More than worth the money I paid for it.
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food
I’m off on a quest to read a book a week in 2010. In classic overachiever mode here, I’m going to start with the book I read the week of Christmas 2009, In Defense of Food.
Some of you may be shocked I haven’t read this book already, since it ties in with a lot of what I believe about how we should eat. Honestly, when it came out, I read the reviews and thought, Yep, I agree, and didn’t feel the need to read it right away since I suspected Michael Pollan was just preaching to my choir.
But Ashby received the book for Christmas this year, and I quickly appropriated it.
I did enjoy it, and I highly recommend it to you if you are interested in the food-industrial complex or if you’re trying to eat healthy and local. Pollan does a nice job of de-myth-ifying lots of what we believe about food, showing us how conventional wisdom came to be — why we think eating low-fat is good, or why we think carbs are bad — and showing that many of these common assumptions are half-truths at best.
I found one thing frustrating about the book, though. While Pollan spends a lot of time debunking common food assumptions, he does not devote time to his own original research about food. And he’s up front about that, by the way — it’s not a hidden agenda. But I just found myself wanting the same rigor applied to what we ought to know about food, as he applies to that which we think we know, but don’t.
Ah, but part of his point is that we haven’t done the research, and/or don’t yet have the technology, to understand how food really works. At any rate, I found this book a nice companion to Marion Nestle’s What to Eat
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I’ve been thinking about food a lot this summer. If you’ve read this blog very long, you know that I spend a lot of time figuring out how to please a very picky 10yo vegetarian at the table. And perhaps it was the media blitz surrounding Frank Bruni’s new book Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-time Eater
I love no holiday more than Thanksgiving — a gathering of family and friends, careful preparations and a groaning table.
And I have been thinking about how this feels like a very positive part of my life, this love of food and sharing it with my friends and family. And I notice that the 10yo — honestly — could care less about food. She eats every day, but much more because she is hungry than because she likes food, per se. She’s a fan of Cheetos like any other 10yo, but her food cravings and desires don’t go far beyond that.
There’s a part of me that can read all that and say, OK, probably a healthy thing. Why on earth would you be concerned about a child who eats when she’s hungry?
I’m not really. But I wonder about what created this love of food in me, and I wonder if there’s a way to consciously share that. I enjoy thinking about how to make better tasting, more nutritious meals for my family. And in this day of instant anything, that seems to me like an enormous gift to them.
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