The Elegant Sufficiency

Michael Pollan at the Writers Festival

I’ll be honest… I haven’t read Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food) so what he had to say last Saturday at the Sydney Writers' Festival was fascinating, if not surprising.
On his request, moderator Caroline Baum had taken Pollan to the Sydney Fish Markets, and to an Australian supermarket. He showed the audience Exhibit A, Yoplait Smackers, and Exhibit B, an Omega 3-enhanced bread that “promises healthy brain development”. Among the bread’s ingredients was “tuna oil”. “This is a tuna sandwich even before you open the can of tuna,” he joked, before going on to say that adding Omega-3 to processed food is a very "reductive" approach to nutrition. He continued this theme on ABC's 7.30 Report on Tuesday night (transcript and video here) when he told Kerry O’Brien (who was hugely amused by the concept of the "soul of a carrot"):

“We know carrots are good for you, right? People have been eating them for a long time and the assumption was that what was good in cancer preventing in the carrot was the beta carotene. What makes it orange. So we extracted that and we made these supplement pills and we gave them to people and low and behold in certain populations like people who drink a lot would get sicker, were more likely to get cancer on beta carotene and the scientists kind of scratched their head. There is a couple of explanations. We don't know. But one may be that the beta carotene is not the key ingredient. You know there are 50 other carotenes in carrots. Food is incredibly complex. It's a wilderness, you know, we don't know what's going on deep in the soul of a carrot. And we shouldn't kid ourselves to think we can reduce it to these chemicals.”

My notes below on other themes he touched on at the Writers' Festival:

• In California’s Central Valley, vineyards are being ripped up to make way for almond crops, which are now one of the most profitable crops in the US. But almond trees only bloom for 10-14 days in February so there aren’t enough bees to do the pollination job. So now, every February, 60% of America’s honey bees are shipped across the country — others are brought in from Australia. With bees from all over the world mingling, it becomes, he says, “a great bee brothel”, trading viruses and parasites. The Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV) has been implicated in colony collapse disorder in honey bees. Bee owners get $140 a box for the process. The bees are fed high-fructose corn syrup to get them in shape. Industrial agriculture is stressing bees and monoculture is the “original sin of agriculture”; nature doesn’t work that way. It may be an efficient method of production, but it’s not a resilient one.
• Caroline Baum asked Pollan how we can get people to care about food. Pollan responded by saying that when you can tell stories that link what’s on someone’s plate to what’s happening in the wider world, when you can tell people a narrative, a story, that’s when people will start to care. (This to me, is the most interesting sort of food writing.)
• He talked about the carbon and moral footprint of eating meat and predicted that we won’t be eating the way we do now in the future.
• He was asked about the crazy portion sizes in the States. Apparently they got bigger in the Seventies, when the price of raw materials was negligible. Companies such as McDonald’s were faced with two options: reduce prices, a bad move in business, or increase portions. The latter option won out. He drew gasps from the audience when he said it was possible to get a 64 ounce portion of soda in the US — half a gallon. That’s about eight cups, 1.9 litres, 4 pints. With food prices skyrocketing, it remains to be seen whether the super-sizing will continue.
• In one of the most interesting things he had to say, Pollan said that eating ethically in the 21st century is a complex decision-making process that depends on your values. What is your priority: your concern for your health? For the environment? For animals? Because those values might conflict. Organic rules, for example, “were invented before climate change was an issue”, and organics can have a very high carbon footprint. Work out what you value, Pollan said. “The key thing is to introduce values, not just value to your shopping decision.” As a result, we should be trying to get as much information as we can about what we buy. Transparency is what matters. 
• The refrain he has repeated time and again: “Don’t eat things your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise: Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.”

Pollan can also be heard on Radio National’s Life Matters program here.

A New Week + Recipe Scout 12

A ghastly week behind me; a new (brighter...) one ahead in which my father’s health improves (please…) and his doctor considers releasing him from hospital, and in which I write a rather fine, rather clever 2500-word profile on the rather appealing, rather clever Sydney actor-writer Brendan Cowell, get to the gym and take a healthy packed lunch to work every day, let nothing pass my lips stronger than a Single Origin Roasters skim latte, and count the varieties of food I’m eating.
Have followed with interest Limes & Lycopene blogger Kathryn Elliott’s charting of the varieties of food she eats. “If you try to eat a greater variety of foods, you will be healthier for it,” writes Kathryn, who tallies between 30 and 35 different foods a day in her own diet. (And, I warn you, no cheating by counting the Brie de Meaux and the Parmigiano-Reggiano as two foods! That’s one and it’s called dairy!)
But Kathryn, I have questions:

• If I have miso soup at work — made from a packet mix but one without MSG — can I count the spring onions and wakame and tofu that rehydrate with the addition of boiling water as three varieties of food? And what about the miso sauce that they provide for you to mix in?
• And do pizza toppings count? And, if they do, is there a statute of limitations on how many days old the pizza can be before those toppings have lost their food value?
• Do freshly ground black pepper and Murray River salt flakes have any credentials here?
• What about a clove of garlic crushed in a lazy pasta dish and the chopped parsley from my sad balcony herb pot that I might consider using too? And hey, how about the olive oil?
• If I have muesli, do I count everything I put in it, even if I might only end up having an eighth of a teaspoon or less of the ingredient?
• What about raspberry jam, eaten with a croissant on a Sunday morning?
• And how about the store-bought spinach dip I’m hoeing into right now (and the pinenuts it claims to have)? Is that two ingredients, three if you count the rice crackers?

