Springfield Locavore

Froot Loops: A Smart Choice

In the book In Defense of Food, one of the things Michael Pollan discussed was "nutritionism", which is thinking of food only in terms of their nutrients, rather than in terms of the whole food. One distinguishing feature of "real" food is the general lack of nutritional claims.

In a grocery store, in the aisles of processed food, you'll see plenty of labels on the packages boasting of the great nutritional contents and the wonderful health benefits of the product. "High in Vitamin C!" "Heart Healthy!" "Bursting with Anti-Oxidants!"

Meanwhile, in the next aisle over, you'll find broccoli, with no nutrition and health claims plastered all over it. Yet few people would argue that broccoli is less nutritious than, say, Froot Loops.

Yes, that's right, even Froot Loops is being labeled as a healthy food! There is now an industry-backed label program in which food products that meet a certain standard can bear a green checkmark symbol indicating that the product is part of the "Smart Choices Program".

Froot Loops qualifies. Why? Well, apparently the claim is that Froot Loops is healthier than donuts. I guess if a food exists that is less healthy for you, then they can call their food healthy. Or something.

Actually, I think the real criteria is that if the food has been mixed with enough vitamins, then it's considered healthy. I guess if McDonald's sprinkled some vitamin C on their french fries, they would become a health food.

Skip the "Smart Choices" labels. Buy the food in the periphery of the grocery store. You know, the stuff that doesn't have any labels.

What's Cooking? Not Us!

One of the interesting tidbits that I picked up while reading locavore-related books was the inverse relationship between cooking and obesity: More cooking leads to less obesity; less cooking leads to more obesity. As you might have noticed, there's not much cooking going on these days. (No, throwing a frozen pizza into the oven or a frozen dinner into the microwave does not count as cooking.)

Last week Michael Pollan wrote a very good article in the New York Times, Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch. It discusses the decline in recent years of cooking, which ironically corresponded to a simultaneous increase in the popularity of food-related TV shows. Here's an excerpt:

Today the average American spends a mere 27 minutes a day on food preparation (another four minutes cleaning up); that’s less than half the time that we spent cooking and cleaning up when Julia arrived on our television screens. It’s also less than half the time it takes to watch a single episode of “Top Chef” or “Chopped” or “The Next Food Network Star.” What this suggests is that a great many Americans are spending considerably more time watching images of cooking on television than they are cooking themselves — an increasingly archaic activity they will tell you they no longer have the time for.

What is wrong with this picture?

A few months ago, I saw the documentary Food Fight at Liberty Brew & View. (Not to be confused with the new documentary, Food, Inc., which I haven't seen yet.) Frankly, I was disappointed. The movie spent far too much time discussing celebrity chefs and expensive restaurants, which very little time spent on actually buying and cooking food yourself. If eating local food meant spending $30 (or more) per person on dinner at a fancy restaurant, how often would you actually do it?

Part of the catalyst for the appearance of Pollan's New York Times article is the new movie Julie & Julia, which deals with Julia Child, the original television cook, and Julie Powell, who decided to cook -- and blog -- all of the recipes in Julia Child's book Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It looks like it could be an interesting movie! Here's the trailer:

Here's another excerpt from Michael Pollan's article:

It’s generally assumed that the entrance of women into the work force is responsible for the collapse of home cooking, but that turns out to be only part of the story. Yes, women with jobs outside the home spend less time cooking — but so do women without jobs. The amount of time spent on food preparation in America has fallen at the same precipitous rate among women who don’t work outside the home as it has among women who do: in both cases, a decline of about 40 percent since 1965. (Though for married women who don’t have jobs, the amount of time spent cooking remains greater: 58 minutes a day, as compared with 36 for married women who do have jobs.) In general, spending on restaurants or takeout food rises with income. Women with jobs have more money to pay corporations to do their cooking, yet all American women now allow corporations to cook for them when they can.

Those corporations have been trying to persuade Americans to let them do the cooking since long before large numbers of women entered the work force. After World War II, the food industry labored mightily to sell American women on all the processed-food wonders it had invented to feed the troops: canned meals, freeze-dried foods, dehydrated potatoes, powdered orange juice and coffee, instant everything. As Laura Shapiro recounts in “Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America,” the food industry strived to “persuade millions of Americans to develop a lasting taste for meals that were a lot like field rations.” The same process of peacetime conversion that industrialized our farming, giving us synthetic fertilizers made from munitions and new pesticides developed from nerve gas, also industrialized our eating.

