In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto

by Michael Pollan.  Penguin 2008.

Since reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma last year, I’ve been trying to avoid processed food (loosely defined by Pollan as packaged food items containing more than five ingredients). I’ve had some successes (supermarket moments where I have put something back after scanning the ingredient list) and a few failures (Country Crock tastes so good on a matzoh!), but it raised my consciousness.  In Defense of Food goes further in telling us how to eat more healthily while enjoying it more; Pollan condenses his personal eating advice into a small number of general guidelines, the first and most general being EAT FOOD. NOT TOO MUCH. MOSTLY PLANTS. The rest of the book is an elaboration on these three ideas, which, if we succeed in implementing them, should make us healthier by enabling us to stop eating what Pollan calls “the Western diet,” but which is perhaps better called “the American diet,” as many Westerners (the French, the Italians, and the Greeks are all mentioned specifically) do not eat it.

Part Three of the book, “Getting Over Nutritionism,” provides some  specific guidelines, including the no-more-than-5-ingredient rule. Here they are, in Pollan’s words, with a bit of commentary from me:

1. EAT FOOD.

• Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize. Mine wouldn’t recognize canola oil, which is supposed to be good, as oils go.  But as it is made from seeds, maybe it’s best to go easy even on that.
• 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. I’ve been working on this one for a while now.
• Avoid food products that make health claims. (“For a food product to make health claims on its package it must first have a package, so right off the bat it’s more likely to be a processed than a whole food…. Meanwhile, the genuinely heart-healthy whole foods in the produce section, lacking the financial and political clout of the packaged goods a few aisles over, are mute.”)
• Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle. Hey! I still need to buy flour, sugar (not too much! I know), dried beans, rice and pasta, oil and peanut butter… but I get the general idea.
• Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. Shop at farmers’ markets or subscribe to community-supported agriculture (CSA) farms instead. I want to try the CSA idea if I can find a farm around here, but I don’t like our local farmer’s market. It’s inconvenient to go to [only Thursday afternoons] and has only about 4-5 vendors offering little variety.

MOSTLY PLANTS.

• Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. (Grains, which are seeds, are too nutritionally rich; too much makes us fat, and  they have the wrong kind of fat, omega-6 fatty acids instead of the healthier omega-3s in leaves.)
• You are what what you eat eats too. This advice is basically for meat-eaters but also applies to those like me who consume dairy products, eggs and fish.
• If you have the space, buy a freezer. Use it to store fresh local produce and grass-fed meat.
• Eat like an omnivore. The more diverse the better
• Eat well-grown food from healthy soils. It doesn’t have to be labeled organic, although it might be.
• Eat wild foods when you can. The only rule that sometimes conflicts with what is good for the environment, because some wild foods are endangered.  But wild greens such as purslane and lamb’s quarters are particularly nutritious. And the vlita so beloved by my Greek friends are a great example.
• Be the kind of person who takes supplements. But don’t take them, necessarily.
• Eat more like the French. Or the Italians. Or the Japanese. or the Indians. Or the Greeks. In other words, eat a more traditional cuisine. All of them have stood the test of time, and the people that developed them are still around.
• Regard nontraditional foods with skepticism.
• Don’t look for the magic bullet in the traditional diet. Go for the whole kit and kaboodle. We don’t really know what it is that makes these diets healthier, and it doesn’t really matter.
• Have a glass of wine with dinner. I don’t think I can do this one. I really dislike wine.

NOT TOO MUCH.

• Pay more. Eat less. Get better quality food and enjoy it slowly.
• Eat meals. Don’t snack, don’t eat in the car or at your desk.
• Do all your eating at a table. See above.
• Don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does. Avoid convenience store food.
• Try not to eat alone. Many of us eat more when we eat alone.
• Consult your gut. Don’t eat when you have satisfied your hunger. Be aware of how much you have consumed.
• Eat slowly. Enjoy food more.
• Cook, and if you can, plant a garden. Easy for him to say! He lives in Berkeley. As I write, snow is falling outside my house in Maryland. But the advice to cook is definitely good.

The great thing about all this is that as consumers, we have it within our power to make better choices.  For most of us, it is not difficult to find alternatives to the diet foisted on us by the food industry and nutritionists.  But actually making the switch is challenging. Old habits are hard to break, and American food is so cheap and available in such quantity that we have forgotten how to eat in a healthy way.

