My Food & I

If you’re won­der­ing about it from my veg­e­tar­ian posts, no, I haven’t become a vegetarian.

What drew me to explore veg­e­tar­ian restau­rants is what I’ve learned about food these last few months, which made me look for places that serve nutri­tious and envi­ron­men­tally friendly foods.

This post is about that learn­ing jour­ney, but I want to warn you that it’s slightly over 2000 words long. If you don’t want to go through all that, Mark Bittman sum­ma­rizes the impor­tant points in his much more enter­tain­ing TED talk, which will only take you 19 min­utes to watch.

Liv­ing the Life

It all kick-started for me when a friend intro­duced me to British chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s TV show River Cot­tage. I instantly fell in love with it.

In 1997, Hugh moved from the big city to the coun­try­side for an exper­i­ment in self-sufficiency. He learned how to grow his own crops, rear his own ani­mals and every episode he took the best advan­tage of these beau­ti­ful har­vests, using his culi­nary skills to whip up delec­table dishes. Here’s a taste of the first episode:

Watch­ing River Cot­tage made me real­ize how far removed I was from where my food came from. Whereas Hugh grew and slaugh­tered his own meat for exam­ple, I thought of my meat com­ing from the super­mar­ket in clear plas­tic wraps. The sources of my food were intel­lec­tual facts in my head, but never some­thing I had expe­ri­enced first­hand, and it made me inter­ested to learn more about food and where it came from.

In Defense of Food

It was around this time that I finally bought myself a copy of Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Man­i­festo, a book I’d been mean­ing to read for a while.

Nutri­tion vs. Nutritionism

Why does any­one need to defend food, of all things? In the book, which grew out of an arti­cle Pol­lan wrote for the New York Times called Unhappy Meals, Pol­lan argues that mis­tak­ing the sci­ence of nutri­tion­ism – which breaks food down into its chem­i­cal con­stituents – for actual nutri­tion has its costs.

Pol­lan, an inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist, found that whole foods behave dif­fer­ently from the nutri­ents they con­tain. While fruits and veg­eta­bles help to pro­tect against can­cer, when the antiox­i­dants are removed from the con­text of the foods they’re found in to be taken as sup­ple­ments, they don’t seem to work. In other words, if you find your­self choos­ing between a vit­a­min sup­ple­ment and a salad, eat the salad.

The Per­ils of the West­ern Diet

He also wrote about the per­ils of the West­ern diet: a diet full of processed foods and meat, fat and sugar. It seems that peo­ple who eat a West­ern diet suf­fer sub­stan­tially higher rates of can­cer, car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease, dia­betes and obe­sity than peo­ple eat­ing any num­ber of dif­fer­ent tra­di­tional diets.

Pol­lan describes an exper­i­ment under­taken by ten middle-aged Abo­rig­ines in 1982. Since leav­ing the bush some years before, they had all devel­oped type 2 dia­betes and risks of heart dis­ease. The ten Abo­rig­ines returned to their home­land, and were forced to rely exclu­sively on foods they hunted and gath­ered for themselves.

After seven weeks in the bush, all had lost weight, blood pres­sure had dropped and accord­ing to Kerin O’Dea, the nutri­tion sci­en­tist who designed the exper­i­ment; “all of the meta­bolic abnor­mal­i­ties of type 2 dia­betes were either greatly improved or com­pletely nor­mal­ized in a group of Abo­rig­ines by a rel­a­tively short rever­sion to hunter-gatherer lifestyle.” Since then, a series of com­pa­ra­ble exper­i­ments with Native Amer­i­cans and Hawai­ians have pro­duced sim­i­lar results.

In short; lay off the processed foods and meat, fat and sugar, eat as nat­ural as pos­si­ble and there may be hope for you yet.

So Pol­lan isn’t defend­ing food as much as he is defend­ing real foods; foods that don’t con­tain a laun­dry list of ingre­di­ents but are ingre­di­ents in them­selves, foods that actu­ally grow in nature and our ances­tors would rec­og­nize, like a potato from the ground ver­sus a potato chip that comes out of a can. The mes­sage of the book is sim­ple and sum­ma­rized on its front cover: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

But Not in Defense of White Rice

While read­ing In Defense of Food, I dis­cov­ered that not all foods I thought were good for me really are. It turns out that refin­ing grains length­ens their shelf life but removes impor­tant nutri­ents like B vit­a­mins, fiber and iron. And one of the sta­ples of the mod­ern Chi­nese diet is a refined grain: white rice. We eat it with almost every meal, every sin­gle day.

If that wasn’t enough, eat­ing a lot of refined car­bo­hy­drates, which include white rice and other refined ‘white’ foods like white bread and white pasta, may increase the risk of insulin resis­tance and type 2 dia­betes. Plus, it turns out that a high car­bo­hy­drate diet may also make you fat.

