Super Natural Cooking by Heidi Swanson

I apologize for the long absence. Busy as the proverbial bees, and without my laptop for two weeks (a story for another time, perhaps). While I may not have been writing recently, I have certainly been reading. I expect some of my readers (those of you who have stuck it out through the lean winter months) may be interested in the work of one Heidi Swanson. She is an artist and blogger from San Francisco who has recently published a book Super Natural Cooking.

Super Natural Cooking is stuffed full of simple, reasonable recipes with ingredients that seem neither scary nor obscure and which have gourmet-looking results…Its contents alone are enough reason to love the book, but Super Natural Cooking’s construction, layout, and photography will delight any lover of good design. This is a book you want to hold in your hand and carefully read…

Swanson also presents healthful eating, not as a negative stop-gap to avoid disease, but as a toothsome celebration of the age we live in, where we can make food from all different cultures with the ingredients from our grocery shelves—food that is aesthetically pleasing, delicious, and good to serve to friends, family, and guests. This is not a book filled with “healthy” versions of old standbys, but creative foods that take advantage of their ingredients’ natural properties to create something new, beautiful, and altogether good.

- Read the entire Cardus review here.

Also linked in the above quoted review is Ms. Swanson’s excellent cooking blog 101 Cookbooks, which you best check out.

“Eat Food”

Anymore, what exactly qualifies as food, and what is a “food-like product”? Some helpful rules of thumb:*

1. Avoid food products containing ingredients that are A) unfamiliar, B) Unpronounceable, C) more than five in number, or that included D) high-fructose corn syrup.

2. Avoid food products that make health claims.

3. Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.

4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible.

- Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food, pp. 147-161.

* “The earliest citation comes from Sir William Hope’s The Compleat Fencing-Master, second edition, 1692, page 157: “What he doth, he doth by rule of thumb, and not by art.”[1] The term is thought to originate with wood workers who used the length of their thumbs rather than rulers for measuring things, cementing its modern use as an inaccurate, but reliable and convenient standard.”

Your God Demands Seeds

It’s no accident that the small handful of plants we’ve come to rely on are grains…these crops are exceptionally efficient at transforming sunlight, fertilizer, air, and water into macronutrients – carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. These macronutrients in turn can be profitably converted into meat, dairy, and processed foods of every description. Also, the fact that they come in the form of durable seeds which can be stored for long periods of time means they can function as commodities as well as foods, making these crops particularly well adapted to the needs of industrial capitalism.

- Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food, p. 124.

A Refined Ignorance

Science doesn’t know nearly enough to compensate for everything that processing does to whole foods. We know how to break down a kernel of corn or grain of wheat into its chemical parts, but we have no idea how to put it back together again. Destroying complexity is a lot easier than creating it.

- Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food, pp.115-116.

Why is Corn Syrup a key ingredient in Everything?

Store food is food designed to be stored and transported over long distances, and the surest way to make food more stable and less vulnerable to pests is to remove the nutrients from it. In general, calories are much easier to transport – in the form of refined grain or sugar – than nutrients, which are liable to deteriorate or attract the attention of bacteria, insects, and rodents, all keenly interested in nutrients. (More so, apparently, than we are.) Price concluded that modern civilization had sacrificed much of the quality of its food in interests of quantity and shelf life…

Health depends heavily on knowing how to read these biological signals: This looks ripe; this smells spoiled; that’s one slick-looking cow. This is much easier to do when you have long experience of a food and much harder when a food has been expressly designed to deceive your senses with, say, artificial flavors and sweeteners. Foods that lie to our senses are one of the most challenging features of the Western diet.

- Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food, pp. 97, 104.

