One Geek, One Earth

This challenge is very similar to the localvore challenge (eat local when you can, etc) but with some added caveats based on the algorithms/rules in Michael Pollan’s book, In Defense of Food. I don’t have any preset goals with the In Defense of Food challenge – my overall health is probably the best it has ever been. My wife has decided to join me and she would like to see if this will help accelerate weight loss, but for me, I’m just curious how much convenience and money I’m forced to sacrifice to manage this, and at the end of it see if I feel different. It’s a fun experiment – a learning experience for me and for you, gentle reader. Now straight to his “algorithms” and how they incorporate into the challenge. For the sake of brevity, I’m not including all of them here, but this will get across the gist of it. It’s still a long post, so forgive me in advance.

• Don’t Eat Anything Your Great Grandmother Wouldn’t Recognize as Food

This one is easy – avoid products like Gogurt and Twinkies that aren’t really food, but are more like “foodish products”. I’ve already eliminated most of these things from my diet. This is not a large step.

• Avoid Food Products Containing Ingredients that are A) Unfamiliar B) Unpronounceable C) More than five in number or that include D) High-fructose corn syrup

Woo-boy. If you’ve ever looked at the ingredients list at almost any product in the supermarket, you will have noticed the vast majority violate this rule in one form or another. The high fructose corn syrup alone invalidates so many. It is in bread, for pete’s sake. It seems to be in everything. This will definitely be the hardest rule to follow 100% and I expect that I may end up violating this one every now and again (the 5 ingredients rule will be especially difficult).

• Avoid Food Products That Make Health Claims

If I can avoid packaged food in general, this will be an easy rule to follow – this rule exists to remind us of the “dubious benefits of nutritionism”.

• Shop the Peripheries of the Supermarket and Stay Out of the Middle

• Get Out of the Supermarket Whenever Possible

These two rules push you towards the healthier things in the supermarket located on the outside – fruits, vegetables, dairy, meat and so on. And preferably stay out of the supermarket altogether and get everything from local sources. I’m not sure that is completely feasible, but we’re going to do our best. We did just find out that there is a CSA option that would allow us to get grass fed beef and pork, which would be awesome and solve many of our problems, but I think there will always be staples that we will have to get at the supermarket.

• Eat Mostly Plants, Especially Leaves

• You Are What What You Eat Eats Too

This two will end up being easier if we’re following the rest of the rules, because it will be more inconvenient and more expensive to buy meat outside of the supermarket. And our current mobile market setup gets us a lot of plants, especially the green leafy ones that we might not have eaten a lot. Before this, I had never eaten a collard green or a turnip green. (Verdict: Not bad). I’m looking forward to getting some grass fed beef – if I have to lower my intake, probably better for me and makes each time a special occasion.

• If You Have the Space, Buy a Freezer

We do and already have. Now we just need to make sure we have the proper technique for freezing produce so we’ll have some available for the winter months.

• Eat Well Grown Food from Healthy Soils

Our mobile market is organic based, so this should follow naturally.

• Eat More Like the French, or the Italians, or the Japanese, or the Indians, or the Greek
• Regard Non Traditional Foods With Skepticism
• Don’t Look for the Magic Bullet in the Traditional Diet

These rules basically suggest that traditional cultural food patterns are successful for a reason – they work, and you diverge from them at your peril. The diets also work as a whole – you can’t just pull out one ingredient and say “That’s what makes this diet work.” I will be making an effort to learn traditional dishes as part as my cooking growth.

• Have a Glass of Wine with Dinner

This one is harder than you would think. Alcohol in moderation has solid benefits, but for whatever reason, I’ve never liked the taste of alcohol. I’ve tried wine a few times and never really been fond of it. So time to get back up on the horse and try again.

• Pay More, Eat Less

As he puts it, “choose quality over quantity, food experience over mere calories.” Eating less is better for you in lots of different ways, and the easiest way to do that is to eat better and savor what you do eat more. I’m hoping we can do this, although I’m worried about the impact on our budget.

• Eat Meals
• Do All Your Eating at a Table
• Don’t Get Your Fuel From the Same Place Your Car Does
• Try Not to Eat Alone

These 4 rules are all grouped together because they basically all say the same thing – the best way to eat is at a table, as a formal meal rather than a snack that you have with other people. Joy and I have not been great at this because of our odd schedules. We’re planning to make an attempt to get back into the habit of better dinner environments.

• Consult Your Gut
• Eat More Slowly

We oftentimes rush through our food too quickly, ruining the experience of the food and causing to not pay attention to how much or what type of food we’re eating. Food is meant to be enjoyed and savored and I think we’d all be better off if we spent a little more appreciating the food that we have and are eating.