In the meantime, while I anxiously wait for answers, here are the latest recipes I’m adding to my Recipe Scout Index:

1. Salmon Rillettes on the David Lebovitz blog.
2. Rick Stein’s Fillet of Turbot with Clams and Chardonnay on BBC Food.
3. Chickpea, Almond and Sesame Spread on A Life (Time) of Cooking.
4. Gourmet Traveller's fine-looking Lasagne. 
5. "Salmon Noodle Soup for What Ails You" on Cook & Eat.
6. Algarve Buzz's Portuguese Codfish Cakes (Pasteis de Bacalhau).
7. Indian Squid Curry on Rasa Malaysia.
8. Bake until Bubbly Macaroni Cheese on Bay Area Bites.
9. Saveur's Spinach with Pinenuts and Raisins.
10. Strawberry Panzanella on 101 Cookbooks.

The Packed Lunch

Stumbled on this fascinating New York Times blog post about "Smart Eating at Work". The passion and vehemence of the commenters responding to a list of nuts and brand-name granola and fibre bars, yoghurt and crackers, are as riveting as the post itself.
It's a subject that's on my mind: am smug that I took my lunch to work four days out of five this week to avoid dire cafeteria offerings — and limited lunch options in my office's neighbourhood. A leftover cannellini bean, roasted field mushroom, silverbeet and goats cheese salad of my own invention (a little odd to start with, didn't travel terribly well, I won't be sharing the "recipe", but at least I knew who had prepared it and what was in it); leftover meatloaf (now that was a fine thing; wish I could remember what I put in it); a chicken, avocado and um, mayonnaise sandwich on grain bread (can't go wrong with that...). And, of course, fruit and, in my desk drawer, roasted salted cashews (I guess if I'm serious about eating well I need to make a shift to unsalted raw ones?).
I'm on the hunt for more packed-lunch suggestions — throw them at me — and eagerly waiting for Lucy's promised ideas. The first one she shared with me was brilliant. Apart from the afternoon emissions.

A chickpea salad: canned chickpeas, drained, rinsed, drained. Chopped tomato. Chopped herbs (parsley, mint, basil). Grated parmesan. A little chilli. Lemon juice. Olive oil. Sea salt. Ground black pepper. Excellent.

A Million Stories in the City

It's a long time since I've known my neighbours ... living in big apartment buildings tends to do that. But thanks to a brief conversation with my next-door neighbour in the lift this week, I think I know an alarming amount about her. Had noticed her before: an unnervingly skinny woman with a hard face, always in gym gear. I suspect too, that her apartment is the source of the regular doof-doof bass beat that drives me nuts. In the lift this week she was again in tight-fitting lycra and I smiled and asked her if she'd been out exercising. She volunteered more than I expected: "Yes, but I can only walk ... otherwise the baby jiggles too much," she said, patting her stomach. She hadn't put on any weight that I could see — there was no bulge at all — and I asked her how many months pregnant she was. Five-and-a-half months, she told me, then clutched at her non-existent chest and, grimacing in horror, said "and I've got boobs!" I think I shook my head sympathetically but my head was full of images of this malnourished woman pounding the streets, trying to throw off her imagined new breasts. I hope there's someone watching over her, and her unborn child. As a result of the encounter, I read this piece in The Age about eating disorders with more interest than I might normally.

The Sleepover

She's soundly asleep, teddy one side, dolly the other. I'm completely exhausted after play, park, catering and endless toileting. (Simply can't understand how anyone has the energy to do parenting permanently.) I gave her meatballs and spaghetti: onion, garlic, mushrooms and prosciutto fried 'til soft; that then mixed with grated carrot (insert vegetable wherever possible — isn't that what you do?), an egg, beef mince, pepper, grated nutmeg, a little chopped tomato left over from lunch, the last of some fontina and manchego, grated. All rolled into tidy little balls. Fried. Mini grissini sticks to keep her quite while I finished off — "needs hummus," she announced. All of two years and one month she is. Transfixed by the Wiggles. Batons of zucchini that she guzzled. Less enthusiastic about the beans and sugar-snap peas. She didn't seem to notice that there wasn't much of a sauce with her moist-as-anything meatballs and spaghetti ... that her aunt had neglected to stock up on canned tomatoes (how does that happen?) ... and that the homemade tomato relish really wasn't much of a substitute. The Sara Lee Absolutely Boysenberry a hit. There's still two-thirds of a tub of it left. Good thing my self-conceived, no-alcohol (19 days now) and now no-bread diet doesn't make mention of icecream.

Changing the Subject Now

Moving right along now... two brief articles from The New York Times health pages that might interest. As I throw back a coffee and wonder why I'm feeling so exhausted, I'm reading that new research has confirmed the value of exercise over say, coffee or energy drinks, in combating fatigue. The other article — on a topic that's on my mind right now — is about binge-drinking. Touching on cultural differences, author Benedict Carey writes: "In a Japanese island village, Takashima, people knew a drinking occasion had gone completely off the dials if villagers began to sing or, wilder still, to dance." He adds that western cultures "are more likely to excuse binge drinking as a needed mental vacation" and quotes Brown University professor Dwight Heath: “An awful lot of cultures have institutionalized bingeing as a kind of time out like Mardi Gras or New Year’s Eve, a culturally recognized period where a certain amount of acting out is acceptable." In Australia, as our Prime Minister has identified, that culturally recognised period seems to have no limits. Just come walk the streets of Surry Hills with me any night of the week.