BEING WHOLE, IN BODY MIND AND SPIRIT

Number seven of eight children (five boys and three girls), I was born--so my older siblings later told me--on a cold and frosty Tuesday, Jan 14, 1930, into a family that knew what it was to work hard at any job available.

In the so-called "good old days there were no laws against child labor. Nor was it compulsory for children (until 1945) to go to school. Born in 1880, my father went to a church-run school long enough to learn to read and write.

He started to work in 1891 when, at eleven years of age, he got his first job. He told us that for much of his childhood he was virtually a child galley-slave on a schooner, which fished in Labrador. Poverty, ignorance and lack were considered normal.

Over the years that followed, wherever he could get work so doing, fishing is what he did. What other education he got was in the school of hard knocks.

Later, he was drawn to carpentry. With the help of experienced builders with whom he worked, he learned carpentry and boat-building, which he passed on to all his sons, including me. When he was 18, iron-ore mines started on Bell Island and he was among the first to get work there hand-loading ore. The next three older sons also worked in the mines. 

Brother number four, who was ten years older than I was, was born there in 1920. I arrived in 1930. Encouraged by my parent and older siblings I stayed in school until I completed high school, in 1946. Born in 1932, somewhat later, so did our youngest sister.

In 1947, I went off to Mount Allison University to begin studying to be a minister of the United Church of Canada.

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Later, I will explain why I include the article below.

The article, Jan. 19, 2010, by Robert Fulford, in the National Post, is a good place to begin the dialogue about the issues involved.

You mar what you eat and the politics of Michael Pollan

Robert Fulford,  National Post 

 

Michael Pollan, a leading figure in the movement that's launched an international ethical debate around ordinary eating, believes that when we discuss health we ignore an elephant that's sharing the room with us.

 

The elephant is the routine diet of modern industrialized nations, a diet that encourages obesity and thereby spreads hypertension, heart disease and other forms of illness. As Pollan sees it, if we ignore the elephant we blind ourselves to reality. It's ridiculous to talk about health without discussing the food we consume.

 

A University of California journalism professor, Pollan has become the prince of investigative food writing by directing attention to the elephant. He became widely known in 2006 for his detailed survey of wrong-headed eating, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and in 2008 he developed his theme with In Defense of Food. This month, he's back in the bookstores with Food Rules: An Eater's Manifesto (Penguin), a handy little book that illustrates Pollan's method while pointing readers toward a healthier approach to food.

 

Pollan's success rests on a literary strategy. Dealing with a subject that's often paralyzing (locavore this, vegan that), he writes in a friendly style, highly bearable, never bullying, often engagingly folksy. He doesn't forget that he writes for people who can't or won't spend nearly as much time thinking about food as he does.

 

He wants to wean his readers (and, if possible, the whole world) off the now traditional Western diet, which emphasizes white flour, polished rice and high-fructose corn syrup. He warns us against new waves of manufactured products that show up every year, products heavy on corn and soy, plus chemical additives. Pollan calls them "edible foodlike substances." He believes the trick to eating well is choosing real food over foodish novelties. (You recognize non-food by the fact that it has the same name in every language: Cheetos, Big Mac, Pringles, etc.)

 

Considered as part of evolution, the techniques of food engineers and the international public's embrace of their pseudo-foods amount (as Jason Epstein remarked recently in The New York Review of Books) to a species failure, a maladjustment of the human brain implicit in the triumph of ingenuity over wisdom. Or, as Pollan says, "Western medicine is learning how to keep alive the people whom the Western diet is making sick."

 

For Pollan and his growing army of admirers, eating intelligently is a key to food policy, whether the policy is political, industrial or personal. Better diet and exercise, he argues, could prevent about 80% of the cases of type 2 diabetes. Instead, diabetes has grown so common that it's becoming normalized, just another part of life. He calls it a disease of civilization.

 

He's mainly concerned with Americans, but Canada shows a willingness to copy America's mistakes. Last week, the Canadian Health Measures Survey reported that the fitness of Canadians has declined sharply in the last generation; nearly two-thirds of adults are overweight or obese. Pollan believes the food system can eventually be reversed but that won't happen soon. On the other hand, a reversal can be accomplished quickly in the life and diet of individual eaters -- providing, of course, that we are talking about people who have enough money to choose what they eat.

 

Pollan establishes his own populist legitimacy by calling on the traditional wisdom that speaks through ancient sayings. "The whiter the bread, the sooner you'll be dead," he quotes at one point. He goes back to an Emily Post rule of manners (she used it in 1922) to suggest that we revive it if we want to eat with more moderation: "Put down your fork between bites." If you eat slowly enough to savour food, you'll need less of it to feel satisfied.

 

"The banquet is in the first bite" is another old saying he endorses. No other bite will taste as good as the first, and every subsequent bite will progressively diminish in satisfaction. He compares it to the economic law of diminishing marginal utility. It argues for savouring the first bites and stopping sooner than you otherwise might.

 

He nailed me neatly with another line, "Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored." At a public dinner, if the guest speaker is a drone, I find that I retaliate by overeating. That'll show 'em! When the waiters are gathering up the plates, I realize I've eaten 25% more than I wanted or needed, just to fill the time.

 

Pollan adds a few lines of his own that may well eventually acquire the patina of adages. Don't ingest foods made in places where everyone is required to wear a surgical cap. Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce. If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don't. Don't eat breakfast foods that change the colour of the milk.

 

He acknowledges the embarrassing truth that the unconscious governs much of our conduct at the dinner table. At times, his books recall sex manuals of long ago in their attempt to warn us against the perverse signals that emanate from dark and distant corners of the mind. But then, there's no reason why the human personality should be any less wayward in dealing with diet than in dealing with sex.

 

Infuriatingly, our minds can be loyal soldiers, habitually following rules they were taught in childhood. Millions of humans, while believing they govern their actions with conscious intelligence, clean every morsel from their dinner plates, mainly because their parents told them to. And we do this even if we don't particularly like the food on the plate and even if we know we should be eating less of it. Unthinkingly, we follow a habit we would condemn if we looked at it clearly.

 

Pollan suggests we should confront the subconscious on its own devious level. He suggests an idea that I seem to recognize from earlier books on food, or maybe just from conversation: Buy smaller plates. Pollan says one researcher found that simply switching from 12-inch to 10-inch dinner plates caused people to reduce their consumption by 22%.

 

But that's outrageous. To claim that presumably intelligent readers of Pollan's bright, smart books could possibly improve their health through such a sneak attack on their own unconscious is, frankly, insulting. Also probably true.

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