Over the last several days, I've been slowly wrestling with the possibility that the anemia is forever. That it's not a matter of making sure I get enough of the right kind of iron, that this is not a thing I can eat my way out of. That something is wrong with me beyond my ability to maintain my own health myself.
Two weeks ago, I had what I thought was the last hematologist appointment for half a year. Everything looked good, she said, hemoglobin and hematocrit numbers holding steady. My color is back, my energy is up. My hair and nails have been growing much stronger and thicker, my skin is better, and I just, overall, feel healthy.
Then, Monday morning, I got a call from the hematologist's office. My serum iron is in the 30's (normal is 50+) and my percent saturation is 9% (normal is 12). Four more infusions. Four more lost days of work. Four more trips to the chemo lab to sleep away three hours in a Benadryl haze. Four more anxious moments as I watch the first injection of the iron solution, knowing that if I have a reaction this door may be closed to me forever. Four more weeks of my body pulling energy away from cognition and motivation, to turn the glut of iron into healthy blood.
What the numbers mean, by the way, is that I'm walking a tightrope of deficiency. I have enough oxygen in my blood *now*, but one false step and I don't have the reserves to cover it. One bad nosebleed. One nasty cut while slicing vegetables, and I can't replace what will wash down the drain. And as the cells die, I'm at the very edge of being able to replace them.
Through it all, the anxiety. Is this just what my life is now? Semi-annual injections of something the entire rest of the world can get from a spinach salad or a hamburger? Watching for the pica, the shortness of breath, the cracked nails and the diminished energy, all the little ways my body tells me it's failing? Second-guessing every groggy morning and every brief moment of chill? Looking, every time I miss it, for a new metric that would have warned me? Accepting, after each episode, that that wasn't the right way to track it. Even a home iron test wouldn't have found this; it tests hemoglobin and hematocrit, which were fine.
Adding 'hematocrit' to my spell checker, because it seems I may need to be using it a lot. It suggests 'crematorium' instead. No, thank you, spell check.
The scariest thing a doctor can say to you is "I don't know why this is happening to you, and I don't know where else to look." I have no symptoms of deeper problems, no signs of cancer or internal bleeding or failing bone marrow or my liver gone rogue, mad with the power to destroy blood cells. That would be reassuring, except...I have no symptoms of anemia either, and I seem to have that.
Feeling simultaneously betrayed by my body, which is refusing to conform to the agreement we made in which I will give it good food and exercise and it will function as I need it to -- and compassionate towards it, because I can feel myself *trying* to compensate, to keep up, to do what is needed with what I have. It really doesn't help that within five minutes of the confirmation phone call, I started feeling cold and dizzy and weak. No, I told my feet, I can feel you just fine, dammit. This is psychosomatic and you KNOW IT so stop it!
The thing is, anemia doesn't kill you, because it's resolvable and treatable. It's not a thing people really die from, because iron is easy to replace, until it's not. Once you have a reaction to the iron treatments, your options become very limited. I've been in the lab, once, when someone started to have a reaction. He said, "It's swelling. It doesn't usually swell like this. Is something wrong?" I drifted into the Benadryl haze about that time; my last conscious thought was a panicked glance at my own injection site. When I woke, he was gone. I don't know where he went, or what his options are now. I asked, once, what if I can't have infusions any more? The nurse looked away and said, "Don't worry about that right now. Just focus on getting better."
The part of my brain I call Traitor Brain is having a field day.
"You're broken," she says. "You have bad blood. There are secret things wrong with you, things you should have seen, but now they're going to kill you and you're missing the significance of the only warning you're being given. This is your fault, for all those years when you couldn't get a job that gave you insurance. You'd already know what was wrong, but you were too busy being a fuckup to have the stability to find out."
She also says, "Get over yourself. This isn't a real illness. This isn't a thing. You know people with real things. They have real, bona fide illnesses and you're, what, a little chilly? Put on a fucking sweater and tough it up. Look around that fucking chemo lab and then say you're afraid with a straight face, that you're dealing with anything even close to what those people are facing. You should be ashamed of this, it's stupid narcissistic weakness."
I know that Traitor Brain is a bitch and she wants me to fail. That's why I named her that. I've had her on the run pretty well the last year or so, and she's trying to make me pay for it. I repeat her words here, because when I say them out loud I can hear how full of shit she is, but when she's hiding in my head, those insidious whispers are self-reinforcing.
There's another voice, too. It says, "Um, what if there's nothing wrong with you? What if this is just...how you are? How your body works?" I have started finding things on web searches that say that with steady hemoglobin levels, lots of women function fine with a serum iron in the 40s if they're not having any symptoms. That's not far from where I am. It's possible, remotely, that I am at a confluence of 'does not absorb iron well' and 'turns serum iron into hemoglobin VERY FAST' so that what looks like cruising disaster is actually my normal state of being, and my crises were triggered by something as simple as "eating a heavily vegetarian diet without noticing." This is where the lack of insurance comes in. I have hemoglobin levels from 10 years ago, and they were low, but I've never really had regular serum iron tests when I was healthy. I have no baseline, just the last several years of extremely problematic hemoglobin levels. And in the absence of that baseline, the doctor treats what she sees, and what she sees is blood on the dangerous edge. I'll talk to her about the possibility of it, and she's been very receptive, but "I think this may be an OK place for me to be as long as I'm careful" is going to be a hard sell.
