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07/01/2015 08:00 AMHow did eating ever get so complicated, controversial, and contradictory?
As a Boomer, looking back, it’s been a long, strange trip.
When I was a kid, fast food hadn’t taken off yet, and I ate mostly home-cooked meals. My grandmother took the train from Brooklyn to our house in the burbs on weekends and I helped her make all kinds of wonderful dishes like stuffed cabbage, pierogis, blintzes, honey cakes, and lemon meringue pies.
But now I realize she cooked with chicken fat—and we all know how bad that is—and she certainly didn’t use grass-fed chopped meat in her stuffed cabbage. And baking was with white sugar and white flour, and maybe even some Crisco.
When I started going to school, processed food was becoming increasingly popular. My mother would give me a bologna sandwich with American cheese on white bread, and for dessert, along with an apple, I’d get Snowballs or Twinkies—remember those?
And then they discovered if you put a Twinkie in a time capsule, it would last for eternity and never disintegrate. Now, that’s not something I really want to think about—maybe there are still molecules of Twinkies floating around inside me.
At least apples have remained consistently good for you—I think.
So, when we Boomers had kids, we were the parents that were going to only feed our children healthy meals—down to homemade baby food, right? But my older son rejected almost everything in its natural state, so he subsisted on macaroni and cheese (Annie’s, at least that was a little healthier, or so we thought), chicken nuggets (nothing too good about that), and peanut butter sandwiches, only raw peanut butter on whole wheat bread. But now we know about the preservatives in most store-bought bread—even whole grain—not to mention the cholesterol in peanut butter. And the dangers of peanut allergies.
I envy my mother’s and my grandmother’s ignorance—it truly was bliss. They didn’t stress out all the time about food. They enjoyed cooking, feeding us, and eating.
I don’t envy how my own children’s heads will explode if and when they have kids and have to figure out how to feed them without killing them.
It kind of ruins the good memories when you discover that basically everything you’ve eaten was bad for you before you learned what was good for you and then found out that the “experts” changed their minds about what they told you was good for you just last week.
For example, we were told that olive oil was the best of the oils to cook with. But then we found out that all olive oil is not alike—I recently heard on NPR that you should never buy olive oil in a clear bottle or a plastic bottle or if it’s less than $5.
And then, not too long ago, we were informed that coconut oil was incredibly good for you, so I started cooking with it and thought it was great—I had friends whose doctors even prescribed it for them as a very healthy fat. Until it wasn’t. Just a month or so ago, it was all over the Internet (and even Fox News!) that coconut oil is in fact an artery clogging, saturated fat. I threw out my container and went back to olive oil, in a dark green bottle.
Fish is another controversial food. It’s very healthy, unless it’s among one of the 10 or 12 species with higher than average mercury levels and you don’t know exactly how it’s been farmed. Tilapia—touted as an inexpensive and tasty fish—was all the rage a few years ago. Well, the newest “truth about tilapia” is it’s worse for you than bacon. I also just read that regular ol’ fatty pork bacon is better for you than turkey bacon…but I won’t get into that.
Lately, I find myself standing in the supermarket aisle, feeling the stress building in the pit of my stomach because of the eight million choices of everything—organic, not organic, regular fat, low fat, no fat…with gluten, gluten-free…supermarket brand, dozens of other brands. Remember when there were only a few choices of everything? It’s just so exhausting.
Kale is another food I find fascinating. I’ve interviewed people for food stories that are absolutely convinced that kale is the most perfect vegetable—that they could live on it raw, baked, and shaked. And then I’ve talked to people who absolutely detest kale and think it’s the most disgusting food nature ever invented. No one is ambivalent about kale. You love or you hate it. But at least, they haven’t discovered anything unhealthy about it. Yet.
Chocolate, on the other hand, is one of those few foods that keeps getting good press—as long as it’s dark chocolate, eaten in moderation. It reduces blood pressure, lowers body weight, improves cardiovascular health, and just recently has been found to lower stress—of course, because it’s delicious and you’re actually allowed to eat it!
As much as I complain, I realize that there are many positive things happening in the food world food. A lot of Boomers, along with the younger generation, are eating more healthy, farm-to-table diets and rejecting fast food. Restaurants have heart-healthy choices on their menus. Farmer’s markets are popping up all over the shoreline where you can buy home grown food and support the local farming community.
It really does all come down to common sense, eating a lot of fruits and vegetables, and portion control—something we Americans are extremely resistant to.
In his book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (2009), Michael Pollan’s directive to “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” is probably still the safest bet.
Or just tune out the information overload, listen to your own body, and trust your own instincts. Life is too short to spend it trying to control every single thing we eat—and certainly not much fun.
Anybody for ice cream?
Amy J. Barry is a Baby Boomer, who lives in Stony Creek with her husband and assorted pets. She writes arts features and reviews for Shore Publishing newspapers and is an expressive arts educational facilitator. Please email your responses and ideas for future columns to aimwrite@snet.net or at www.aimwrite-ct.net.