AN EATER'S MANIFESTO #2

My own mother grew up in the 1930s and 1940s eating a lot of traditional Jewish-American fare, typical of families who recently emigrated from Russia or Easter Europe: stuffed cabbage, organ meats, cheese blitzes, kreplach, knishes stuffed with potato or chicken liver, and vegetables that often were cooked in rendered chicken or duck fat. I never ate any of that stuff as a kid, except when I visited my grandparents. My mother, an excellent and adventurous cook whose own menus were shaped by the cosmopolitan food trends of New York in the 1960s (her influences would have included the 1964 World's Fair; Julia Child and Craig Claiborne; Manhattan restaurant menus of the time; and of course the rising drumbeat of food marketing) served us a rotating menu that each week completed a culinary world tour: beouf bourguignon or beef Stroganoff on Monday; coq au vi or oven-fried chicken (in a Kellogg's Cornflakes crust) on Tuesday; meat loaf or Chinese pepper steak on Wednesday (yes, there was a lot of beef); spaghetti pomodoro with Italian sausages on Thursday; and on her weekend nights off a Swanson's TV dinner or Chinese takeout. She cooked with Crisco or Wesson oil rather than chicken or duck fat and used margarine rather than butter because she'd absorbed the nutritional orthodoxy of the tie, which held that these more up-to-date fats were better for our health. (Oops.)

Nowadays I don't eat any of that stuff and neither does my mother, who has moved on too. Her parents wouldn't recognize the foods we put on the table, except maybe the butter, which is back. Today in America the culture of food is changing more than once a generation, which is historically unprecedented-and dizzying.

What is driving such relentless change in the American diet? One force is a thirty-two-billion-dollar food-marketing machine that thrives on change for its own sake. Another is the constantly shifting ground of nutrition science that, depending on your point of view; is steadily advancing the frontiers of our knowledge about diet and health or is just changing its mind a lot because it is a flawed science that knows much less than it cares to admit. Part of what drove my grandparents' food culture from the American table was official scientific opinion, which, beginning in the 1960s, decided that anal fat was a deadly substance. And then there were the food manufacturers, which stood to make very little money from my grandmother's cooking, because she was doing so much of it from scratch---up to and including rendering her own cooking fats. Amplifying the "latest science," they managed to sell her daughter on the virtues of hydrogenated vegetable oils, the ones that we're now learning may be, well, deadly substances.

Sooner or later, everything solid we've been told about the links between our diet and our health seems to get blown away in the gust of the most recent study. Consider the latest findings. In 2006 case news that a low-fat diet, long believed to protect against cancer, may do no such thing-this from the massive, federally funded Women's Health Initiative, which has also failed to find a link between a low-fat diet and the risk of coronary heart disease. Indeed, the whole nutritional orthodoxy around dietary fat appears to be crumbling, as we will see. In 2005 we learned that dietary fiber might not, as we'd been confidently told for years, help prevent colorectal cancers and heart disease. And then, in the fall of 2006, two prestigious studies on omega-3 fats published at the same tie came to strikingly different conclusions. While the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences found little conclusive evidence that eating fish would do your heart much good (and might hurt your brain, because so much fish is contaminated with mercury), a Harvard study brought the hopeful piece of news that simply by eating a couple of servings of fish each week (or by downing enough fish oil tablets) you could cut your risk of dying from a heart attack by more than a third. It's no wonder that omega-3 fatty acids are poised to become the oat bran of our time as food scientists rush to microencapsulate fish and algae oil and blast it into such formerly al-terrestrial foods as bread and pasta, mi and yogurt and cheese, all of which will soon, you can be sure, spout fishy new health claims. (I hope you remember the relevant rule.)

In Defense of Food
Author: Michael Pollan

http://michaelpollan.com/books/in-defense-of-food/

http://www.depsyl.com/

http://back2basicnutrition.com/

http://bionutritionalresearch.olhblogspace.com/