Shapiro shows that the shift toward industrial cookery began not in response to a demand from women entering the work force but as a supply-driven phenomenon. In fact, for many years American women, whether they worked or not, resisted processed foods, regarding them as a dereliction of their “moral obligation to cook,” something they believed to be a parental responsibility on par with child care. It took years of clever, dedicated marketing to break down this resistance and persuade Americans that opening a can or cooking from a mix really was cooking. Honest. In the 1950s, just-add-water cake mixes languished in the supermarket until the marketers figured out that if you left at least something for the “baker” to do — specifically, crack open an egg — she could take ownership of the cake. Over the years, the food scientists have gotten better and better at simulating real food, keeping it looking attractive and seemingly fresh, and the rapid acceptance of microwave ovens — which went from being in only 8 percent of American households in 1978 to 90 percent today — opened up vast new horizons of home-meal replacement.

Anyway, after you watch the trailer for Julie & Julia, go read Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch. It's a lengthy article, but Pollan makes very good points throughout. And it just might inspire you to learn to cook!

(And after you're done reading the article, you can listen to Michael Pollan on Cooking as Spectator Sport, a  20-minute radio segment from NPR's Fresh Air.)

My Locavore Weight Loss Plan

One of my hopes in becoming a locavore was that it would help me lose weight. After all, nutrition experts say that, instead of eating french fries, hamburgers, shakes, cookies, candy, chips, etc, we should be eating plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables. That's pretty much exactly what happens when you become a locavore.

Think about it: If you had to make your own potato chips, how often do you think you would eat them?

Counting Calories

I've always found that it is very difficult for me to lose weight during cold weather. For whatever reason, when it's cold outside, I tend to eat more. So I decided that I would start trying to lose weight on the first day of Spring, which was March 20 this year.

I've never done any sort of fad diet (e.g. Atkins, South Beach, etc). All I do is count calories. It works pretty well.

On March 20, I weighed 256.2 pounds.

By May 20, I was down to 248.2 pounds, a loss of 8 pounds over the course of nearly 9 weeks. I'm 6'1" tall, so my BMI went from about 33.8 to about 32.7. I averaged a drop of 0.9 pounds per week.

I steadily lose weight when I count calories, but the actual mechanics of counting calories is a pain! Inevitably, I always eventually stop counting. Have I found a better way?

Not Counting Calories

May 20 was the official beginning of our locavore challenge. From that point on, I stopped counting calories. By June 20, I was down to 241.2 pounds, a loss of 7 pounds over the course of 4½ weeks. My BMI dropped to about 31.8. I averaged a drop of nearly 1.6 pounds per week.

In other words, I lost weight at nearly twice the rate without the tedium of counting calories!

Of course, whenever I would "fall off the wagon" — going to a picnic, or travelling out of town — I would gain weight. And unfortunately, there have been 2 picnics and 2 trips out of town over the past 3 weeks! If not for them, I would probably have lost another 8 pounds by now! Instead, I'm only down to 240.3 as of this morning, a drop of 0.9 pounds over the course of 16 days.

Even with the non-locavore setbacks, since May 20 I've lost an average of nearly 1.2 pounds per week. And I haven't exactly been starving myself — eggs, sausage, broccoli, green beans, tomatoes, potatoes, salads, homemade ice cream, cherries, strawberries, blueberries, peaches, sweetcorn, whole milk, butter, etc. Do you think you could survive on that?

The lesson I would draw from this is not that you can stuff yourself and still lose weight. Rather, it's that by becoming a locavore, it's easier to avoid stuffing yourself, which allows you to lose weight without the tedium of counting calories!

Tomorrow the boss is bringing pizza to work. No, it's not local. I think I'll be bringing some local blueberries to share, but I'll also be eating some pizza. (I never turn down pizza!) And I know I have some other non-local eating in my future as the summer activities get underway. However, if I can keep the non-local eating to a minimum, I hope to be back to losing over 1½ pounds per week soon — without counting calories!

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.