The Best Nutrition is Natural
By Barbara Damrosch, published Thursday, February 14, 2007 in The Washington Post
Nature's gifts come in fancy wrapping. "Look at me!" the tomato shouts. "I'm red, I'm sweet, I'm juicy." The banana makes no less flashy a pitch: "Check out my E-Z-Peel skin!" It's a marketing strategy designed to lure creatures to eat fruits and thereby disperse their seeds.
You wouldn't think these goodies needed help selling themselves to us, but advertising by the ultra-processed food industry is a big distraction. Even recent boosts from science, trumpeting the nutritional value of fruits, vegetables and whole grains, seem to derail nature's mission. No sooner do we learn that a plant food is a package rich in disease-fighting antioxidants than somebody tries to take that complex package apart. Witness the beta carotene debacle of the '90s. On the strength that beta carotene, found especially in bright orange foods, might protect us from diseases such as cancer, suddenly beta carotene supplements were hot-selling items. Then studies found that the supplements might cause cancer instead. The conclusion: Get your beta carotene from carrots.
That's the central message of Michael Pollan's latest book, "In Defense of Food." In his usual clear, hit-the-nail-on-the-head style, Pollan traces our country's sorry journey to a less healthful diet, and he offers good, simple solutions -- the most noteworthy of which is to "eat food." Real food, that is, not a collection of cheap, dubious makeshifts assembled in a lab. Basic to his argument is the idea of food synergy, that a food "is more than the sum of its nutrient parts."
The trend toward medicalizing vegetables (breeding them to be higher in the flavonoid of the month) is perhaps better intentioned than turning food into pills, but to my mind it still smacks of what Pollan calls "nutritionism." Is it necessary to pack extra lycopene into a tomato and more carotene into a carrot, or vice versa? If you eat a diet rich in lots of different fruits and vegetables, grown organically and picked fresh, you will get all the nutrients you need.
One of Pollan's maxims is to choose food at the edges of the supermarket if you must shop there at all. The center aisles are a swirling nucleus of ever-changing fake foods with unpronounceable ingredients. Pick up something from the outer walls instead: an honest red cabbage or a fat beet. Then break through those walls to the fields and gardens beyond.
Granted, February is not the garden's best season, but in my pantry there are red paste tomatoes that I put up in summer, pink applesauce I made in fall, and even, in the cold greenhouse, a few last sweet winter carrots. And that's what I'll serve my valentine.
Article copyright of Barbara Damrosch. Reprinted with permission.
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