Tag Archives: food

There’s no such thing as “healthy food”

There’s no such thing as “healthy food”.

I’ll just let that sink in for a moment.

And repeat:

There’s no such thing as “healthy food”.

It’s true.

There is Health Food, as a cultural construct¹, but, as a cultural construct, it is ever changing; currently we are undergoing a cultural shift from low-fat to low-carbohydrate food earning the appellation. But, aside from the fact that we simply cannot agree on what qualifies, there is so such thing as “healthy food”.

One of the most frustrating things about being a fat woman is: everyone is convinced they have The Perfect Diet, and if I would just follow it, the fat would just walk away². Everyone. Everyone. The veg*ns. The Paleos. The Atkin adherents. The raw food peeps. Eat no fat; eat tons of fat. Eat no grains; eat soaked grains. Eat a fastfood turkey sandwich every day; eat nothing from a store. Everyone is convinced they have The Truth on what is Healthy Food, and what the other guy (or the fat chick) is eating ain’t it.

Or, maybe, for the super open minded and tolerant, they’ll say we’re not quite sure just what healthy food is (except you won’t find it at McDonald’s). But by all the saints and Starbucks, don’t question the idea that there is such a thing as Healthy Food, because surely, if we just apply Science/Prayer/Common Sense/Historical Analysis/Noble Savage Wisdom, we’ll figure it out. And no one will ever die.

What? That’s the logical conclusion to the idea of Healthy Food. If we eat right, we won’t get sick. If we eat right, we won’t get fat. If we eat right, we won’t become diabetic. If we eat right, our kids won’t get autism. (If we eat right, we won’t be infertile, and we’ll be able to have children, who will obviously be free of all illness and defect.) If we eat right, we won’t be crazy. If we eat right, we won’t die from heart attack or stroke or cancer or liver failure or kidney disease or AIDS — and, if we eat right when we’re pregnant, neither will our children.

These are all things believers in the myth of healthy food have said. Half of them to me.

Ok, but let’s say that’s a hyperbolic misrepresentation of the position of Healthy Food’s believers³. Let’s say that when you say “she got diabetes because she ate like crap” you don’t actually mean “she wouldn’t have gotten diabetes if she’d eaten right” which itself could only be true if “no one who eats right gets diabetes”, which is utter bollocks. Let’s say that, instead, you have amazing powers of sight into alternate dimensions and a perfect ability to predict outcomes of statistical likelihoods⁴ — because that what it comes down to, risk, with some eating patterns carrying, on a population scale, different risk profiles than other eating patterns. You’re just saying healthy food improves your odds, not actually calling healthy food a panacea. But there’s still healthy food and unhealthy food, right?

No.

If we are not claiming there is a food, or a way of eating, that brings perfect health (which is assuming we can even meaningfully define “perfect health” in the first place), then the best we can do with food is risk management. “Healthy” can only exist as a comparative, not absolute, value.

So, compared to what? Which is healthier, raw cultured butter from pastured cows, or cold-pressed organic olive oil? That depends on whether you’re vegan, or lactose intolerant, or live in a dessert without a means of keeping food chilled⁵, I’d say. Which is healthier, a plate of brown rice spaghetti in fat-free sauce made from tomatoes from your own garden, or a protein shake with artificial sugar substitutes — to a diabetic? Which is healthier, the home cooked meal a growth-delayed, sensory-averse child absolutely won’t touch, or the McDonald’s chicken nuggets they’ll scarf?

Food — all food — brings things that are “good” for us, and things that are “bad”; or, more accurately, things that we need in that moment and things that we can store for later and things we don’t need (right then or at all) and things that we have too much of and things that actively harm us. All foods have all of these — only the specifics and amounts of each change. And the specifics are variable depending on our needs, which not only are different from person to person but each person’s needs change all the damn time.

Given that no food can fill all needs simultaneously⁶, and eating is a practice in good enough balance over time, how can we call a food “healthy” as an absolute?⁷ Food is meant to meet our needs⁸, and can only be evaluated on its ability to do so. Even a Twinkie is “healthy” for a person starved for caloric energy.

So there it is. There absolutely are foods that have a better need-filling to harm ratio in any given situation⁹. There absolutely are reasons to aim for eating foods that better meet more of your nutritional needs more of the time (though you have no moral obligation to do so). There so absolutely are reasons to call for large corporations to take out unnecessary harmful components from the food they sell and for, at the least, factual labeling about those additives. I disagree with not a piece of that, nor with helping people, should they wish, learn how to feed themselves in a way that meets more of their needs more of the time with less harm. Please, if that’s your calling, keep at it.

But the fact remains: there is no such thing as “healthy food”.

Whence we have the terms “crunchy” and “granola” to describe people — as many would describe me. ↩
SOMEONE BUY ME THIS. ↩
It isn’t. ↩
Remind me not to play craps with you. ↩
Helloooo rancid oils. ↩
For example: the presence of calcium inhibits the absorption of iron (and, pertinent to both me and the Boychick, oral thyroid hormone supplementation), and therefore we need to eat some foods high in calcium and deficient in iron, and others high in iron but lacking calcium. ↩
Even postulating the theoretical existence of a food that perfectly filled all of our nutritional needs simultaneously in a perfectly balanced way: would it be healthy to be bored out of our ever-loving gourds by eating the same exact thing all the time? ↩
Not just nutritional needs, but emotional, ritual, social, and so on — none of these is more or less important than others. ↩
A large apple may do as well for our theoretical Twinkie-eater — though only if they have the teeth to eat it. ↩

34 Comments | Posted on 21 January 2012 by Arwyn | Category: Body, Kyriarchy | Tags: Fat is a feminist issue, food, Health

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Cooking and Competence (and Massively Mangled Metaphors)

Recipe for competence

Stuffed squash and
Sausage stew and
Spiced muffins and
Sweet potato popovers and
Creamy corn chowder and
Risotto from scratch and
Stock from scraps
because I am able
and they are there

Chop, stir, spoon, cook,
dash of this because it smells right,
measure of that to rise it well

Each meal might last as long as leftovers, built into the menu
or
a frozen portion put up for who knows when
(more likely gone tonight)

and

this is how
I feed
my family
self
soul

***

I’ve been cooking more, lately. We’re back to weekly meal plans (and their requisite weekly shopping trips), a chore that creates more work, yet (done well) makes our lives easier. There is mindfulness to be found in the movement of food from pot to plate, to be sure, but sometimes it’s more a struggle to eke out the time, trade off the babe, fend off the child (or, harder, invite him in to help). Yet when it is done: I have done it. We, more likely, but for all the effort is communal, my pride is personal. I was taught some skills in each discrete kitchen task, but never shown, in instruction or by model, the how of putting it all together in putting a meal on the table. This is learned. This is mine.

There are so few areas of my life I feel unreservedly, realistically competent. Not confident — a wager on oneself, a boast of one’s abilities — but competent: to know a job has been done well, and I have done it, not by fluke or luck or Herculean effort, but by showing up and simply doing. A repeatable act.

I have skills as a parent. Contrary to the trolls taken to haunting my comment box, I am not a bad parent. I have skills, and creativity, and a vast, emphatic love for my children. I have a metaphorical toolbox full of skills and tricks and guiding ideas — but its latch sticks. Its hinge is squeaky sometimes, and I’m not sure there’s enough oil in the world to make it open smoothly when I most need it. I do not feel competent as a parent, not past infancy. I cannot stir lovingly and spice well and bake children with brilliantly balanced flavors, nor whip up a smooth and full and just-right-sweet relationship with them. I know how to hold and I know how to hold firm, and I even have an idea of when each is needed, but the synthesis (the putting into practice when three burners are full and the oven needs emptying), the ownership and overarching knowledge of this parenting gig, is lacking. My snuggle soufflés, like my similes, fall flat.

But in the kitchen: this I can do. There’s no cookbook I follow (though I always have Joy at hand, a metaphor too obvious to pursue), no single philosophy beyond “food as much like food as seems appropriate” (because sometimes there’s only time for canned beans, or a craving only boxed mac’n'cheese will fill). I use what I have, clean out the fridge when things get funky, mix beloved dishes with new recipes with spontaneous inspirations, and feed us, and feed us, and feed us — knowing none of it will last, knowing failures and fiascoes are blessedly fleeting, knowing with each meal I am building something worthy, knowing tomorrow’s drivethru cannot uneat today’s homemade fare.

This is competence, and I did not know its lack until I first tasted its elixir. I find myself craving more.

2 Comments | Posted on 19 January 2012 by Arwyn | Category: Parenting | Tags: domesticity, falling short, food, Mental Health

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“What if…?” On prenatal precautions and superstitions, and the burden of blame

Lying in bed the other night, drifting off to sleep thinking of holidays and cookie traditions and solstice eclipses, I jerked alert with a sudden, horrible realization: I have not been taking B vitamins. And without B vitamins — folate/folic acid in particular –, babies get neural tube defects. It’s Science. Everyone knows this. And once one knows one is pregnant, it’s really too late, because it’s most critical in those very first weeks, when the neural tube is first being formed. And for whatever reason, I, though trying to conceive, had completely forgotten about this Most Vital Fact and have neglected to take any form of prenatal combination vitamin or folic acid substitute and so I have doomed¹ my child to cleft palate, or spina bifida, or, my nightmare when I was on a drug with a significant increase in NTDs, anencephaly.

Except that’s not true.

The truth is that a maternal diet low in folate (found primarily in leafy greens) is associated with an increase of neural tube defects noticeable on a population scale, enough so that in the USA we enrich nearly all grain products with folic acid². The truth is that even without supplementation, the risk of NTDs are still really quite low. There’s also decent evidence that we piss away most of the content of artificial, pressed-together single-dose multivitamins. So for most people, especially those with halfway decent diets who do not regularly suffer from starvation or malnutrition, skipping vitamin supplementation is a pretty safe choice.

Except that’s not true, either. Hear me out.

The risk for choosing to avoid supplementation — or any other prenatal practice dictated as standard by society — isn’t, primarily, physical or nutritional: it’s social and emotional. The risk isn’t that one will have a child with a neural tube defect (which, even with food- or supplement-based folate intake far exceeding the ridiculously low minimums set by the FDA, is entirely possible) or other “imperfection”, the risk is that one will have a child with an atypicality and be blamed for not doing everything possible to prevent it.

The risk is that one will spend an entire pregnancy obsessing and worrying over what one “ought” to have done better, taken more of, eaten less of. The risk is that one will blame oneself for the rest of one’s life should it happen. The risk is that one will live with a constant refrain of “What if?” running in the back of their brains, never ceasing, never slowing, never backing down in the face of reason or rationality or science or practical assessment of odds because what if. What if something’s wrong because I didn’t take vitamins, did drink a beer, ate too much tuna? What if I could have prevented this condition/disease/disability/death if I had only done this differently, better, not at all? What if, what if, what if?

When we have taken all precautions — based in science and fact, or superstition and “everyone knows”³, or some muddled combination thereof — that are deemed appropriate by our society, well then, things just happen sometimes, and though still at risk for the whispers (or outright statements) that we must have done something wrong, we also often get sympathy (or pity) and are assured of our inculpability. But if we didn’t? Ah, then, we are at fault, inescapably, unforgivably. Then it — our baby born brainless, our newborn unable to nurse, our child needing yet another surgery — obviously wouldn’t have happened if only we had done better/more/what we were supposed to.

And so we take our vitamins, get the tests, avoid soft cheeses⁴ and deli meats, and pray nothing goes wrong and we will not be victim to the unbearable blame.

*****

Appendix, or Apologia: Of course there are good reasons for some of our prenatal precautions, and there is almost always at least some seed of reality behind each of them (except the all-soft-cheeses here in the USA — that one I’m fully willing to mock). I’m hardly arguing against ignoring all precautions, or saying that people only follow them out of preemptive defense. We each take the information we have and perform absolutely brilliant feats of risk-benefit calculations on it, and make the best decisions out of the choices available to us given the resources we have. My point is not that pregnant people are sheep, or prenatal precautions are entirely pointless, for there are Prenatal Do Nots that I indeed do not do⁵, and some proscriptions I proverbially thumb my nose at⁶, and some precautions — the folate — that I wish I had done. My point⁷ rather is that fears, not so much of the risk but of the social repercussions of bypassing expected precautions, are absolutely included in our calculations. And sometimes, when we deviate, they keep us up at night.

Because having any form of physical variation such as spina bifida is of course automatically DOOOOOOOM. For the unfamiliar, this footnote is sarcasm. ↩
Why we don’t instead, say, make leafy greens — and vegetables generally — more accessible to everyone who wants them is a rather different rant. ↩
And oh, how often one masquerades as the other! ↩
Despite all USian cheeses being required to be pasteurized or aged sufficiently that risks of listeria are considered nonexistent; some soft cheeses somewhere in the world aren’t, and so have an astronomically small risk of carrying pathogens, and so best to avoid all soft cheeses everywhere, obviously. ↩
Such as deep abdominal work — when not a part of Maya Abdominal Massage — which is really a bummer because my psoas needed some lovin’ this week and didn’t get it. ↩
Oh holiday homemade eggnog with raw eggs and a dash of rum, how I adore thee! ↩
In this post, because oh will there ever be more posts on pregnancy and kyriarchy and social pressures and the arbitrary nature of Western pregnancy and birth, should this currently-seed-size collection of cells stick around for the entire ride. ↩

23 Comments | Posted on 26 December 2010 by Arwyn | Category: Body, Kyriarchy, Parenting | Tags: food, pregnancy, societal pressures, superstitions and sorta science

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Blogging for Sophia

This is a post in which I ask you for money, if you have it, and hope, whether you think you have it or not.

Reader Mary Maxfield Brave asked me if I would “lend the power of the hambeast” to the cause of getting Sophia sufficient funds for her eating disorder treatment. And it was this paragraph from her post that got me to agree:

The Big Picture — with all its beauty and contrast and confusion — is a mosaic of tiny, smaller pictures. And the value system at the core of my activism is the notion that each of those tiny specks also matters — that, while I tend to think in generations and movements, in long-term change worth personal sacrifice – my desire for those changes and my belief in them depends upon my attachment to specific, individual folks. When I cut to the core of things, I still must admit: the one, specific friend I lost to suicide causes me more pain than the fact that another life is lost (to suicide, in the US alone) every 17 minutes. The personal matters.

And here is Sophia:

My name is Sofia Benbahmed and I am trying to do everything in my power to get the help I need – if you read the description on my page, all of the details are there in an email that I am sending out to friends and family. I am currently trying to raise money to get the treatment recommended for me for a disease I have had for 12 years – an eating disorder. I have had issues with my insurance company and am trying to get the help I need and finally get better!

*******

For all that I initially — and readily — agreed to take part in the blogging carnival for Sophia (because I am fundamentally a softy with a tendency to swoon when people ask me for help as though I were not an especially tiny krill in the online ocean), I realized I had a lot of resistance to the idea.

What do I know about her, really?

Might it be a scam?

Why her, and not someone else?

Why one person with an eating disorder, when that much money could help so many others with different illnesses?

And even — and I hate myself for thinking this — what if she doesn’t make it? What if she doesn’t get better?

And y’know, in examining these resistances, they each came down to… cynicism. And I don’t particularly like the thought of myself as quite that cynical. (“contemptuously distrustful of human nature and motives” — “based on or reflecting a belief that human conduct is motivated primarily by self-interest”)

Cynicism has its place, perhaps. But cynicism is the antithesis of hope. Cynicism is immobilizing. Cynicism is douche in the back of the class scoffing that it will never work whilst the people in the front do what they can to make it happen. And after high school (and, um, in high school), that really stopped being amusing. So forget cynicism. Forget the voice in my head saying but she has so much, others have so much less. Forget the urge to pile up her privileges and deem her “not oppressed enough”; that was me when the Boychick was born, having too much family income to access state health care, but still having too little to pay the midwife and our daily bills and forget trying to get out of debt. Others had less, yes; that didn’t mean I should give up and be “grateful”, but rather that we all deserved more.

Forget cynicism. Even if you have nothing to give, or choose to decline this particular cause, I challenge you to not roll your eyes as you click away. I challenge you if you send nothing to send nothing but wishes for good luck. Forget cynicism.

*******

What do I know about her, really? She’s a person with an illness, wanting and trying to get better and being blocked by bureaucracies and capitalism and the alchemy of greed, ableism, and misogyny that allows insurance companies to deny payment for full courses of treatment for eating disorders.

Might it be a scam? Maybe. But I have no reason to think so, and every reason to think it’s entirely legitimate. And even if it is, what would a donor of $25 lose? $25. Not a bad price, if you can afford it (and if you can’t comfortably do so, please send wishes and retweets and know that is more than enough), for the reminder that you are not entirely immobilized by cynicism. I would be out more — social capital, readership trust — and I deem it more than worth the negligible risk.

Why her? Because a friend asked, and I was able. It really is that simple.

