestern farmer. “A decision to buy locally produced food,” Singer and Mason write, “is a decision not to buy food from countries that are significantly worse off than our own.”

And you know what? My son can already read pretty well, and it seems like he has a pretty decent moral sense for a 9-year-old. So it stands to reason that I should seek out the neediest housing project children I can, and raise them instead.

There’s a fine movie from the 1930s about Weimar Germany called Little Man, What Now?, in which one of the supporting characters is a socialist crank who supposedly loves humanity— but can’t be bothered to adequately care for his own wife, who eventually sickens and dies of neglect. It’s absurd to think that I have to scour the world for the peach from the absolute worst-off farmer— and help him a little and a shipping company a lot— or else admit I’m a hypocrite. That’s a real example of the kind of hypernarrow absolutism that no locavores I know actually practice. It is enough that I can help a farmer, and eat a better peach, and all in all it was a good thing, whether or not it was the best possible thing. Il faut cultiver notre jardin.

One of the sillier tendencies Baby Boomers have is to hyperdramatize every choice in life.  The reality is, the darkness will not descend if either McCain or Obama is elected or not elected, the oceans will not boil if you drive to the video store and will not be saved if you watch An Inconvenient Truth, etc. etc.  And eating a Michigan peach or a Chilean one is not a momentous decision for the planet.  That said, that real farmer at Green City puts your real money in his pocket, and keeps more of it than if he sold his product to a distributor.  So you and he can benefit directly from that act.  It can matter to the two of you, even if it doesn’t matter to the whole world.  And frankly, I’m fine with helping a human, over worrying about helping humanity.

What Tamarkin surely knows but isn’t going to admit in the midst of making the case for the prosecution is that the point of the two-week Green City challenge isn’t that everyone will keep it up forever and absolutely. That’s proven by the fact that it’s timed to exactly when the market is flooded with the most choices, and being a locavore is easiest and most appealing. But a two-week trial gives you a chance to try a lot of things and incorporate a few into your diet and be more likely to seek out superior-tasting market produce on a more regular basis. This is the kind of locavorism that is small-scale, individual, and makes your life and maybe, possibly, in some fraction of the Adam Smith invisible hand way, the world a tiny bit better place.

The more extreme kind of locavorism is not like that. And if I ever meet a person who actually believes in it, I’ll tell them that.

UPDATE: Although part of my point is that it’s NOT necessary to research every last consumer decision you make to death, that the act of buying good-tasting stuff from a real farmer is good enough, there’s a comment at Chicagoist that provides some solid facts about the Peter Singer notion of aiding the world’s poorest farmer or else don’t even bother. It’s here.

UPDATE 2: Tamarkin has some more comments on the TOC blog. He seems so keen on this notion of the absolute locavore that I guess we have to accept that he’s really met this mythical creature, but I haven’t and I just don’t take the whole notion seriously, maybe I’ve met enough people in my life who’ve found The Answer (whatever it is this week) and bore everybody to death with it. But again, the locavores I know aren’t like that, or this:

Localvores take the thinking out of their food choices in favor of being part of a movement; the only requirement for eating something is where it was produced, so not a lot of thought is required.

Again, couldn’t be more unlike the locavores I know, who think hard about what will be best and what to do with it for maximum flavor. Just read this LTHForum thread, for instance.

Eating locally is a principle, not a fatwa, which is to be followed for its obvious and direct benefits. And again, I find something sort of narcissistic about this boomer compulsion to make the best possible choice for the planet, or don’t even try. The local movement educates you to some major components of why things taste good when, and gives you a principle that leads you to putting money directly in farmers’ hands. The more people who do that, the better it is for farmers, health and maybe the environment. More good will come from more people partially following a good general principle than a few people rigidly following a dogma.

Maybe Tamarkin just needs to meet some different locavores….

My third podcast, the barbecue one, has passed over 1000 views on Vimeo. (You have to watch substantially the whole thing to count, so those are real views, not clicks to it who quickly clicked away.) Add in the iTunes podcasts— no exact number for views, but I have close to 100 subscribers— and the first podcast, the local one, currently hovering at 988 Vimeo views, is certainly over 1000 viewings total as well.

