Healthcare (6) Mark Bittman's "Food Matters"

In my previous health care blog, I expanded on my adopting a healthier lifestyle (which was less of a conscious decision than a gradual development that resulted from my heath - and environment - conscious children, one a former Greenpeace photographer and the other a stay at home mom with Quaker ideas and attitudes). My own lifelong interest in nature as a flora and birding enthusiast had already made me aware of the degradation of the environment, for example the disappearance of habitats, pollution etc. Thus I followed relevant reports on PBS, in Western European papers during our long visits, the New York Times and read books by Michel Pollan and others.

Last week, while waiting for my shopping partner in a Borders cafe I picked up Mark Bittman's FOOD MATTERS. A Guide to Conscious Eating - With More Than 75 Recipes. (NY, 2009). I was never much impressed with his column in the NYT food section on Wednesdays and was rather turned off by his t.v. series on cooking with great chefs where his personality stood in the way. More fun was the series on Eating in Spain where he clearly enjoyed being guided and sharing the limelight with 2 actresses and benefited from he presence of too much Mario Batali. Meanwhile his columns in the Times had become more interesting.

Although the book gave a sort of "seal of approval" to the changes in our own eating habits, it did not really change my feelings for him and I am convinced that in many cases too much t.v. or autobiographical exposure to authors may interfere with the appreciation of their works. This happened for me in the case of Paul Bocuse or Ruth Reichl. Anyway, for readers of Michel Pollan and the like, Bittman brings little that is new, but for people alerted more recently to the relationship between food and health, or food and the environment (or the environment and health) Bittman provides a good introduction. And the message he gives cannot be repeated often enough (though perhaps not necessarily as repetitively as in this book). The inventive recipes as well as the example of daily meal schedules must be most helpful to people who, like me, are not retired and have no adult environmentally aware children. But even for them Bittman's didactic emphases (sometimes he sounds like a parent anxious to make sure a child gets the point) maybe off-putting.

I read the (not very long) text as if I were still the disciplined researcher on a scholarly project. Of course, it wasn't too arduous, probably because I am fully in agreement with several of his main themes, for ex. his criticism of Big Food with its industrialized agriculture and (overly) processed foods, or of the failure of government (the USDA in particular) to act to protect the citizenry against the practice of Big Food to replace naturally present nutrients by chemical additives, or the environment against the effect of monoculture crops that require chemical fertilizer and pesticides, or the raising of livestock in Cafos (Confined Animal Feeding Operation) that require anti-biotics and promote growth with hormones. He also gives some more disturbing news concerning the misleading labelling of products as in "whole grain" bread or flour that consists for a large percent out of refined white wheat. More than before I got the impression that Big Food employs a stable of writers instructed to mislead the public, a stable that gets larger each time the government requires more labeling; writers that, I wonder, may have received their training at Fox News or the Drudge Report.

Bittman wants to convince his readers that their individual actions matter, for instance by not overeating, in particular by not eating junk (mostly fast) food. He argues that by eating less meat and more plants (Pollan's big message) one does actually have an impact on the Cafo system of livestock raising which is cruel to the animals, bad for the environment, wasteful of the plant foods raised to feed them (grown increasingly on deforested land) and, through the use of anti-biotics and hormones likely dangerous to our health [the land used to produce the animal food could be used to grow a diversity of crops to feed more people especially those already used to a mostly vegeterian diet]. On p. 20 there's a photo of a cattle Cafo that reminds me of those my son once took for a Greenpeace campaign, the ones of cattle "living" in inches of their own excrement encouraged me to eat less beef and to find the little we still eat in a local farmers market. Butchers who slaughter their own meat used to be around until 30 years ago (the father of one of my students was one of them) but they are very hard to find now. One (expensive) butcher who buys his meats from farmers he knows and how raise their animals in the traditional free ranging ways, was pictured in the NYT (10-21-09), the meat is labeled with the names of the farms and a chef gives cooking advice. Ah, but to be able to afford life in the Chelsea section of New York City! Most of the red meat we eat is venison shot by one of the craftsmen at the College where I taught for 30 years, buffalo that is carried by an small food store in an odd place in a nearby town or, much more rarely, wild boar from a specialty shop in Philadelphia which involves an "expedition."