• Cook And, If You Can, Plant a Garden

Cooking I have got covered. We’ve gone out to eat once in the past few months (and that was the result of a bad cooking experiment). The garden is a little harder, as I can’t really start one until we move to a new house, and that probably won’t be until next year. But I might make an effort to start a windowsill herb garden for the kitchen.

And that’s it. I’m going to be blogging every so often over the next few months to talk about my progress in moving away processed foods, as well as what my difficulties and obstacles were. I hope this long post hasn’t driven you away – stick around for a bit and see how I do.

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
by Michael Pollan

This book is the follow up to Omnivore’s Dilemma, that answered the question “Where do the foods we eat today come from?” This book, however, answers the question, “What foods should I eat?” As Pollan says, it seems a little silly that we should have to present an argument of why food is good and what foods should be eaten, but as he points out a little later, this is the point that our Western society has gotten to.

In the first part of the book, “The Age of Nutritionism”, he explores how ever since William Prout identified the 3 principal elements of food (protein, fat, carbohydrates), science in the form of nutritionism, has been trying to break food down to core elements and then duplicate that food through science. Margarine is a good example and one he uses often. But as he also points out, it is a very young science and whole food is a very very complex set of intertwined resources that can be nearly impossible to duplicate. The flaw of nutritionism is that by its very nature (studying nutrients) it is forced to break a complex, intertwined system into its component parts and unfortunately for them, food is more than the sum of its nutrients. This leads to declarations of nutrient health (”fat is bad for you!”) that are established and then decades later found out to be wrong and potentially harmful for you (”oh, remember that trans fat we used to replace saturated fat? It actually causes heart attacks and that saturated stuff is ok. Sorry about that.”).

The second part, “The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization”, talks about the Western Diet: “lots of processed foods and meats, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything except fruits, vegetables, and whole grains” and how whenever it is introduced to a new society, the same diseases start cropping up almost immediately: cardiovascular diseases, cancer, diabetes, and obesity - otherwise known as the Western diseases.

He also points out that the human being seems adapted to almost any diet - all plants, mostly animals, mostly fish, etc, etc. About the only diet we’re not adapted to is…wait for it…the Western diet. He goes on to talk about the history of refined food (a staple of the Western diet) and how it reduces complex food to simple food, and as nutritionists are finding out, simple food loses a lot of what we need to thrive and survive. That reduction to simplicity causes a change from quality to quantity in the food we eat, which is quite possibly one of the major elements in the Western diet that leads to its namesake diseases.

The third part, “Eat Food: Food Defined” gets back to the first sentence of the book (and one that is on the cover as well) - Eat Food. Mostly Plants. Not Too Much. He clarifies that by food, he means real, whole food and not the foodish products that line the shelves of your local supermarket. He then lays out what he likes to call “food algorithms”. They’re not rules. He doesn’t want to tell you exactly what to eat. He just wants to give guidelines; patterns of behavior that if we keep them in mind, we can eat whatever diet we want and remain healthy (and do the environment a service as well). This, of course, excepts the Western diet, which is the diet we’re trying to escape in the first place.

Some of these algorithms include: “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food,” “Avoid food products that make health claims,” “Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle,” and “Eat more like the French, or the Italians, or the Japanese, or the Indians, or the Greeks”. There are more and I plan to go over them in more detail when I establish the guidelines for my In Defense of Food Challenge, which will start next week. But the gist of them is: Try and revert back to the kind of food/diets we know work for human beings and stay away from the processed foods of the Western diet whenever possible.

This, like, Omnivore’s Dilemma, is a complex, interesting book that this review has only really skimmed the surface on it. I highly recommend you pick up a copy from your local library, or if you’re in a hurry to read it, your local book exchange. And tune in Monday for the rules of the In Defense of Food Challenge (IDFC), which is going to be a lot of fun and a lot of challenge.

Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
by Michael Pollan
Part III: Forest

The final portion of Omnivore’s Dilemma has Pollan going out and hunting a wild pig and gathering wild mushrooms to be able to create a complete meal that he gathered completely on his own. He diverges some at the beginning, as he goes into the idea of vegetarianism for a bit. He quotes famous animal rights activist Peter Singer, who said “No one in the habit of eating an animal can be completely without bias in judging whether the conditions in which that animal is reared cause suffering.” So he takes up vegetarianism for a while but comes to the conclusion that eating meat is ok, as long as the animal involved was either wild or humanely raised.

And so he goes out into the wilds of California and hunts a wild pig, with the help of an experienced hunter. He feels the thrill of the hunt, which is something he really wasn’t expecting to experience. He later feels guilty about the killing (and about feeling so excited during the kill) but eventually comes to terms with it.

He then has an entire section devoted to gathering wild mushrooms with hobbyist gatherers who all have their own personal secret locations to gather and rarely share them with the outside world.

