What's on the Menu?
Food. I've written about it before, but it's an everpresent theme and something we think about every day. Every day we choose what we eat for breakfast, what we make for lunch, and what we reheat for dinner. As well as what we can stuff in our face between meals when hunger strikes like an angry tiger. Unless it's a very special meal we usually buy timesavers so that the preparation is faster. We can get together a meal for four in around a half hour or less now. And we do so without thinking much about where the food has come from, except at which supermarket we bought it and if it was on sale. It wasn't always like this.
I have a book somewhere in this mess, I believe, called Russian Journal. It talks about a husband and wife who go to Soviet Russia in the 1970's. The husband is a doctoral candidate at Harvard and gets permission to do research in Moscow University and then-Leningrad. The wife wrote the journal about their stay. In one chapter she mentions a visit to new friends in which their new friends take them hunting for mushrooms. She describes the preparation of the meal and mentions that in Soviet Russia one must give long hard thoughts to the preparation of food. Small snacks don't exist unless you make them. There is no going down to the corner store for a bag of chips when the munchies threaten. Outside laborious mealtimes there is no opportunity to snack because there are no ready-made snacks in stores. This was in the 1970's, when, though not as plentiful as now, you could find from A to Z in American supermarkets snacks that you could simply pick up and stuff in your mouth with no extra thought than of making sure you had the stipulated twenty-five cents it cost. I know, I lived it. At the same time, in Spain it was getting to be common to find sandwich items, such as Nocilla, the Spanish version of Nutella, sandwich meats, processed cheese, margarine. I remember coming on vacation and being given a margarine sandwich sprinkled with sugar. Sound strange? It tasted good. We also ate chocolate sandwiches. We would take a piece of a chocolate tablet and stuff it in the middle of some bread. The point is, we were already wandering away from what nutritionists now call the Atlantic Diet.
The Atlantic Diet is supposedly a more or less common diet that people on Europe's Atlantic coast have eaten for generations in accordance with what the land yields. Or, better said, what those who have always had money have always eaten. It's characteristics are: local, fresh foods that are in season, including leafy vegetables, and fruits, potatoes, chestnuts, bread, and beans. It also includes dairy products, especially cheese; olive oil, fish and shellfish, and red and white meats. Typical recipes would be caldeirada, fish, potatoes, and onions cooked together; or caldo, with pork, potatoes, cabbage, and beans in its simple state, fried fish with cooked potatoes, etc. People who used to stick to this tended to be healthier. But the only fats came from the salt pork in the caldo, which was not eaten every day, and from the fats used to cook. And fried foods weren't eaten every day. Of course it was healthier than food we eat today. Because even if now we eat some good food that people have always eaten here, we also eat our cookies with milk to which we have added cocoa, or a croissant or doughnut from the pastry shop. And when we have the munchies because lunch is late we can always sneak in some potato chips, etc. And the fat in those extras is much more than the fat we might ingest from the salt pork we might have eaten once a week.
Another, much-touted, diet is the Mediterranean Diet. That consists of mainly fruits and vegetables, rice, bread, legumes, olive oil, fish and less quantities of dairy products with even smaller quantities of meat and meat products. To mind comes the paella, ratatouille from France, and almost any traditional food from countries around the Mediterranean. Again, good food with adecuate nutrition to keep an eater healthy. But, again, we add the processed foods to one meal or the snacks when the stomach growls, and the intrinsic healthiness of this way of eating also disappears.
The origins of these diets has always been the kitchen garden. In most villages and small towns, families always had (and sometimes still have) a plot on which to grow their own foods and keep their chickens or a hog. In the absence of the ability to ship foods long distances, families have always had to eat what they had to hand. Simple food processing has always been a part of this. The Russians in the book I mentioned pickled the extra mushrooms they found to keep them for later. The truth is, food processing has been around since the first humans learned to cook foods. Any way in which we manipulate food to preserve it for a few days or hours longer is food processing. There is nothing wrong with eating processed foods if we eat foods that have previously been refrigerated, frozen in their natural state, dried, pickled, or canned. But the problem is the overly processed foods that no longer resemble their natural selves. Humans love fatty foods. It's part of our genetic makeup. Eating fatty foods once upon a time ensured our survival. We still need some fat in our foods, to maintain healthy skin and a healthy nervous system, as well as to keep our organs functioning correctly. But the producers of the snack industry overload their products with fats and sugars to appeal to our palates. That's where the modern human's problems with obesity have set in. A person can eat a healthy main diet, but if they hit the snacks or sugary drinks during the rest of the day, they will get fat.
