Brick

We’re try­ing veg­an­ism, My Beloved and I, now in our 11th week of cut­ting the ovo-lacto from our com­fort­able veg­e­tar­i­an­ism of over two decades.

Look Out For That Bus!

It’d been a year since my last fast­ing cho­les­terol blood test. The results so floored my doc­tor a week ago — total dropped from 244 to 159 with triglyc­erides and LDL roughly halved, 161 to 78, 147 to 85, respec­tively — that he ended my 12-year pre­scrip­tion to cholesterol-lowering drugs.

The online pro­gram www.21daykickstart.org begins the first of every month, and we started April 1. I went ovo-lacto veg about Elec­tion Day 1990, so included dairy and eggs. MB dropped meat after we began dat­ing in sum­mer 1991, but she got me to have salmon monthly.

We chose 21-Day Kick­start because it’s run by the Physi­cians Com­mit­tee for Respon­si­ble Med­i­cine and its founder Dr. Neal Barnard, because they’re not fad­dish and cite only solid, inde­pen­dent science.

Ask any­one who’s dieted. You can do most any­thing for a very few weeks.

While gloat­ing over my num­bers and self-discipline — or what passes for gloat­ing, list­ing these counts on Face­book — I kept think­ing how use­ful good health is … until it’s cut short by an unsus­pected defect in some vital organ. Or that with my half-working ears, and head in the clouds, I step into the path of an elec­tric car. I’m pretty sure I’d sense a bus and hop back.

‘Cook­ing Is a Polit­i­cal Act’

I’ve lost a lot of weight, too. More on that, anon.

Eat­ing bet­ter has been for me as much an intel­lec­tual chal­lenge as an emo­tional one. I’d say phys­i­cal also, but pick­ing out food comes from the brain and the heart. Thirst and hunger are real, but delin­eat­ing them fur­ther employs men­tal and emo­tional judg­ment. Our sources for such judg­ments have got­ten us into the health mess we’re in.

“Cook­ing is a polit­i­cal act,” says Michael Pol­lan. This is the the­sis of the UC-Berkeley jour­nal­ism professor’s lat­est book, Cooked: A Nat­ural His­tory of Trans­for­ma­tion. He explains it in an inter­view:

All we do is we take the one thing that we do for a liv­ing, we sell that into the mar­ket, we take that money and use that to out­source every­thing in our lives. That leads to a depen­dence that is almost infantilizing.”

Why didn’t he use “eco­nomic” instead of “polit­i­cal” in the five-word throw-down? Cook­ing is polit­i­cal more than eco­nomic for him because it’s more about power than mere money, extend­ing beyond the marketplace.

This is not my favorite Pol­lan book. It’s fun, but the depth comes from the intro­duc­tion and a few para­graphs among hun­dreds of pages on how this middle-aged urban guy finally learned — after becom­ing an expert on the food indus­try — to cook. He chose to pick up tra­di­tional, uni­ver­sal meth­ods: roast­ing meat, bak­ing bread, stews and pickling.

(My pick is Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Man­i­festo. This manifesto’s title is an homage to his The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Nat­ural His­tory of Four Meals.)

That’s right, Michael Pol­lan is not a veg­e­tar­ian. Nor is my other favorite food jour­nal­ist, Mark Bittman. Nei­ther fol­lows hype. They fol­low facts. Both eat meat and dairy carefully.

We’re all omni­vores, right? Bio­log­i­cally for 10,000 years, give or take a cou­ple mil­lion. Peo­ples world­wide have thrived on what­ever their sur­round­ings pro­vided them to eat. For exam­ple, we Amer­i­cans think of Bud­dhists being on the plant end of diets — rice and tofu. Yet Tibetans, whose spir­i­tual leader is the Dalai Lama, are on the car­ni­vore end of foods — after all, few plants grow in the Himalayas. Yak steaks, goat burgers.

The fact I can thrive on a healthy diet from any tra­di­tional cul­ture is a clue. Solid sci­ence blames mod­ern West­ern society’s indus­tri­al­ized food choices for many ail­ments. If that’s so, why are we as a soci­ety liv­ing longer? Answer: We have incred­i­ble health care.

When ‘They’ Cook, It’s Become a Con

Sta­tis­ti­cally, though, I am much more likely than my bacon-on-Wonder-bread-loving friends to make it to age 90. Vegan means, besides now quelling a fam­ily his­tory of blood pres­sure, heart trou­ble and dia­betes II (my fast­ing glu­cose was 86), less chance of can­cers and even dementia.

Yet sta­tis­tics mea­sure pop­u­la­tions not indi­vid­u­als. The odds are fully 100 per­cent whether I will float atop that bell curve of longevity. Hello, bus.

What’s to account for longer lives? The veg­e­tar­i­an­ism of George Bernard Shaw? More likely, Ignaz Sem­mel­weis get­ting the world to wash its hands, only in 1847.

Our Amer­i­can cul­ture, both the good and the bad, pro­pels us toward overindulging in foods that his­tor­i­cally have been enjoyed in moderation.

Besides Pollan’s books, doc­u­men­taries like Mor­gan Spurlock’s Super Size Me high­light the big-business machi­na­tions to con us to order­ing more food of ques­tion­able nutri­tion in restau­rants. Other books like Michael Moss’ Sugar Salt Fat detail how Big Food gets us to buy not food but food prod­ucts from markets.

I haven’t quit such processed foods, but I’ve become far bet­ter at eval­u­at­ing them. One irony is they infect the vegan world — ads for ready-to-eat plant-based prod­ucts under­write the glossy veg mag­a­zines I drool through at the local nat­ural food store.

It was so damned hard to cut cheese from my palette that I’m stay­ing vegan for the near future partly out of spite. The other rea­son is control.