Okay, so my mom is proud, but is that really a significant number compared to the millions who must watch food TV? Well, yes and no. This is a Chicago-based podcast, although of course its viewership is not limited to Chicago. So how many people watch Food Network in Chicago? Without tracking down exact Nielsen numbers, we can get an idea from an article like this which says that the record for a Food Network show was Who Will Be The Next Food Network Star? which drew about 3.4 million viewers— or about 1.1% of the population.

If that’s the record, then the average is probably half that or less. So let’s call it half a percentage point. Half a percentage point of the population in Chicago would be about 40,000 people.

So my show, produced for the cost of videotape and the occasional lunch, draws about 1/40th of what the multimillion-dollar Food Network does in Chicago. That may not seem like that much, but it’s also worth remembering that there’s a big difference between flipping the TV on, which you may or may not actually pay attention to, and seeking out a podcast which you sit and watch during its brief run. So in terms of actually committed viewers… well, who knows how to measure that. Suffice it to say the gap between me and Food Network just got smaller yet by some indefinable amount.

Now, I don’t think guys working in their basements will ever replace multimillion-dollar TV networks. But what I do think this demonstrates is that we can now find an audience of decent size which will choose to watch well-produced video like this and doesn’t have to be approached in a glitzy, sensationalized way. We can make shows about real food, not hyped-up game shows (which I have nothing against, but they do demonstrate how TV is always about TV first and the actual subject second), and attract, if not a huge audience, a sufficient, highly-interested-in-food audience who justifies doing it—and which some ad agency will find sufficiently attractive, less because of its size than because of its quality.

Will this ever actually be a business? Who knows. The web itself seems to be a mass experiment in finding out what people will do for attention and not money. Being a Food Video Podcast Star may never amount to anything beyond, as somebody said in inverting Warhol’s cliche, “In the future everyone will be famous to 15 people.”

But I have more than 15 people. I got over 1000 for two different podcasts, and I did them my way. That’s pretty damn cool. Cool enough to keep shooting and see where it leads to next.

I was shocked today to learn that Bobby Mueller, one of the two Texas pitmasters profiled in my current video podcast, died over the weekend at the age of 69.  (Which was a good ten years older than he looked.)  Mueller was happy to let me dog his steps with a camera as he prepared his meats for lunch one morning in July, and though he was the quintessential taciturn Texan, when he answered a question, his answer was always thoughtful and to the point.  I hope my podcast serves as a fitting tribute to one of the great keepers of the BBQ traditions, and I wish his family and his son Wayne, who now takes over, the best in preserving this legendary BBQ temple for a new generation.

If you haven’t seen the podcast, click here.

Having written about Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food before reading it, I thought it might be nice to write about it after, too.

As noted before, Pollan— the author of the our-food-chain-is-messed-up book The Omnivore’s Dilemma— is here trying to put a positive spin on that message by showing how it’s possible to arrive at a reasonable and healthy diet by, basically, following the principle on the book’s cover: Eat Food.  Not Too Much.  Mostly Plants.

Pollan’s overarching target in the first half of this book is what he calls Nutritionism— the unnatural practice, as he paints it, of breaking our diets down into scientific processes.  He is very compelling, first, on how this has caused a major shift in how we eat that few of us have really noticed:

In the case of nutritionism, the widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. Put another way: foods are essentially the sum of their nutrient parts. [p. 28]

This brings us to one of the most troubling features of nutritionism… when the emphasis is on quantifying the nutrients contained in foods (or to be precise, the recognized nutrients in foods), any qualitative distinctions between whole foods and processed foods is apt to disappear. [p. 32]

