want basil with that?
Too damn cold to ride lately, so the mind tends to wander and read things like this:
Unhappy Meals - Michael Pollan - New York Times
(via Kottke)
It’s long - here’s a link to a decent quick summary.
Lots of interesting bits in the article; nothing especially new if you do any sort of reading on organic farming and the food industry, but i especially liked the discussion about food culture and the inherent healthfulness of an established culture’s diet.
It makes total sense from an evolutionary standpoint that humans should evolve with their immediate environment to create foods that are inherently healthy. If a group of people have been surviving anywhere in the world for any length of time (say a dozen generations), they are most likely eating a healthy diet, otherwise they simply wouldn’t exist; they would have since died out or moved away. That these diets can vary widely simply speaks to the variation in available food.
(As a side note, i’m speaking of health in a general sense, and as compared to the typical American diet, which isn’t culturally so much as commercially evolved.)
A typical diet in Greece, or Japan, or France, for example, is a healthy diet because of the aggregate effect of the diet, not because or despite containing any particular food. In short, the French aren’t healthy because they drink more red wine, but because of how the whole range of food and those food combinations (including red wine) nourish and supply the human body.
It would have been interesting to study whether one traditional diet is healthy for someone from a different culture. It’s commonly noted that people moving to America from other cultures tend to get fat and have health problems, but would a Greek moving to Japan and eating the standard Japanese diet also suffer health problems over time? In other words, to what degree have the people of that area evolved/adapted to the diet? Quite probably the world is already too intermingled a place to study if effectively - that, or the study participants are the only ones who it would effect.
Healthiness aside, what i find interesting is the whole idea (less explicitly covered in the article) that our foods, and indeed our taste in foods, may be driven by the need for nutrients or other things in the food that we haven’t even discovered yet. Do we want basil with tomatoes because there’s something about that combination that makes us healthier or more disease-resistant? Is there something about drinking tea that helps our bodies better process the nutrition in typical asian food? (beyond the original benefit of simply drinking boiled, hence cleaner, water).
The idea of beneficial combinations has already been shown with lime and corn and our bodies ability to use the amino acid lysine, and how rice and beans combine to form more complete proteins. Historically, beer wasn’t just a fun drink; but for a long time a major source of nutrition. Was it also a compliment to other parts of a typical German or English diet?
It’s fascinating to think of the hundreds of generations, of the countless meals that have gone into creating the variety of dishes we enjoy today. Certainly some seasoning has come from a medicinal use and found it’s way into food - thyme has been used throughout history, and in many cultures, for example - but we tend to like it with some foods and not others. Are those food combination choices based on some buried knowledge in our dna?
I think that a good part of the reason so many Americans struggle with weight and health issues (aside from the general sluggishness and malaise) is that we’re also struggling to find a food culture. We’ve lost our traditional sense of food, or rather it’s been taken away by the very companies we’ve grown at home. Our only fallback on food-as-medicine is chicken soup, but we need a lot more than that.
When you see some study that starts promoting the benefits of some antioxidant or enzyme or particular food, get out the salt bucket. It seems a lot more likely that it’s not just that particular thing, but that thing in its typical environment or combination that gives the real benefit.