Notes from a Cookbook to be

I'm finally doing it: throwing together my obsession with food and my increasingly arcane views on health into a sort of manifesto, masquerading as a cookbook. The project's still in its early adolescence, but I see no reason not to provide a taste of it here.

* * *

Guidelines for Cooking and Eating Well:

Base your meals around what’s fresh and in season.
Use all your senses.
Don’t be Afraid of Salt and Oil.
Use Good Ingredients and Be Generous with Them.
Be Mindful of Balance.

Together these add up to a formula for good eating and, through it, satisfaction and health. The first guideline may seem obvious, but the point is often lost on folks: you’ll eat better if you head to the market with an open mind and let yourself be moved by what looks, smells, feels, tastes, and sounds good. That’s where the second rule comes in, obviously. Engage with your ingredients on a visceral level. Then as you head home with a bag full of whatever called out to you, let inspiration for how to use it all come to you. Or if that’s too abstract, start planning your meals as you roam amongst the garden rows, market stalls or aisles. Just don’t let preconceived notions of what you’re going to cook dictate your choices completely. You’ll miss too many delights that way.
My third and fourth rules may come as a surprise, since I’m advocating a certain level of indulgence and claiming to offer a healthy approach at the same time. The idea is that food should be about pleasure, not guilt; depriving ourselves of what satisfies us now is only likely to lead to overindulgence in less wholesome ways later. True, we first need to discern what is truly wholesome and nourishing. And the answers here may be counter-intuitive. After all, we have been trained for a few generations now to avoid so many of the foods we naturally gravitate towards. Nutritional science has by turns steered us harshly away from fats, carbohydrates, sugar, and meat. Every two weeks, it seems, there is a sea change in what is allowed to count as healthy. And partly as a result of this indecision, we find ourselves in the midst of what Michael Pollan calls a “national eating disorder.” We are simultaneously obese and starved for nourishment; record numbers struggle with anorexia. It’s probably not a coincidence that fewer and fewer people spend time cooking, or even feel comfortable in the kitchen. For the question of what to eat is a remarkably simple one (and one that applied science has done more harm than good in trying to answer). Michael Pollan again: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
The heart of the answer is incredibly simple: eat food. Real food. The sorts of things people have been eating for millennia. We all know at some level what this means: real, crusty bread that you have to chew; vegetables that aren’t jetlagged from their red-eye flight from another hemisphere; fragrant nut and seed oils and sweet yellow butter; and, yes, meat, from animals that lived happily and healthily and were slaughtered humanely.
Lest this sound too good to be true, there is a mounting movement to support exactly this kind of traditional food and reveal the dangers of modern, industrialized diets. The work of the early 20th Century dentist Weston A Price has been championed by Sally Fallon and others to show that people living on traditional diets tend to be in excellent physical condition and don’t suffer from the degenerative diseases that plague modern Americans. “Traditional diets” means exactly what Michael Pollan does: real food. But some of the details are surprising, because it is often exactly those foods which we’ve been warned against most severely that turn out to be most supportive of good health. A prime example is fat. Fat itself has been demonized, which is absurd since fats are an essential class of macronutrients that we need to produce everything from cell membranes to sex hormones. Simply put, without fat people go crazy, wither away and eventually die. The key, however, is getting the right kind of fat, and this is where the biggest surprise comes in. Because the saturated animals fats that we all “know” are bad for you turn out to be a sheep in wolf’s clothing. Butter, lard, tallow--all of these are life-supporting lipids, provided they themselves come from healthy animals. In this sense the authorities are correct, for most of the butter on the market come from cows raised away from their natural pasture and in factory farms. But real, sweet, yellow butter is out there, too, and worth every penny you pay for it. This kind of butter actually concentrates the nutrients found in green grass, providing a rich source of the omega-3 fatty acids that have emerged recently as so crucial to good health. Lard from pastured pigs is similarly healthy, in proper proportion. Of course, it’s not just animal fat that’s good for us: plant oils are great too, if they’re unrefined. This is what makes extra virgin olive oil so healthy as well as so flavorful. What most people don’t realize is that tons of other seeds and nuts are equally healthy and delicious, if we can get a hold of them in cold-pressed forms. Sunflower, mustard, hazelnut, almond--every edible seed has precious oil locked within.

...But for whom? What the Weston Price/Sally Fallon school of traditional diets tends to gloss over is that not all people are the same. Some of us struggle to keep our weight down, while others can’t ever seem to put on a pound. Some are prone to acne while others have perpetually dry skin. Some people do indeed have to watch their salt intake and blood pressure, while others have to make sure they’re getting enough iron and other nutrients to keep from becoming anemic and having fainting spells.
Almost everybody has an intuitive sense of what’s right for them. Haven’t you ever bitten into a radish or a cucumber and felt unreasonably good? Or eaten a supposedly healthy meal only to find it’s given you gas, or that you’re hungry again 90 minutes later?
A one size fits all approach doesn’t work. This is where traditional ideas from both Eastern and Western traditions can help immensely... (to be continued)