He then makes his meal and serves it to everyone that helped him do the foraging and gathering and proclaims it as the perfect meal for him, in that while it might not have been the “perfect” meal as a cook would envision it, it had a unique greatness to him personally since he was so in touch with all the elements involved.  He does conclude that this meal, like the McDonald’s meal at the end of Part I, was just not sustainable in modern times. Just like you should only be having fast food on rare occasions, so the meal completely gathered by its cook is going to be a very rare event.  I found this section of the book to be the least interesting, mostly because it was the most personal - it was Pollan getting deeply in touch with basic hunting/gathering instincts and I just didn’t find it as interesting as the first two sections.

On a meta note, I messed up reviewing this book in 3 sections. It’s a complex,interesting book with a lot of themes that weave back and forth throughout. I thought by dividing it, I could do it better justice, but instead, I still couldn’t do it justice and I stretched this out to a painful ordeal both for you and for me. I’m 10th on the library waitlist for his next book, In Defense of Food, which I need to read so I can do this food challenge I have planned. But, I think I will work on making a shorter, more compressed review of that, and in the meantime, work on getting back to some interesting posts about the world of green. Between the prepping of the house for sale and getting my wife’s jewelry website running, blogging has seemed more like work that is getting in the way of other things that needed to be done, and I don’t want it to be that way. So back to shorter, more fun posts in the near future.

Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
by Michael Pollan
Part II: Grass

Part II actually takes Pollan down two separate paths for two different meals. First is discovering what Big Organic is all about, and then second is a trip to a small scale completely sustainable farm (whose owner refers to himself as a “grass farmer”).

Pollan thinks about shopping in places like Whole Foods is the equivalent of “supermarket pastoral” - a quality story attached to each piece of meat and vegetable to allow us to create a picture in our mind of how that free-range chicken lived a wonderful life before being brought to our plate. But in reality, the way Big Organic works is not tremendously different from regular industrial farms. The major difference is that they don’t use pesticides. But chickens, for example, are kept in the exact same condition as industrial farms, except that the farmers can’t use antibiotics, making the whole system even less stable. “Free range” means they have a door open to a small yard that the chickens never go out into (and the owners, afraid of chickens getting sick, pray that they never use).

Pollan goes on to explore the history of the organic movement, straight from its roots in hippiedom. Now organic foods gotten at the supermarket are mostly produced by two extremely large companies (Cascadian Farm and Earthbound Farms) or are subbrands of the industrial food system.  Pollan asks the question, “Is Organic better?” and concludes you have to ask the question, “Better for what?” If you’re asking about our health, the answer is “probably, but not necessarily”. The lack of pesticides can’t be a bad thing, but there have been no real tests to prove that the small doses of pesticides that we intake with non-organics is affecting us in any way. If you’re asking about the environment, the lack of pesticides is a good thing…but there’s a large carbon footprint involved with all the fuel used to transport this organic food across the globe. In short, the industrial organic movement, by its very nature, is a contradiction in terms.

Pollan then goes to Polyface Farms, in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. Polyface is run by Joel Salatin. Salatin is a fanatic. Not that is a bad thing in this case. But he lives and breathes the idea of a sustainable farm. He considers himself a grass farmer, by which he means that his primary goal is to make sure the grass at his farm is growing well - everything else flows from that. His cows are moved from pasture to pasture daily, getting only one chance to eat a particular set of grass a day. His chickens follow the cows two days later, eating grass destroying grubs and fertilizing the grass with their manure. The farm is also completely transparent - you can come by and watch your chickens being slaughtered - that allows you to know how your chickens were raised. He also only sells locally. Like I said, he lives it and breathes the environment where a lot of people just talk it.

This part of the book was the most fascinating to me, by far. I can’t do the section on Polyface Farms justice, honestly. It made me want to drive to Virginia to pick up some chicken and beef from the farm. It’s a complex, interesting farm and I highly recommend picking up the book, if for no other reason to read this section.

Next: Part III - The Forest

Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
by Michael Pollan
Part I: Corn

Pollan’s book, is at its core, about the disconnect that the modern human being experiences from the food they eat. Or more specifically, the disconnect about where that food comes from. The title of the book (as he explains in the introduction) comes from the idea that herbivores mostly have it easy. The koala bear, he says, knows that if the green thing they’re eating has the characteristics of eucalyptus, in the mouth it goes. But the omnivore has a much broader array of choices, which makes it harder for the omnivore to determine what is good to eat (is this poisonous? Did I feel good after eating this last time?). And in modern Western society, the industry that has sprung up around food has made it extremely hard to determine what foods, exactly, went into whatever you are eating out of that package.

The book is broken down into 3 sections, where he attempts to follow the 3 major food chains that make up our choices - industrial, organic, and alternative.