‘Their’ Food Doesn’t Taste Good

Before 1990 I ate like every­one else. After col­lege grad­u­a­tion a decade ear­lier I learned in that first sum­mer of inde­pen­dence that burger and chicken joints, even Arby’s roast beef, soon came to taste alike, of musty oil and salt. At home, both Ham­burger Helper and the twinned cans of La Choy got old by fall. So I began teach­ing myself to cook.

Mom had given me the Joy of Cook­ing, but it never res­onated. PBS cook­ing shows did; I did chores on week­end after­noons with them — never Julia Child, though — stop­ping to take notes. In 1985, Jane Brody’s Good Food Book struck a nerve. It was my first journalism-based nutri­tion bible. As she’s still with The New York Times, she’s a god­mother to Bittman, Pol­lan and Moss.

Mov­ing toward Mol­lie Katzen in the ‘90s, then last Sep­tem­ber to India’s tra­di­tional Ayurveda reg­i­men and in April to PCRM’s plant-based low-fat diet, now seems to have been inevitable.

If only I could fol­low Max Perkins’ “Always leave the table a lit­tle bit hun­gry.” My impulse con­trol is lousy.

In June 2012, the doctor’s scale had me at 155 pounds, this past June 7,  I weighed 135. The Ayurveda months cut the first 15 of 20 pounds.

What helps is that PCRM’s veg­an­ism uses no por­tion con­trol. These past weeks I have often stuffed myself, just gorged if I wanted, on plant-based, whole-grain, low-fat items. I allow refined flour when we’re out — there’s lit­tle choice.

MB and I recently went to the local Mel­low Mush­room, because I heard the pizza chain offers vegan cheese (a sub­sti­tute, or ana­log, of mushed-up flours, oils and fla­vor­ings). I liked the Daiya cheese OK, but MB didn’t at all.

The server said because we’re vegan she’d tell the kitchen to skip spread­ing but­ter on the edges of the pie after it’s baked. Olive oil, sure, but not but­ter. The menu said the dough had sugar, boast­ing it was unre­fined, but still, why? Makes me angry.

When I scraped away the veg­gies and fake cheese to taste just the tomato sauce, I found lots of cumin. Why, Ital­ian food doesn’t use cumin. How did the chain restaurant’s mas­ter lab come up with that?

Do I have to cook all my own meals? My own pizza now longer seems vain.

A local Tex-Mex place boasts of being vegan-friendly and of using only fresh veg­eta­bles. We tried it. MB’s spinach was canned, and my sauteed zuc­chini and cau­li­flower had that once-frozen tex­ture and tasted of vine­gar. Vine­gar? We grew angry.

Twice since then, I’ve spread fat-free refried beans (my lat­est pantry sta­ple) on corn or whole-wheat tor­tillas, heaped on freshly cooked, sea­soned veg­eta­bles and spooned on either of two jarred sal­sas. Folded to make que­sadil­las or rolled for enchi­ladas, then browned in a non­stick skil­let. Crav­ing a sauce? Keep pack­ets of Wholly Gua­camole (or the house-brand equiv­a­lent) in the freezer. Tasty, healthy and fill­ing, with only one skil­let to clean.

Anger dri­ves me into the kitchen. For­tu­nately, I love to cook, and I’m mak­ing time for it more often.

Eat­ing also is a polit­i­cal act

In the West, in the 20th and now 21st cen­turies, we can choose to eat any­thing. The econ­omy has been set up to make foods cheap and easy to find, com­pared to pre­vi­ous cen­turies and other lands.

What we eat is a choice.

My veg­an­ism puts me in league with my bacon-loving broth­ers. I have lots of pro­fes­sional col­leagues who boast of junk food diets and laugh admir­ingly about the lat­est bacon con­coc­tion of chain eateries.

These friends don’t want to be lec­tured to by the likes of me. I am the enemy here.

Under­stood. Eat­ing these days is both act­ing and react­ing, both exer­cis­ing con­trol and admit­ting such con­trol is lim­ited. Eat­ing cer­tainly has become a polit­i­cal act.

Over a dozen years I’d care­lessly gained around 20 pounds. Out­side my con­trol, last August I was laid off from a long-held posi­tion. Now I run around with three part-time gigs so low-paying I still qual­ify for unem­ploy­ment. But work’s great for morale, gives me some power over circumstances.

Why not go fur­ther? Only organic (whose def­i­n­i­tion?), only locally grown (hypocrisy out­side of Cal­i­for­nia), only old-fashioned fam­ily farms (how far back for authen­tic­ity) and so on?

First, food­ies, who by def­i­n­i­tion rave about those, reek of elit­ism, and I want no part of that. You must have a very good income to even approach ideal food choices. Sec­ond, if you’re going the fresh-always-is-better route, you can’t allow for excep­tions: Are you really going to inter­ro­gate your friends over every item on their party platters?

I am a Wal-Mart vegan. Both it and area super­mar­ket chains make it easy, despite their infi­nitely more yards of shelf space for junk food.

My body got clogged with com­mon, cheap choices, even the more nutri­tious ones. My anger directs me to good deci­sions. Self-control now has become satisfying.

Last, my goal is not to live to 90, be some wiz­ened, shuf­fling, for­get­ful crank. Since the lay­off I’ve decided to plan only in five-year incre­ments. Four-plus years is all I can stom­ach think­ing about.

Will I have cheese pizza and creamy brown­ies for the next five-or-zero birth­day? I have no inter­est in plan­ning or promis­ing past this summer.

Zorba the Greek’s wis­dom, to live fully, is no con­tra­dic­tion when applied to the mun­dane act of eating.

I am in con­trol so that I can be free.

“Teach me to dance.”

Copy­right 2013 Ben S.Pollock (not the clip, of course)

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