Liberal Debutante

1 | Ian

July 14th, 2008 at 10:43 am

No XTC was involved in this post right…?

Just kidding, another good idea for beer might be going the homebrew method, after a bit of practise you can get some pretty good results.

2 | Alon Levy

July 14th, 2008 at 9:14 pm

First, the 3,800 figure is misleading, because it includes spoilage and remains. If you buy a 1,000-calorie sandwich and eat half of it, your consumption is deemed to be 1,000 calories, not 500. When you only account for calories that are eaten, the US drops to something like 3,000.

Second, there are food surpluses globally. The problems are always about distribution, not production. India’s never had a famine since independence, even when its GDP per capita was in the tens of dollars and its agriculture labor-intensive and inefficient. The best way of ensuring food security is getting rid of dictators; that way the market can sort out things like meat consumption, and the government will be sure to step in if it leaves people hungry.

3 | King

July 14th, 2008 at 9:34 pm

theres alon yet again nit picking and missing the point of the post. and just trying to sound smart by saying irrelevant points. always reliable for these.

4 | Alon Levy

July 14th, 2008 at 10:29 pm

Shorter King: who cares if her numbers check out? I’m swooning over her, so she must be right.

5 | Katie Kish

July 14th, 2008 at 10:49 pm

Alon - the numbers are still valid … you’re still using 1000 calories, depsite if its going into you or into the trash - my point still remains. we’re “consuming” too much…buying or eating or throwing out. also - i wasn’t really talking about food security for the world……… but. okay.

6 | Alon Levy

July 15th, 2008 at 12:08 am

Well, spoilage is everywhere, even in places where people consider 1,500 calories their lucky break. I’ve read somewhere that it’s consistently around 20%, regardless of where you are.

I’d also nuance your other points about meat and beer. I don’t know how it is in Canada, but in the US vegetables often involve as much abuse as meat or even more; lettuce growing operations involve severe exploitation of illegal immigrants, whereas stockyards have horrible safety records (grain growing operations have minimal abuse). Beer involves its own waste and abuse, but so do psychedelic alternatives. The real Medellín cartel was a lot more violent than the fictionalized version in Blow.

7 | Jerry

July 15th, 2008 at 12:47 am

I think the most compelling reason to stop eating meat is the ethical cost not only to ourselves but to animals. Please take a second to watch this video. Thanks
http:/meat.org

8 | Lowrider

July 16th, 2008 at 6:19 pm

After doing my share of reading on the subject, I am convinced that meat really does stand out as a major source of carbon emissions and pollution in general (I think the IPCC puts the meat production, distribution, etc as contributing to something like 20-40% CO2 emissions…can’t remember details). The most appalling part of this is that it is primarily for rich western nations. As more countries start to adopt the NA lifestyle of super gas consumption AND meat eating there will be even more crops grown to raise livestock. What else is bad about meat? Cholesterol and saturated fats (and transfats in butter, etc.) stand out to me. Lets see how cardiovascular diseases start progressing in countries starting to eat more meat. Seriously, give me some pluses about meat and I’ll reconsider vegetarianism, but I can’t think of any. After about 2 weeks of no meat, it now make me sick so I don’t even miss the taste. Vitamins and minerals (b12 and iron)? Sources of b12 = yeasted products (bread). Plus many foods are supplemented with b12 (Read the side of a ground round package). As long as you are not a box vegetarian (pasta and cereal and crackers) and eat healthy (lentils, soy, green and yellow veggies) you will get all of the nutrients you need. I think I eat healthier now as a veg than I did as an omnivore. I also agree with the ethical animal thing. I just really wanted to comment on this subject because a year ago I never thought that I could be a vegetarian….I don’t even miss meat one shred, and I feel like I am doing something fro the environment.

9 | hélène

July 18th, 2008 at 2:50 pm

vegan/freegan here
just a note to Lowrider:

the cholesterol in your blood is only distantly related to cholesterol levels found in food.

Michael Pollan gives good insights on this topic, far from patronizing, you know?
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/2/13/in_defense_of_food_author_journalist

Also, while transfats are naturally found in dairy products, like butter and yogurt, but only in small amounts. I’d be more worried about hydrogenated fats like margarine and other oils, which are found in a lot of vegetarian/vegan friendly foods. Seeing how folks are becoming more aware of the health risks revolving around trans fats, the Canadian government made some pretty fast moves to make the nutritional labeling of trans-fats mandatory on pre-packaged foods.

Lastly, LOL at Alon. Wow.

10 | Alon Levy

July 19th, 2008 at 7:23 am

Michael Pollan is an idiot. I haven’t read In Defense of Food, but I read a long article he published in the New York Times last year that said the same things as the book, in shorter format. For example, in order to support his case against nutrition science he gave an example of conflicting studies about the benefits of omega-3 fatty acids, and concluded the advice to eat more omega-3 is worthless. In fact, the conflicting studies in question were about omega-6, which is known to have both benefits and drawbacks; omega-3 has never been shown to have any negative effect, while American food products rarely if ever make omega-6-related health claims.

Just as ignorantly, he tells his readers to consider switching to traditional Indian or Italian cuisine, and at the same time exhorts them not to eat anything their grandmothers wouldn’t consider to be food. Pollan’s grandmother’s generation would probably not consider Indian cuisine to be food; it would actually be more likely to eat processed foods with partially hydrogenated oil (introduced in 1910) than Indian food (introduced in the cosmopolitan urban parts of the US in the 1980s and 90s, and elsewhere more recently or not yet).