I have to give up white rice? Say it ain’t so! Pic­ture by MR+G

I’d grown up eat­ing white rice almost every­day, and it was as unques­tion­able a part of my diet as water, but now it turns out to be bad for me? It was unset­tling to accept, but I bit the bul­let and started cut­ting down my con­sump­tion of white rice to lit­tle or none, which earned me ques­tions and curi­ous stares from fam­ily and friends. It also made me won­der about how much I thought I knew about food that I still needed to learn more about.

The Prob­lem with Meat

But I did dis­cover a great side-effect from skip­ping the rice: I had a lot more space in my stom­ach for fruits, veg­eta­bles and meat, glo­ri­ous meat. Gotta get my pro­tein right? I really enjoyed myself, but then I started think­ing about the big­ger effects of eat­ing lots of meat.

Oh yes. Pic­ture by TheBusyBrain

The Envi­ron­men­tal Problem

A 2006 United Nations report called Livestock’s Long Shadow found that “the live­stock sec­tor is one of the top two or three most sig­nif­i­cant con­trib­u­tors to the most seri­ous envi­ron­men­tal prob­lems, at every scale from local to global” and that “live­stock are respon­si­ble for 18 per­cent of green­house gas emis­sions, a big­ger share than that of transport.”

The prob­lem doesn’t arise from the prac­tice of meat-eating per se, if you grow your own cat­tle and hunt your own food like Hugh, that’s fine. The prob­lem comes from the mod­ern fac­tory farm­ing sys­tem. These fac­tory farms con­sume enor­mous amounts of energy and cre­ate large amounts of green­house gases. When I think green­house gas, I usu­ally think of car­bon diox­ide. But methane, another green­house gas, is 20 times more pow­er­ful than CO2 at trap­ping heat in the atmos­phere, and the United States Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency reports that ani­mal agri­cul­ture (of cat­tle, buf­falo, sheep, goats, and camels) is the num­ber one source of methane in the world.

The Health Problem

And those are just the envi­ron­men­tal effects of meat pro­duc­tion. Cat­tle raised indus­tri­ally are fed cheap corn (mixed in a feed which may include ani­mal prod­ucts, it was the feed­ing of cat­tle to cat­tle that caused mad-cow dis­ease), but because their stom­achs are meant to digest grass, not grains, they get sick. Which is why as much as 70 per­cent of antibi­otics used in the United States is given to live­stock, a prac­tice that leads to the devel­op­ment of bac­te­ria that are immune to many treatments.

Feed­ing cat­tle grains also makes their diges­tive tracts more acidic. Because of this, a strain of acid-resistance E. coli has devel­oped that’s more likely to sur­vive the acid that usu­ally kills it in the human stom­ach. If you’re an adult, infec­tion can give you severe diar­rhea. For chil­dren under 5 years of age and the elderly though, it can cause kid­ney fail­ure and death.

The Eth­i­cal Problem

It gets bet­ter. The life of an indus­tri­ally raised ani­mal is not a good one, this is the life of a typ­i­cally fac­tory farmed chick in 39 days (warn­ing: graphic):

Nearly 280 mil­lion lay­ing hens in the United States are con­fined in cages so restric­tive the birds can’t spread their wings. “Broiler” chicken (young male chick­ens sold when still young) rear­ing facil­i­ties, on the other hand, are extremely over­crowded, with tens of thou­sands of birds crammed into a sin­gle closed broiler house, where the chick­ens’ excre­tions pile up and the ammo­nia fumes burn their eyes, mak­ing them blind. The growth of abnor­mally heavy bod­ies for more meat causes crip­pling and defor­mi­ties, some chick­ens can’t even walk because their bod­ies are too heavy, and some sim­ply die of heart failure.

Unfor­tu­nately, inhu­mane treat isn’t just reserved for chick­ens. Other factory-farmed ani­mals like cat­tle, ducks and geese, and pigs have it bad too.

This Time it’s Personal

This is the part where I man up to an embar­rass­ing confession.

Like a lot of things, change doesn’t come until there are real costs and ben­e­fits attached to it. I started read­ing about diet back in the late 90s, but it still took me a long time to change.

What really pushed me over the edge this year was how fat I was becom­ing. If you know me, you’ll prob­a­bly think I’m going anorexic, but what you may not see on this skinny-fat guy is the extra flab grow­ing on his waistline.

I’ve been try­ing to lose these love han­dles ever since I over­dosed on food in my 20s, but it never worked. Things came to a head when I gorged myself silly on hol­i­day foods dur­ing the end of last year and the begin­ning of this, and I saw myself fat­ter than I’d ever been in my hol­i­day pho­tos. This had to end!

The point of this con­fes­sion? Knowl­edge about diet is nice, but it’s all in the head. You’ll never get it in the body unless there’s a per­sonal price tag involved.

