Springfield Locavore

Orthorexia - An Unhealthy Obsession with Healthy Eating

The New York Times has an interesting article, What's Eating Our Kids? Fears About 'Bad' Foods, which discusses orthorexia, "an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating." (Michael Pollan talked a bit about this in his book In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto.) Here's an excerpt from the article:

While scarcely any expert would criticize parents for paying attention to children's diets, many doctors, dietitians and eating disorder specialists worry that some parents are becoming overzealous, even obsessive, in efforts to engender good eating habits in children. With the best of intentions, these parents may be creating an unhealthy aura around food.

"We're seeing a lot of anxiety in these kids," said Cynthia Bulik, the director of the eating disorders program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "They go to birthday parties, and if it's not a granola cake they feel like they can't eat it. The culture has led both them and their parents to take the public health messages to an extreme."

Tiffany Rush-Wilson, an eating disorder counselor in Pepper Pike, Ohio, has seen the same thing. "I have lots of children or adolescent clients or young adults who complain about how their parents micromanage their eating based on their own health standards and beliefs," she said. "The kids' eating became very restrictive, and that's how they came to me."

Michael Pollan discussed orthorexia, as well as "nutritionism". The 2 terms refer to related but different ideas.

Orthorexia is an unhealthy obsession with healthy food, which tends to mean closely reading labels on packages to make sure that they don't contain the bad stuff and do contain the good stuff.

"Nutritionism" is a focus on the nutrients rather than on the foods. For example, carrots are good for us. Why? Well, perhaps it's because they contain vitamin A, as well as beta-carotene. Great! So let's create a product packed with vitamin A and beta carotene! We'll have a big marketing campaign, with ads in all the major print publications, and....

Or... we could just eat carrots.

Of course, I'm sure that some people will read this and use it as a justification for eating whatever they want. But the point of the article isn't that healthy eating doesn't matter. It's just that maintaining a sense of perspective is important. We shouldn't let a fear of "bad" foods ruin our lives.

Michael Pollan in Mother Jones

Mother Jones has an interview with Michael Pollan. He talks about the impact of our food systems on climate change, Obama's choice of Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture, the problems with corn-based ethanol, subsidies, the high cost of healthy food, and more. FYI.

Review: Designing the New Kitchen Garden, by Jennifer R. Bartley

While reading The $64 Tomato, I kept thinking, "Part of this guy's problem is that he doesn't just want his vegetable garden to provide him with vegetables; he wants it to look pretty as well." As far as I was concerned, if my tomato plants give me tomatoes, I'm happy! After reading Designing the New Kitchen Garden: An American Potager Handbook, by Jennifer R. Bartley, I now have a little more interest in the idea of a garden that looks nice as well as being tasty.

Perhaps one of the first questions you have is, "What does the word 'potager' mean?" As used in this book, the word refers to "a year-round kitchen garden whose purpose is to supply the kitchen with fresh vegetables and herbs on a daily basis." In addition:

What makes the potager different from a typical vegetable garden is not just its history, but its design: the potager is a landscape feature that does not have to be hidden in the corner of the backyard, but can be the central feature of an ornamental, all-season landscape — even in the front yard of a home in the most exclusive residential neighborhood. The potager is a source of herbs, vegetables, and flowers, but it is also a structured garden space, a design based on repetitive geometric patterns.

(Irrelevant bit of trivia: One of the surnames in my family tree is "Pottenger", a corruption of the word "potager", implying that perhaps I had an ancestor who maintained a kitchen garden for someone.)

First of all, this is a gorgeous book! There are wonderful color photos on nearly every page, and it's quite enjoyable just to flip through the book, gazing at the photos and browsing the captions.

The first chapter discusses the origins of the potager, looking at the gardens created in Medieval and Renaissance times. Chapter two continues the history lesson, examining some large old gardens in France. Chapter three moves a bit closer to home, discussing three gardens in the U.S. on a somewhat more reasonable scale. Chapter four takes a slight detour, discussing why people enjoy kitchen gardens.

All of which is fine, but we're now finished with four chapters out of eight and I still haven't really come across anything especially useful! Whenever I read books, I tend to underline bits of particularly interesting information, writing notes in the margin to agree or disagree with whatever point the author is making. (I have a friend who specifically borrows books after I've read them so that she can enjoy reading my notes in the margin.)

After reading four chapters of this book, I still hadn't underlined anything. (That's a pity, because this book has nice wide margins for writing in!)

Finally, in chapter five, "Design Principles of the Modern Potager," the author starts to provide some useful information. Make a diagram of your property. Include structures on neighbors' properties on your diagram, as they can impact your garden. If your garden can't be quite close to the kitchen, create an enjoyable walkway on the way to the garden, since you will be making the journey often. Divide your garden into modules, rather than rows. Design the garden as an outdoor room by providing some sense of enclosure. Place fragrant plants near the entrance to the garden, as that will be an invitation to guests to enter. And so forth. At this point I was underlining lots of stuff!

Chapter six, "Plant Combinations for Design and Sequence," was far less interesting to me. Discussions of contrasting heights, textures, colors, etc, just didn't spark an inspiration with me. There was some useful information in this chapter, however. For example, attempt to design your garden with crop rotation in mind. Create a design for each of the years of the rotation, so that you can ensure that you aren't planting things in the wrong place. In general, plant your perennials and your annuals in separate locations, so that you don't disturb the perennials each year while trying to plant the annuals. Etc.

