Sunday, February 01, 2009

The Pleasure of Food

So, I was listening to the Fat2Fit podcast and they were talking about this new diet book "In Defense of Food" by Michael Pollan. One of the advice the book supposedly gives is that you shouldn't eat anything your grandmother (or in my case, probably great grandmother) wouldn't recognize as food. This reminded me, as I am now on something of a diet, of what happened when I tried to look up eggs in one of the calorie counter websites. All I wanted was the count for a simpy made sunny side up, what I found were a bunch of products I couldn't even recognize. I gave up.
Now, I should mention, if you don't already know this, that I'm from Israel. And while Israel is very advanced in some aspects, most of the products you find in your supermarket are foods your grandmother would recognize. I mean, we have the snacks and cereals and the instant soups and other than that... We don't have TV dinners, we don't have these egg replacements, and I suppose there are other things I wouldn't know about. In order to get fruit or veg out of season you need to go to a specialty shop. People who live close to an outdoor market (shuk) will go there and some people will make the extra effort - because it's cheaper, you get more choice and it's fresher. Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts tried to open here and failed, probably because most Israelis like to be able to recognize their food.
Things are changing. More processed food is entering our diets and people are getting heavier, but while many people I know are over their recommended BMI, I can count on one hand the number of Israelis I have known throughout my short life that are obese. This however, was not my point. My point is that sometimes I wonder how much Americans really enjoy food. I know, people say that the reason they gain weight is because they like food to much. However, the Americans I know live on what I would consider a relatively plain diet where salt, oil and sugar are the usual flavorings. Kids get home from school and eat the same salty or sweet. There seems to be no place for the nuances of different vegetables, for tangy, spicy and the millions of flavors in between. Mostly the food itself looks plain and has little smell, as opposed to colorful meals that give off strong. Cooking is seen more as a chore that is better done away with than a way to be artistic and experimental.
As I said, I'm not an American and possibly I am wrong, affected by the images of the US from TV. So I'm asking any Americans out there, do you really enjoy your food like one enjoys lounging in the sun or hot bath, or do you treat your food as if it were something to satisfy your body because otherwise the pain is to great and if you could you'd get rid of it?
On a side note, I did discuss the egg issue with my elderly grandmother who said that for a while when she was growing up in Ireland they had powdered eggs. This was during WWII and they couldn't get real eggs. A point of fact to remember is that many of the processed foods we eat today were in fact designed in time of war (including canned goods) simply because people could not get the real thing. They would have loved fresh vegetables or real eggs. What does it say about us, that given the choice, we choose what they were forced to eat?

1 comment:

Akaky said...

Gadzooks, you're back! As to your question, most Americans eat mechanically; the mouth has to be kept busy doing something, so we stuff high fat, salt, and sugar into our mouths on a fairly constant basis. Do we actually enjoy what we eat? That's problematical at best, I think.