Phood Filosophy

This clip from CBS purports to detail the devastating effects of rising food prices on the poor. What came across (to me) was not so much the struggle to make ends meet, but more the sense of panic that somehow the food would "run out". In a way, this does make sense--when you're poor, food and money are more or less interchangeable, and the urge to hoard is especially strong if you have enough of neither.

And so the dutiful cameraman records images of people stocking up with entire pallets of canned beverages (presumably soda), boxes of frozen fish sticks or chicken nuggets, bulk quantities of prepared pancake mix and jars of applesauce and small closets' worth of Froot Loops.

But the point of all this is not to lambast the food choices of the poor. At the far more upscale Albert Heijn (a Dutch supermarket), I see people with far more money buying more or less the same sorts of things: soda and/or beer, frozen meat in stick form, pancake mix, jars of applesauce, loaves upon loaves of squishy bread (cereal isn't nearly as popular here).

People eat what they eat because it's available, and it's what they know. How we eat is far more a matter of comfort--emotional as well as financial--and availability, and far less a matter of taste and nutrition. It was the case before agriculture arose, and it's the case today. You can see it for yourself--if you go to a supermarket and watch how people shop, most of the time, most of their money will be spent on things that they consider "basics" in accordance with the culture they grew up in. Humans are largely conservative when it comes to their food repertoire.

And if you think about it, it makes sense--the old "if it ain't broke don't fix it" mentality. In the days of hunting and gathering, someone who found an edible plant probably ate it while it lasted, knowing that trying other plants nearby might result in nasty poisoning or general unpalatability. The requirements for food were (and still are) abysmally low: enough calories to make getting it a worthwhile effort, and isn't poisonous or rotten. Nevertheless these criteria limit our choice of plants, and the cost-benefit analysis (in the crudest sense of the word) of hunting means that going after deer will probably be more beneficial than wasting your energy hunting mice. Our sense of taste has evolved to facilitate the selection of edibles. Of the five flavors (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami), sweet taste signifies sugars, the preferred energy source of cells; sour indicates fermented, and therefore rotten, foods; salty tells us that the food contains the sodium that is so vital to fluid balance; bitter is the taste of many plant alkaloids; umami is the taste of protein, another vital component of our diet.

Most of the cuisines around the world tend to fall in the middle of the spectra of tastes, falling safely within a reasonably balanced combination of the flavors. There is a base flavor, if you will (rice) that gets augmented (lemongrass, lime), but generally speaking, no cuisine is exclusively sweet, salty, spicy, or bitter. I would posit that this has to do with "taste fatigue", whereby eating a lot of one particular flavor results in a kind of boredom with that flavor, and you stop eating it--variety is good. A more scientific analysis has to do with the lateral diffusion of crops (as opposed to longitudinal) means that the same types of food could be smeared across the Eurasian continent that Jared Diamond puts forth. Local variations of a theme (wheat, millet, barely, rice) might arise, but the idea that you could grow up grasses and eat their seeds was everywhere.

This tells us three things: humans are inherently conservative in their food choices. The second conclusion we can draw from this is that health has far more to do with lifestyle than it does with what you eat.

It might sound like I'm restating the obvious, but considering the legacy that Kellogg and Graham left, and considering how many books promise you that if you just follow such-and-such a diet plan you'll get a whole new life, perhaps it's not so obvious after all. The diet of a Mongolian yak herder is simply not healthy to someone working in a cubicle, and the diet of the average cubicle dweller is probably woefully inadequate to lumberjacks working the Siberian winter. You are what you eat, in the sense that the foods you like are a reflection of the culture you grew up in, but you are more what you do. You can see the truth of it especially in cultures that are transitioning from no-car to cars: in China, obesity rates, while still ridiculously low compared to the United States, have skyrocketed if you consider that as early as 15 years ago, nobody in China was fat. I've also observed it in Holland, too--traditional Dutch fare was the food of farmers, designed to fill you up with as many calories as was possible to cram into a bowl, but if you keep eating that when you're living in a city and the hardest thing you have to do is stop by the supermarket on your way home, well, the end shouldn't be so surprising.