I've wrestled with talking to the people in my life about all this, this week, but there are so many people who are important to me, that I knew I'd have to have this conversation too many times, and I'd forget things, or get angry when the same suggestion came from five people who didn't know I'd already addressed and considered it.
The long and the short of it is that while I've always considered my depression a chronic condition, it was something that I didn't really need medical intervention to manage. It's been something that just *knowing* about seemed to help. But this is the first time I have fully had to face the idea of the anemia as a chronic condition, one I must maintain with medical treatment, instead of an occasional one. I can no longer shrug it off as "I should eat more steaks!" and ignore the possibility that there is something to be concerned about. That's been really hard for me, this week.
And let me say one last thing: every hemogoblin joke, every Magneto reference, Every goofy picture of iron toys, every offer to staple things to me because "every little bit helps, right?" is a blessing. Making light of this is helping me, tremendously, navigate a very difficult and scary course. My twisted, disturbing, irreverent and loving friends continue to remind me that I have chosen to fill my life with the right people.
I love you all.
Showing posts with label food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label food. Show all posts
Friday, March 21, 2014
Thursday, September 27, 2012
In Which Being Happy and Being Healthy Are Very Similar
Since I wrote this post about being happy, several people have said to me, "Badger, that sounds well and good, but can you put it into practical terms?
I can, and I'm going to talk about one of my favorite things: food. I'm going to lay out my philosophy for having a healthy diet, which is remarkably like my philosophy for having a happy life, and I'll even explain why at the end.
1. Know your limitations. This may seem like a downer of a way to start, but when you're looking at building a healthy diet, the first thing you have to do is figure out where to say an absolute 'no' to yourself. Are you allergic to any foods? Do you have any sensitivities, or any conditions like Celiac Disease or lactose intolerance? Cut out the things that damage you, that should be nourishing you but are attacking you instead. For now, whether you 'should' do certain things is irrelevant, 'dietary guidelines' are irrelevant. Simply try to identify all the things that actively harm or poison you, and cut them out of your life. I, for example, cannot have artificial sweeteners; they give me migraines. Rather than lamenting my inability to have something most people can have without trouble, I accept that I have a non-negotiable hard boundary that limits me in some small way. I incorporate that boundary (and a few others) at the foundation of every meal I build and every set of decisions I make about food. It's part of who I am.
2. Know your history. Do you have any addictions? Any relationship with certain types of food you feel you don't control? A fear of trying new things? Do you have a condition like diabetes or high blood pressure, that affects the choices you need to make about food? Did your family express love through certain types of foods? Did your family instill certain 'food rules' in you? Where, simply put, do the attitudes you manifest come from? My mother instilled in me at an early age that it's not dinner unless there is a green vegetable included. I've been able to expand this to things like squash, but if I try to eat just meat and potatoes for dinner, I feel unfulfilled because my internal expectations for 'dinner' haven't been fulfilled, no matter how much I eat. Learning to acknowledge my expectations and determine whether they're reasonable has been one of the most empowering things in my entire life.
3. Really understand your goals -- and the goals behind them. If you ask someone, "Why do you want to lose weight?" you could get back a variety of answers: to be healthier, to be more attractive, to feel better about myself, my doctor says I have to, I have a really kickass dress my butt is just too wide for...the list is endless. Sometimes, though, the answer really is, "Because I think I'm supposed to want that." When you set goals, especially goals based around something as necessary as food, drill down through those goals until you really get to the heart of what motivates you, and make sure that what's motivating you is not, in fact, a set of expectations someone else chose for you.
4. Make sure your choices are feeding your goals. If you want to gain or lose weight, if you want to completely change your diet, if you want to become a locavore, if you want to raise your own food, you're going to have to make months, maybe years, of small, sustained choices that lead you to the goal in incremental steps. If you believe that eating a certain way (paleo, organic, vegan) will bring you a set of benefits you want, then regularly check in with your habits *and* how you're feeling. Every so often, step back and make sure that your choices are pointing at where you want to be. If they're not, then either the choices need to change or the goal should be revised.
5. Will is strong, but so is Science. If you really really want to subsist on nothing but bacon and vodka, you will get scurvy and eventually die, no matter how much you believe that's a sustainable diet. It is theoretically possible, through skilled and powerful application of tremendous Will, to bring almost anything to pass -- but if you have that sort of skill and power, why use it to change the molecular makeup of bacon to include Vitamin C when you could just drink a glass of OJ instead, and have all that energy for something else? If you can use science and reason to your advantage, your Will can achieve more than if you try to fight them. If, for example, I know that eating high-protein cinnamon-chocolate multi-grain oatmeal will keep me feeling full twice as long as the same number of donut calories, or that certain vitamins improve my absorption and use of other nutrients, then I can use the science to boost the power of my choices.