This is one of Pollan’s key points: an emphasis on nutrition rather than eating has actually made our food worse for us, because it strongly favors Big Food’s latest product over the little farmer and the real food from the soil.  Food marketing requires novelty.  Carrots are pretty much carrots, a commodity.  But new Totally XTreme Asian Ranch Whole Grain Num-Os are an improvement over last year’s Partially XTreme ones, or at least they can be if some science can be rigged up to let you make a claim that they cure heart disease.  And that’s what nutritionism’s reductive view of eating is: find a magic bullet, hype the hell out of it, and sell sugary salty gloppy glop because it has a supposed single virtue.  A mere carrot hardly stands a chance against such marketing muscle; “the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over in Cereal the Cocoa-Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming their newfound ‘whole-grain goodness’ to the rafters.” [p. 39-40]

The problem with this is not only that the claims are often dubious (he shows how malleable supposedly legally-defined terms such as “whole grain” are) but that the science underlying so much of this is, simply, bullshit.  This is perhaps the most eye-opening and valuable part of the book, a long section in which he shows that, as Dr. Happy Harry Cox put it, everything you know is wrong, or rather, everything the largely self-appointed experts have told you is built on evidence ranging from flimsy to nonexistent.  Take one of the things everyone knows, that a high-fat diet leads to heart disease.  That’s like saying sunlight leads to plant growth, right?

In a recent [Harvard] review of the relevant research called ‘Types of Dietary Fat and the Risk of Coronary Heart Disease: A Critical Review,’ the authors proceed to calmly remove, one by one, just about every strut supporting the theory that dietary fat causes heart disease… Only two studies have ever found ‘a significant positive association between saturated fat intake and risk of CHD [coronary heart disease]’; many more have failed to find an association. [pp. 41-3]

But at least we know that high cholesterol is bad, right?

As for the dangers of dietary cholesterol, the review found ‘a weak and nonsignificant positive association between dietary cholesterol and risk of CHD.’ [p. 43]

Still, encouraging us to replace all that fatty red meat couldn’t have been all bad– it’s not like what we ate instead could have been worse for us:

By the end of the review, there is one strong association between a type of dietary fat and heart disease left standing, and it happens to be precisely the type of fat that the low-fat campaigners have spent most of the last thirty years encouraging us to consume more of: trans fats… the principal contribution of thirty years of nutritional advice has been to replace a possibly mildly unhealthy fat in our diets with a demonstrably lethal one. [p. 44]

If this were fully recognized for what it is, it would be considered one of the great government screwups of all time, nutritionism’s Vietnam.  In the late 70s government started encouraging us all to eat in a new way, eating less fat and, more importantly, different kinds of fat.  The “low fat” or “lipids” theory was embraced by food companies and is evident in thousands of products at every supermarket today.  Yet what was supposed to make us thinner and healthier instead has made obesity, diabetes, every “disease of affluence” far more prevalent.  It has blown the O-ring on American health and sent its flaming wreckage spiraling toward the ocean.  It has done exactly the opposite of what it was supposed to do, and in a real sense the famous joke in Woody Allen’s Sleeper has proven prescient:

Dr. Melik: This morning for breakfast he requested something called “wheat germ, organic honey and tiger’s milk.”
Dr. Aragon: [chuckling] Oh, yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.
Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or… hot fudge?
Dr. Aragon: Those were thought to be unhealthy… precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.

But at least from a food marketer’s, or a diet book author’s, perspective, it’s been an enormous success, because it’s created a massive market whose hunger is limitless for new products– which have the tremendous benefit, from a marketer’s point of view, of never working.

*  * *

So if nobody knows nothing, what the hell do we do now?

Pollan starts by suggesting that we back our way out of the nutritionist mindset and accept that we just don’t know what we don’t know about how food works.  The search for magic bullets has been a red herring, we just don’t know how the combinations of foods produces healthful effects, eating one thing to produce one result almost never seems to work.  We’re in the dark ages still on this stuff.

But what we can reasonably deduce is the basic validity of things like the French paradox– that if we need complex combinations to produce a fully healthy diet, then the traditional diets of most cultures have evolved to provide such combinations.  As he points out, nearly every culture, whether they eat lots of vegetables or nothing but meat and blubber, manages to have roughly the same low incidence of diseases of affluence– except us.  Only we managed to create, scientifically and industrially, a diet that so overdelivers on the things humans crave that it causes us problems.

