"Is 'Eat Real Food' Unthinkable?" asks Mark Bittman. His column is a must read. It's great. I love it. I love him. In his newest column, he takes on the government's Dietary Guidelines, Oprah, and Walmart, all at the same time. Among the wonderful nuggets of wisdom in this piece, he says:
The truly healthy alternative to that chip is not a fake chip; it's a carrot. Likewise, the alternative to sausage is not vegan sausage; it's less sausage.
Here's what he says on the Dietary Guidelines and their new acronym, SOFAS (Solid Fats and Added Sugars):
The problem, as usual, is that the agency's nutrition experts are at odds with its other mission: to promote our bounty in whatever form its processors make it. The U.S.D.A. can succeed at its conflicting goals only by convincing us that eating manufactured food lower in SOFAS is "healthy," thus implicitly endorsing hyper-engineered junk food with added fiber, reduced and solid fats and so on, "food" that is often unimaginably far from its origins. When it comes to eating more "good" food, the report is clear, because that can't harm producers. When it comes to eating less of what's "bad," the language turns to "science," because telling us which products to avoid - like a 3,000-calorie fast-food "meal" or a box of low-fat but chemical-laden crackers - would play badly with industry. Instead we're told to avoid SOFAS. Where's that SOFAS aisle?
And Oprah (on her attempt to have her staff go vegan for a week):
Intriguing, except her idea of surviving without meat and dairy - no explanation given for why we should go from too much to none - is to fill your shopping cart with fake versions of both, like meatless chicken breasts and dairy-less cheese.
And Walmart:
We are promised more affordable produce, which undoubtedly means that Wal-Mart will beat the living daylights out of produce suppliers, crushing a few thousand more small farmers. (In fact, what we need is higher-quality and probably more expensive produce, that which is less damaging to the environment, laborers, and consumers, but that gets into the "how do we afford it?" argument, which must wait for another day. Let's leave it that we like Wal-Mart's goal of selling more produce.)
The real problem, again, is Wal-Mart's other promise: "healthier" packaged foods. And whether baked, low-salt chips are "better" than fried ones, is not only arguable - the baked ones are more likely to be chemical-laden - but misses the point which, again, is that real foods are superior in every way.
Bittman is, of course, right. There is no alternative of substitute for eating real food and COOKING real food. But the beef lobby wouldn't be happy if the USDA simply quoted Michael Pollan's "Eat food. Mostly Plants. Not too much." So instead they made up a new acronym to obscure the facts while offending no one. |