I have sometimes fallen into the trap of potato chips, snack bars, and the like. We all have. Finding the willpower in the face of all that stares at us from the supermarket shelves is sometimes difficult. We live in a time of over-abundance of food and have forgotten what a trial it once was to get together enough food to put a meal on the table.
I have a book somewhere in this mess, I believe, called Russian Journal. It talks about a husband and wife who go to Soviet Russia in the 1970's. The husband is a doctoral candidate at Harvard and gets permission to do research in Moscow University and then-Leningrad. The wife wrote the journal about their stay. In one chapter she mentions a visit to new friends in which their new friends take them hunting for mushrooms. She describes the preparation of the meal and mentions that in Soviet Russia one must give long hard thoughts to the preparation of food. Small snacks don't exist unless you make them. There is no going down to the corner store for a bag of chips when the munchies threaten. Outside laborious mealtimes there is no opportunity to snack because there are no ready-made snacks in stores. This was in the 1970's, when, though not as plentiful as now, you could find from A to Z in American supermarkets snacks that you could simply pick up and stuff in your mouth with no extra thought than of making sure you had the stipulated twenty-five cents it cost. I know, I lived it. At the same time, in Spain it was getting to be common to find sandwich items, such as Nocilla, the Spanish version of Nutella, sandwich meats, processed cheese, margarine. I remember coming on vacation and being given a margarine sandwich sprinkled with sugar. Sound strange? It tasted good. We also ate chocolate sandwiches. We would take a piece of a chocolate tablet and stuff it in the middle of some bread. The point is, we were already wandering away from what nutritionists now call the Atlantic Diet.
The Atlantic Diet is supposedly a more or less common diet that people on Europe's Atlantic coast have eaten for generations in accordance with what the land yields. Or, better said, what those who have always had money have always eaten. It's characteristics are: local, fresh foods that are in season, including leafy vegetables, and fruits, potatoes, chestnuts, bread, and beans. It also includes dairy products, especially cheese; olive oil, fish and shellfish, and red and white meats. Typical recipes would be caldeirada, fish, potatoes, and onions cooked together; or caldo, with pork, potatoes, cabbage, and beans in its simple state, fried fish with cooked potatoes, etc. People who used to stick to this tended to be healthier. But the only fats came from the salt pork in the caldo, which was not eaten every day, and from the fats used to cook. And fried foods weren't eaten every day. Of course it was healthier than food we eat today. Because even if now we eat some good food that people have always eaten here, we also eat our cookies with milk to which we have added cocoa, or a croissant or doughnut from the pastry shop. And when we have the munchies because lunch is late we can always sneak in some potato chips, etc. And the fat in those extras is much more than the fat we might ingest from the salt pork we might have eaten once a week.
Another, much-touted, diet is the Mediterranean Diet. That consists of mainly fruits and vegetables, rice, bread, legumes, olive oil, fish and less quantities of dairy products with even smaller quantities of meat and meat products. To mind comes the paella, ratatouille from France, and almost any traditional food from countries around the Mediterranean. Again, good food with adecuate nutrition to keep an eater healthy. But, again, we add the processed foods to one meal or the snacks when the stomach growls, and the intrinsic healthiness of this way of eating also disappears.
The origins of these diets has always been the kitchen garden. In most villages and small towns, families always had (and sometimes still have) a plot on which to grow their own foods and keep their chickens or a hog. In the absence of the ability to ship foods long distances, families have always had to eat what they had to hand. Simple food processing has always been a part of this. The Russians in the book I mentioned pickled the extra mushrooms they found to keep them for later. The truth is, food processing has been around since the first humans learned to cook foods. Any way in which we manipulate food to preserve it for a few days or hours longer is food processing. There is nothing wrong with eating processed foods if we eat foods that have previously been refrigerated, frozen in their natural state, dried, pickled, or canned. But the problem is the overly processed foods that no longer resemble their natural selves. Humans love fatty foods. It's part of our genetic makeup. Eating fatty foods once upon a time ensured our survival. We still need some fat in our foods, to maintain healthy skin and a healthy nervous system, as well as to keep our organs functioning correctly. But the producers of the snack industry overload their products with fats and sugars to appeal to our palates. That's where the modern human's problems with obesity have set in. A person can eat a healthy main diet, but if they hit the snacks or sugary drinks during the rest of the day, they will get fat.
I have sometimes fallen into the trap of potato chips, snack bars, and the like. We all have. Finding the willpower in the face of all that stares at us from the supermarket shelves is sometimes difficult. We live in a time of over-abundance of food and have forgotten what a trial it once was to get together enough food to put a meal on the table.
Comments
Post a Comment