Jacob Harris
read 672 pages in
2666
His Tips for Eating Food:
1. Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.
2. Avoid food products containing ingredients that are
a. unfamiliar
b. unpronounceable
c. more than five in number
d. or that include high-fructose corn syrup
3. Avoid food products that make health claims.
4. Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.
5. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible.
6. Eat mostly plant, especially leaves.
7. You are what what you eat eats too.
8. If you have the space, buy a freezer.
9. Eat like an omnivore.
10. Eat well-grown food from healthy soils.
11. Eat wild foods when you can.
12. Be the kind of person who takes supplements.
13. Eat more like the French, or the Italians, or the Japanese, or the Indians, or the Greeks.
14. Regard nontraditional foods with skepticism.
15. Don't look for the magic bullet in the traditional diet.
16. Have a glass of wine with dinner.
17. Pay more, eat less.
18. Eat meals.
19. Do all your eating at a table.
20. Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does.
21. Try not to eat alone.
22. Consult your gut.
23. Eat slowly.
A hallmark of the Western diet is food that is fast, cheap, and easy. Americans spend less than 10 percent of their income on food; they also spend less than half an hour a day preparing meals and little more than an hour enjoying them. For most people for most of history, gathering and preparing food has been an occupation at the very heart of daily life. Traditionally people have allocated a far greater proportion of their income to food – as they still do in several of the countries where people eat better than we do and as a consequence are healthier than we are.
Food safety didn't become a national or global problem until the industrialization of the food chain attenuated the relationships between food producers and eaters. That was the story Upton Sinclair told about BeefTrust in 1906, and it's the story unfolding in china today, where the rapid industrialization of the food system is leading to alarming breakdowns in food safety and integrity.
With the rise of industrial agriculture, vast monocultures of a tiny group of plants, most of them cereal grains, have replaced the diversified farms that used to feed us. A century ago, the typical Iowa farm raised more than a dozen different plant and animal species: cattle, chickens, corn, hogs, apples, hay, oats, potatoes, cherries, wheat, plums, grapes, and pears. Now it raises only two: corn and soybeans. This simplification of the agricultural landscape leads directly to the simplification of the diet, which is now to a remarkable extent dominated by – big surprise – corn and soybeans. You may not think you eat a lot of corn and soybeans, but you do: 75 percent of the vegetable oils in your diet come from soy (representing 20 percent of your calories) and more than half of the sweeteners you consume come from corn (representing about 10 percent of total calories).
Simplification of the food chain occurs at the level of species diversity too. The astounding variety of foods on offer in today's supermarket obscures the fact that the actual number of species in the modern diet is shrinking. Thousands of plant and animal varieties have fallen out of commerce in the last century as industrial agriculture has focused its attentions on a small handful of high-yielding (and usually patented) varieties, with qualities that suited them to things like mechanical harvesting and processing. Half of all broccoli grown commercially in America today is a single variety – Marathon – notable for its high yield. The overwhelming majority of the chickens raised for meat in America are the same hybrid, the Cornish Cross; more than 99 percent of the turkeys are Broad-Breasted Whites.