The third conclusion we can draw from all this is that from Japan to Spain, the one universal thing about good food is that it's fresh. Whether you're eating Hollandse Nieuwe haring or edamame, fresh food is good food. I don't know what it is about, say, a homemade gelato made with fresh strawberries, that makes it tons better than the pink "stuff" sold in the supermarkets--a more intense, realistic taste, certainly, but there's also something richer and more satisfying about fresh food in general that's hard to place. Je ne se quois, indeed.

I'm tempted to say that there's a moral to all of this, but really there isn't. There can't be: food is such a basic need that any attempt to moralize on the topic would just sound idiotic, biased, most likely both. Still, I would encourage you to try new foods whenever you can. Try cooking old food in new ways. Expanding the horizons of your knowledge is, as I've always maintained, never a bad thing.

Processing power

The nice thing about writing on eating habits is that the English language is relatively unimaginative towards food: a raw diet is one in which you eat nothing but raw or only partially-cooked foods (heating food above 120 F is not allowed, under the theory that higher temperatures "destroy" enzymes within the food that allow you to better digest and use it. Macrobiotics is much the same, in that the belief is that processing a food in any way beyond cooking (what you would normally do at home) also tampers with the "essential" vitamins and somehow destroys the nutritive value of the food.

There are, as per usual, truths and untruths to this belief. On the one hand, it is known that some vitamins, vitamin C and folate amongst them, are inactivated by heat, and that many proteins are denatured when exposed to high temperatures.

Let's address the protein issue a bit further: proteins are essentially like a ball of tangled yarn. The analogy of dumbbells, joined end-to-end, which I used earlier to describe them, is still true, but rather than one long thread, they snake back and forth, in and out--like a ball of yarn. If you apply heat to them, they may unwind, and look like a long thin thread, but--and this is critical--the order with which they are arranged remains the same (if you have access to a protein lab, you can try this with serum, 8 M urea, and a circular dichroism spectrometer). But it is how the protein is coiled that gives it the specific properties, and furthermore, whether it remains coiled depends on things other than merely heat--the acidity of the environment, for instance, or the presence of salts and sugars. If you consider how food is eaten--seasoned, flavored to taste, chewed, swallowed--even the most raw diet is going to end up denaturing something.

The issue with "killing" the vitamins, is a more valid reason to eat raw food (though, as we shall see, it does not mean that you should switch your oven for a dehydrator). Vitamins, especially the more complex ones, are sensitive to heat, and many of the fatty acids that are touted today as being good for you are also highly susceptible to oxygenation, which turns them rancid.

What is oft forgotten about a raw diet, in the midst of the frenzy about feeling good and being healthy, is that the only reason such things are possible is because our food supply is reasonably safe--and that presupposes that random spinach and tomato contaminations are indeed random and not a sign that our food safety program requires a massive overhaul. There is some speculation as to whether cooking "evolved"--a hominid stumbling across a charred carcass and finding out that burned flesh is actually not that bad--or was invented, but either way, the point remains that humans have been cooking their food for at least 10,000 years, when the first civilizations arose. You don't stick with a fad that's not useful, and killing dangerous germs on your food is infinitely useful.

However, there is one thing that these diets get right: processed food isn't good for you. Making my own lentil soup allows me to tweak the flavors so that I get to taste what I like. Opening a can of lentil soup, on the other hand, means that I have bought into what a chef ten-thousand miles away, has decided I should like, and has added salt, sugar, and flavorings, accordingly. Processed foods are often stripped of their fiber, flavored with "things", preserved with "other things", and even colored and gussied up to look, if you think about it, nothing like food. I'm not really opposed to chemicals in our food--some of them are inevitable, after all--but it's probably better for you to eat less of them. It's the addition of fats, sugars, and salt, and the removal of fiber and vitamins that makes processed food unhealthy.

Or maybe we just need healthier palettes. A raw diet, like any other diet, is what you make of it. If you do your research, and follow good food safety rules, then odds are you won't make the New England Journal of Medicine under "Bizarre cases". I once considered going on a raw diet, and went so far as to purchase a cookbook (using my Borders Cash Back rewards). It was after a failed attempt at making nut milk that I decided that maybe raw is a bit more difficult than it seemed.