When a discipline rests on shaky grounds, there will usually be an intrepid insider publishing books attacking it, or an outsider making the practitioners fall for hoaxes. Economics and politics are replete with the former, business administration and literary criticism with the latter. Even evolutionary science has some insiders who say it’s being misused. With nutrition, there aren’t any. The people writing books against it, such as Barry Glassner and Michael Pollan, have no scientific training, and routinely get basic scientific facts wrong.

11 | hélène

July 21st, 2008 at 1:29 am

Perhaps he was drawing conclusions with Indian and Italian cuisine as an example of a people experiencing the benefits of excluding highly processed foods in their traditional diet, but again I’m not sure. Feel free to direct me to the article in question.

I’m by not means anyone’s blind follower, but merely attempted to point out that Polland’s reads are good starting points to exploring food issues, whether they relate to ethics or nutrition, especially for folks having one perspective on the “correct” way of eating (a vegetarian, vegan, meat-eater). He doesn’t write self-help books and does remind folks that he is a journalist, not a scientist, I rather thought he was merely making some suggestions to help confused and overwhelmed people make healthier choices when writing out their grocery lists, I thought that his name-dropping would be seen as a direct criticism to a previous comment that someone posted, which I found condescending by criticizing people who eat meat . Maybe I wasn’t being blatant enough?

When I converse with folks about food, I don’t tend to recommend reading my huge obscure textbooks firsthand because they tend to be intimidating in the way they are written. Access is pretty important to consider when trying to get folks pumped up learning about issues, and yes I do find Pollan’s writings engaging, even if they do simply scratch the surface on a lot of topics. His writings are accessible because they are so mainstream, and they are so by being introductory, hopefully facilitating some future independent research for the reader. Anyhow he does relate a lot of his information from scientific journals which would otherwise be only available to a select few who pay a fee for their access or know how to navigate easily on the interweb.

Considering what my grandmother considers healthy (lard, cheese, cream, and so on) I do find serious fallacies in Pollan’s “if your grandmother doesn’t recognize[...] thou shall not eat it” comment. I felt it was rather an attempt to explain (perhaps badly?) why one should be suspicious not of pineapple or something but highly proceeded foods, as well as the convenience and deliciousness they offer. Again, I feel like he’s trying to simplify, perhaps naively and misguidedly, the issues that folks face regarding the change in the food industry, making it more and more difficult for us to determine what we ought to be getting in our diet (do we get enough Omega 3s, vitamin C, protein, etc).

About the Omega 3 question, and again, I’m not sure which passage/article/interview, you’re referring to, but his complaint may be more directed toward the food industry AND the government who approves the labelling which deepens consumers’ ignorance towards the complexity of Omega-3s and its recommended intake, such as: the importance of the Omega-3 to Omega-6 proportion in our diet, the types of Omega-3 (EPA, DHA, ALA, all of which have different qualities and are absorbed differently in our system), whether the Omega-3 being added to foods is of redeemable quality (fresh, rancid/oxidized oils added to foods), and whether foods that are supplemented with these fats worthwhile to buy in the first place (full of sugar, salt, preservatives and other unnecessary additives). These complexities are based on scientific facts, so I don’t think he’s trying to discredit those facts, since he’s using them to make his argument. I think he’s criticizing the food industry that’s only taking bits and part of science to make their products more marketable, leaving other crucial information, which ironically is comparable to what you were doing by reading summaries of his work and concluding that he’s an “idiot”.

I could say a lot about Omega-3s, but this post is ridiculously long. For a blog comment anyway. Again, if you could direct me to the passage where you found that he was attempting discrediting science or nutritional science that would be great, because I get impatient and am generally unimpressed when high profiled folk are hypocrites. I’m generally pretty open to criticism and will be persuaded if I see the facts.

12 | Alon Levy

July 21st, 2008 at 2:16 pm

Here it is - it’s a long New York Times article from which In Defense of Food emerged. I haven’t read the book, but the usual case with these ideas is that once you’ve read the original article, the book is redundant.

The scientific facts posited at the beginning are by and large wrong, beyond the part about omega-3 versus omega-6. Replacing carbohydrates with unsaturated fat reduces the risk of heart attack, and replacing them with saturated (or trans) fat increases it; this has been the main rationale for telling people to switch to unsaturated fat. The part about breast cancer is quite marginal. It’s like looking at conflicting studies about whether smoking increases the risk of hypertension and concluding that the “Smoking kills” notices are suspect.

The same is true for what he says about health claims. The most recent health claim used in the US is that olive oil consumption reduces the heart attack risk, as long it displaces saturated fat. The studies it’s based on look at how certain oils make blood vessels more elastic, reducing hypertension; there are disagreements over whether it’s due to the monounsaturated fats in it or the phenols, but not over the basic effect. This isn’t nutritionism - it’s trying to figure out how things work, and making the best conclusions based on the available information.

Fortification is another issue. In the 1990s, the first grains to be fortified with various vitamins, such as breakfast cereals, were brimming with detailed tables and commercials listing just how much they have of each B-group vitamin. Nowadays they’re a lot quieter about it: bread and rice are just as fortified, and public health officials have realized getting these vitamins is easy enough that they’ve moved on to other concerns, like vitamins A and C. If everything gets fortified with omega-3, the health claims about it will start disappearing, too.