The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World

by Eric Weiner (Twelve, 2008)

It always amazes me how some people persuade other people (publishers?) to foot the bills for extensive travel and purchases so that they can write books or articles about them–like the person who got his publisher to pay for a horrifically expensive bottle of very old wine so he could review it (he wasn’t impressed).  Eric Weiner somehow got funding to travel around the world to the Netherlands, Switzerland, Bhutan, Qatar, Iceland, Moldova, Thailand, Great Britain, and India (not to mention the United States), as well as to purchase a Ridiculously Expensive Pen (which he subsequently lost)–so he could reflect on that experience.  Life is tough.  I loved the book, though, so why am I complaining?

Weiner did his homework concerning research on happiness, and he asked informants in all those different places whether they were happy, how happy they were, what made them happy, and so on–not very scientific, but it makes for very interesting reading.  In the end, he sums up what he learned: Wealth does not ensure happiness, especially if Culture is absent.  Familial and social connectedness are necessary to happiness, as is trust; envy makes happiness impossible. If we think too much about happiness (or anything), it will elude us.  That last comes mainly from the chapter on Thailand, which also yields the expression, mai pen lai, or “never mind”.  If we don’t let the bad stuff get to us, if we just let it roll off our backs–mai pen lai–we can be happier.  I think I will try it (although I am pretty happy, generally–maybe a 7 or an 8 out of 10, depending on the day).

English language learners may enjoy reading the chapters about their own countries–although they may not always like what Weiner has to say about their compatriots!

I’d definitely recommend this book.

36 Views of Mount Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan

by Cathy N. Davidson.  Dutton 1993 (out of print)

This is the third time I have read this wonderful book about bridging two cultures.  In the early 1980s, Cathy Davidson and her husband Ted, American academics, went to Japan to live and teach.  Over the next decade or so, they straddled two worlds.  The book describes not only the Japanese world that they fell in love with, but also the culture shock that they experienced as they traveled between the two cultures.  This is what distinguishes 36 Views from other memoirs about living and working in a foreign culture.

The book is sometimes funny, as when Davidson describes the dinner where a Japanese couple try to get her and her husband to teach them exactly how to eat soup in America.  It is sometimes heart-breakingly sad, as when she recounts the delicacy with which her Japanese friends and colleagues helped her and her husband after the sudden death of his brother and sister-in-law in an accident.  It is always fascinating, as in her description of her visit to a sacred grove on Kudakajima, an island near Okinawa with a communal matriarchal society.  And it is unfailingly honest.  Davidson skillfully portrays her states of mind as she straddles the two cultures, never completely at home in either.  This feeling of incompleteness, of longing for the other, is something with which all who have enjoyed living in a foreign culture can identify.  It is the bittersweet price that we pay for stepping outside of the familiar and learning to appreciate new ways of doing things, of looking at the world.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough.  It is not particularly easy to read, but English learners who have lived in other cultures will appreciate the descriptions of learning to get along in a strange place, of struggling with the language, and of learning to adapt and disadapt as they travel back and forth between the home culture and the new culture.

A Free Life

by Ha Jin (narrated by Jason Ma) 2007 BBC Audiobooks America

A Free Life chronicles the lives of Chinese immigrants in the United States.  Nan Wu was in graduate school in the Boston area when the Tiananmen Square event in 1989 prompted the United States to make it easy for Chinese students to remain in the U.S.  The book follows Nan, his wife, and their son as they separate (Nan goes to New York City, where he becomes a chef) and then reunite and move to the Atlanta area, where they buy a Chinese restaurant, the Gold Wok.  Nan considers himself a poet but rarely has the time or the inspiration to write.  In the end, however, he returns to his dream of writing poetry.

The book has an autobiographical feel to it.  I don’t know anything about the author other than that he, like Nan, grew up in China and now lives in the United States and writes in English.  Nevertheless, I constantly had the sense that he was describing his own travails and triumphs, especially where poetry is concerned.  Ha Jin is known as a writer of fiction, whereas Nan Wu resisted suggestions that he turn to fiction as “easier” than writing poetry in a new language.  A Free Life gave Ha Jin an opportunity to publish his own poetry as that of his character.