Post Hoc, ergo propter Hoc

Even if we accept the epidemic of obesity and diabetes as the unintended consequence of the war against dietary fat – collateral damage, you might say – what about the intended consequence of that campaign: the reduction of heart disease? Here is where the low-fat campaigners have chosen to make their last stand, pointing proudly to the fact that after peaking in the late sixties, deaths from heart disease fell dramatically in America…

Whether the low-fat campaigners should take the credit for this achievement is doubtful, however. Reducing mortality from heart disease is not the same thing as reducing the incidence of heart disease…A ten year study of heart disease mortality published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1998 strongly suggests that most of the decline in deaths from heart disease is due not to changes in lifestyle, such as diet, but to improvements in medical care…For while during the period under analysis, heart attack deaths declined substantially, hospital admissions for heart attack did not.

- Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food,pp. 60 – 61.

Return to the Old Paths, and Throw Out your Margarine

“Worrying so much about food can’t be very good for your health” Indeed. Orthorexia nervosa is an eating disorder not yet recognized by the DSM-IV, but some psychologists have recently suggested that it’s time it was. They’re seeing more and more patients suffering from “an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.”

So this is what putting science, and scientism, in charge of the American diet has gotten us: anxiety and confusion about even the most basic questions of food and health, and a steadily diminishing ability to enjoy one of the great pleasures of life without guilt or neurosis…

The novel food products the industry designed according to the latest nutritionist specs certainly helped push real food off our plates. But the industry’s influence would not be nearly so great had the ideology of nutritionism not already undermined the influence of tradition and habit and common sense – and the transmitter of all those values, mom – on our eating.

Now, all this might be tolerable if eating by the light of nutritionism made us, if not happier, then at least healthier. That it has failed to do. Thirty years of nutritional advice have left us fatter, sicker, and more poorly nourished. Which is why we find ourselves in the predicament we do: in need of a whole new way to think about eating.

- Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food, pp. 80 – 81.

Do not Presume to Search the Souls of Carrots

In the same way nutritionism can lead to a false consciousness in the mind of the eater, it can just as easily mislead the scientist.
The problem starts with the nutrient. Most nutritional science involves studying one nutrient at a time, a seemingly unavoidable approach that even nutritionists who do it will tell you is deeply flawed. “The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient science,” points out Marion Nestle, a New York University nutritionist, “is that it takes the nutrient out of the contest of the food, the food out of the context of the diet, and the diet out of the context of the lifestyle.”

If nutrition scientists know this, why do they do it anyway? Because a nutrient bias is built into the way science is done. Scientists study variables they can isolate…Yet even the simplest food is a hopelessly complicated thing to analyze, a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in intricate and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the process of changing from one state to another…

It’s important also to remind ourselves that what reductive science can manage to perceive well enough to isolate and study is subject to almost continual change, and that we have a tendency to assume that what we can see is the important thing to look at. The vast attention paid to cholesterol since the 1950s is largely the result of the fact that for a long time cholesterol was the only factory linked to heart disease that we had the tools to measure. (This is sometimes called parking-lot science, after the legendary fellow who loses his keys in a parking lot and goes looking for them under the streetlight – not because that’s where he lost them, but because that’s where it’s easiest to see.)…

[C]uriously, the human digestive tract has roughly as many neurons as the spinal column. We don’t yet know exactly what they’re up to, but their existence suggests that much more is going on in digestions than simply the breakdown of foods into chemicals…

When Prout and Liebig nailed down the macronutrients, scientists figured that they now understood the nature of food and what the body needed from it. Then when the vitamins were isolated a few decades later, scientists thought, okay, now we really understand food and what the body needs for its health; and today it’s the polyphenols and carotenoids that seem to have completed the picture. But who knows what else is going on deep in the soul of a carrot?

The good news is that, to the carrot eater, it doesn’t matter. That’s the great thing about eating foods as compared with nutrients: You don’t need to fathom the carrot’s complexity in order to reap its benefits.

- Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food, pp. 62 – 66.

