Reconciling With Real Food
I was in Las Vegas recently for a conference, and among the more memorable of the gaudy excesses on display was a banner of celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay that made the most recent movie version of "Godzilla" look small. I had comparably larger-than-life encounters with Wolfgang Puck, Bobby Flay and other celebrity chefs better known to Food Network devotees than to me. They were everywhere- more ubiquitous, perhaps, than illusionists, singers and Cirque du Soleil.
Our culture these days seems more likely to elevate chefs than even meteorologists to stardom. Weather is yesterday's news! Food is today's news.
But then things take a very strange turn. Because among the recent news items about food is our inclination to renounce it altogether. The trend has become salient enough to claim a great patch of rarefied real estate in the most recent New York Times Magazine.
There are, apparently, a number of efforts propagating this new fashion, but most salient of all, and aptly so, is Soylent. The name refers playfully back to a science fiction film, "Soylent Green." The current concoction is an amalgam of nutrient supplements intended to be nutritionally complete, and thus an indefinite alternative to actual food.
Something is just a bit -- well -- off, to put it bluntly, with a culture inclined to celebrate its chefs to the point of virtual canonization, even as it flirts with ways to eschew eating altogether. The plat du jour, it seems, is a culinary conundrum, with a heaping side of ambivalence. We love a whole lot of cooks, and yet something is spoiling our stew.
Paradoxically, the problem with our stew may be that it's just too darn good. The message from The New York Times' Michael Moss, and others before him, is that our food has been willfully manipulated for years to make it all but irresistible.
[Read: A Taste for Satiety.]
Arguably, making food irresistibly "good" might be about increasing the pleasure we get from it, but that was never the mission. Rather, it has always been about increasing the amount of eating we do, maximizing the calories it takes to feel full. It has been about making "betcha can't eat just one" as safe a bet as possible.
That does not necessarily increase pleasure any more than drug addiction results in pleasure. The debate about the actual "addictiveness" of food goes on, and we needn't bog down in it. For what it's worth, my own view is that food, along with sex, is the reason addiction to anything is possible in the first place. What matters most is that with food, as with other indulgences, the phenomenon of tolerance prevails. The more we get of sugar, salt, creaminess and flavorings, the more we tend to need. The result is a preference for excessively sweet, excessively salty, excessively adulterated foods, satisfied only by ever more adulterations, which in turn further debase our palates.
One remedy, and the one now becoming a fashion, is to bypass food altogether. But I believe there is a far better option than putting the white linen napkin on mothballs and running up a white flag in its place. A process I like to call " taste bud rehab" allows us all to reverse engineer the escalation of sugar, salt and chemical additives in our food; reawaken the dormant sensitivity of our taste buds; and come to prefer simpler, more wholesome food. Not just accept it -- prefer it.
[See: U.S. News Best Diets for Healthy Eating.]
There are important reasons to do this; I can think of five right off the bat.
1. Foods contain innumerable nutrient compounds; plant food in particular contain thousands of phytochemicals. We simply don't know what they all do in the human body, and many of these nutrients may be important to health without being essential, per se. The evidence that a diet rich in diverse plant foods promotes health is vastly stronger than the evidence for any given array of nutrients. The notion that we can live and thrive over a span of decades on a nutrient concoction in place of food thus requires a leap of faith. It may be true, but we cannot be sure.
2. Soylent and its analogues seem a departure from nature at a time when we need to be going the other way and fortifying our links to the planet. Our planet is threatened by climate change, overpopulation, ecosystem degradation and loss of biodiversity. Sustainable food production requires us to confront and remediate these perils. Test tube food alternatives do the opposite How would our nonfood sustenance be sourced? What industrial practices would be involved? What would the environmental impact, carbon footprint or cost in water consumption be? Now is not the time to turn a blind eye to our interdependence with the planet.
3. Think of the great occasions in your life. Now re-imagine them with no food. The image is difficult, if not bleak. Food has always been a centerpiece of holidays and celebrations. We sacrifice something quite indelible if we renounce that.
4. Beyond the personal, there is the cultural. The great cultures of the world are ineluctably defined partly by their cuisines. That vivid aspect of human culture is lost when all of our food comes out of the test tubes.
5. There is an alternative to "eating to live" that isn't living to eat. We can get health from the pursuit of pleasure, and pleasure from the pursuit of health. We can love food that loves us back. When a process as accessible as taste bud rehab would allow us to have this less-sweet cake and eat it, too, why replace the kitchen table with a laboratory bench?
[Read: Faith, Facts and Fatness.]
We love our chefs so much because we love food so much. We reject food because we love to look good, and feel good -- and food all too often is undermining these goals. But we need not choose only from the extremes of reverence, or renunciation. We have the far better choice of reconciliation: reconciling our love of good food with our love of good health. We can find our way back to real food, rehabilitate our taste buds and learn to love the very food that loves us back. Test tubes not required.
David L. Katz, MD, MPH, FACPM, FACP, is a specialist in internal medicine and preventive medicine, with particular expertise in nutrition, weight management and chronic-disease prevention. He is the founding director of Yale University's Prevention Research Center and principal inventor of the NuVal nutrition guidance system. Katz was named editor-in-chief of Childhood Obesity in 2011, and is president-elect of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. He is the author of "Disease Proof: The Remarkable Truth About What Makes Us Well."