6. Listen to your cravings. Once you really start focusing on feeding yourself what you need, and paying attention to what you put into your body and bring into your life, you'll find you have a lot sharper awareness of what you want. Generally, even the 'bad' cravings (the ones out of line with your goals) tell you something important, and you can train your body to respond to a need for iron and protein by telling you "I could murder a good steak" instead of "I need a Big Mac." If you're willing to listen, you will generally tell yourself what you need, and how best to nourish yourself.
7. Don't eat anything that isn't delicious. This sounds like a stupid rule, but there are so many ways to have good, tasty, healthy, nourishing food that you should never say to yourself, "It tastes like shit, but it's good for me." There is no 'good' food and no 'bad' food. There is "Food that will help get me where I want to be" and "Food that will get in my way." Never choose penance when there are joyful options.
8. Make sure you know what you're feeding. Some things feed your body. Others feed your mind. Others feed your spirit. Ice cream may be a good source of calcium and dairy protein, but I eat it because I love it and it makes my soul happy. You should not eat anything that doesn't nourish you, but different things will nourish you for different reasons, and once you manage to work out your cravings and listening to your needs, you'll be able to understand what to feed, and when.
Now, it should be fairly obvious how I apply these to both diet and life. If you start from a position of knowing what it's just not reasonable for you to expect of yourself, and build yourself attainable goals that meet *your* needs, then you start to build healthy practices in focusing your energy where it'll bring you the most joy. If you shift your life so that everything you bring into it feeds you somehow, nourishes or supports you somehow, then your path becomes much clearer. And if you make it your daily practice to choose the joyful, nourishing, fulfilling options, you may not ever be completely free of unpleasant obligations, but they'll hold a much smaller space in your heart.
You'll notice there are no details here. No "always eat organic" or "never eat processed sugary snacks." That's because there's a different path to health and happiness for each of us, and we have to choose how we'll find it ourselves. What works brilliantly for me might be poison for my friend, and you can't judge the success of your journey by how well you walk the best path for someone else.
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Simplicity
Life is a complicated exercise made up of simple equations.
For example, weight and health are a function of simple equations of diet and lifestyle. Nothing simpler. If you want to gain weight, consume more calories than you burn, every day. If you want to lose weight, burn more calories than you consume, every day. If you want to maintain weight, equalize the two roughly.
Except that the numbers in the equation are made up of multiple variables, many of which change throughout our lives and can be hard to quantify. Metabolism, thyroid function, family history all play a part. So do food allergies and reactions, and the type of diet you have. Diets higher in fat, or carbohydrates, or protein, change your body chemistry and affect how you handle resources and energy. Whether the 300 calories you burn in your workout are aerobic or anaerobic, whether you're building muscle or burning fat, it all plays into that equation. If the disparity between calories taken in and calories burned is too great OR too small, then your metabolism compensates and the desired effect doesn't happen. Behind that simple "(calories in - calories out)/3500 = weight change in pounds" equation is an entire life's work of understanding your own body and what you want it to do for you.
'Being healthy' is another simple thing. Eat a variety of foods that provide you the resources you need, get regular moderate exercise and plenty of restful sleep, drink lots of water, see your physician for an annual checkup or if anything about your health needs managing. Very simple, and if we all did that, we'd all be healthy regardless of our waist sizes. All the mysterious miracle "eat this and don't eat that and never touch this food and if you only eat sugar while standing on one foot it doesn't count" diet voodoo in the world can't even begin to touch the benefits of giving your body the right amounts of rest, resources, and exertion.
But then come the variables. What are the resources you need and how do you prioritize them? If you need more iron, do you get it from leafy green vegetables that are loaded with fiber and other nutrients but don't supply much protein, or meat that supplies protein with added fat and no fiber? Vitamin D in your milk, or from sunshine? What if you're allergic or sensitive to a food that provides a critical nutrient? Do multivitamins supply the things you need, or just pass through your system undigested? How do chronic health conditions, from celiac disease to fibromyalgia to insomnia, play into the balance of eating, exercise, and sleep? Is your thrice-weekly strength training a sustainable lifelong practice? How can you afford to see a doctor regularly or even in an emergency if you have no health insurance and can't afford an office visit?
Habits also play a huge part in how we live and in our general health. It is my habit to have a cup of coffee every morning. This decreases the absorption of my iron supplement, so on days I take iron, I have to delay my cup of coffee until mid-morning and start my day with orange juice. It is my habit to come home from work and relax with my cats for a while to unwind, but after doing that it's really hard to get motivated to go exercise. If I want to get in the active time I have to come home, immediately change, work out, and then pet the cats. Because it's important to me to stay active and healthy, I have had to figure out ways to balance what I need to do with what I want to do.