It's Not Just Tofu Anymore

Vegetarianism actually shouldn't be a "fad". Or, if it is, then it's one of history's oldest and most universal, appearing in cultures as diverse as the ancient Greeks (Pythagoras) and intertwining itself into the very social fabric of India. As a practice, it is fairly uninvolved--eat things that don't require shedding blood. Of course, you could debate whether plants "bleed", but the reasons for going vegetarian don't always have to do with animal rights. Actually, many people do so for their health--I am a vegetarian simply because I have never liked the taste of meat. Still others do so out of concern for the environment, and the latest "thing" is to go vegetarian because $4/gallon gas is making meat too pricey to buy.

Veganism is a more recent development. People who are vegans don't eat animal products--not milk, cheese, eggs, butter, and some of the strictest won't use honey. This makes life tricky, to say the least, as recipes have to be tweaked and ingredients substituted, but today it's not too difficult, given the enormous numbers of food substitutes that are available.

Many of the websites on vegetarianism and/or veganism tout the health benefits of eating a diet that has less saturated fat. A vegetarian diet, however, is not necessarily a healthy one, and I will use my own diet the last week as an example of how to be terribly unhealthy while following a vegetarian diet: eating too many candy bars and cookies, drinking too many diet colas, skipping meals, only to buy a cone of French fries on my way home. To be fair, it was because I hadn't had the time to prepare meals in advance (ordinarily I make bean soups, vegetarian chili, and all manners of healthy good stuff to bring with me to work) that week, but it illustrates the point quite admirably: just because you're a vegetarian doesn't mean you're healthy.

Barring such extreme cases, it is true that eating more fruits and vegetables is good for you. But what about the claims, for instance, about protection against cancer and heart disease? There are too many factors to make such claims. The Japanese, for instance, are well-known for their healthy cuisine, but they also eat less, live in cities and not suburbs (thereby making walking a more effecient form of transportation than driving) and have a culture which makes it easy, in many ways, to know where you belong, thereby easing a great deal of stress. Food alone does not cause or cure cancer, though it can determine how your body responds to it. Getting the right nutrition can literally be a matter of life and death.

Today, nutritional deficiencies tend to be rare, thankfully. And for that, we can thank the manufacturers of vitamins and multivitamins, and the government, for mandating that bread be stuffed with extra folate. The food industry, always angling for that butter zone between health and zing, stuffs orange juice with calcium, and yogurts with vitamins A and D.

Which begs the question: is it better to eat some animal products and get your nutrition naturally, or no animal products and depend on vitamin-overloaded soy products and the like? We're not going to go into matters of taste--maybe, if I start a cooking blog.

And on this, the jury is still out. I've informally polled some vegetarian friends--their answers are mostly that "it's just what suits me". A few are lactose-intolerant, some thing eggs are meat and therefore don't eat them. Though there have been some studies suggesting that soy products interfere with hormonal balance, one must wonder if the farming methods employed by modern farmers have anything to do with it, as soy milk has been enjoyed in the Far East for almost 2000 years, and breast cancer rates are still far lower there than they are here.

It's something to think about, that's for sure--but paying attention to one's own health isn't exactly a bad thing. If anything, we've been doing far too little of it.

Laying down the lines

This is not, by any means, a complete summary of what we know about food and nutrition, nor is it meant to be. For the most part, I am merely defining what I mean when I refer to, say, carbohydrates, because going by what I've seen floating around on the Internet, there are some confused souls, to be sure.

With that in mind:

There are five basic food groups--carbohydrates, proteins, lipids (fats), vitamins, and minerals. (I did consider adding alcohol, but decided against it for expediency)

Not what you were expecting, were you?

The food pyramid that the USDA devised is still valid, for the most part, as a guide for what to eat to stay healthy. But from a nutritional point of view--the view your cells have of that apple you've eaten--all foods are made of these five things, but in different proportions.

I say "for the most part" because, in my opinion (and the opinion of just about everybody else in the world who doesn't drink 3 glasses of milk a day or eat meat) the milk and protein recommendations are still grossly exaggerated. But we'll see what the science has to say about that later.

Carbohydrates are, in a nutshell, sugars. At the molecular level, sugars look like rings--some have five links, some have six. And the most amazing thing is, depending on where they join together--which link of one sugar is joined to a link of another--they can take on different properties. Some are readily assimilated into the body. Others are wholly undigestible (fiber). Some soak up water--the starch that thickens sauces relies on this property.

