A Matter of Time

Happy New Year from

Willie Nelson

Dooley Wilson

Cyndi Lauper

and me.

Better Fed Than Dead

This review ran today in the San Francisco Chronicle.

IN DEFENSE OF FOOD: An Eater’s Manifesto
By Michael Pollan
Penguin Press, 244 pp., $21.95

These days, it seems as if almost any statement about the relationship between food and health needs to be taken with a grain of … Mrs. Dash? We have all become victims of what might be called the “Sleeper” syndrome, after the 1973 movie in which Woody Allen wakes up in the future and discovers that everything he thought he knew about food was wrong. In the film, the physicians of the future confer:

Dr. Melik: This morning for breakfast he requested something called "wheat germ, organic honey and tiger's milk."
Dr. Aragon: [chuckling] Oh, yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.
Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or … hot fudge?
Dr. Aragon: Those were thought to be unhealthy … precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.
Dr. Melik: Incredible.

All too credible, to Michael Pollan’s way of thinking. “Today in America,” he writes in “In Defense of Food,” “the culture of food is changing more than once a generation, which is historically unprecedented – and dizzying.” We are the victims of what Pollan sees as the media-industrial-political complex: “journalism by uncritically reporting the latest dietary studies on its front page; the food industry by marketing dubious foodlike products on the basis of tenuous health claims; and the government by taking it upon itself to issue official dietary advice based on sketchy science in the first place and corrupted by political pressure in the second.”

Most of all, Pollan says, we are victims of the ideology called “nutritionism,” which is based on several “unexamined assumptions,” among them that “Foods are essentially the sum of their nutrient parts” and “that the whole point of eating is to maintain and promote bodily health.” Moreover, nutritionism has foisted on us a view of a kind of eternal food fight going on in our bodies: “protein against carbs; carbs against proteins; … fats against carbs” as well as “smaller civil wars … within the sprawling empires of the big three: refined carbohydrates versus fiber; animal protein versus plant protein; saturated fats versus polyunsaturated fats; … omega-3 fatty acids versus omega-6s.” No wonder the pharmaceutical industry makes so much money off of drugs to combat heartburn.

And now we seem to be entering the “Sleeper” future, in which deep fat may make a comeback. “What the Soviet Union was to the ideology of Marxism,” Pollan observes, “the Low-Fat Campaign is to the ideology of nutritionism: -- its supreme test and, as now is coming clear, its most abject failure.” More and more scientists are questioning whether there really is a connection between dietary fat and heart disease. Not only that, Pollan quotes an article from the Journal of the American College of Nutrition: “It is now increasingly recognized that the low-fat campaign has been based on little scientific evidence and may have caused unintended health consequences.” In other words, the low-fat, low-cholesterol campaign not only hasn’t helped stem such problems as obesity, heart disease and diabetes, but it may have in fact made them worse.

Readers of his engagingly written earlier books on food, “The Botany of Desire” and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” know that Pollan is not just another Berkeley food crank. Moreover, his is not the only new book proclaiming the hazards of nutritionism. Pollan himself cites science writer Gary Taubes’ recently published “Good Calories, Bad Calories” (Knopf, $27.95) as an “important” book “blowing the whistle on the science behind the low-fat campaign.” Taubes’ book is weightier than Pollan’s, thickly documented and heavy on the science. Pollan faults it for not being skeptical enough about the current identification of carbohydrates as the enemy that fats were once thought to be: “As its title suggests, ‘Good Calories, Bad Calories,’ valuable as it is, does not escape the confines of nutritionism.”

Pollan urges us to relax, and not worry so much about food. At the very beginning of the book he provides a mantra: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” After spending much of the book explaining why almost all nutritional advice in the past 30 or 40 years has been misleading, unsubstantiated, bogus and even counterproductive, he unpacks his mantra for us concisely and amusingly. “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food,” he advises. This needs a bit more explanation. After all, many of our great-grandmothers weren’t exposed to the great multicultural bounty we find in stores and restaurants, so a lot of them wouldn’t recognize some perfectly wholesome stuff as edible. Calamari, for example, or tofu. One imagines Great-Grandma’s reaction to such now-commonplace fare as artichokes (“You want me to cook a thistle?”) or yogurt (“That milk is sour!”) . To paraphrase Jonathan Swift, it was a brave great-grandmother who ate the first oyster.

But Pollan’s point is this: Great-grandmother never cooked with guar gum, carrageenan, mono- and diglycerides, hydrolyzed vegetable protein, modified food starch, soy lecithin and any number of other ingredients found in processed food. Great-Grandma may have picked cotton, but she never ate it. Yet cottonseed oil is commonplace in all sorts of the “edible foodlike substances” found in supermarkets today.

Pollan’s advice is sensible and even inspiring. It can, however, be faulted as a little elitist. It’s not that hard if, like Pollan, you live in Berkeley, where Alice Waters is guide and guru, to shop carefully at farmers’ markets and specialty stores, to spend more to get fresher and better stuff, to cook your meals, and to eat them slowly and at a table with good company. But god help you if you’re a single parent working long hours and living in a poorer neighborhood where there aren’t even any supermarkets. A bag of Whoppers or a bucket of KFC is probably your inevitable choice.

And in the end, this thoughtful, entertaining and helpful book does wind up being a little more alarmist than Pollan pretends it is. The very thought that a book needs to be written “In Defense of Food” is unsettling. It might instead have been called “Fear of Feeding.”

Unhealthy

I fell into a coverage gap. The prescription coverage I had from my former employer ended on November 30, and I couldn't pick up Medicare prescription coverage until January 1. But I ran out of my meds -- a generic anti-anxiety drug -- last week and had to pay full price. One hundred seventy-seven dollars. For sixty little pills.