That is, at the heart of it, what solving the equation comes down to. Would I be healthier if I didn't eat cookies for breakfast as often as I do, and if I never blew off working out to read a book and drink a glass of wine instead? Probably, and I'd definitely be thinner, but I wouldn't be as happy. Meeting specific and often socially-imposed criteria about the shape of my body is less important to me than enjoying the life experience that body is having, so there's a variable in my personal equation that says, "Is that fun, or at least not terribly annoying?" If the answer is no, there has to be a significant payoff for me to make that choice. A lot of folks see my insistence on honoring that variable as weak-willed or lazy, and they make assumptions about me based on the importance I place on living joyfully.
The biggest problem with all this is that people confuse 'simple' and 'easy'. The simple thing is the easy thing if it also happens to be the thing that fits in with your needs, practices, and priorities, but that's rarely the case. Consequently, some people look at others and see them struggling with what appears, from the outside, to be an easy fix. Without understanding the variables affecting another person's experience, the inability to separate 'simple' and 'easy' can lead to frustration, and even to judgment, bigotry, and discrimination.
We look at an obese person or someone with a chronic illness, and think, "How unhealthy. Why can't she just exercise and eat right?" and we make assumptions about her -- usually that her evenings consist of sitting on the sofa eating ice cream right out of the container. But there are things we don't know, can't know: what her metabolism is like, whether she lives in a food desert and can't afford fresh fruits and vegetables, whether she has a chronic health condition that makes exercise difficult, whether she's perfectly happy looking the way she does, whether she's quite healthy and as active as she wants to be, or whether decades of being pressured to look and act and eat and live a certain way have left her depressed or suffering from an eating disorder.
At its heart, fat hate and fat prejudice (and most ableist prejudices) come from the assumption that other people can and should solve their equations with your variables. They should be able to shoehorn their experience and their priorities into a set of life choices that matches what the mythical "everyone" wants. They should place the same value on what really is a marketing-driven artificial standard of 'healthy living' and strive to operate within it. The media machine that's worked so well to convince us that somewhere there is one perfect diet or exercise plan that will render everyone identically thin and healthy (and Dr. Oz will tell you all about it after this message from our sponsors) has also convinced us that living outside of an artificially established 'normal' body image is not only a conscious choice, but a lazy, despicable, self-destructive one.
Many of my friends are frequently trying to 'get healthier', with varying degrees of success. The ones who succeed aren't the most dedicated or the strongest-willed. They're the ones who work to understand as many of their own variables as possible, from the biology (family history, metabolism) to the limitations (allergies, mobility concerns, medical issues) to the geographical (availability of food resources and activity centers) to the emotional (habits, body image satisfaction, priorities), and come up with a vision of 'health' that is reasonable for them and a set of sustainable lifestyle choices they can make to reach and maintain that goal.
What does all this ultimately mean? Well, from my point of view it means I'm likely to keep eating cookies for breakfast, and work to resolve any discontent with the life and the body that choice creates.
For example, weight and health are a function of simple equations of diet and lifestyle. Nothing simpler. If you want to gain weight, consume more calories than you burn, every day. If you want to lose weight, burn more calories than you consume, every day. If you want to maintain weight, equalize the two roughly.
Except that the numbers in the equation are made up of multiple variables, many of which change throughout our lives and can be hard to quantify. Metabolism, thyroid function, family history all play a part. So do food allergies and reactions, and the type of diet you have. Diets higher in fat, or carbohydrates, or protein, change your body chemistry and affect how you handle resources and energy. Whether the 300 calories you burn in your workout are aerobic or anaerobic, whether you're building muscle or burning fat, it all plays into that equation. If the disparity between calories taken in and calories burned is too great OR too small, then your metabolism compensates and the desired effect doesn't happen. Behind that simple "(calories in - calories out)/3500 = weight change in pounds" equation is an entire life's work of understanding your own body and what you want it to do for you.
'Being healthy' is another simple thing. Eat a variety of foods that provide you the resources you need, get regular moderate exercise and plenty of restful sleep, drink lots of water, see your physician for an annual checkup or if anything about your health needs managing. Very simple, and if we all did that, we'd all be healthy regardless of our waist sizes. All the mysterious miracle "eat this and don't eat that and never touch this food and if you only eat sugar while standing on one foot it doesn't count" diet voodoo in the world can't even begin to touch the benefits of giving your body the right amounts of rest, resources, and exertion.
But then come the variables. What are the resources you need and how do you prioritize them? If you need more iron, do you get it from leafy green vegetables that are loaded with fiber and other nutrients but don't supply much protein, or meat that supplies protein with added fat and no fiber? Vitamin D in your milk, or from sunshine? What if you're allergic or sensitive to a food that provides a critical nutrient? Do multivitamins supply the things you need, or just pass through your system undigested? How do chronic health conditions, from celiac disease to fibromyalgia to insomnia, play into the balance of eating, exercise, and sleep? Is your thrice-weekly strength training a sustainable lifelong practice? How can you afford to see a doctor regularly or even in an emergency if you have no health insurance and can't afford an office visit?