Proteins are comprised of amino acids, linked together like a set of magnetic dumbbells. It is not the actual linkage that is important, though--it's what's attached to the handle of the dumbbell that makes a protein what it is (the side chain). The side chains play an important role in how the protein gets metabolized.

Lipids are the fats and cholesterol--the greasy bits. They are, essentially, long strings of carbon molecules. Carbon-carbon bonds are some of the strongest in nature, meaning that there is a great deal of energy stored in them. This makes lipids a valuable source of energy.

The most amazing thing about carbohydrates, lipids, and proteins is that the body can convert one to the other. A few steps, a few atoms added here or there, and voila--you have fat from sugar, sugar from protein, protein from sugar. These three groups comprise the main sources of energy for the body.

Vitamins are organic molecules that aid in the function of our body. Unlike the three listed above, they are not a major source of energy--rather, they are like the starter block of the wood fire--they get the fire started, but contribute little to the actual burn. But once the fire is out, and you need a new one, if you don't have enough starter, you might not be able to get it lit.

Minerals are inorganic substances (substances that come from the earth, and are not manufactured by living things). They have a diverse role in the body, too complex to cover here, but suffice it to say that it is amazing that trace amounts of a salt or metal can make the difference between sickness and health. Most minerals are only needed in trace amounts in the average diet of an average person in good health.

If you'd like to learn more about nutrition, you can start here. As I said above, the point of this is not to explain how these are integrated into a seamless picture of metabolism. The point of this is to lay out what I mean when I later say "vitamin" or the like.

Diets: of worms, fruits, and figs

The topic of the week has to do with diets. Not the kind where you lose weight--although, with some of the ones I'll be discussing, it's kind of hard not to--but rather the stuff you eat every day as part of a normal routine.

For the most part, we grew up being taught to eat a "balanced" diet, to include plenty of stuff from the "four" basic food groups and go easy on the candy and fries. The most extreme idea we might have entertained was going vegetarian, and then it was because we didn't like the thought of eating the piglets we oohed and aahed at in picture books. Then we started hearing about how Gwyneth Paltrow or some other celebrity is eating a "macrobiotic" diet, the benefits of veganism, the Bible diet, and all manners of advice on what we should eat and how we should eat it that will bring us health, propserity, happiness, and possibly that new svelte figure.

Why do we keep falling for this? It's not new--Sylvester Graham and John Harvey Kellogg made their names doing exactly this over one-hundred years ago. The phenomena of fad diets is particularly marked in America, but I don't think anybody in the world is entirely immune to the idea that you can make yourself better by changing what you eat: the food we eat becomes a part of us, so if we want to become better people we need to eat better food. In part, this is true, but as with all things that occupy the fringe between science and lunacy, the story is a lot more complicated.

But this isn't about the psychology of diets--this week I'll be talking about the diets themselves, what the science knows and doesn't know, and how our (mis)understanding of food and nutrition can literally reshape ourselves.

1) Crash course in food and nutrition
2) Vegetarianism/veganism
3) Raw diets/macrobioitics
4) What regional cuisines have to offer in terms of knowledge of food and health
5) Diets in history, why we eat what we do

Food prices going up? Great!

I'm trying not to blog about frugality, since this blog is devoted to doing things as chemical-free as possible, but the fact is that the fewer chemicals that go into the food and things you use, the cheaper it is.

For instance, you could buy a loaf of bread for $2, or a bag of flour that will make 2 loaves of bread for $1 (because I now live in Europe, the amounts are kind of weird--no 5 lb bags of flour here, but 1 kg bags, intsead). The best thing about making your own bread is that there are no preservatives, it's REALLY fresh, and if you have a bread machine, that delightfully crunchy crust. But even if you don't, it's not that difficult--it just takes a little planning.

But it's not just bread--the same is true for almost all other foods, as well. I can make 3 meals' worth of chili (for two people no less) for about 3-4 euros, give or take 10 cents' worth of salt, pepper, cumin. The higher price is whether I make it with ground beef or not. It certainly beats paying $2 for a can of chili impressions from a soup company.

It's not just good for you inside, though. Eating a more natural diet can be good for your outside, too. I'll grant you that there's no real scientific data for this, but how many beautiful people--truly beautiful, without makeup--do you know who eat nothing but chips and hot dogs?

