My relationship with food is not unique. I love to eat, mostly love to cook, and sometime soon again, love to feed friends. I have gained and lost the same 30 pounds so many times that I can’t count them. I exercise at least four times a week and, at 77, am on the right side of fit for my age. I don’t eat junk food — well, the occasional pretzel or piece of cheese, but no Doritos or french fries — and my sugar consumption is limited to a teaspoon in my coffee in the morning, and the sugar in Trader Joe’s bag dinners or the cakes I make for my husband and for family dinners. I sample these only to make sure they are not poison. I eat too much red meat, not necessarily because I prefer it, but because it’s easier than figuring out what to do with fish or addressing the poultry white meat/dark meat differing preferences of my husband and me.
However, food and I have never been friends. Due to weight maintenance we have an adversarial relationship. I own too many diet or low fat cookbooks. The things I like to cook are not necessarily the things I should be eating. I bake a lot; but bread, cake and cookies are not as nourishing as broccoli, kale and quinoia. We eat a fair number of ethnic foods, particularly Thai and Korean, but again due to differences in tastes (my husband does not tolerate heat/spice), I find the unseasoned versions a bit bland.
Sometime in the last year or so I was asked to shadow an online course called Food, Culture and the Environment through the University of California at Berkeley, in case the instructor was not available to answer questions or comment on student posts. For reasons beyond my knowledge, the course was not offered then. But UCBerkeley has recently offered it to Cal alumni, staff, and friends. I am taking the course now.
I am learning from neuroscientists, anthropologists, chefs and even a statistician about what food means in the context of different cultures, and how the ways in which we produce food are leading us to poorer health, not better health. I’m adding fiber to our meals to nurture my colonic microbiome, and thinking about food in an entirely different way from the ways I have thought about food in the past.
A character in the recent novel Deacon King Kong forages food from empty lots under freeways in Brooklyn. This seemed truly strange and dangerous to me until I watched an interview with a very fit UCBerkeley statistics professor and long-distance runner, who began his foraging by wondering what plants grew along his running routes. Once he learned the names of many of the plants his interest turned to how many of them were edible. It turned out that most of them were. When his interviewer asked if he worried about dog pee on the plants or poisons in the ground where the plants grew, he shrugged. Dog pee is water soluble so washing the plants was about all that was needed to insure their safety as food, and studies he did with a student research group confirmed that plants carried very little of the harmful toxins in the ground in which they grew. I’m not heading out the door to forage for oxalis any time soon, but I’ll add dandelion greens to my salads for sure.
I’m studying what black cooks did to support the civil rights movement in the 60s and what Scandinavian chefs do with insects in meals. (That one may be a bridge too far for me.) The connections between what we eat or don’t eat and how our environment supports what we eat, are fascinating to me. For instance, I learned that South Koreans ate mostly grains in the 60s. While they still eat more grain than anything today, their meat consumption has increased by almost 600%. As South Korea’s economy grew and it became easier to import more food, their diet changed from an overwhelming proportion of grain, to grain plus meat, sugar and more produce.
I am making friends with food by an oblique path. While I have always loved to pour over a new cookbook, I’ve not been much interested in how food is produced, who eats what and why, or what the dangers of a Standard American Diet (SAD for short, but the word fits) has done to make us less healthy and energized. It has even taught me that my singular emphasis on weight has focused the whole Western Developed World on calories rather than the more complex needs of our gut(s) to get and remain healthy.
I have no room and not enough sun in my tiny Berkeley yard to start a vegetable garden. But as I learn more about food, cooking and eating, I see food as something to be cherished rather than feared. And I see it as an adventure I’m only now embarking on, without a specific goal (other than learning and increased health) or endpoint, except the date on which I leave our lovely planet.