We are Food Prudes

We Americans have always had a problem taking pleasure in eating. We certainly have gone to unusual lengths to avoid it…the sheer abundance of food in America has bred “a vague indifference to food, manifested in a tendency to eat and run, rather than to dine and savor.” To savor food, to conceive of a meal as an aesthetic experience, has been regarded as evidence of effeteness, a form of foreign foppery…To the Christian social reformers of the nineteenth century, “The naked act of eating was little more than unavoidable…and was not to be considered a pleasure except with great discretion.”…Kellogg himself was outspoken in his hostility to the pleasures of eating: “The decline of a nation commences when gourmandizing begins.”
If that is so, America had little reason to worry.

- Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food, pp. 56 – 57.

The French do Potatoes: Pommes Duchesse

At the end of the preceding recipe, we are encouraged to garnish our duck and poached-pear masterpiece with “duchesse potatoes”, which I realized may be a cryptic instruction to many. I mean, “potatoes” is easy enough, but the French bit at the beginning suggests all kinds of excessive preparation and manipulation of that most humble of root vegetables, and so I thought it would be neighborly to tell you how I make this delightful little side-dish (traditionally paired with roasts and steak, if I am not mistaken). After all, it would be a shame to slap a baked potato down next to your beautifully fanned duck and pears.

Pommes Duchesse

1 1/2 lb. russet potatoes
1 1/2 tablespoons unsalted butter
3 eggs
salt and white pepper
freshly ground nutmeg

1/2 cup heavy cream (optional)
1 more tablespoon butter (optional)
1 garlic clove, minced (optional)

1. Boil potatoes in lightly salted water. When cool enough to touch, halve and scoop out flesh, then force through a potato ricer (a food mill or even a wire strainer works fine as well) into a bowl.

2a. Here’s the optional part: If you want a heartier side, say with a roast or steak, add the extra cream, butter, and garlic, and follow these instructions
Heat cream with butter and garlic in a saucepan over low heat until hot, then stir into potatoes. Beat in the eggs one at a time until blended, then spice with salt, pepper, and nutmeg to taste (don’t get carried away with the nutmeg).

2b. For a lighter, fluffier garnish, as might be preferred with the preceding duck and pear recipe, eschew the cream and garlic, and do the following:
Mix in butter (1 1/2 tablespoons) and 2 egg yolks one at a time until blended. Season with salt, pepper and nutmeg to taste.

3. Beat an egg yolk with a pinch of salt and tablespoon of water in a separate small bowl.

4. Using a pastry bag with a star tube, pipe onto an oiled cookie sheet. Brush on egg wash and broil (or bake in 400 F oven) until golden brown.

They should look something in the neighborhood of the following picture, though you may of course serve them in any way that you feel will best complement the presentation of your meal.

As always, corrections, suggestions, and interesting anecdotes are always welcome.

Breast of Duck with Chianti-Poached Pears and Roquefort Sauce

This recipe is from “The Cheese Bible” by Christian Teubner, which is, criminally, out of print. Because of its limited availability, the price of this book is rising; You can find it here, and if you have any kind of love for fine cheese (or want to develop such a love), this is a beautiful book to start with.

Breast of Duck with Chianti-Poached Pears and Roquefort Sauce

For the Chianti-Poached Pears:
2 Pears, 1/2 teaspoon sugar, 1 cup Chianti, 1 1/2 inches cinnamon stick, 2 whole cloves, 2 crushed peppercorns, a pinch of ground cardamom

For the Sauce:
1/2 onion, finely diced; 2 teaspoons butter, 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar, 1/4 cup red wine, 1 cup duck roasting-juices or duck stock, 1/2 cup heavy cream, 2 oz. Roquefort, salt and white pepper

You will also Need:
2 duck breasts, skinned and boned (10 oz. each), salt and white pepper, 2 tablespoons clarified butter, mint for garnishing

Peel, quarter, and core the pears. Lightly caramelize the sugar in a saucepan and pour in the Chianti. Add the spices and bring to a boil. Place the pears int he liquid and poach gently for about 10 minutes, remove the spices, and reserve the pears.