This is where the advice to eat nothing your grandmother wouldn’t recognize comes in.  Basically, he says, if you eat real foods from before the days of food science, you should wind up with a diet that reflects cultural knowledge of what makes you healthy.

The problem with this is that the apple’s been eaten and we can’t go back to Paradise.  Once we have knowledge of Mexican and Thai and sushi, we’re not going to be happy living on an American farm diet full of English or Germanic touches circa 1910 (which would probably be what most of us, strictly choosing to eat like Grandma, would wind up with).  But the danger of being an omnivore is that in choosing to eat from many cultures, we’ll wind up cherrypicking the most appealing foods from those cultures– and miss out on the balance part.

To my mind, the grandmother advice doesn’t really work, except as a reminder to keep a skeptical eye toward the new foods (or, as Pollan calls them, edible foodlike substances) that pop up every year in the supermarket.  The other problem is that the foods in the supermarket aren’t themselves any more, anyway.  Grandma might recognize a steak (though it’d look pretty darn lean to her) but its cornfed taste would seem very odd.  And that difference conceals the fact that a cornfed steak is lacking precisely the omega-3s that were one of a grassfed steak’s contributions to your balanced diet and health.  It really isn’t the same food it was in her day.

Nevertheless, Pollan does try to identify some basic principles which, if followed, will help you generally work your way toward a diet as balanced and healthy as Grandma would have recognized:

Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.  [Since the real stuff tends to be along the walls, and the fake stuff is in the center.]

Avoid food products that make health claims.  [If it had to be engineered and tested, it’s too fake to be part of a balanced Grandma diet.]

Eat meals.  [Grabbing a sack of food and wolfing it down in the car, or grazing all afternoon, is not a meal.  The way the French sit and eat for an hour and a half has all sorts of mechanisms built into it to provide satisfaction and feedback without stuffing yourself silly.]

These principles are the way Pollan avoids falling into the trap he’s set for himself, which is being someone who’s just condemned nutritionism, and then proceeds to write a diet book.  There are no recipes and no weight-loss schedule here– which is why it’s all the more startling when he suddenly turns up advocating we all take supplements.  Isn’t that exactly the kind of nutritionism, healthy eating reduced to a pill, that he’s been against in the rest of the book?  It may be good advice for the middle-aged, but so is making sure to invest in your employer’s 401k, that doesn’t mean it belongs in a book about looking at eating as a part of a rich and happy life, not as a system of self-medication.

One principle is perhaps the most thought-provoking: Eat less and pay more. It’s not that paying more is exactly a positive good, but until you know you’re paying more for your food and spending more time preparing it, you’re not getting the stuff that’s better for you, better for the farmer and the food chain.  If it’s cheap and convenient, there’s something wrong with it, is Pollan’s basic point.  To be that cheap, it must be being grown in a way that’s less than ideal.

*  *

In warning us against the latest breakthrough in nutrition science, Pollan runs the risk of being exactly that— this season’s Scarsdale Diet or The Zone or South Beach, the book that finally Explains It All… until the next one.  And in reviewing it, I run the risk of becoming the acolyte who has Found the Answer… until the next book.

Yet I think the first half of the book, demonstrating how completely farbungled our dietary situation is, thanks largely to science and experts who were just plain wrong, is extremely important— a key text of American skepticism and debunking, up there with Mencken and Jessica Mitford, if not as wittily written.

And the second half, if not entirely news you can put to use today, thinks seriously and practically through the issues involved in trying to get back to a more sensible way of eating in today’s world, as it’s just becoming possible enough to actually do it thanks to farmer’s markets and CSAs and so on.  It may not be possible to live entirely according to Pollan’s principles yet, without growing it all yourself, but living according to as many of them as you can will make that day come a little closer, and probably make your meals taste better— even as they also take longer to make and cost you more.