You are what you eat

Michael Pollan on how to eat well

Michael Pollan, who wrote the excellent and eye-opening The Omnivore's Dilemma, has a new book out: In Defense of Food, and I can hardly wait to read it.

Pollan has famously summed up his advice on eating in seven words: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Now he goes on to explore the question of just what food is in our food, or should that be "food"?

Here are his 12 Commandments on eating healthfully, courtesy of my Food First newsletter (so no link, alas):

1. Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.
2. Avoid foods containing ingredients you can't pronounce.
3. Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot.
4. Avoid food products that carry health claims.
5. Shop the outside isles of the supermarket; stay out of the middle.
6. Better yet, buy food somewhere else: the farmers' market or CSA.
7. Pay more, eat less.
8. Eat a wide variety of species.
9. Eat food from animals that eat grass.
10. Cook, and if you can, grow some of your own food.
11. Eat meals, and eat them only at tables. And
12. Eat deliberately, with other people whenever possible, and always with pleasure.

Now here's an eating plan I can get behind! I especially like commandments 1, 3, 9, 10, and 12.

We Americans are pitiable when it comes to food. We treat it as if it's not important, happy to have so much cheap "food" compared to other industrialized societies, ignorant of what we're doing to ourselves. As a people, we obsess over food, yet can't seem to find our way to eating a reasonable, health-promoting diet. We diet and then gain the weight back without ever deeply changing our eating habits and routines, only to go back to some fad diet or other.

And I think our disrespect for our food goes hand in hand with disrespect for the land we're also ruining with our huge factory farms. The two seem to me to be inseparable. We need to learn respect for the basics: soil, water, ecosystems, because those things need to be in good condition in order to grow the nutritional necessities of human beings. When we cavalierly buy our meat from CAFOs, we're guilty of contributing to some of the worst practices, the worst crimes that can be committed against land and water. And we're buying "food" that doesn't meet our human needs, whether it's grain-fed beef or vegetables and fruits grown in depleted soil that lacks nutrients. (In this regard, do read Freelearner's terrific post "A disease of malnutrition.")

I know that too many Americans cannot afford truly good food. But many can, yet they don't--or won't--pay the higher price for the better foods. Whether this is out of ignorance, miserliness, or lack of conviction that food really matters all that much, I don't know; I suspect all three are at play in the population as a whole. Making the situation worse is the lack of a national cuisine, I suppose, and the concomitant lack of the French or Italian citizen's reverence for food and food traditions.

In any case, if you yourself want to eat better, do keep in mind Michael Pollan's twelve commandments. You can't go wrong, and your body will thank you.

Laurie Colwin

Maybe it's just the holiday, a time when those of us who are fortunate feel loved, feel warmed by the company of others, feel that groups of people dining together at someone's home is, indeed, a special occasion, but I find myself thinking about Laurie Colwin. She died unexpectedly and too young, and those of us who remember her still miss her, even if we knew her only through her books and her Gourmet columns. She was that kind of writer, that kind of person, someone you wanted as your friend: a funny, intelligent, full-of-heart kind of person, and one who would feed you well, to boot.

She was a writer of fiction, and I love her fiction. She was also a food writer, one who truly understood what "home cooking"--the title of one of her collections of essays--means. (The other is More Home Cooking.) She was the opposite of pretentious, and her self-deprecating humor is an ingredient that, in my opinion, should be added to more Famous Chefs.

Here's what long-time Colwin friend Willard Spiegelman wrote about her:

Neither literary life in the fast lane of New York publishing circles nor eating in restaurants held any appeal for Laurie. After her first book of stories came out I wrote a wide-eyed letter from the provinces asking whether she’d been feted at a famous East Side literary eatery. She responded, calling it “a drab place…with tatty pub types at the bar…a very awful place and not where one wishes to have a nifty meal. How about Chock Full O’ Nuts, or the Bagel Bar?” Now those were places to grab her attention. As was any project requiring will and muscle. In a letter from 1982, which begins “I am an orderly person and so here is an orderly letter,” Laurie remarked that, apart from her continuous writing, “I struggle to be the editor of the newsletter for the Coalition for the Homeless (I am not good at this) and once a week I help cook and serve lunch at the Olivieri Center for Homeless Women on 30th Street (I am very good at ladling, cleaning the counters, and saying, ‘I’m sorry—we don’t have any more bread.’)” Glamour was, for her, the closest thing in the world to Hell.

Which is why she stayed home. An incipient agoraphobic (she hated elevators and once boasted that she hadn’t been north of 23rd Street all year), she realized that the best meals are always those that are shared, often improvised, and that lack the theatrical vulgarity, not to mention the noise (whoops, I mean the ambience) of fancy restaurants and the sculpted, architecturally conceived, vertical constructions that decorate plates on restaurant tables.

From the same essay, this will give you an idea of Colwin's (I want to call her Laurie) food essays:

Like all great food writers who do more than merely give recipes (Elizabeth David, M.F.K. Fisher, and John Thorne leap immediately to mind) Laurie admits her readers into her kitchen and her opinionated orneriness. We experience food as part of her personal and social life. Her instructional impulse is matched, even exceeded, by her narrative or anecdotal one. She explains what it is like to live in a teeny apartment where the tub serves as the kitchen sink and where a hot plate is the only stove; where an eggplant is a girl’s best friend; and how one learns to make do and, even more, to flourish. And we learn about entertaining a beau, dating an Englishman, marrying a Latvian, about entertaining strangers, relatives, and friends (and, along the way, about how friends now constitute family in the lives of many Americans), about cooking shepherd’s pie for one hundred and fifty people once you’ve decided to do some good deeds, about throwing out of the window various time-consuming chores once a baby has entered the household. By opening a book we come to know the writer; even a cupboard contains personal data.

One of my favorite Colwin essays is "Repulsive Dinners: A Memoir." It begins thus:

    There is something triumphant about a really disgusting meal. It lingers in the memory with a lurid glow, just as something exalted is remembered with a kind of mellow brilliance. I am not thinking of kitchen disasters--chewy pasta, burnt brownies, curdled sauces: these can happen to anyone. I am thinking about meals that are positively loathsome from soup to nuts, alhtough one is not usually fortunate enough to get either soup or nuts.
    Bad food abounds in restaurants, but somehow a bad meal in a restaurant and a bad home-cooked meal are not the same: after all, the restaurant did not invite you to dinner.
    My mother believes that people who can't cook should rely on filet mignon and boiled potatoes with parsley, and that they should be on excellent terms with an expensive bakery. But if everyone did that, there would be fewer horrible meals and the rich, complicated tapestry that is the human experience would be the poorer for it.
    My life has been much enriched by ghastly meals ...

She also makes confessions (this one is from "Black Beans"):

People in a hurry often open up the [tomato] can, drain the juice into the pot, and then slice up the tomatoes with a knife while they are still in the can. I would never let anyone catch me doing this, but I do it all the time.

How can you not love a food writer like this?

If you haven't read Home Cooking and More Home Cooking, get thee to a bookstore, fast! Because you can't simply read these books. You must have them, preferably next to your bedside, to read again and again. If you don't believe me, check out the customer reviews at Amazon.com (use the links above). They are nothing less than the textual equivalent of comfort food.

It's rare to find a writer like Colwin, whether of fiction or nonfiction. Those of us who loved her through her writing continue to wish that she'd lived to write more of her food columns (which add up to something more like a memoir), novels, and stories.  If you know someone who loves to cook and doesn't know Colwin's work, Christmas would be a good time to introduce her or him to the joys of Home Cooking.