As I read along I was wondering once more how long it takes for a message like Pollan's or Bittman's to become the practiced golden rule of every one's behavior. It's not just a matter of education or of the poor and third world people's catching up with the richer and educated, for the richer with all their education and their media outlets, even the Wall Street Journal, that promote a more environmentally (and healthier) lifestyle are slow to modify their individual ways of living. In the 1970s, as a member of Social Science teaching panels for an MA degree and while teaching courses in "Modernisation" and "Economic Development," I examined such issues as limited resources in the context of the Club of Rome report (1970) and Lester Brown's The Twenty-Ninth Day and used FAO statistics showing that meat consumption increased when income went up (a fact that Bittman makes clear with a graph (p.12). I had the students write on such topics as: "Can a meat-eater tell the poor nations 'There is not enough food for every one'?" And two decades before Silent Spring we were made aware of the problems caused by chemical fertilizers that then began to be used in the Netherlands. Individual lifestyle modification seems an ineffectual alternative to governmental action. My own students all too often dismissed the idea that individual efforts had an impact; International Relations majors pointed at the examples of nations using boycotts, embargoes or other sanctions without much success; Social Science majors, generally more sympathetic to the idea, expressed their doubts pointing at boycotts of supermarkets, department stores or specific items, all of these with moderate or no success. The best chance was through such legislation as the prohibition of trade in endangered animals or the banning of DDT. Not a few were willing to do their part by contributing to organisations that would have more impact. Greenpeace was one of those (a big improvement over the Eighties and Nineties when that group was used by Conservative politicians as a scapegoat for any and all restrictive laws and regulations for example on logging. Elsewhere Greenpeace is not as easily maligned as shown by an article in the NYT of 10/7/09 that announced the cooperation of four giants in the cattle industry to help fight deforestation in the rain forest. And my daughter (who once collected money from door to door - so as to secure her brother's salary when he worked for Greenpeace) sent me a Treehugger.com item and after reading that, I clicked on their food+health link where I found a 10/7/09 news story about the Baltimore Md. school district instituting a meatless Monday for its 80,000 students, as well as the organic school gardens and a policy of locally grown produce. I am sure that the current generation of student may object, but if the school system persists, incoming students will accept it as a matter of course.

Bittman is aware of the difficulty of altering one's eating habits and suggests one carries such healthy snacks as fruits or raw carrots to satisfy a craving between meals. And, he repeats, one should not eat snacks, and foods in general, that are designed by Big Food to increase such cravings. It is important to record that the suggestions he makes are based on his personal (and successful) attempts to reduce weight (and keep it off), lower his blood pressure and remedy a pre-diabetes condition. Retired and thus not faced with the problem of access to a cupboard or refrigerator, I can say it works (though easy availability, such as the presence of junk food and soda machines in schools is commonly said to have the opposite effect and it is reported as progress that schools are eliminating them). More interestingly, when I am out working in the garden for a long stretch or out birding and thus burning more calories than when I am reading or word processing, I have fewer cravings in any case. But even when I am totally absorbed in something while sitting down, I have no cravings and may even be unaware that is is lunch time. And it may also be that my early upbringing and wandering (not luxurious) life until I came to the US and became an academic, made it easier to revert to more meager eating habits.
[Addendum: An item in the news is germane to this discussion as well as to the debate on the cost of health insurance. It appears that SAFEWAY, the nation's 3d largest grocery chain, spends about $1 billion on health insurance for its workers. One of the remedies initiated in some places is offering healthy food choices in companies' cafeterias in place of the usual menu choices now available on the premise that a healthy person needs less medical care and thus reduce the cost of health insurance. Sounds like a great idea and perhaps SAFEWAY could lead the way by selling fewer weight-gain, etc. items as a way to safer eating habits.]

