The silence of the yams

Since reading Barbara Kingsolver's book last summer about eating locally (click to read my post about it), I've been on something of a kick with other *food* books when I come across a new one. Deb's recent post on the subject, in which she shares her doubt about the viability of eating only locally grown products where she lives in Minnesota, made me feel a bit better about the difficulties I have in doing the same here - and let's face it - the growing season in NJ is considerably longer than in Deb's home state. Farmer's markets here typically run from May through October only.

At any rate, I borrowed Skinny Bitch from a friend, mostly to see what all the fuss was about. I've never read a diet book in my life, and this one read a bit too much like one for my taste, but if you can get past the shock value of the language and past their insisting that vegan is the only healthy way to eat, you might just find something useful there. I could easily be vegetarian, but give up eggs and cheese and ice-cream? Well... I'm not there yet.

I've just about finished Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto and find his measured approach a bit more helpful and, dare I say it, affirming of the food choices I regularly make. The crux of his *manifesto* is that we should eat food, but not too much of it, and mostly plants. The first two-thirds of the book are spent defining what *food is not* and explaining how the typical Western diet and our current focus on nutrition have caused so many of us to be unhealthy.

I don't want to give away all of the gems of this book, but these are a few things that have really hit home with me:

*Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.
*Avoid food products that are unfamiliar or unpronouceable.
*Don't eat anything incapable of rotting!
*Shop the edges of the supermarket and avoid the middle where the *food-products* shout at you with their health claims, while the kale and carrots sit in silence on the periphery.
*Shop at farmer's markets or CSA's (click for a list) whenever possible. Shake the hand that feeds you.
*Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.
*Eat well grown foods from healthy soils. Just as food sustains us, soil sustains everything that grows in it. Everything that is put into the soil should nurture and support its ability to give and sustain life.
*Pay more, eat less. Better food costs more to produce. Food needn't be cheap, fast and easy.
*Try not to eat alone. A shared meal is part ritual, part culture.
*Only eat when you're truly hungry and then eat slowly!
*Prepare your own food and plant a garden, however humble.

I'm not so inclined to recommend books, but this one is worth noting, I think, in that it offered me an eye-opening look into the food industry and how deliberately we've been led astray from what's really good for us.