I’ve posted several essays recently on the joys of eating simply and naturally, avoiding heavily processed foods and focusing on lightly-cooked, quality ingredients, and keeping an eye on cholesterol, fats, sugars, salt. I’m a foodie, not a health nut, and certainly not a crusader. I’m just describing my own enthusiasms, not recommending anything to anybody or trying to foment change.
But I’m flabbergasted by the zealotry of some healthy-food gurus. Those self-appointed food nannies really need to pipe down, because they’re making things a lot worse, not better. Probably the biggest hurdle to jettisoning a death-dealing fast-food diet is learning to ignore that phalanx of prissy, holier-than-thou “experts” who forbid you to eat stuff that’s fun and prescribe instead a deadening regime of soulless, monotonous crap.
A short session with Google revealed a nanny-site which more or less forbade eating anything, from what I could tell. Even worse was the obnoxious tone of the authors, such as this gem: “if you must indulge, then be sure to eat only low-fat unsweetened frozen yogurt.” But I’ve got news for the nannies: low-fat unsweetened frozen yogurt isn’t indulgence. It’s just plain old dull humdrum boring everyday unexciting unremarkable unindulgent yogurt, except colder. A scoop of fine chocolate ice cream, made lovingly from prime ingredients and devoid of icky chemicals or unnatural things: that is an indulgence. And we should have it. Maybe not every day, maybe not more than that one scoop, but we should have it, and so should the nannies.
I recall a food-nanny type who hosted a short-lived cooking show on PBS. I saw one of her paltry few episodes. She prepared steamed vegetables with brown rice. Now, let’s get real here: steamed vegetables and brown rice is brain-dead easy. My cat April could do it. Prissy McNanny even used an electric rice cooker for her brown rice, so even the culinary challenge of setting a timer was sidestepped. And steaming vegetables? The deeper in the ground it grows, the earlier it goes in the steamer. How this merited a full half-hour’s episode was something of a mystery. Lidia Bastianich could teach you two or three knockout Italian dishes in that same time.
But Prissy McNanny assembled her veggies in cute little bundles, each lovingly tied with chives, as though that were going to make a rat’s ass worth of difference. No salt, no seasonings—just veggies tied up like bouquets and a rice-cooker full of brown rice. Hell, it barely even qualifies as cooking. And this on the same network as Jacques Pepin and Julia Child…oh, it just breaks the heart.
Now I’m not inveighing against such a menu, but on a 1—10 scale of foodie-lust such a meal rates about a minus-2. Boring isn’t the half of it. Miss Prissy’s oh-so-virtuous dinner wasn’t even nutritionally complete; it required legumes or nuts, or better yet a bit of meat.
Prissy exclaimed how her family “just scarfs it all down!!”. Yeah, I thought, I just bet they do. I’ll also wager that hubby makes a pit stop at Sonic on the way home from work. And just how many Krispy Kremes and pizza slices have the kids stashed around the house?
Prissy Dear: thank you for this steaming platter of brown rice and veggies tied up in cunning little bundles. Now let me suggest what you can do with this steaming platter of brown rice and veggies tied up in cunning little bundles—but perhaps you might want to let them cool down a bit first.
I have been watching Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution since it began broadcasting on ABC about a month ago. I have grown quite fond of him and the series in general, although I realize that this so-called “documentary” show is fundamentally fiction, if not downright fantasy. Too much is falling into place just so and obviously a lot of planning has gone into creating that spontaneous, non-scripted gestalt. It emits the faint aroma of a sustained publicity stunt, at least around the edges.
But I’m quibbling more than I should; on the whole I admire it given that Jamie Oliver is taking on a difficult issue in modern American life, and he’s taking it on full-throttle. But he isn’t making the error of marching into Huntingdon, West Virginia and insisting that everybody drop their Hot Pockets right now in favor of brown rice and steamed veggies (bundled or not) with a “dessert” of non-fat unsweetened frozen yogurt. As he strives to transform elementary- and high-school lunch menus, he proves that goodies like sloppy joes, nachos, and meat-sauce spaghetti, can be perfectly healthy if they’re cooked right. He isn’t throwing spelt-pasta-with-broccoli at people.
He’s getting in their collective face about frozen breaded chicken patties, about microwaved pizza, about frozen dinners, about flavored milk with more sugar than sodas, about heavily processed sugared breakfast cereals, about greasy french fries with every meal, about “salads” that turn out to be mostly fats, salt, and sugar. He’s inveighing against food that is so laden with chemical additives that it damn near glows in the dark. Bit by bit he’s encouraging his target population to buy real, fresh food and to cook it themselves. To be sure, sometimes his tactics run a bit kamikaze, and sometimes his mouth gets the better of his judgment. Some of the good people of Huntingdon have suggested that he do with his stir-fry wok as I suggested to Prissy, a few paragraphs above, apropos her platter.
But Oliver could succeed where many others have failed because he isn’t an ascetic suffering from a psychotic aversion to pleasure. He’s obviously quite the happy hedonist. His food is not only healthier than the crap they’ve been eating, it’s a lot more fun to boot. As a result, his “food revolution” emits the positive vibe of a celebration, not a mournful renouncing of life’s pleasures.
And that’s precisely why the food nannies fuck it all up: they come across as a bunch of sanctimonious killjoys. There’s more than a hint of self-flagellation in that brown rice and steamed veggies; mea culpa, they groan, mea maxima culpa, as they whip themselves bloody with knotted carrot peelings.
It never seems to occur to the food nannies that, with a bit of imagination, a bag of brown rice and basket of veggies can become a lovely brown-rice pilaf. All you need extra is a splash of olive oil, some garlic, onions, seasonings, and—most important of all—a love for food, rather than a puckered aversion.