Habits also play a huge part in how we live and in our general health. It is my habit to have a cup of coffee every morning. This decreases the absorption of my iron supplement, so on days I take iron, I have to delay my cup of coffee until mid-morning and start my day with orange juice. It is my habit to come home from work and relax with my cats for a while to unwind, but after doing that it's really hard to get motivated to go exercise. If I want to get in the active time I have to come home, immediately change, work out, and then pet the cats. Because it's important to me to stay active and healthy, I have had to figure out ways to balance what I need to do with what I want to do.
That is, at the heart of it, what solving the equation comes down to. Would I be healthier if I didn't eat cookies for breakfast as often as I do, and if I never blew off working out to read a book and drink a glass of wine instead? Probably, and I'd definitely be thinner, but I wouldn't be as happy. Meeting specific and often socially-imposed criteria about the shape of my body is less important to me than enjoying the life experience that body is having, so there's a variable in my personal equation that says, "Is that fun, or at least not terribly annoying?" If the answer is no, there has to be a significant payoff for me to make that choice. A lot of folks see my insistence on honoring that variable as weak-willed or lazy, and they make assumptions about me based on the importance I place on living joyfully.
The biggest problem with all this is that people confuse 'simple' and 'easy'. The simple thing is the easy thing if it also happens to be the thing that fits in with your needs, practices, and priorities, but that's rarely the case. Consequently, some people look at others and see them struggling with what appears, from the outside, to be an easy fix. Without understanding the variables affecting another person's experience, the inability to separate 'simple' and 'easy' can lead to frustration, and even to judgment, bigotry, and discrimination.
We look at an obese person or someone with a chronic illness, and think, "How unhealthy. Why can't she just exercise and eat right?" and we make assumptions about her -- usually that her evenings consist of sitting on the sofa eating ice cream right out of the container. But there are things we don't know, can't know: what her metabolism is like, whether she lives in a food desert and can't afford fresh fruits and vegetables, whether she has a chronic health condition that makes exercise difficult, whether she's perfectly happy looking the way she does, whether she's quite healthy and as active as she wants to be, or whether decades of being pressured to look and act and eat and live a certain way have left her depressed or suffering from an eating disorder.
At its heart, fat hate and fat prejudice (and most ableist prejudices) come from the assumption that other people can and should solve their equations with your variables. They should be able to shoehorn their experience and their priorities into a set of life choices that matches what the mythical "everyone" wants. They should place the same value on what really is a marketing-driven artificial standard of 'healthy living' and strive to operate within it. The media machine that's worked so well to convince us that somewhere there is one perfect diet or exercise plan that will render everyone identically thin and healthy (and Dr. Oz will tell you all about it after this message from our sponsors) has also convinced us that living outside of an artificially established 'normal' body image is not only a conscious choice, but a lazy, despicable, self-destructive one.
Many of my friends are frequently trying to 'get healthier', with varying degrees of success. The ones who succeed aren't the most dedicated or the strongest-willed. They're the ones who work to understand as many of their own variables as possible, from the biology (family history, metabolism) to the limitations (allergies, mobility concerns, medical issues) to the geographical (availability of food resources and activity centers) to the emotional (habits, body image satisfaction, priorities), and come up with a vision of 'health' that is reasonable for them and a set of sustainable lifestyle choices they can make to reach and maintain that goal.
What does all this ultimately mean? Well, from my point of view it means I'm likely to keep eating cookies for breakfast, and work to resolve any discontent with the life and the body that choice creates.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
The Incredible Edible...Pink Slime?
This article talks about three state governors (including my own lamentable Rick Perry) traveling to tour a production facility in order to try and save the businesses that produce 'pink slime', a form of processed lean beef currently in massive public disfavor. Internet pictures of piles of nasty neon-pink goo, combined with descriptions of product processing, have greatly damaged the prospects of companies that sell this product. Several of the grocery stores I frequent (Whole Foods, HEB), have put up signs assuring their customers that they do not sell it, because people simply do not want to eat it.
As I read over this article, especially the last half, what I'm really struck by is a profound misunderstanding by some people on how the free market works.
You make a product that is disgusting, but safe for human consumption by legal standards. People, upon finding out how you make it, stop wanting to eat it and choose to buy other things. This is, well, how an economy works. It's your responsibility to change public perceptions or make your product more appealing through marketing or pricing. It's not government's job to save your business.
All I ask is that the food be labeled as to its contents so that people can decide for themselves what to eat. No bans, no government protections for industries who claim they can't compete with bad press. A level, fully informed playing field on which basic capitalism can determine who fails and who thrives, so long as minimum food safety requirements are met (which, in fact, 'pink slime' or 'finely textured lean ground beef' does). The unpopularity of a product is a sad reality for all businesses: ask Coke and Pepsi how many products (New Coke, Pepsi Clear...) have failed because people just didn't want them.
