I am an omnivore and glad that I am! Omnivores eat all foods. We fortunate creatures are able to digest either plants or flesh while herbivores are limited in their food choices because they can only digest plants and carnivores can only digest flesh.
Being omnivorous helped early humans survive. Hunters and gatherers canโt be picky because before agriculture, food was pretty scarce. Hunger and curiosity drove our ancestors to walk all over the world, the prequel to settling down and developing civilizations. Yay, omnivores!
Today? Author and food-movement leader Michael Pollan says we are sustained by three food chains. The biggest is industrialized food grown and processed by agribusiness (and promoted heavily by food advertising), next is the much smaller organic food supply, and a very few people grow, hunt, or gather their own food. Food in the U.S. is super abundant, readily available, and cheap.
Does this cornucopia make us healthy and happy? Actually, no. Too many of us eat too much. Our obesity epidemic is an immense (word chosen carefully) threat to individual and public health but that is the subject of another column.
Many of us have a strange malady found only in lands where food is readily available and there are many choices of what to buy and eat. I call this the Bad Food/Good Food syndrome. In a recent New York Times article,โWhy Everything is Bad For Youโ Jim Windolf says he has scrolled through numerous computer articles warning that food is killing him. โLike everyone else, I believe every word in those articles.โ He concludes, โWe are all going to die. And we all eat food. Therefore food must be the culprit.โ
The medical-science-journalism complex is powerful and influential. At one time or another we have been told to avoid just about everything: animal fats, red meat, cranberries, apples, eggs, top-of-the-food-chain fish, farmed fish, carbohydrates, insecticide-infested fruits and vegetables.
Many of these warnings came from studies showing a correlation between self-reported eating habits and certain diseases. Some foods were contaminated with things that arenโt good for us. Growing certain foods has an adverse effect on the environment (almonds drink up too much water, overfishing destroys fish numbers but fish farming pollutes the ocean).
As in the case of parenting advice and hemlines there are eating trends. Sometimes the answer to health and svelteness is a low-fat diet. Sometimes the healthy-carbs diet sprints to the lead.
We are also told to fill up on certain foods because they are healthy. Eat green veggies, especially kale, the current vegetable du jour. I donโt remember when a high-fiber diet first came into fashion but it was the time intestinal gas in elevators became noticeable.
Some of us worship certain foods and convince ourselves to eat these with an almost-religious fervor. Unduly influenced by what we read about a substance like gluten, we think, โHey, maybe I can live forever if I avoid gluten or switch to soy-based everything.โ
There is also our national passion for dieting, fed by the fashion mafia as well as the health police. Daily weighings, knowing the exact calorie or carb count of every morsel, and virtuous denial of forbidden foods, at least in public, all common. There is even an app that provides a nutritionistโs opinion of what you are about to eat if you send a photograph.
There are people who cannot safely eat everything. Those of you who have a documented food allergy or food intolerance, stop reading right now, this is not for you guys. I also give a pass to committed vegetarians or vegans. Who am I to question your beliefs (even though I have questioned some of the science)?
I think the rest of us should lighten up about food. Stop thinking a food, or the absence of a food, is the key to health. Start enjoying what you eat. Try new foods because you can, not because you have been told itโs healthy. Eating healthy is ridiculously simple. Follow the advice of Pollan who tells us to eat real food rather than processed food, mostly fruits and vegetables, not too much.
What does this have to do with parenting? My advice to parents: Model wholesome eating and, over time, get the following points across to your children:
1. Eat when hungry and stop when full. Learn what a serving size is both when reading labels and ordering in restaurants. Avoid mindless eating like gobbling down a tub of popcorn at the movies or demolishing a jumbo bag of chips while watching TV. Avoid eating establishments that encourage us to pig-out like all-you-can-eat restaurants. Be judicious about buying large economy sizes because a lot of what we eat ends up in landfill.
2) Eat regular meals, preferably with the family, and enjoy between-meal healthful snacks. Eat a variety of foods and be brave enough to try new ones. Fresh is always better than processed, local better than grown far away.
3) Go easy on foods that fool you. Soft drinks and many juices list sugar as the first ingredient and processed foods you donโt think of as sweet contain sugar. Many processed foods and restaurant meals are over salted.
4) Learn to be aware and wary of how foods are advertised and why (to make money).
5)Eat some so-called-bad-for-us-foods once in a while โ itโs OK.
6) Cook and eat together โ itโs fun.
7) Enjoy food, my cute little omnivores!
