Nutrition and Local Foods
As someone who has struggled with health issues for long stretches of my life, I find the word nutrition to be shaming. It embarasses me just to hear the word as it conjures up images of scales, measuring tape, log books, calorie counting, utterly preposterous diets (cabbage soup anyone?) and reed-thin weight tyrants telling us what we cannot eat. Over the past 40 years, and in particular the last 20, American’s health has declined so precipitously, that the experts are stumped. It seems that the more we learn about nutrition the farther we get away from employing sensible habits. It’s almost if we have collectively decided that simply because we know so much about our food, because our science is so impecabble, that eventually the “smart people” will figure it all out, and then, finally! we will know what to do.
This is a huge problem. It strips us of our agency. If we cede all the authority to our betters then we have become passive participants in our OWN health issues. The past generation has witnessed our knowledge about food, nutrition, diet expand dramatically; and yet our health has gone in the exact opposite direction. I spend a lot of time thinking about this, first because I’ve lived it, and secondly because the Farm To Table TV Show, though not about nutrition or diet per se, will have to engage these issues at some point. I hopefully will be smart enough by then that I will be able to weave it in and out of various episodes, without sounding didactic or preachy, two adjectives I never, ever want associated with the show.
I am reading Michael Pollan’s latest book, “In Defense of Food,” which I am preparing for review. Pollan takes direct aim at this idea of “nutritionism,” the now common set of beliefs that says if we can just break down food, either literally or in our minds, into its constituent nutrients, vitamins, et al..then somehow magically, our health problems will be solved. But what we’ve forgotten in this whole fracas, is that food is food. It’s not about how many carbs or grams of protein a food contains. Since the dawn of time, human beings have figured out ways to survive without obesity, heart disease, and type-2 diabetes. For the first time in human history, we are overfed, and undernourished. That’s how off track we currently are. And I cannot tell you how many of my friends, family, colleagues and peers (smart, intelligent and engaged people) have fallen prey to this sick science and unfettered belief in the dogma of nutritionism. I look in their fridges and I see protein shakes and egg white mixes, I see diet sodas, margarine, I see frozen organic meals, and protein bars and soy milk and other crap. These people aren’t healthy either. They work too much, they don’t get enough sleep, and they are sick all the time. It’s sad. Cause you cannot challenge them at it. Not if I want to keep my friends, which I sincerely do.
I wonder what it is in our culture, whether it is something specific to America, that we can cede our most important decisions on a daily basis to a collection of myths, conflicting advice and absolute hogwash, and walk home patting ourselves on the back for being so “good.” That’s the word I hear when ask my friends what they ate for lunch, and they say, “Oh I was good. I had a protein bar.” Sorry buddy, but that’s not good. Not by a long shot. And I love the connotations of the phrase, “I was good.” As if eating real food is bad or forbidden, g-d forbid someone should have an omelette with egg yolks!
I am still unsure how local foods fits into debates about nutrition. But it is something that I feel is a natural ally of good health. Eating local foods ensure that we are eating foods at the height of their seasonality, just when foods are at their peak nutritionally and in terms of flavor. Eating locally also forces us to eat foods that we normally would never eat. This is a plus, but it is an aspect of local foods that is going to receive some serious push back from the culture at large. For two generations at least we’ve been conditioned to believe that we can have just what we want, whenever we want it. Also, it should be cheap. In effect, we are spoiled. And our spoiled nature is destroying our health, because we miss out on so many of the foods that can truly sustain us, and make us healthy at the same time. And for now that food is not going to be cheap, but good food should not be cheap. Why would we cheap out when it comes to our health?
Zachary,
Nice post, as usual.
Your last paragraph gestures toward an important point about the farm and food systems movement. “Local” only means what your last paragraph suggests it means at the present time. It might not (it almost certainly will not), however, mean those things in a decade. Local could easily become as industrialized as our current global farm and food system, at which point it would have nothing to do with seasonality, or the consumption of such a wide variety of foods that we remain familiar with unfamiliarity, or, therefore, health.
We seem to think that for various reasons the tenets of localism will act as a bulwark against industrialization, but it is not necessary that they will do so, especially when regionalism is factored into the localist equation (strict localism and industrial processing are more or less anathema simply based on the expense of industrial facilities and machinery). If local advocates have our way and our culture is willing *and able* to increase the percentage of our income that we spend on food from 10% up to, say, 20%, this will effectively open the flood gates to the industrialization of local-regional farm and food systems. The only thing preventing it currently is a lack of demand, primarily based on price. Industrialized local-regional food is always going to be more expensive than industrialized global food. If, however, that higher expense is culturally accepted, then that higher expense no longer serves as a barrier to industrialization.
Already “local” processors are adopting the methods and/or materials of industrialism. I recently tried Jane’s Ice Cream for the first time, which is available at one of my local stores. I just assumed, because it is made local-regionally (Kingston, NY) that 1) it would be real food and 2) the high cost ($5.00 per pint) would reflect the fact that real food ingredients are more expensive than industrial ingredients. I didn’t bother to look at the ingredients list. I just assumed it would have cream, milk, egg yolks, salt, and vanilla. I simply expected to eat high quality ice cream made with a few high quality ingredients. Instead, I ate disgusting ice cream (the texture was absolutely horrible) made with a long list of industrial ingredients, of which I only remember corn syrup and carageenan, that cost $5.00 per pint not because it is made with high quality whole ingredients, but because it is made in small batches in a small facility and because it carries a “local” niche markup that, literally speaking, has only to do with geography. (Then of course on the other side there are “local” Frito Lays chips, and, yes, even “local” pet food [Dad's]!)
Is Jane’s Ice Cream, a local-regional product (at least in terms of processing) healthy? No, it is not (note that real ice cream in moderate amounts is perfectly healthy). On the spectrum, Jane’s is closer to toxic than it is to healthy.
As local grows and settles into our cultural consciousness, the current tenets will be stripped and stripped away until eventually all that will remain of them is geography, and geography, as such, has nothing to do with health, either of people or land, or of animals, plants, soil, water, or air.
Thank you for this post. I think that the key to all of this is that people have to THINK about what they do. Buy local produce and consider all the other options for food. Grow your own, shop at the farmer’s market, buy fair-trade products, buy organic. You choose what you do. But by all means, either avoid food that comes with labels or read the labels to know what you are putting in your mouth.
I teach cooking, do tours of farms and farmer’s markets and I’m a Registered Dietitian. Nutrition is only important in a general sense but if you eat real food, it doesn’t matter quite as much. Most people in this country are overfed and undernourished. Sad state of affairs.
Thanks for sharing.
Its just market dynamics – price and convenience are king.
People want to buy into the idea of being healthy and many of those processed products give them that impression through great marketing.
Local, sustainable food has to shift their market from difficult and expensive to cheap and easy. You aren’t going to do it with CSA’s and Farmer’s Markets. The demand is there – you just have to envision a new type of food supply chain and distribution system and then roll it out to about 7 billion people.