Chapter seven, "Potager Designs," returned to the earlier theme of presenting examples of potagers, again emphasizing inspiration rather than information. I found more things to underline than in the first four chapters, but significantly less than in the previous two.

Finally, chapter eight, "Building and Maintaining the Edible Garden," provides quite a bit of useful information, discussing ordering seeds; the meanings of terms like hybrid, organic, heirloom, open-pollinated, annual, biennial, perennial, etc.; growing plants from seed; preparing the soil; cover crops and green manures; etc. One useful suggestion in this chapter was to order seed and plants from companies that are close to your area. The idea is that a seed company in Iowa or Missouri is more likely to be carrying varieties that grow well in Illinois than a seed company in Oregon or Florida. I don't know whether that's true, but it at least sounds like it might be true, so I'll keep that in mind.

Although this book has made me somewhat more interested in the idea of a pretty vegetable garden, I still found it rather slow-going to read through it all. The pictures and diagrams were inspiring, but I'm just not a design-oriented type of guy. I can only read so much about complementary colors, contrasting textures, etc, before my eyes glaze over (or, since I tend to read at bedtime, close). Whether I would recommend it to others depends upon how interested you think you might find such topics. However, I admit that I found it somewhat inspiring and it has me thinking along lines that I hadn't previously considered.

• American Potager web site
• American Potager blog

What I'm Currently Reading

• The Vegetable Gardener's Bible, by Edward C. Smith

Waiting in My Queue

(in no particular order)

• Lasagna Gardening: A New Layering System for Bountiful Gardens: No Digging, No Tilling, No Weeding, No Kidding!, by Patricia Lanza
• All New Square Foot Gardening: Grow More in Less Space!, by Mel Bartholomew
• Let It Rot! The Gardener's Guide to Composting, by Stu Campbell
• Keeping the Harvest: Discover the Homegrown Goodness of Putting Up Your Own Fruits, Vegetables & Herbs, by Nancy Chioffi & Gretchen Mead
• Illinois Gardener's Guide, by James A. Fizzell
• Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long, by Eliot Coleman
• Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, by Toby Hemenway
• Country Wisdom & Know-How: Everything You Need to Know to Live Off the Land, from the editors of Storey Books

Previously Reviewed

• The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden, by William Alexander

Hill Street Farm CSA for 2009!

I talked to Andy Heck of Hill Street Farms yesterday. He'll be doing another CSA this year, this time with Garrick Veenstra of Veenstra's Vegetables. Rather than pickup being at the Old Capitol Farmers' Market on Saturday mornings, pickup will be at the farm near Rochester on Tuesday evenings.

I'll be signing up for a half-share this year, in part because we just weren't organized enough to use up a full share last year, but also because I'm hoping I'll be harvesting some food from our own garden this year!

I don't yet have all of the details (e.g. cost), but Andy and Garrick will be sending out a letter and contract soon. I'll post more about it when I get it!

Oh, and if you don't know what a CSA is, you might want to ready my earlier post, What the Heck is the Hill Street Farm CSA?

100 Days Until Old Capitol Farmers' Market Opens!

I just realized that the Old Capitol Farmers' Market opens 100 days from today. Woohoo! Mark May 20 on your calendar!

Michael Pollan on Bill Moyers' Journal

Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food, appeared on Bill Moyers Journal on November 28, after Obama was elected President but before he appointed Tom Vilsack to be the Secretary of Agriculture. PBS has now posted the video (in two parts) on YouTube.

If you only have time to watch one part, and you're already quite familiar with Michael Pollan's open letter in The New York Times Magazine to the Farmer in Chief, be sure you at least watch part 2. That includes a short piece about a neighborhood farmers' market in New York, discusses the difficulty of finding fresh produce in low income areas, and talks about the strong correlation between cooking and health.

Here's an excerpt from part 2:

BILL MOYERS: What else? Give me a list, quickly, of what we can do to make a difference in this reforming the food system.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, plant a garden. If you've got space, and if you don't, look into a community garden where you might rent a little bit of space, like we saw in East New York.

Cook. Simply by starting to cook again, you declare your independence from the culture of fast food. As soon as you cook, you start thinking about ingredients. You start thinking about plants and animals, and not the microwave. And you will find that your diet, just by that one simple act, that is greatly improved. You will find that you are supporting local agriculture, because you'll care about the quality of ingredients. And you know, whether you're cooking or not is one of the best predictors for a healthy diet. It's more important than the class predictor. People with more money generally have healthier diets, but affluent people who don't cook are not as healthy in their eating as poor people who still cook. So, very, very important. If you don't have pots and pans, get them.

Now people say they don't have time, and that's an issue. And I am saying that we do need to invest more time in food. Food is just too important to relegate to these 10-minute corners of our lives. And you know, even if you would just take, you know, we watch cooking shows like crazy on television. We've turned cooking into a spectator sport. If you would merely invest the time you spend watching cooking shows in actually cooking, you would find you've got plenty of time to put a meal on the table.

The points he makes about cooking are, I think, extremely important. I know that one of the biggest hurdles to my eating more fresh, local food last summer was lack of knowledge about how to cook some things and a (perceived) lack of time to do so. (Of course, then we started house hunting, packing, moving, etc, and the lack of time became very real!) One of my goals this year is to be more organized in the kitchen, more prepared, and more "daring" at actually trying stuff. Practice, practice, practice!

Part 1:

Part 2: