By Greg Drescher
Oldways Preservation and Exchange Trust
As evidence mounts linking diet with disease prevention, Americans are under increasing pressure to change the way we eat. The most recent heart disease and cancer research indicates that we should be eating less food from animal sources. Indeed, colon cancer research conducted for the Harvard School of Public Health suggests that meat consumption should be significantly reduced.
At the same time, all indicators point to enhanced disease prevention through substantially increasing our intake of fruits, vegetables and grains. The broad message is clear: the dominant culinary model in our culture, which puts animal foods at center stage while relegating plant foods to a supporting role (or worse, a garnish), is not contributing to our good health.
Unfortunately, Americans are responding unenthusiastically to the need for more than modest dietary changes. According to recent studies reported in Newsweek, "nearly half of all Americans eat no fruit on a given day and nearly a quarter eat no vegetables. Eleven percent eat neither, and only nine percent of us get the recommended five servings a day." This isn't surprising, as surveys show consumers reluctant to change food selection and cooking practices out of fear that food will no longer taste as good or be as satisfying. Indeed, as Newsweek proclaimed in a cover story devoted to these issues, Americans are "Fed Up!"
Food manufacturers and many in the public health community, apparently believing that Americans are firmly wedded to the culinary model we inherited, are seeking improvement through technology. Some of those strategies are low-fat reformulations of existing food products, the introduction of fake fats and other ersatz foods and the increasing reliance on fiber additives such as oat bran and other supplements. The solution to our diet- linked diseases, this direction suggests, will be found in "techno-food."
Oldways Preservation & Exchange Trust believes there is a far easier, more efficient and ultimately more satisfying approach to dietary change. Look internationally -- and to our own ethnic and immigrant traditions -- for culinary models that combine healthfulness with good taste. From India and China to Latin America and the countries of the Mediterranean, generations of home cooks have developed techniques and recipes to transform fruits, vegetables and grains and small, occasional amounts of meat, fish, poultry and dairy products into satisfying, even spectacular, meals.
Whether the grains are wheat or corn, the vegetables eggplant or bok choy or the flavorings olive oil, chilies, cumin or lemongrass, the collective experience of these traditions proves that diets based largely, but not exclusively, on plant foods can be appealing and delicious.
Indeed, when we confront the embarrassment of culinary riches in these cultural models of healthy eating-models that cast meat and animal fats in a secondary or supporting role, we wonder why so much attention is devoted to techno-food. Or in the words of one French medical researcher, why do we continue to insist on "playing sorcerer's apprentice?"
The conclusion? The widespread existence of healthy-eating models as palatable as the Mediterranean and Asian diets demonstrates that no new food products need to be developed, technologies invented, nor even recipes reformulated to meet the the dietary guidelines. All that is needed is a less myopic perspective on achieving dietary change -- and a sense of culinary adventure.