In the early 80's, doctors began aggressively insisting patients limit cholesterol, especially eggs. Egg producers started losing money. In response, we got the Egg Council and ads for 'the Incredible Edible Egg'. You'll notice that people are still eating eggs. By the basketful. Eggs in cookies, eggs in omelettes, eggs in every conceivable form, and it turns out that they're actually pretty good for us. Though some producers suffered fiscal setbacks, egg consumption is high and production of both conventional and cage-free eggs is a pretty lucrative business.
What do I remember as being different? Well, no one called for a ban on eggs and egg products due to their unhealthy nature. People decided for themselves what to eat, and they voted with their budgets on what industries they wanted to support. And the egg producers, for the most part, took matters into their own hands. They created commercials that said, "You know what? Eggs are fucking delicious. Get you some." (I paraphrase sometimes...)
There may have been small subsidies I don't remember, and I'm sure that some elected officials spoke publicly in support of the egg industry. But complaining that "we can't compete in light of negative public opinion and it's not FAIR," is frankly bullshit. You're right. You can't compete because once people know how you produce that cheap food they were enjoying, they lose their taste for it.
The larger statement is, of course, that if more of us knew how and under what circumstances our food was produced, we wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. For myself, I greatly increased my consumption of local produce and small-farm fruits and vegetables, as well as free range meat produced without hormones or prophylactic antibiotics, and ethically produced seafood, when I started looking closely at my food chain. Several months out of the year my produce comes from Tecolote Farm in a CSA basket, because it takes away my appetite to consider my spinach being picked by an undocumented migrant worker receiving a few dollars a day and living under deplorable conditions.
Food is about choices. We have to make good choices if we want to be as healthy as we possibly can. And when a company produces food that people choose not to eat, it's that company's problem, not my governor's and not mine.
Conservatives are forever telling people that we have to let the market solve all economic ills. There is no sphere in which I agree more with this than the sphere of food production and consumption. All I want my government to do is ensure that the labels on my food are correct, and that my food is free of harmful contaminants and produced in a safe manner. Everything else, the market and I will sort out for ourselves, and neither one of us believes in the idea that anyone (not Cargill, not Monsanto, not ADM or Farmland) is 'too big to fail'.
As I read over this article, especially the last half, what I'm really struck by is a profound misunderstanding by some people on how the free market works.
You make a product that is disgusting, but safe for human consumption by legal standards. People, upon finding out how you make it, stop wanting to eat it and choose to buy other things. This is, well, how an economy works. It's your responsibility to change public perceptions or make your product more appealing through marketing or pricing. It's not government's job to save your business.
All I ask is that the food be labeled as to its contents so that people can decide for themselves what to eat. No bans, no government protections for industries who claim they can't compete with bad press. A level, fully informed playing field on which basic capitalism can determine who fails and who thrives, so long as minimum food safety requirements are met (which, in fact, 'pink slime' or 'finely textured lean ground beef' does). The unpopularity of a product is a sad reality for all businesses: ask Coke and Pepsi how many products (New Coke, Pepsi Clear...) have failed because people just didn't want them.
In the early 80's, doctors began aggressively insisting patients limit cholesterol, especially eggs. Egg producers started losing money. In response, we got the Egg Council and ads for 'the Incredible Edible Egg'. You'll notice that people are still eating eggs. By the basketful. Eggs in cookies, eggs in omelettes, eggs in every conceivable form, and it turns out that they're actually pretty good for us. Though some producers suffered fiscal setbacks, egg consumption is high and production of both conventional and cage-free eggs is a pretty lucrative business.
What do I remember as being different? Well, no one called for a ban on eggs and egg products due to their unhealthy nature. People decided for themselves what to eat, and they voted with their budgets on what industries they wanted to support. And the egg producers, for the most part, took matters into their own hands. They created commercials that said, "You know what? Eggs are fucking delicious. Get you some." (I paraphrase sometimes...)
There may have been small subsidies I don't remember, and I'm sure that some elected officials spoke publicly in support of the egg industry. But complaining that "we can't compete in light of negative public opinion and it's not FAIR," is frankly bullshit. You're right. You can't compete because once people know how you produce that cheap food they were enjoying, they lose their taste for it.
The larger statement is, of course, that if more of us knew how and under what circumstances our food was produced, we wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. For myself, I greatly increased my consumption of local produce and small-farm fruits and vegetables, as well as free range meat produced without hormones or prophylactic antibiotics, and ethically produced seafood, when I started looking closely at my food chain. Several months out of the year my produce comes from Tecolote Farm in a CSA basket, because it takes away my appetite to consider my spinach being picked by an undocumented migrant worker receiving a few dollars a day and living under deplorable conditions.
Food is about choices. We have to make good choices if we want to be as healthy as we possibly can. And when a company produces food that people choose not to eat, it's that company's problem, not my governor's and not mine.