Part I: Corn

This is both an amazing and scary section all at once. He moves through the history of corn as a plant and follows it from the beginnings in a farm to a grain elevator, a feedlot, a processing plant. and eventually a meal. What is amazing is how corn has basically taken over agriculture as we know it and due to a variety of factors (government subsidies, processing, hybrid corn’s ability to create high yield) we have a huge corn surplus in America. And since the surplus has to go somewhere, it does - low quality “commodity corn” goes to feeding cattle (which normally are grass fed) and it goes to processing, where it gets turned into hundreds of different things that we ingest in pretty every food that comes from the supermarket that isn’t in the produce aisle.

High fructose corn syrup is in soda (the primary ingredient, in fact) and hundreds to thousands of other products (check out a huge list of brand name products with HFCS in it). Dextrose, lecithin, corn starch and dozens of other ingredients that are regularly listed on labels - in fact, he says the larger the ingredient list the more it will be made of corn byproducts. At the end of the chapter, after he and his family ate a meal from McDonald’s, he takes a duplicate meal to a lab with a mass spectrometer. It turns out that corn’s greatest strength - it’s ability to make C-4 carbon compounds - also allows it to be easily tracked via spectrometer. And as it turns out, the meal from McDonald’s is mostly corn.

• Soda (100%),
• Milk shake (78%),
• Salad dressing (65%),
• “Chicken” nuggets (56%)
• Cheeseburger (52%),
• French fries (23%).

As he puts it, we have become “corn’s koala” - the creature that subsists solely on corn in one form or another. It is a really fascinating chapter and it makes me really wonder how, when huge industries and everything we eat revolves around corn, how we can manage to try and escape from it.

Part II: Grass coming soon.

Voyage of the Turtle: In Pursuit of the Earth’s Last Dinosaur

While you drift in sleep, turtles ride the curve of the deep, seeking their inspiration from the sky. From tranquil tropic bays or nightmare maelstroms hissing foam, they come unseen to share our air. Each sharp exhalation affirms, “Life yet endures.” Each inhaled gasp vows, “Life will continue.” With each breath they declare to the stars and wild silence. By night and by light, sea turtles glide always, their parallel universe strangely alien, yet intertwining with ours.

Those words are the second paragraph of the book and they illustrate so well the power of this book- it is, at times, as much as poetry as science, as much stories as it is facts.

This book is about the sea turtle and all its varieties. A warm blooded reptile, it is basically a living dinosaur.

The book itself is divided into three sections:

• Part I: Atlantic
• Part II: Between Oceans
• Part III: Pacific

In each section, he talks about the different types of sea turtles that make their way through that part of the world, from the Green Turtles to the Loggerheads to the massive Leatherbacks. What made this book so fascinating for me were two elements.

First, the sea turtle itself is just a fascinating creature - a warm blooded reptile, as the subtitle to the book says, the world’s last living dinosaur, weighing up to a ton. Imagine a turtle that weighs half as much as your car. An incredible navigator, a Leatherback sea turtle can unerringly cross the Atlantic Ocean, returning to the exact place it was born 30 years ago to lay its eggs. I get lost pulling out of my own driveway. But as the book points out, they’re in serious danger of extinction due to numerous reasons - fishing nets, people eating turtle eggs, light pollution causing the mother turtles to avoid the beaches they need (and hatchling to get confused as to where they are going). And you can tell that Dr. Safina really cares about the turtles.

Which makes the second compelling factor in the book all that more amazing: he tells the stories of all the people involved in or related to the life of a sea turtle, including the shrimpers whose nets end up catching turtles; the scientists diving to the incredible depths of the ocean with the turtles; the poachers who gather eggs in Mexico because the eggs are a delicacy (and rumored to be an aphrodisiac!); the harpooners hunting swordfish in Nova Scotia who pass by the Leatherback turtles swimming in the cold Canadian waters. He tells all of their stories (and more) and he does so without prejudice or bias - he just tells the story. Even if you don’t agree with some of the people that he interacts with, you at least come to an understanding of WHY they do what they do. And that understanding of all the factors allows him to paint the true and complete story of the sea turtles.

It also doesn’t hurt that he knows the science and can give it to the reader in an easily understandable form and intersperse the science with almost poetic descriptions of scenery and people. For example, talking about New Guinea:

Some of the local people here have already felt insulted that the world would look here and see the needs of turtles more than of the people themselves. Fewer than half have been to school; they want education for their children. They want access to markets. They want what other people have. They live in a beautiful place with more leisure and more priceless waterfront than they could ever use. But there have always been unquenched desires in paradise. The human heart will cast itself out of Eden every time, because it has needs that heaven never addresses.

I highly recommend this book. It is a compelling read about an important environmental topic. Run, don’t walk, to your local library and check out a copy.