“Most of our family and friends think we are nuts” for eating healthy, states Lisa Imerman in her comment on my Jan. 29 posting about the New York Times Magazine article, “Unhappy Meals”. Since its publication last Sunday, Michael Pollan’s article has been one of the most emailed from the New York Times site, and I suspect many of those are messages among relatives and friends, with the underlying message: “See, we’re not nuts.”
This matter of perception is humorous on one level. When I had a special birthday a few years back, several friends took the opportunity to roast me by producing a clever video of an “investigation” showing that, no, my shopping expeditions to Whole Foods and visits to the health club were merely a show…to cover up my addiction to donuts. Everyone had a good laugh, including me.
But such bantering hides a darker side. I have learned not to “preach” to family and friends about the importance of eating healthy, and so I mostly observe silently when they pile sugar into their coffee, sip on diet drinks, and load up on pasta. I even say little when they maintain they are “eating healthy”—presumably because they aren’t eating so much saturated fat. I must say that it pains me to observe such behavior, since I hate to see them potentially injuring themselves. As Lisa suggests, being ridiculed for my own eating habits adds insult to injury.
This business of eating healthy in a society that has been taught so many inaccurate lessons about food and health—some of which are discussed in Pollan’s article—is a complex matter. He discusses the media side of it, how reporters and editors welcome the chance to continually write of the latest new study that disputes the previous new study. He also discusses the food industry’s obvious desire to maximize sales and profits.
But there are lots of other things going on that promote a distorted view of food. Physician scare tactics and political witch hunts to rid the country of raw milk and implement NAIS, and thus “protect the integrity of our food supply.” The really crazy situation (among others) is a Michigan county prosecutor spending months of time weighing reams of reports representing hundreds of hours of investigation to decide what charges to bring against honest farmers producing whole foods–and all so the authorities can say they are protecting us.
Elizabeth McInerney points out that Pollan shied away from discussing Weston Price, and I strongly suspect that’s because Weston Price is viewed as being “on the fringes.” Maybe Pollan saw himself as already “out there,” and felt that going further risked losing credibility.
As I and others have pointed out, Pollan’s article represented significant progress in terms of informing a public that has for so long been fed a diet of half truths about nutrition. One day, I suspect, us nutcakes will look back and have a good laugh about the old days when eating whole foods and avoiding sugar and chemical additives was considered radical.
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