Read an Excerpt
Part I:
The Theory
Whether you and I and a few others will renew the world someday remains to be seen. But within ourselves we must renew it each day.
Hermann Hesse
A Kitchen Philosophy
Where We Are Now
Public concern over the quality of our national diet has been growing lately at an astonishing rate. Today most people are aware that serious doubts have been raised regarding the safety and healthfulness of our commercial food supply—even if they choose not to act upon that awareness. More and more, the historically recent practice of consuming industrially processed, chemically colored, flavored, freshened, preserved foods is being called into question, and the answers that have been coming in are far from reassuring.
Among the avalanche of material on the subject, scientific and otherwise, one carefully researched and far-reaching document stands out: the official report of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Need, Dietary Goals for the United States, first published in February 1977. In essence, it states that “our diets have changed radically within the last 50 years, with great and often very harmful effects on our health. These dietary changes represent as great a threat to public health as smoking. Too much fat, too much sugar and salt, can be and are linked directly to heart disease, cancer, obesity, and stroke, among other killer diseases. In all, six of the ten leading causes of death in the United States have been linked to our diet.”
To help reverse this situation, the report goes on to recommend a general increase in the consumption of complex carbohydrates such as whole grains, vegetables, and fruits; a decrease in the consumption of meat, and foods high in fat, sugar, and salt; an increase in the consumption of fish and poultry; and the substitution of polyunsaturated fats (vegetable oils) for saturated fats such as butter, lard, and shortening. It also urges reduced consumption of nonnutritive additives, colorings, flavors, and preservatives.
Looking beyond purely nutritional concerns, the report states that “the social, cultural, and psychological significance of food in our lives can scarcely be overestimated. Sharing of food is one of the prime social contacts; provision of food is one of the prime signs of caring … Nothing is more divisive than when people eat a different fare in different rooms. At a time when more and more meals are being taken away from the home, removed from the company of family members, perhaps more consideration should be given to the possibility that this trend is a factor that substantially contributes to the stresses found in modern family life … If you eat enough precooked, frozen, reheated, foil-and-plastic lunches out of machines, part of you will starve to death.”
In statements such as these, the committee tacitly acknowledges that food is more than just the sum of its nutrients.
Choosing Our Food
Of all the variables affecting our health, food is the easiest to handle, to alter, to tailor consciously to our needs; therefore, it can often be used to counterbalance other variables. Choosing our food can then become a balancing act through which we adjust to the total context in which we live.
To help us make informed choices in such a vital matter, let’s take a look at some basic aspects of the quality of our nourishment.
“Natural” or “Artificial”?
The major difference among the foods available today comes down to quality. A long, thin carrot grown with chemical fertilizers and sprayed with pesticides is just not the same as a short, fat carrot grown with natural compost and unsprayed. The difference in quality may be a serious cause for concern: research has proven that pesticides and other petroleum-derived chemicals are dangerous; they have been implicated in the causation of cancer, liver and brain damage, high blood pressure, birth defects, and genetic mutations. Some are lethal: only one drop of the pesticide TEPP on the skin will kill a person.
Not all the dangers inherent in the thousands of chemicals now routinely used in food production have yet been proven; however, as Dr. Jacqueline Verret, a biochemist and researcher with the FDA for 15 years, writes in Eating May Be Hazardous to Your Health (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), “All of us are involved in a gigantic experiment of which we shall never know the outcome—at least in our lifetime.” She goes on to state that “far more critical than acute poisoning is the subtle, long-term insidious poisoning of the body by certain chemicals that work slowly or cumulatively and whose ravages may not become evident for years … We know that chemicals may leave their mark not only on the recipient but on future generations, through mutations which might not be detected for a hundred years or more—if at all.”
The quality of today’s food is changed not only by the elements added to it, but also by what is done to it: flaking, texturizing, pasteurizing, homogenizing, freezing, canning, condensing, spinning, juicing, et cetera. These processes alter and even destroy molecular structure; what effect this tampering has on us can only be intuited at this time.
We do know that the chemical treatment of food has been shown to be generally dangerous. Therefore, it seems safest to return to more traditional ways—growing our foods with natural methods and eating them fresh. If we look at the human body as part of the whole ecosystem, it becomes clear that we are built so as to digest foods as they grow in nature. Natural foods have been proven good over millennia. The new “improved,” texturized, artificially colored and flavored foods, on the other hand, are the product of doodlers in the food technology departments of large corporations, and in the few decades that these foods have been around, their record for enhancing health is pretty dismal. I’ve never run across anyone who reported feeling better by switching to processed foods, but I’ve encountered many people whose health improved dramatically after a changeover to a more old-fashioned way of eating.
Nutrients: Quantity, Quality, and Proportion
Much has been written about our bodies’ need for specific quantities of vitamins, minerals, protein, carbohydrates, fats. What is generally overlooked is the fact that, in whole foods, such elements appear in a certain proportion to one another. This is a crucial factor, for all natural foods contain the micronutrients required for their complete metabolism. Artificially induced changes in the structure of foodstuffs upset the relationship of these micronutrients to one another.
When refining, processing, and concentration alter the original proportion of nutrients, the food in question may then not be properly metabolized. This could be interpreted as a “nutritional deficiency.” For example, it is well known that taking one of the B vitamins as a supplement increases the body’s need for all the other B vitamins; thus, if you take a B6 pill but neglect to take the rest of the B-complex, you are in effect creating a deficiency of B-complex. Paradoxically, you would become vitamin-deficient by taking vitamins.
Unfortunately, we do not know what is actually the correct proportion of nutrients for our optimum health. Nature, on the other hand, probably knows a bit more. We might consider the proportional relationships between the elements present in mother’s milk, the human food par excellence, as a fairly trustworthy parameter.
Based on figures obtained from the Nutrition Almanac, it can be noted that vitamins comprise the smallest total amount of elements present; next in quantity come the minerals; then comes protein, then fats, next carbohydrates, and finally, water. In cooked grains, the same graduation occurs, except that fats and protein trade places. The same happens generally with fruits and vegetables, both cooked and raw. Meat, fish, and fowl, on the other hand, are totally devoid of carbohydrates, and their proportion of protein to water is only 1 to 4; in cooked brown rice this proportion is 1 to 27, in steamed greens it’s 1 to 43, and even in a baked potato it’s as high as 1 to 37. This may explain in part why high-animal protein diets require the addition of large amounts of additional water to the diet as well.
In mother’s milk, there is four times as much fat as protein. In cooked oats, as well as in many fresh fruits, there’s twice as much protein as fat; in wheat flour there’s seven times as much, and in cooked beans and vegetables, the amount of protein can go as high as ten times the amount of fat. Hence, although adults probably need less fat than infants, we could assume that in a fully vegetarian regime a little extra oil or fat would be easily tolerated by the system. In raw food regimes, milk, nuts, and nut butters (which have 3 to 10 times more fat than protein), would provide the extra fat; a little vegetable oil in cooking would do the same.
However, if proportionately too much oil is used, there could be a metabolic call for a proportional rise in the other elements: for more minerals (salt), more protein (meat or other animal food), more carbohydrates (white flour or sugar). The vicious spiral can start at any point: for example, a high mineral (salt) intake may result in cravings for additional fats, protein, carbohydrates, and water—put them all together and you’re “overeating.”