One Sunday as we were birding around Cape May we stopped off at C-View, the closest thing to a European pub with beer and food (their beer selection is not as wide as the neon signs suggest and their wines, California mostly, are what John Mortimer's Rumpole would, good naturedly, call plonk. But they actually have a nice selection of salads and everything is prepared on the spot. Bittman allows his readers to "cheat" once in a while and that Sunday I did by ordering "mild" chicken wings. I had thought about them but opted for a salad, however as we were sitting down among an unexpectedly large and repeatedly noisy crowd, I took the wings after all. It was a "football Sunday" and the many overhead tv.s featured 5 simultaneous games. At every table around us people were having wings, often everyone at a table, and several beers (at least we had wine hoping for the famous "French miracle"). The wings were delicious, but "5 napkins greasy." Then, on 10-13-09, the NYT carried an article about the rising cost of "wings" and their replacement by "boneless wings" that are actually pieces of breast. It turns out that wings are the preferred food of restaurants that cater to football fans (the idea is to sell beer!) and one one chain of 600 buys 57 million pound of wings a year (of which I eat some 20 a year - my salad eating partners nibbling on 2 or three of each order). The article astounded me and it also made me feel rather virtuous, though it made it clear how little effect my not eating wings at all would have on the battery system of raising chicken. Maybe the NFL should carry ads for Bittman's and Pollan's books or flash their message across the screen each time there's a wait for a replay.

Among his environmental concerns, Bittman censors of course Big Food's need for monoculture - with its use of pesticides etc. - of its products. But while he favors organic farming, he wonders about how organic a head of lettuce that travels 3000 miles really is if one considers the carbon footprint of transportation (he also has tables showing the energy calories per calorie of food that go into modern farming, not to speak of producing the packaging). As foods begin to loose their nutrition gradually after having been harvested, several days on a truck before arriving in a store, are also a problem. Thus he favors buying local and "eating fresh" - bringing one's own reusable bags and baskets - from small farmers who use traditional methods (if they are truly traditional they are also practically organic as the agro-chemical industry did not really take off until the last half of the 20th century. On this subject several recent experiences deserve mention.

One is a visit to my daughter's who took us to a farmers market in a Washington DC suburb. On the way, my 11 year old grandson, who was to get us there if I lost sight of his mother's car (that was not big enough to carry us all), explained about the market and its wide selections and added: "It's open all year, but what they are selling in the winter I don't know." No doubt this was a topic of discussion at home, but it remains a problem for "locally grown" advocates in cold climates, unless the foods come from cold frames (how much can be grown for a Sunday market stall in those or in (plastic?) and unheated green houses. That day, the market was well supplied with organics (including meats) or "all natural" produce from individual farms that guaranteed that no pesticides were used. In that upper-middle income neighborhood the buyers looked like people one sees at a college home-coming and they had canvas bags with foreign language logos or handwoven shopping baskets. I felt like being on vacation in a French town.

The other instance is the appearance of folders from the Wegmans supermarket chain at annual health fair at the College where I used to teach. Wegmans, an up-scale outfit (whose workers voted it the best employer of 2008), just opened a gigantic store in a new "lifestyle" shopping center that replaced a 150-year old farm whose heirs could not resist the millions their land was worth after a four lane highway was put in next to it. Called Wegmans NATURE'S Marketplace
it promised "simple ways to go green" on the cover which is illustrated with the ingredients for "quick organic lunches" (not a few of them pre-packaged and processed). True enough, the store has a much wider selection of organics than the two other supermarkets that recently opened in a shopping center only 15 minutes from this new one. But the carbon footprint of the new store is also gigantic, let alone the waste of duplication, even quadruplication of offering - other than the organics - most of the same stuff. Perhaps one should count one's blessings, however small, but considering how quickly the two earlier stores reduced their organics (and European cheeses) when customers passed them up, I wonder how long Wegmans can afford to keep its selections.
Apparently Wegmans is serious and it even has created an experimental farm to show the growers of its produce how to adopt organic ways, one picture in the Menu magazine for the Fall of 2009, showing an immense hoop/plastic green house (that could be the answer to my grandson's question about fresh produce in a cold climate). But what is organic about plastic? One of the flyers that we were given shows Wegmans "wellness keys" of which there are 15, for ex. L for lean, LS for low sodium and a white heart in a red circle for "Heart healthy," any one of which can be found on Wegmans pre-packaged foods or its recipes. The menus are well presented with appetizing illustrations and precise instructions. They are directed at the up-scale person too busy to do a lot of preparation; they include prepared items and specify what equipment is needed (mostly what type of cooking vessel - available in the Kitchen Dept.). I was amused that for one recipe for a cauliflower gratin a food processer was required to grind Ceasar croutons [available in the] (Prepared Foods) [section of the store] having first mixed them with basting oil when for another gratin the recipe asks for 1 cup of Italian Classics [a section in the store] Seasoned Bread Crumbs.