And speaking of makeup--why? My parents are in their fifties, and both are regularly mistaken for being in their thirties (my mother's aerobics instructor thought she was twenty-five)--and neither of them take any extraordinary steps, beyond eating healthy, drinking green tea, and getting enough exercise. But there are plenty of other natural things you can do to beautify yourself. Taking care of your skin does not have to involve lots of chemicals with complicated names. Honey and strawberries are just two of the most efficacious all-natural skin care products out there. And, from personal experience, nothing cures chapped lips faster than a smidge of honey.

Other things can be homemade, too: I make my own laundry detergent, using borax, washing soda, and a bar of soap--I spend extra on the soap, but that's because my skin is highly sensitive to trace amounts of scents and colorings. Other household cleaners can be made using those, too, in combination with dish detergent, vinegar, and nothing polishes wood like olive oil.

The one advantage of going all natural is not, incidentally, the health benefits or money-saving measures. It could quite literally save your life. The packaging that surrounds so much of our food and cleaners today is laden with phthalates compounds that can leach into the product. A few phthalates here and there won't hurt you, but add them up over the course of a lifetime, and you're basically becoming a chemical sink. I've tried to eliminate as much plastic as possible--saving and reusing jars (peanut butter, pickles, jelly) goes a long way.

The benefits of doing things yourself should not be underestimated. There is simply no way a multinational corporation, as much as it may spend on R&D, will ever be able to tailor everything to your own personal needs. Going natural in as many areas as you can is good for you, your wallet, and the environment. If that's not enough, I don't know what is.

Dinner: Bought, cooked, served

The problem with making real food for dinner is that real food seems complicated. You can't just pick up any old tomato, because sometimes you'll get one that's been sitting on the shelf just a bit too long; or maybe the asparagus isn't in season, or you haven't quite got the knack for sorting string beans. And then when you get it home, it's a question of how to prepare it--which food gets cooked first, how do you peel a tomato, is it okay to leave the skin on a potato? Either you've bought too much or not enough of one thing, and while you're pitching a fit worrying about whether the meal will taste good, the sauce is burning and you wonder how it is I persuaded you to try cooking your own dinner.

The fact is, though, making real food for dinner is not that complicated. I learned to cook by the seat of my pants, which I would argue is more suitable to real-life cooking than culinary school techniques. All the same, it does take an effort--it doesn't have to be much effort, but you do have to be willing to take your health into your own hands rather than leave it in the hands of a for-profit corporation. With that in mind, let's cook! The following lists contains 10 tips to simplify shopping, cooking, and storing real food.

Shopping

1. Produce and/or meat - Use your senses. Don't just look at the color. Pick it up, test its weight--is it light, or heavy? Does it smell right? If you tap it, is it hard, or soft? Turn it over, check all sides of it--are there dark spots, indicating bruising? Is there a cut where the juice is leaking out? This doesn't have to take a long time. With a little practice, you can do all this within a split second of just picking it up, giving a quick once-over, and make a decision.

2. Know what's in season - You could make "Asparagus with Hollandaise Sauce" for Christmas. But you might not be able to find asparagus in December, and if you do, it'll be of questionable quality. There's a season for everything, during which they taste better than most. Knowing what's in season can help you plan your menu so that you can take advantage of the best food at the best prices.

3. List everything - Making a list and checking it twice isn't just for Santa Claus. It helps you not forget the one critical ingredient to your chili, keeps you on task so that you don't get sidetracked by that wonderful deal on Belgian endives (which you don't know what to do with), and gets you in and out of the store faster. If you're in a rush at the end of the day, this will save you from a lot of muttering, "What did I want to get again?" Do this the night before, or, if you have a long train ride, on the way home, and you'll save yourself a whole ton of time, and possibly money.

Cooking

4. Know what you want, or planning - In science, we start every experiment with a brief note as to why we're doing it, what we hope to find, and our hypothesis for the outcome. Cooking is much the same thing (a parallel I will continue to make). Starting with the idea that you want scrambled eggs and changing your mind halfway through may lead to something brilliant, but only if you're a trained chef. Know what it is you want to make, and make sure you have all of the ingredients--before you start.