I look at these small white pills and think: Each one of you costs $2.95.

Somebody is making out like a bandit on this deal.

A Momentary Lapse of Reason

I watched a football game tonight. That Patriots-Giants thing? It was fun, too. I mention it only because it's not something I normally do. Sports, that is.

I sometimes tell people that I'm just not interested in sports, but the truth is, I'm afraid I might get too interested in them. I know that I have a tendency to get addicted to things, obsessed by them, preoccupied with their minutiae. I mean, for god's sake, I wrote a whole book about the Academy Awards. And I can see myself becoming one of those guys who comb the agate type in the sports section for statistics.

So for now, I treat sports as an occasional thing, being careful not to show too much interest in them, lest I get drawn into another pastime (like surfing the Internet) that will occupy my attention.

A Little Night Music

k.d. lang

Unsolicited Advice

A friend who lives in Palo Alto goes out for a daily walk. He was striding along happily one day when he was stopped by a woman, a complete stranger, riding a bicycle. She informed him that walking wasn’t a sufficient cardiovascular workout. Pointing toward the bleachers at a nearby playing field, she instructed him to start climbing them as part of his exercise. Which he now dutifully does.

Perfectly Palo Alto, which is the kind of place where you can mind other people’s business for their own good. I guess that’s what people hate about us liberals, too.

Mehtna

Awesomely silly, from that source of silly awesomeness, Boing Boing.

The Liberal Media Convenes

We met for breakfast this morning, one of those breathtaking cool and bright Northern California mornings we who live here take for granted. Seven old friends, journalists (or ex-journalists) who used to work together. Three women, four men, four Jews, one African-American, two on Social Security, two Easterners, two Midwesterners, one Southerner, one Southwesterner, one Californian, all more or less straight (although two of us have gay kids). And the question arose: Who were we voting for?

Hillary.
Hillary.
Maybe Obama, maybe Edwards, maybe Richardson.
Hillary reluctantly, though Edwards and Obama inspire more enthusiasm.
Richardson.
Hillary.
Edwards.

Consensus: It's going to be Hillary. But can she win? Is the America we don't live in -- the non-intellectual, non-affluent, non-urban, non-hyperconscious, non-reading, Fox-watching America -- going to go for Hillary?

A chill went through the room.

Et Incarnatus Est

I guess if I had to call myself anything, which I don't, it would be "Christian." Mainly because I was raised in a home that was rather unenthusiastically Methodist. (I really think of myself as a "secular progressive," because whatever Bill O'Reilly is, I don't want to be.)

Christmas has become an exhausting holiday, though. Everyone works so hard to make it merry, and you can see the effort. But it's the only Christian holiday that still holds meaning for me. Easter? No. Because I can't bring myself to believe in the Resurrection. Sentimentally, perhaps, I would like to believe in something after this life, but it all seems so implausible -- and even a little unnecessary. What would heaven be for, anyway?

But Christmas is the holiday that recognizes the one Christian mystery that I can still put some belief behind: the Incarnation. The idea that God, whoever or whatever that is, could become, for whatever reason, a human being. Where I part with the Christians is in holding that Jesus is the only incarnation. I think maybe he had a lot more of God in him than most of us do, sure. But there are surely a lot of other people who have manifested the divine. Moses and the Buddha and Lao-Tse and Muhammad; Socrates, Plato and Aristotle; Homer and Aeschylus and Sophocles and Sappho; Dante and Chaucer and Hildegarde of Bingen and Teresa of Avila; Shakespeare and Cervantes and Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe; Bach (for sure), Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven; Goethe and Keats and Shelley; Dickens, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf; James Joyce and Samuel Beckett; Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton and the Marxes (including Karl); Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin; Voltaire and Moliere; Descartes and Kant and Nietzsche; Dryden, Pope, Swift; Leonardo and Michelangelo and Vermeer and Daumier and Picasso and Hogarth and Tenniel; Walt Kelly and Charles Schulz and Bill Watterson; Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks; Garbo and Dietrich, the two Hepburns, Stanwyck, Marilyn and Elvis; Fred Astaire and Bruce Springsteen and Willie Nelson and ....

Merry Christmas to them all, and to you and your favorite incarnations.

A Sick System

I knew that there was a health-care crisis, and as an old lefty I've always believed that the government should do something about it.

But it's never been a matter of personal urgency. I've always had fully paid health insurance. But now, having retired, I have to deal with plans and fees and deductibles and limits and all the other headaches that millions of people have been dealing with.

Even with Medicare, there are choices to be made on prescription drug plans and supplemental coverage. And they cost money, and involve "gaps" and limits and all sorts of headache-inducing stuff, largely because Congress has kowtowed to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. Even so, it's a lot easier than dealing directly with insurance companies.

What kind of "health care" system allows a teenage girl to die while waiting for a liver transplant? You probably read the story: Nataline Sarkysian's doctors said she needed a liver transplant, but her insurer, CIGNA, declined to pay for it because the surgery was "experimental" and because there was no guarantee that it would be effective. And while the family was appealing the decision, she died.

Why is health care less important than highways, or schools, or police forces, or fire departments? We trust the government to use our taxes to fund and manage these things. Why are we so reluctant to let the government take charge of seeing to it that Americans have guaranteed access to the health care they need? If we belief in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, why is "life" being neglected?

Why is a governmental bureaucracy supposedly less efficient than a corporate bureaucracy? The standard conservative argument against universal health care is that it's too important to be left to bureaucrats. But it was a corporate bureaucracy that determined Nataline Sarkisyan's fate -- on the basis not of the patient's welfare but of the company's profits. My dealings with the government's health bureaucracy -- Social Security and Medicare -- have been both efficient and helpful. My dealings with insurance company bureaucracies? Not so much.