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You Call That Food?

Why modern-day grub is hard to stomach

by DON GENOVA

I haven’t been watching commercial TV for about a year and a half now. But I started again recently and was horrified at some of the scenes that flickered across the screen.

No, they weren’t from the autopsy table of the latest Crime Scene Wherever, but from a commercial for a “tasty and convenient” meal. This meal—if you can even call it that—consists of various pouches of precooked veggies and sauces that you cut open and pour over the precooked meat in the handy tray the “food” is packaged in, before popping it into the microwave. Ugh. If this is what dinner is coming to then I don’t have much hope for the palates of our nation.

Premade meals are not the only kind of food that gives me the shivers. When I haven’t been watching TV, I’ve been reading a lot about what’s in our food. Or more importantly, what isn’t in our food. In Thomas F. Pawlick’s 2006 book The End of Food, the organic farmer and journalist writes about how the vitamin, mineral, and nutritional content of food is in shocking decline. Pawlick details how industrial food production systems are designed to maximize profit at the expense of our soil, water, and health.

He discovered that the tomatoes we buy in supermarkets today have lost nearly two-thirds of the calcium they contained in 1963. These “red tennis balls,” as Pawlick calls them, have gained 200 per cent in sodium, but have decreased levels of potassium, vitamins A and C, and iron, phosphorus, niacin, and thiamin.

A friend of mine who produces TV documentaries about food purchased the rights to the book in the hope of bringing the facts to a larger audience through a major Canadian broadcaster. Not one of them he approached was willing to finance the project. “Too serious,” they said. This is why people with TV have to watch Rachael Ray be cute with her food and Gordon Ramsay shout expletives at his underlings in Hell’s Kitchen.

This year has brought us Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Pollan is the bestselling author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a book that, like Pawlick’s, seeks to tell us what’s happening in our world of food these days, like why farmers in the American Midwest only grow corn and soybeans, and why these ingredients are contained in nearly every processed food we eat.

In Defense of Food slams the science of food nutrition and demonstrates why so many products on the market have “good-for-you” nutrients added to them. Surely you’ve seen the labels by now. The hot ones are processed foods with omega-3 fatty acids, dietary fibre, and whatever substance has most recently been discovered to have high levels of antioxidants.

In reality, Pollan says eating such foods can lead you down a road of nutritional ruin. He advocates getting back to eating “real” foods. “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food,” he advises, and “avoid food products that carry health claims.” My favourite bit of advice from Pollan is to avoid food products containing ingredients that are unfamiliar, unpronounceable, more than five in number, and that include high-fructose corn syrup.

Pollan’s mantra to his readers is, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” It’s a diet for the future that comes from the past. It also sounds very simple, but start taking a look in your cupboards, fridge, and freezer, and see how many items you’re left with… if you dare.

The good news is we’re living in one of the best places in the world to follow Pollan’s advice. I now have a freezer full of grass-fed beef, lamb, and chicken raised on a farm not far from my place on Vancouver Island. I can’t wait for the farmers’ markets to start up again in the city so I can get my weekly dose of “real” food in the form of lettuces, peas, beans, and organically produced strawberries, blueberries, and tomatoes.

No more red tennis balls for me, thank you, and I’m probably going to turn off the TV again—it’s not good for digestion.
Don Genova is gearing up to test his green thumb on a small patch of garden. By the end of the summer, he figures even the weeds might look good enough to eat. Follow his progress at dongenova.com.