Conservatives are forever telling people that we have to let the market solve all economic ills. There is no sphere in which I agree more with this than the sphere of food production and consumption. All I want my government to do is ensure that the labels on my food are correct, and that my food is free of harmful contaminants and produced in a safe manner. Everything else, the market and I will sort out for ourselves, and neither one of us believes in the idea that anyone (not Cargill, not Monsanto, not ADM or Farmland) is 'too big to fail'.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
The Joy of Simple Food
Over the last few months, I’ve been reading my grandmother’s cookbooks, including a “Joy of Cooking” from the mid-1940’s. The thing that has struck me, over and over, is the simplicity of the recipes. Four or five ingredients are combined to produce a tasty dish without a lot of attention or intervention from the cook. Many do take several hours, but the majority of that time is spent on the simmer or in the oven. As I look at them, I see how many of them could be made using a crock-pot or a slow oven, using the staples of my own moderately-well-stocked pantry. So-called ‘convenience foods’ (canned soup, bottled sauces) appear rarely, and are treated as emergency supplements for a short schedule or an unexpected situation when they do.
I contrast this to my experience using online recipe sources and reading food blogs. I find complex arrangements of ten or fifteen ingredients, at least two of which I invariably don’t have on hand, heavy reliance on prepared foods (for example, premixed Italian salad dressing, bottled marinades, and boxed rice or pasta meals appear frequently in recipes), and restaurant-level presentation. In most recipes the phrase ‘just before serving’ seems to appear. “Just before serving, shave curls of extra-dark chocolate (85% cacao) into each bowl...just before serving, garnish with a tablespoon of creme fraiche and a dot of mango salsa...just before serving, arrange chicken medallions over sorrel puree and garnish with jicama matchsticks.”
Is it any wonder that the slow food and whole food movements have been dismissed as elitist and impractical for the insistence that we should cook more and rely less on processed foods? When people are led to believe that ‘cooking’ requires this or this for everyday meals* (look especially at the ingredient lists, and ask yourself if you have freshly ground white pepper or broccoli rabe on hand...), then of course home cooking looks like a thing only people with time and money do. Of course that box of Rice-a-Roni makes sense, when contrasted against “Orzo in Mint Salmoriglio Sauce.”
But what if you took that boxed pasta side dish, and weighed it instead against boiling some noodles, frying some onions and garlic and tomatoes in butter or olive oil, and tossing them over the pasta, maybe with a sprinkle of thyme? Now the comparison looks a little less daunting, no? But it incorporates fresh produce and contains a bare fraction of the sodium and preservatives, giving you a superior food product -- for the same amount of time and money as that boxed side.
How did we get here? How did we arrive at a place where someone who doesn’t have the time and money to bake cinnamon-chipotle cupcakes filled with raspberry ganache and topped with a reduced Chambord glaze thinks that Hostess Twinkies are the only other option? Where did we lose the middle ground of simple, delicious, quality food? You can blame single parents, you can blame education cuts that took Home Ec out of high schools, you can even blame Monsanto and the corn lobby. You can definitely cite studies about how many Americans live in ‘food deserts’ without reasonable access to fresh food and quality groceries. These things all have something to do with it.
Even more though, I think it has to do with a loss of appreciation for the simple, and a break in the passing of family wisdom. Almost none of my friends learned to cook at home; they’re pretty much all self-taught. In contrast, most of what I know came from my mother and grandmother, who never ‘taught me to cook’ so much as they ‘kept me in the kitchen, handing me tasks, while they cooked and I learned by example’. I learned to respect and appreciate the basic taste of the things I was eating, without hiding them in sweet sauces or covering them with strong spices.
There were still things I didn’t exactly know how to do when I left for college, like hard-boil an egg and roast a turkey, but the skills they gave me meant that I could read a simple recipe or suss out a cooking puzzle (extremely helpful when my CSA basket began delivering me vegetables I’d never seen before). My grandmother also gave me my first cookbook, the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book, which filled in the gaps admirably -- though it has no recipes for broccoli rabe.
Occasionally, in the produce section, some helpless-looking person of about my age will look at my veggie-filled basket with hopeful eyes. He’ll gesture at the beets in my basket, and he’ll say, “Um. Excuse me. How do you cook those things? I only ever had the school lunch ones.” Or she’ll watch me confidently sorting through the turnips and whisper “How do you know which ones to get?” So I explain that beets can be boiled or roasted, but are best roasted until they get sweet on the outside, or that smaller turnips are more tender and less bitter, or that onions should feel firm and heavy for their size and leeks need a good washing after they’re sliced.
The tips I give them are things like “steam these” or “mash these” or “you can chop up the tops and cook them like spinach.” Nothing fancy, nothing complicated, just the basic means of getting acquainted with the food. Later, once they have a sense of beets or leeks or even that rakish broccoli rabe, they can explore the different things they want to do with it, but I start them with a basic introduction.