The style of writing is peculiar.  Jin says that Nan read dictionaries and learned idioms; another character in the book was always misusing idioms.  To me, the book sometimes felt like an ESL idiom textbook.  These textbooks present a group of idioms and then contrive a text which features all of them–with varying degrees of success.  That is how A Free Life often felt to me.  Idioms were used with abandon, but not always in ways that I, a native speaker/writer, would have used them, and sometimes in ways that seemed awkward.  Had I been Jin’s editor, I would have advised him to go easy on the idioms.  On the other hand, English is not the possession of its native speakers in America, England, and Australia only.  Sometimes a non-native writer can give the English language a delicious twist that becomes part of the charm of the book (I am thinking in particular of The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy).

Another strange characteristic of A Free Life is how the chapters ended.  I expect a chapter ending either to provide closure to the chapter or to link to the following chapter in such a way that the reader will have a hard time putting the book down (think: The Da Vinci Code!).  Many chapters in A Free Life just stop…. sometimes on a note that relates neither to the chapter that is ending or to the next one.  I often felt that the book needed an editor to tighten it up.

Despite my complaints, I stuck with the book until the end because it gave me insights into the lives of immigrants in the U.S.–particularly Chinese immigrants–and because I came to like the characters and to want to know how things turned out for them.

Great Tales from English History Vol 2

by Robert Lacey (Little, Brown 2004)

I picked this off the shelf because Vicki was doing a project on Henry VIII’s six wives for summer school, then got so engrossed that I read the whole thing! This volume covers English history from Chaucer (1387) through Newton (1687). Each chapter is only a few pages long but manages to convey a lot of information in a very interesting way. Lacey succinctly tells the true (so far as is known) stories of Joan of Arc, the Princes in the Tower, the struggle between Catholics and Protestants, the King James Bible and its predecessor, William Tyndale’s translation of Scripture…over 50 chapters in all. Many of the events and people were new to me, but for Lacey’s intended audience of Britishers, the book would clarify and explain much that they would have grown up “knowing” about, but not really (I think of all the misbegotten ideas Americans grow up with concerning our history–Cf Lies My Teacher Told Me). He points out how much of what we think we know about Richard III and others, for example, comes from Shakespeare’s plays, but Shakespeare was after all not a historian but an entertainer (makes me think of JFK). I wish I could remember all the fascinating facts and stories in the book! It has inspired me to read Volume 1.

For EFL/ESL readers interested in English history, this book should be good because the language is not overly difficult and the chapters, as I mentioned, are short.

Confucius Lives Next Door: What Living in the East Teaches Us About Living in the West

by T. R. Reid.  Random House, 1999.

I might have rephrased the subtitle of this fascinating book as “What Living in the East Teaches Us in the West About Living.”  Reid’s thesis is that the teachings of Kung Fu-Tzu (Confucius, or “the Master Kung”) still permeate the societies of Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, and to some extent other nations in the area; that Confucius’ theories about how to create and maintain a civil society are actively taught to the citizens of these countries; that they explain the “social miracle” of low crime rates, stellar schools and stable families; and that Confucian values are in essence not different from Western values.  We are taught the same thing, but we don’t seem to learn the lessons very well, or apply them in our daily lives.

T. R. Reid, the Washington Post’s bureau chief in Tokyo for five years, is said to be fluent in Japanese and is a keen observer of Japanese society and culture (as well as the cultures of many of the other Asian countries he writes about–but since his expertise is in Japan, most of his examples are Japanese).  The book is a good read, well-organized (but slightly repetitious) and easy to understand.  It would be an excellent choice for Asian EFL/ESL students and would give anyone much food for thought.

The Sunday Philosophy Club

by Alexander McCall Smith (narrated by Davina Porter; Recorded Books)

I am an enthusiastic fan of Mma Ramotswe and the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, but it has taken me years to get around to reading Alexander McCall Smith’s other series, The Sunday Philosophy Club and its sequels: Friends, Lovers, Chocolate; The Right Attitude to Rain; and The Careful Use of Compliments. Although not quite up to the standard of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, this is a delightful series. The novels are billed as mysteries and the protagonist, Isabel Dalhousie, as a sleuth; but they aren’t really mysteries (any more than the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency stories are) and Isabel is a 42-year-old independently wealthy philosopher and editor of The Review of Applied Ethics. She is incorrigibly interested in the affairs of others and constantly getting herself embroiled in their business, much to the dismay of her friends. I think Isabel is McCall Smith’s way of pondering the common ethical questions we all meet in daily life (When is it okay to lie? What is our obligations to our fellow humans? etc.). Isabel’s niece Kat, Kat’s rejected suitor Jamie, Isabel’s no-nonsense housekeeper Grace, and the various characters who people the novels are portrayed in that marvelously succinct way he has. There is a love story entwined in the series which unfolds at a leisurely pace. I like Isabel very much, despite her tendency to meddle, and I enjoy the sense of place with which these novels are embued. They renew my wish to visit Scotland.