There remains the question of what happens to "organics" if Big Food enters the field for real when retailers like Wall Mart and Wegmans go green? I am reminded of the fact that a recent E.coli scare was illustrated by the media with packages of organic spinach grown in California on very large fields.

Incidentally, Food Matters reveals an unrelated aspect of our modern culture. On the page with bibliographical info there is also an extensive legal disclaimer absolving the publisher and author of any responsibility for risks incurred from application of the book's advice. If required the reader should consult a competent professional. This is interesting for it suggests that "self help" books and articles may be dangerous to their readers. A still more serious assumption can be drawn, nl. the readiness to sue may become generally inhibiting of the spread of information.

There are some problems with Bittman's arguments that result, I think by the journalistic treatment of his material. He states for example that "overproduction drives overconsumption which in turn is bad for our bodies and the environment. . ." (p.18) It sounds alright, but as long as people in the world are underfed there is less a problem of overproduction than of poor distribution. On p.26 he classifies cows pigs and chickens as herbivores, while already in High School, I learned that pigs and chickens are omnivores (in fact critics of organic and anti-animal cruelty advocates have defended modern poultry raising methods as healthier than free range chickens who are likely to forage for insects on dunghills). In discussing the history of governmental nutrition advice (p.40ff) he refers to the action to prevent scurvy in the mid-nineteenth century by the British Government mandating that seaman be given lime juice. But such action had already been taken by the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. On p.98 he states "Wild fish, obviously is organic." But on the next page he refers to yellow fin tuna as containing high mercury levels. Wild fish may not have the problems of farmed fish raised with anti-biotics and growth hormones, but the oceans have become so polluted (including with escaped farm fish (i.e. salmon), that wild Alaskan salmon cannot be labeled "organic" even when caught in the apparently pristine waters off Alaska. (Also see NYT, Nov. 10-09, p.B2, on "Expanding Islands of Trash", one of which, in the Pacific, is larger than the state of Texas and contains plastic fragments like confetti that absorb such unsolvalble chemicals like DDT, PCBs which are then eaten by fish where they accumulate ready for the predator at the top of the food chain, i.e. humans). All too often Bittman sounds like he's responding to an t.v. interviewer in a trhee minute slot or like a student activist as in the section header (p. 23) "Cheap Soy and cheap corn yield cheap meat (and cheap lives)." I also cannot escape the impression that, however useful Bittman's avocacy of environmental sanity is, he inserted the relevant material to give his book greater appeal; he's obviously riding the wave of environmentalism whose crest is becoming fairly crowded.

Relevant to the concerns of Pollan, Bittman and the like is current report on feeding the world population by 2050 when the population will be more than 9 billion requiring a 70% increase in food production according to the UN's FAO. Verlyn Klinkenborg, writing an editorial in the NYT (10-28-09) suggests that if present production practices continue this will mean an even greater destruction of the world's forests with its deleterious effects on the world's climate [and consequently on shortages of water] and that the most likely solution requires that we shift our thinking to include "the habitat of all other species as the frame of our activities." He also resurrects an 1818 statement by James Madison that it cannot be right "for all of the Earth's resources to 'be made subservient to the use of man.'" VK concludes with an echo of the 1970s debate on limited resources and the arguments made by Bittman: "It will mean a new idea of food equity, a fairer and far more balanced way of sharing and distributing food to reduce the devastating imbalance between the gluttony of some nations and the famine of others [. . . ] Above all it will mean restraint" [. . .]And as I see it, water may well be a more serious problem than expected by the UN report, f.ex. in the production of the parts and assemblage of a single car several hundreds of thousands gallons are needed, not all of which will be recoverable for human use.