Our relationship with food and eating is badly broken, and everyone has suggestions for fixing it. I’m no exception: we must start by exploring that relationship and making it a balance of function and beauty. By recognising that while we *can* amaze our friends and families with involved preparations, expensive ingredients, and complicated presentation, we’re not obligated to and it doesn’t actually change the love of sharing a meal with them. Most of all, by being guides for one another back to the sanity of simple food and the joy of eating.
(*Full Disclosure: All the recipe links on this page were found by going to the Food Network page and searching 'quick main dishes' or 'easy side dishes'. They were within the top three results of each search)
I contrast this to my experience using online recipe sources and reading food blogs. I find complex arrangements of ten or fifteen ingredients, at least two of which I invariably don’t have on hand, heavy reliance on prepared foods (for example, premixed Italian salad dressing, bottled marinades, and boxed rice or pasta meals appear frequently in recipes), and restaurant-level presentation. In most recipes the phrase ‘just before serving’ seems to appear. “Just before serving, shave curls of extra-dark chocolate (85% cacao) into each bowl...just before serving, garnish with a tablespoon of creme fraiche and a dot of mango salsa...just before serving, arrange chicken medallions over sorrel puree and garnish with jicama matchsticks.”
Is it any wonder that the slow food and whole food movements have been dismissed as elitist and impractical for the insistence that we should cook more and rely less on processed foods? When people are led to believe that ‘cooking’ requires this or this for everyday meals* (look especially at the ingredient lists, and ask yourself if you have freshly ground white pepper or broccoli rabe on hand...), then of course home cooking looks like a thing only people with time and money do. Of course that box of Rice-a-Roni makes sense, when contrasted against “Orzo in Mint Salmoriglio Sauce.”
But what if you took that boxed pasta side dish, and weighed it instead against boiling some noodles, frying some onions and garlic and tomatoes in butter or olive oil, and tossing them over the pasta, maybe with a sprinkle of thyme? Now the comparison looks a little less daunting, no? But it incorporates fresh produce and contains a bare fraction of the sodium and preservatives, giving you a superior food product -- for the same amount of time and money as that boxed side.
How did we get here? How did we arrive at a place where someone who doesn’t have the time and money to bake cinnamon-chipotle cupcakes filled with raspberry ganache and topped with a reduced Chambord glaze thinks that Hostess Twinkies are the only other option? Where did we lose the middle ground of simple, delicious, quality food? You can blame single parents, you can blame education cuts that took Home Ec out of high schools, you can even blame Monsanto and the corn lobby. You can definitely cite studies about how many Americans live in ‘food deserts’ without reasonable access to fresh food and quality groceries. These things all have something to do with it.
Even more though, I think it has to do with a loss of appreciation for the simple, and a break in the passing of family wisdom. Almost none of my friends learned to cook at home; they’re pretty much all self-taught. In contrast, most of what I know came from my mother and grandmother, who never ‘taught me to cook’ so much as they ‘kept me in the kitchen, handing me tasks, while they cooked and I learned by example’. I learned to respect and appreciate the basic taste of the things I was eating, without hiding them in sweet sauces or covering them with strong spices.
There were still things I didn’t exactly know how to do when I left for college, like hard-boil an egg and roast a turkey, but the skills they gave me meant that I could read a simple recipe or suss out a cooking puzzle (extremely helpful when my CSA basket began delivering me vegetables I’d never seen before). My grandmother also gave me my first cookbook, the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book, which filled in the gaps admirably -- though it has no recipes for broccoli rabe.
Occasionally, in the produce section, some helpless-looking person of about my age will look at my veggie-filled basket with hopeful eyes. He’ll gesture at the beets in my basket, and he’ll say, “Um. Excuse me. How do you cook those things? I only ever had the school lunch ones.” Or she’ll watch me confidently sorting through the turnips and whisper “How do you know which ones to get?” So I explain that beets can be boiled or roasted, but are best roasted until they get sweet on the outside, or that smaller turnips are more tender and less bitter, or that onions should feel firm and heavy for their size and leeks need a good washing after they’re sliced.
The tips I give them are things like “steam these” or “mash these” or “you can chop up the tops and cook them like spinach.” Nothing fancy, nothing complicated, just the basic means of getting acquainted with the food. Later, once they have a sense of beets or leeks or even that rakish broccoli rabe, they can explore the different things they want to do with it, but I start them with a basic introduction.
Our relationship with food and eating is badly broken, and everyone has suggestions for fixing it. I’m no exception: we must start by exploring that relationship and making it a balance of function and beauty. By recognising that while we *can* amaze our friends and families with involved preparations, expensive ingredients, and complicated presentation, we’re not obligated to and it doesn’t actually change the love of sharing a meal with them. Most of all, by being guides for one another back to the sanity of simple food and the joy of eating.
(*Full Disclosure: All the recipe links on this page were found by going to the Food Network page and searching 'quick main dishes' or 'easy side dishes'. They were within the top three results of each search)
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