To make the sauce, sweat the onion in the butter until golden brown and moisten with the vinegar and then pour in the cream and cook the sauce until creamy. Strain the sauce and work in the Roquefort with a hand-held blender or whisk. Season to taste with salt and pepper if necessary.

Salt and pepper the duck breasts. Melt the clarified butter, add the duck breasts, and fry for about 8-10 minutes, turning them often, until pink inside. Leave to rest on a rack.

Cut the pears part-way through at 1/4 inch intervals and fan out. Boil down the pear stock to about 1/4 cup and add it to the sauce, to taste. Slice the duck breasts on the diagonal, and serve with the fanned pears, duchesse potatoes, and the sauce, garnishing with a sprig of fresh mint.

Enjoy!

Eat the Fat

The most important such nutrition campaign has been the thirty-year effort to reform the food supply and our eating habits in light of the lipid hypothesis – the idea that dietary fat is responsible for chronic disease…Thirty years later, we have good reason to believe that putting the nutritionists in charge of the menu and the kitchen has not only ruined an untold number of meals, but also has done little for our health, except very possibly make it worse…

[T]he admissions of error have been muffled, and the mea culpas impossible to find. But read around in the recent scientific literature and you will find a great many scientists beating a quiet retreat from the lipid hypothesis. Let me offer you just one example, an article from a group of prominent nutrition scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health. In a recent review of the relevant research called “Types of Dietary Fat and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease: A Critical Review,” [Frank B. Hu, et al., the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, Vol. 20, 1, 5-19 (2001).] the authors proceed to calmly remove, one by one, just about every strut supporting the theory that dietary fat causes heart disease…

“During the past several decades, reduction in fat intake has been the main focus of national dietary recommendations. In the public’s mind, the words ‘dietary fat’ have become synonymous with obesity and heart disease, whereas the words ‘low-fat’ and ‘fat-free’ have been synonymous with heart health…It is now increasingly recognized that the low-fat campaign has been based on little scientific evidence and may have caused unintended health consequences”

As for the dangers of dietary cholesterol, the review found “a weak and nonsignificant positive association between dietary cholesterol and risk of CHD.” (Someone should tell the food processors, who continue to treat dietary cholesterol as a matter of life and death.) “Surprisingly,” the authors wrote, “there is little direct evidence linking higher egg consumption and increased risk of CHD” – surprising, because eggs are particularly high in cholesterol…

By the end of the review, there is one strong association between a type of dietary fat and heart disease left standing, and it happens to be precisely the type of fat that the low-fat campaigners have spent most of the last thirty years encouraging us to consume more of: trans fat…

[T]he principle contribution of thirty years of official nutritional advice has been to replace a possibly mildly unhealthy fat in our diets with a demonstrably lethal one…

The lipid hypothesis is quietly melting away, but no one in the public health community, or the government, seems quite ready to publicly acknowledge it. For fear of what exactly? That we’ll binge on bacon double cheeseburgers? More likely that we’ll come to the unavoidable conclusion that the emperors of nutrition have no clothes and never listen to them again.

- Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food, pp. 40 – 45

In Which Scientists do not Recommend that We Eat Food

“…We should understand and engage with food and our bodies in terms of their nutritional and chemical constituents and requirements – the assumption being that this is all we need to understand.” This reductionist way of thinking about food had been pointed out and criticized before…but it had never before been given a proper name: “nutritionism.”…

The first thing to understand about nutritionism is that it is not the same thing as nutrition…It is not a scientific subject but an ideology…The widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. Put another way: Foods are essentially the sum of their nutrient parts…

Since nutrients, as compared with foods, are invisible and therefore slightly mysterious, it falls to the scientists…to explain the hidden reality of foods to us. In form this is a quasireligious idea, suggesting the visible world is not the one that really matters, which implies the need for a priesthood. For to enter a world where your dietary salvation depends on unseen nutrients, you need plenty of expert help.

- Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food, pp. 27-28