5. Mis en place, everything in its place - Mis en place is French (of course) for putting everything in its place. Basically, you get all of the ingredients ready. If the recipe calls for a cup of chopped onions, chop up onions to fill that cup. If the recipe calls for peeled tomatoes, peel the tomatoes (or, my secret, use the canned version). If you're just starting out, this can seem like an extra hassle, but it saves you a lot of time and trouble when you start cooking, because everything will be right there. Once you get used to it, you quickly learn which foods can be bunched together and which ones have to remain separate.

6. Know thyself - At least, know thine own equipment. And then realize that recipes are written for the average, so make your own adjustments where needed. Our oven has a propensity to burn everything if given half an excuse, so I usually set the temperature and the timer to a few degrees and a few minutes less than what's given. Pay attention to how long things take (water to boil, chopping onions), so you can figure out what can be multitasked.

7. Food safety - No cooking post would be complete without a note on food safety: keep veggies and meats separate, milk and cheeses refrigerated, and don't, whatever else you do, use a can that looks like it's about to explode. Use common sense to stay safe. Food is, after all, a living thing, and some living things are more deadly than others.

8. Clean as you go - If you've got everything laid out and you're just waiting for the onions to start sizzling, start putting stuff away, washing what dishes you're finished with, etc. Two advantages to this: one, you won't have to do it after your dinner, and two, it looks really impressive if the kitchen is spanking clean in spite of having cooked up a storm.

Storage

9. Leftovers are your friends - I don't know why people are allergic to leftovers. I routinely cook extra food so that there will be leftovers, which get eaten when we're both too exhausted to cook. Make extra, and tuck them into a Tupperware or similar storage device, and you can eat two meals for the effort of one.

10. Proper storage - The colder, the better. If you plan on eating the food within a few days, then it'll be okay in the refrigerator. But for longer storage, put it in the freezer. Be sure to use an airtight container, because otherwise you'll come back to freezer-burned food that will taste funny. Freezer burn, incidentally, is not because the food "gets frostbite", but because the water sublimates from it, leaving it dehydrated. It's a very slow version of what happens when food gets freeze-dried.

What's for dinner?

Food is one of those weird commodities where the more that's done to it, the cheaper it seems. This is especially the case when it comes to organic food--why are you paying more for the farmer to do less?
Well, that's not strictly true. Fact is, food grown or raised without chemicals is more prone to bugs and weeds, and of course your yield will go down. The exact decrease depends on the type of crop in question, but suffice it to say that the increase in prices reflects some of the decrease in yield. On average, the yield decrease is about 20%, but if you're really concerned about the living planet, there's no question that organics are better than pouring nitrates and phosphates into the soil.
How to integrate a wholesome way of eating--of organic food--into our busy, frantic lives? Sure, we'd all love to be the Barefoot Contessa or any of the celebrity chefs who have minions hunting down the best of the local/exotic/organic produce at the farmer's market, but most of us just want to have dinner on the table without cooking up a storm, and preferably without mortgaging the house.
The biggest change you can make to your health, actually, is to forego the organic question entirely and just focus on eating food. Real food. Baked potatoes, rather than Baked Lay's; chicken broth, instead of Campbell's Condensed; homemade bread rather than the fluffy white insubstantial stuff you buy from the store.
If you look at what most people put into their shopping carts, it's mostly stuff loaded with crap, for lack of a better word. Bread that doesn't go stale after a week, potato chips spiced and flavored into a color that indicates POISON in many species, prepackaged meals that you can just reheat months later. What exactly gives these things the properties they have, of long shelf life and fluorescent colors? Chemicals, i.e., crap.
Richard Hittleman gives a good description of "life force" in food. It's mostly fluff, in my opinion, but it makes intuitive sense: food is a living thing, and if you process it, you "kill" it (which, incidentally, is why you shouldn't eat meat, according to him--it's dead). Eating "dead food" drains you of your own energy, rather than giving energy back to you. Needless to say, I dislike the fluffy language, but there's no question that processing--heating, chopping, packaging, freezing--damages food, destroys the vitamins, and eliminates much of the fiber.
Organic does not necessarily mean healthy. Organic potato chips may be processed without preservatives and real oil, but they've still been processed, and they'll still keep forever on your shelf. Real food doesn't have to advertise its health benefits, because it is healthy.

Next: Cooking and keeping real food