It just might be that the healthiest thing one can do about diet is to ignore everything that even refers to food. No more Food Network, scrolling through the All Recipes website or drooling over magazines. Food happens to be one of my very favourite things in life, so why am I saying this? Simply because it seems we just can’t win — everything we like turns out to be bad for us if we just wait long enough for the right study to come along — and even when it seems like we are doing the right thing, we are getting it wrong.
Consider the recent news about quinoa, that lovely grain that for so many has become a healthier and tastier alternative to rice and other carbs. It turns out that quinoa has become so popular among food conscious North Americans that in Peru, where it is grown in quantity, it has become too expensive for the average citizen. Most of it goes to the export market and Peruvians are increasingly turning to imported processed foods as a substitute. They are cheaper, though not very nutritious, of course.
We have a habit of doing that with food, those of us in more affluent nations. Remember how the production of biofuels helped the price of corn to skyrocket in Mexico, depriving families of their staple tortillas?
New York mayor Michael Bloomberg recently led a full-blown assault on the consumption of soda pop, those famously high-calorie, low-nutrition drinks that have gone from being a treat to an addiction in only two generations. The 10-ounce bottle, a once-a-week luxury has morphed into the 32-ounce several-times-a-day habit that has helped produce even more of what our Russian exchange student referred to 15 years ago as “thick Americans”.
But wait, as the TV game show host might say, there’s more. Huffington Post editor Joshua Ostroff wrote this week that the ban on over-16-ounce soft drinks in New York has the insidious effect of pushing parents to pump their kids with fruit juices, thinking they are healthier alternatives.
Such juices, Ostroff says, have as much or more sugar than pop, but it’s easy to get into the habit of chugging them back by the gallon because we think what is natural must also be healthy. Forget that what is sold as “natural” is often a lab-reconfigured version. A single glass of apple juice has all the sugar of a half-dozen apples, without all the fiber and skin nutrients or appetite satisfaction that the whole fruit offers.
One of the more interesting cultural kickbacks of our continent’s obsession with food is that it seems we are increasingly likely to prepare and consume “comfort foods”, perhaps because we live our lives ironically — bad television shows are a “guilty pleasure” and so are the deep-fried paeans to simpler times on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, where host Guy Fieri fist-bumps the creators of 2,000-calorie burgers, “good” because they are made from scratch.
I’m not preaching here — I’m as guilty as anyone when it comes to ignoring the best food advice I’ve ever heard, from Omnivore’s Dilemma author Michael Palin. No, it’s not, “Don’t buy your food where you buy your gas,” although that’s a good one. The best quote was the simplest: “Eat real food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Although if we care about the nice people in Peru we might want to check where the quinoa in our kitchen cupboard was grown.
Lorne Eckersley is the publisher of the Creston Valley Advance.