Born on a Blue Day: A Memoir (Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant)

by Daniel Tammet (2006; Landmark Audiobooks 2007, narrated by Simon Vance)

This book is one of the most interesting books I’ve read recently.  Daniel Tammet is a young British man with autism and savant syndrome; he is extraordinarily gifted in the areas of mathematics and languages.  Unlike many (or most?) people with savant syndrome, he is verbally articulate and is able to describe, for example, how he “sees” numbers as mental landscapes having shape, color, and size; how he goes about learning (or creating) a new language (he learned enough Icelandic in a week to go on national television and be interviewed in the language!); and his experiences as a volunteer English teacher in Lithuania–his first time living away from home!  What a gutsy guy.  He’s a real inspiration.

Here is one of several videos on YouTube about Daniel Tammet:

Evenings at Five

by Gail Godwin; read by the author

This is the story of Christina and Rudy, author and composer, who fell in love and got married, made a life together and always had cocktails at five o’clock. There is a lot of detail about the drinks they have at the beginning, which seemed kind of odd. After Rudy’s death, Christina has to make sense of her life without him. For a while, she seems to succumb to the temptation to drown her sorrows in alcohol, but she seems to pull herself together.

The novel is very short, only two CDs, so I think it may be appropriate for older English learners; I doubt that younger readers (18-30) would identify with the characters, though.

Gail Godwin as narrator has the exact same gentle Southern accent as my friend Roberta. I wonder if she is from Richmond!

Heidi

by Johanna Spyri

I think Heidi must be my all-time favorite children’s book, at least from those that I actually read as a child. I have three hardcover editions; my most recent acquisition is a Knopf 1987 edition illustrated by Ruth Sanderson (interestingly, the translator is not named).

I don’t know why this story of a young Swiss orphan, her grandfather, the people who dwell on the Alp with her, and those she meets when she is sent to Frankfurt as a companion for a crippled child, appeals to me so much and so consistently; but I love Heidi’s honesty and goodness. Other characters the reader cannot help loving and admiring are Heidi’s grandfather, the Alm-Uncle (or Nuncle, as he is called in one translation); young Clara Sesemann, whom Heidi is sent to Frankfurt to befriend, her father, and her grandmother; and the Frankfurt doctor who helps Heidi return to her beloved home. In addition, the characters of Peter the goatherd; Fraulein Rottenmeier, the Sesemanns’ housekeeper; and Sebastian, the butler are memorably drawn.

My favorite parts include the part where Heidi’s simple trust and intelligence win over her grandfather, who has lived for years isolated from his fellow men; the part where Clara’s Grandmamma persuades Heidi that she can, in fact, learn to read; the part where Heidi’s homesickness gets the better of her and she sleepwalks, frightening the entire household, and especially where the doctor quickly gets to the root of the problem and induces Mr. Sesemann to send her back to her grandfather; and the doctor’s and Clara’s visits to the Alm. I read and reread these and other favorite parts, never tiring of them, always finding tears in my eyes at the same moments.

I also love the descriptions of the natural beauty of the Alps and the mountain meadow where Heidi and Peter go with the goats; the mountains, plants, and animals are lovingly described. It is this natural beauty that Heidi misses in Frankfurt, as much as she misses her grandfather. Shut up in a big city house, unable to see the sky or hear the wind in the trees, served fancy food instead of the wholesome goat’s milk, cheese, and bread she was accustomed to, she actually begins to wither like a plant deprived of light and water.

When Vicki was young, I purchased the Shirley Temple movie for her, and when we began watching it together, I was delighted to see the beginning of the story unfolding exactly as it is told in the book. Imagine my horror when the movie soon diverged so completely from the story as to be unrecognizable. In the movie, Fraulein Rottenmeier, instead of the vain, foolish woman portrayed in the book, is frankly evil, bent on selling Heidi to the gypsies, and Heidi’s grandfather travels to Frankfurt and rescues Heidi in a ridiculous carriage chase through the snowy streets. I wondered, why invent such absurdities when the story is so satisfying as originally told? Despite its moralistic tone and old-fashioned piety, Heidi is a timeless treasure of children’s literature.