Mak­ing it All Work

We’ve cov­ered many top­ics about food. Now the ques­tion is: how do we pull it all together and make bet­ter choices about what to eat?

Books tend to make change sound easy – do this, do that, here’s a 6-step for­mula. But when I tried to put what I’ve learned into prac­tice, I found that real life isn’t so clear cut.

Real Life is Messy

Hav­ing a steak may be health­ier for me than a bowl of white rice, but what about the envi­ron­men­tal cost of that steak? Organic ingre­di­ents at the super­mar­ket are health­ier and more envi­ron­men­tally friendly, but what do I do when it can cost two to four times as much as its non-organic equiv­a­lent? For that mat­ter, which is less harm­ful to the envi­ron­ment and health­ier for me; a non-organically grown local veg­etable or an organ­i­cally grown veg­etable that’s been flown all the way from Japan, eat­ing up fos­sil fuels for trans­porta­tion along the way?

How about when the boss buys the office choco­late cake, richly laden with sugar and white flour, and insists I have a slice? What about fam­ily gath­er­ings where I don’t get to decide what’s cook­ing? What do I eat at work, if I have no idea where the meat and veg­eta­bles in my cafe­te­ria come from?

And most of the research cited in this arti­cle are from the United States. Do we have the same con­cerns here in South-East Asia? Do our chick­ens come from local fac­tory farms? Are our cat­tle fed grass or grain?

These are real ques­tions to a com­plex prob­lem, and to be hon­est, I don’t have the answers. In the end, I don’t think there are any easy, one-piece-fits-all solu­tions, just best choices we each have to make every time we choose some­thing to eat.

Mak­ing Sense of it All

I’m nei­ther a doc­tor nor a nutri­tion­ist, so I can’t rec­om­mend what you should eat. That also means that I can’t objec­tively eval­u­ate nutri­tional find­ings. And when I try to deci­pher it, it all seems like one big mess: some­body claims eat­ing this will save you, some­body else says it’s the worst thing ever, and every year a new mirac­u­lous super-food arises that will save everyone.

The only sane way I can find out of all this con­fu­sion is sim­ply a good dose of com­mon sense. Eat more veg­eta­bles and less meat. Makes sense? I think so. A real potato is more nutri­tious than a processed potato chip. Yup, sounds good. Eat more sup­ple­ments and skip the real fruits? Maybe not. An organic salad is health­ier than a non-organic salad, but a non-organic salad is still health­ier than deep-fried chicken? Def­i­nitely. Give up ice-cream for­ever for health’s sake? No way!

Besides com­mon sense, In Defense of Food’s sim­ple man­i­festo shines through as a use­ful prin­ci­ple: Eat food (real food, prefer­ably organic, fresh and humanely raised). Not too much (don’t eat till you’re burst­ing at the seams, it’s not good for you). Mostly plants (think of meat as side-dishes, for your health, the envi­ron­ment and the animal’s sake).

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Pic­ture by San­cho Papa

Things have cer­tainly changed from when “what do you want to eat today?” was a much sim­pler ques­tion to answer. When I started learn­ing about food, I never thought that what I chose to eat would not only have nutri­tional con­se­quences, but also envi­ron­men­tal, eco­nom­i­cal and polit­i­cal as well. I never thought that I would have to think so much about such an essen­tial, and mostly unques­tioned, part of my life.

But I like to think that even though I’ve still never slaugh­tered a chicken per­son­ally, I am closer to the source of my food now than I used to be.

Rec­om­mended Reading

1. Pol­lan, Michael. Unhappy Meals. New York Times, Jan­u­ary 28, 2007. Link

2. Taubes, Gary. What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie? New York Times, July 7 2002. Link

3. Pol­lan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Nat­ural His­tory of Four Meals. Pen­guin, 2007. Ama­zon

4. Pol­lan, Mic­a­hel. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Man­i­festo. Pen­guin Two, 2009. Ama­zon

5. Taubes, Gary. Good Calo­ries, Bad Calo­ries: Fats, Carbs, and the Con­tro­ver­sial Sci­ence of Diet and Health. Anchor, 2008. Ama­zon

Rec­om­mended Watching

1. The Meatrix. Sus­tain­able Table, Free Range Stu­dios, 2003. Link

2. Ken­ner, Robert, dir. Food Inc. Par­tic­i­pant Media, River Road Enter­tain­ment, 2008. Trailer | Web­site | Ama­zon

3. Spur­lock, Mor­gan, dir. Super Size Me. Kath­bur Pic­tures, Con, The, Stu­dio On Hud­son, 2004. Trailer | Ama­zon

Related Posts

1. My Food & I Part II
2. Burger Bench & Bar
3. My Grandmother’s Prayers