I love to eat.

I LOVE to EAT!

Those people who seem to walk through life eating only because they have to, because food is fuel, who act annoyed when they have to stop what they’re doing to eat – I consider them freaks of nature. And those freaks tend to be skinny as well –hmmf.

When I fill out one of those social networking profiles I seriously consider writing “eating” as my favorite hobby. Not “gourmet cooking” or anything particularly sophisticated. Just EATING.  If I’m forced to qualify it, I’d say “eating good food”, because my palate is a bit persnickety.

When I hear the likes of Dr. Oz talking about Me on a Diet (as if) and suggesting that food is more than food – it is an emotional outlet, blah, blah - I think to myself, he’s got it all wrong. Okay, sometimes I get depressed and devour a pint of coffee Haagen Daz, but generally speaking, I eat because I genuinely love food. A cookie isn’t necessarily a cry for help. A good cookie, a homemade chocolate chip cookie made with a 2:1 ratio of chips to dough and real butter, still warm with molten chocolate chips, is just a cookie and a damn good one at that.

A Deadly Gene Pool

This apple didn’t fall far from the tree. I came from a long line of food loving folks.  Unfortunately, the Love Food gene came with the Get Really Fat gene.

My mom and maternal grandmother were type two insulin diabetics. They were able to control the disease with pills until they became morbidly obese and were forced to control the disease with insulin shots. Of my five siblings, two have had gastric bypass surgery, and one remains morbidly obese. I gave my mom insulin shots when she was too weak from cancer to do it herself. Pricking her calloused fingers several times a day to verify the dose, I would then try to find a fresh spot on her track-marked, 300-plus-pound body to administer the insulin shot. I vowed I would never let it happen to me.

I try to eat healthy without being one of those obnoxious engineered health food, protein bar toting types (aka: the orthorexic)  – exactly the kind of eater that sucks the joy out of eating with the force of a Hoover vac; that buys fat-free (aka: plastic) cheese and fat free ice cream (It should be illegal to call it ice cream.); and eyes a loaf of white bread with scorn and disgust. Those people make lousy dining companions and downright dreadful dinner guests. I take the liberty to say as much, because I was one of those spurious ‘healthy’ eaters for a period in my 20s when my fear of obesity temporarily triumphed over my passion for real food.

My Love Food gene ultimately prevailed. No longer could I resist the complex, earthy flavors of a creamy gorgonzola cheese drizzled with buckwheat honey and sprinkled with toasted walnuts; or a loaf of bread fresh from the oven – golden brown and crisp on the outside giving way to a delicate white interior that begged for a drizzle of olive oil or a pat of European style butter. Who could imagine that four simple ingredients (flour, salt, yeast and water), virtually inedible alone, could combine in such an addictively delicious form. From then on my mantra was moderation.

Am I Really What I Eat?

But then a new fear settled in; I started to think about what was in my food and where it came from.  Such curiosity was a natural side effect of being a foodie. After all, my discerning palate could appreciate the not so subtle differences between blue cheese crumbles from the big box grocery store and St. Agur Blue (double cream!) cheese. Palate preferences aside, anyone interested in learning more about what they ate had a number of resources to choose from including:

What Not to Eat by Marion Nestle

In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

The titles of these books alone induced fear.

What TO eat?

Why did food need a defense?

And now we needed a miracle?

I read these books and a host of others over the years with a careful eye; my fears deepened. Food companies, regardless of their mission statements, are in the business to make money. If they are public companies, they have the added pressure from shareholders to make more and more money each year. So they carefully craft eat-more strategies masked by claims of being better for you. Better for you? It’s questionable, but if you buy it, it’s certainly better for them.

A long stint in marketing left me with a fear of being had by clever advertising, which in the center aisles of the grocery store happens all too easily. Companies try to distract you from the obvious. For example, oils are high in fat and therefore, high in calories. Companies that produce vegetable oil want you to focus on its positive attributes, so many put “Cholesterol Free” on the label. Cholesterol is made by animals, so vegetable oils, all vegetable oils, are inherently cholesterol free. Duped again.

I’m not a bandwagon- jumping alarmist. I was an engineer in a previous life, a finance geek in another, and a marketing director in yet another. I buy nothing with a cord that hasn’t been thoroughly vetted by CNET or Consumer Reports. In short, I’m seldom swayed by simple hype and shock value. I need to see the data. And the data says to me, be afraid, be very afraid. I won’t regurgitate (pun intended) the facts here. Read the books for yourself and, if you have access to filmmaker Robert Kenner’s recently released documentary, Food, Inc., go see it. Then make your own decisions.

As consumers we’re on our own. The hands of the USDA and FDA are often tied by big, powerful food companies. (Did you know the government agencies lack the authority to issue food recalls? They issue warnings only with minor exceptions. The producers issue the actual recalls.) Food safety is our job. Fine, I’m not trying to shirk responsibility for my own wellness, but the government regulators and the food companies don’t make it easy for me to make my decisions. Food labels are unintelligible unless you are fortunate to have a degree in nutrition science and are intimately familiar with the government issued Code of Federal Regulation – Title 21, which addresses the apparently complicated matter of food labeling with no fewer than 47 sub-sections and four appendices. 

Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, suggests that we shop the perimeter of the grocery store and buy products with five or fewer ingredients. To that I would add, and only if they are ingredients you recognize and can pronounce.

I take my food seriously not in the hope of triumphing over my deadly gene pool or to live to be 108 years old. (The vast amount of red wine I consume will see to it that I don’t unless red wine is really THAT good for you. On the plus side, it does have fewer than five ingredients.) I’m serious about my food, because I love to eat. If I am what I eat, I want to know what that is. I don’t want to be oligofructose or soy protein isolate or xanthan gum. (To be fair, if I knew what they were, maybe I would.) I’d rather be creamy gorgonzola – complex, delicious, perhaps off-putting to some. Or buckwheat honey – amber, glossy, and not cloyingly sweet. Or just a simple loaf of homemade bread – a little crusty on the outside, but warm and soft on the inside.