…and not someone else? No reason why not, except that there is never as much time or ability to blog about all that I want to or plan to. And see below for my woo woo rejection of zero-sum thinking.

Why one person with an eating disorder, when that much money could help so many others with different illnesses? Because I deny the culture of lack rather than the belief of abundance that question is based on. I reject that human lives can be measured and weighed so dispassionately. I assert that if one person is not worth an entire community’s support, the community is not worth one person’s effort.

What if she doesn’t make it? What if she doesn’t get better? Oh, cynical, hurting, lacking me, who asks this question. Dear self: you are worth the world, without doing a thing to earn it. You are worth all care, all money, all love, regardless of what happens after. You are worth effort, regardless of outcome. And so, therefore, is everyone else. So, specifically, is Sophia.

So this is my plea, for hope and selflessness instead of cynicism. For abundance, instead of lack. For Sophia.

*******

This post is a part of a Blog-a-Day group effort to have one blog post each day in October to raise funds for Sophia’s treatment, and awareness of eating disorders and the deficits in insurance coverage. See the list at Tumblr to read already published posts and check back in throughout the month as more go live. There are still a few spots left if you wish to participate at your own blog.

5 Comments | Posted on 7 October 2010 by Arwyn | Category: Body | Tags: Blogging for Sophia, eating disorders, food, Health, Mental Health

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Magnificently Simmering: the blog I would wish I were writing if I were a foodie and which you should be reading regardless

I write a lot about bodies — mine, others’, the experience of existing as an embodied being (because we all are). I still haven’t quite managed to articulate what it is about framing my experience as body-centered that is so compelling, so necessary to me, but it is true nonetheless. When I finally manage the blog overhaul I’ve been dreaming of for the past few months, and simplify the categories to three main topics, “Body” will still be one of them. To tell the story of my body, to really be in it, and to care for it are some of my highest goals.

Thus when a dear friend, whose life has near-frightening levels of parallel with mine (but with more getting published and less knitting), started the blog Magnificently Simmering, with the tagline An American Anglophile’s musings on mindfulness, sensuality, and the cookery of Nigella Lawson, I knew I was going to fall, and fall hard and fast, despite being far too lazy to be a foodie of even wannabe-Nigella caliber. And fall I am, for all the blog is only a few days old and a few posts long.

Here’s a sampling of why:

At first, when I started a year ago, I could only [practice mindfulness] while cooking. Even when the monkey brain was in full-on Speed Racer mode, something about setting out a cutting board and some vegetables, or turning on the tap to rinse out a stockpot, would immediately signal to it, Shut the funk up, we’re pretending to be Nigella, now! And I would chop, and do my washing-up, and concentrate on those tasks with such excruciating care, that eventually I could kinda, sorta, by my standards, think of blessed nothing other than ginger, and carrots, and dish soap.

– Why Nigella? And we get the sensuality bit (oh, and how!), but what’s with the mindfulness business? Aren’t you just an ersatz Julie Powell, with more Zen and fewer f-bombs?

After a freak 85-degree day in which I endured three-plus hours of un-air-conditioned public transit, ran across a highway in a slim skirt, and bit my nails to shreds at the pharmacy waiting to find out whether my new wonderdrug prescription was going to cost $200, let’s just say, Gentle Reader, that the only mindfulness I could summon was an awareness of what flavor of ice cream I wanted my minions to spoon-feed me with one hand, while fanning me with palm fronds with the other.

– Spaghetti alla Carbonara

If this happens to you, do not, as I did, immediately grab a spoon and commence forcibly scraping. Simply view this as an opportune moment to practice radical acceptance and distress tolerance skills, and pour your mixture over your croissant bits, before stepping away. Nigella, after all, says we must let this concoction “steep” for 10 minutes.

Once you have deep-breathed and mourned the caramel for the requisite amount of time, return to your steeping slop o’goodness, and place it tenderly (for, it, too, must be mourning the loss of its caramelized potential, and wondering whether it’s worthy enough for Nigella to crawl into bed with it) in the oven.

– Caramel Croissant Pudding

For foodies, for those of us struggling to be present in our lives and to live in and love our bodies, and for those with an unbecoming penchant for watching dreamy sensual women lick caramel off long-handled spoons, (and surely most everyone, certainly among my readership, is covered by at least one of those categories), this will be a blog to watch.

Just be sure to keep a drool rag handy.