Make the path where there’s already a path
In Stuy Cove Park, a public park and native food forest that runs along FDR just east of Stuyvesant Town, the small barriers between the plants and sidewalk kept getting trampled. There was one area in particular where it was clear people didn’t want to walk around the bottom of the park, so hundreds of feet tread straight through the greenery where Candace was planning a garden. Candace was the new manager of the park and when I showed up to volunteer a few hours of gardening help, she explained how we were going to handle the situation. The ineffective barrier would be pulled down. We would put down a layer of cardboard, mushroom spores, mulch, and woodchips to create a path across the park where people were already walking. And the wine cap mushrooms would hopefully grow right in that path, as they tend to like a little disturbance.
It was a good idea, the kind that gardeners and farmers constantly have to make to adjust to environmental forces out of their control. New York City makes for a uniquely challenging environment, where we humans are the pests along with the squirrels, rats, and birds. When we’re hurrying through Manhattan to get somewhere, the last thing on our minds is that the plants in the small noisy city park could possibly be food.
I’ve been thinking more about how to eat well as I study nutrition in school. It’s all just a lot. Fats aren’t bad for you, but omega 6s kind of are, or at least in proportion to omega 3s, protein is important, but excess protein can harm you. Learning a little bit of it is enough to make you want to throw it all out the window and go get some Doritos (Cool Ranch™ flavor). It feels like there are too many rules to remember, too many calculations to make before eating a meal, and too many things I want to eat that I should probably eat less of. Like many people, I’ve had complicated experiences with diets in the past. I can grit my teeth and lose weight if I really want to, but I quickly slide into a pattern of disordered eating that leads me to even more unhealthy habits. Diets are not good for me.
We shouldn’t be locked in a perpetual battle with our food (especially for a vegetarian, since the food doesn’t fight back.) When Anthony and I visit his family in Ukraine, it’s quite easy to eat well. A few times a week we go shopping at the market, which we would call a farmer’s market here but is open all the time over there and is just where people get their food. We have big bowls of berries for breakfast and dried fruit kompot in the afternoon but otherwise not much sugar. Then we come home, habits return, and I want a cookie after dinner.
Fresh food prepared in traditional ways is the most straightforward path to eating well, but it’s hard to maintain when nothing else in our environment encourages it. It might take looking closely at ourselves for the paths of genuine pleasure or curiosity that can lead us to appreciate food without abusing it. For some people, it could be the activity of gardening that’s pleasurable, even if it’s just a few herbs in a windowsill, or for others it could be about plating and presentation or hosting (RIP dinner parties), or learning about other cultures or your own family history. As a cook I enjoy experimentation and constraints. After my grain class, I started cooking different grains all the time: buckwheat and rye berries and millet instead of just rice and quinoa. Quite by accident, I began craving sweets less. This probably had to do with getting more fiber at dinner, but that way of thinking is less interesting than the creative task of pairing different grains with flavors. It worked because it was something I enjoyed, not something I felt I should do.
When I think about how to eat well, I see it arising out of a passion for a particular vegetable or the flow state of folding many dumplings or the deep comfort of sitting down at the table with a friend or family member. Those feelings are compelling enough to change your habits, much more so than a list of healthy tips and shortcuts.
I’m happy to learn some concrete things about nutrition, but I try to forget most of it when I’m actually cooking. I think that for most of us, we’re inundated enough with information from the nutrition world, but not paying enough attention to what our bodies have to say about food. Where can you strengthen/reinforce/cultivate a pleasure that’s already in you?
What I’m reading
In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, by Michael Pollan
As eaters, we find ourselves increasingly in the grip of a Nutritional Industrial Complex — comprised of well-meaning, if error-prone, scientists and food marketers only too eager to exploit every shift in the nutritional consensus. Together, and with some crucial help from the government, they have constructed an ideology of nutritionism that, among other things, has convinced us of three pernicious myths: that what matters most is not the food but the “nutrient”; that because nutrients are invisible and incomprehensible to everyone but scientists, we need expert help in deciding what to eat; and that the purpose of eating is to promote a narrow concept of physical health.
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A nutrient bias is built into the way science is done. Scientists study variables they can isolate; if they can’t isolate a variable, they won’t be able to tell whether its presence or absence is meaningful. Yet even the simplest food is a hopelessly complicated thing to analyze, a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in intricate and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the process of changing from one state to another.
Pollan makes a good argument for why nutrition science isn’t just confusing to us lay practitioners; it’s muddled on the inside too. There’s a lot working against the research methods. It’s hard to measure variables, because people lie or don’t remember what they ate. It’s mostly impossible to force a particular diet on subjects. There are countless interactions between diets and lifestyle, diets and genetics, diets and physical environment. Longitudinal studies take a huge amount of time, obviously, and money.
And then there’s the factor that Pollan describes above. Science is mostly about reductionism but food, it seems, is more than the sum of its parts, involving interaction effects that are sometimes vaguely defined as “synergy.” That’s not something that can be easily recreated in a petri dish, or, once created, to test if it would cause the same reaction as real food in the body of a human. These aren’t reasons to put a halt to nutrition science altogether, but they stay present in my mind when I’m evaluating any dramatic new health claims coming out of the field.