For a talk in New York this week I have been thinking about giving the kind of nutrition I am favoring a name – preferably a catchy name. We all have heard of the Paleo Diet, the South Beach Diet, the Zone Diet, and so on. What would I call my brand of eating right?
For starters, I would not call it a diet. Because it is not something you eat for a month, shed fifty pounds, and then go back to your normal dismal ways.
It occurred to me that I have invented nothing new. In fact, farmers all over the world eat like it. So let’s call it Peasant Food. I could also call it Gardener’s Food, or Farmers’ Market Food – because they all are served fresh and whole. But Peasant food it shall be.
This weekend, the New York Times Magazine ran an article about a very young man (he is all of fifteen!) who aspires to become a famous gourmet chef. I commend the young man for applying himself, instead of dawdling his time away. But as a physician I know that healthy people, healthy families and a healthy nation depend on daily fresh dinners cooked at home – not five-star restaurant fare (as delicious as that might be).
The young man is groomed as a future superstar in the kitchen. Same as we groom young athletes for a big career in football, baseball, basketball – instead of teaching all our school children the joy of movement that could offer them a life of health and physical gratification.
But back to the Peasant Food! What do farmers all over the world have in common that should make them our models for healthy cooking and eating?
Peasant Food is
• Fresh: Farmers eat what they find in their gardens, their fields, and growing wild nearby. They cook from scratch every single day. They are not too busy to bring a fresh meal on the table every day, and share it with family and friends. In fact, these shared meals are the highlight of every day.
• Local: Farmers don’t ship in food from California, or even other continents. They don’t use up much fossil fuels for shipping food across the country. They eat what they find. That is why the people in Mew Mexico eat different from the New-Englanders, and the Italians eat different from the Russians.
• Seasonal: Farmers eat what is growing and ripening right now. Should there be a monster harvest of zucchini, they deal with it by creating a variety of zucchini dishes, canning or drying some zucchini, and distributing the rest to friends and neighbors.
• No “superfoods” – just foods that are grown nearby, and made into so many dishes. Farmers make do with whatever is at hand – they have no preconceived notions of what the “best” food is.
• Not only raw: Farmers can’t subsist on salads alone – it would not give them the strength and nutrients they need in the fields. They might bake a piece of meat in the oven slowly all day, they throw a stew together, or a stir-fry, they cook soups with everything in sight. They cook.
• Not vegan/vegetarian: For a rare feast, they might grill a rabbit or a lamb over open fire. They eat meat, poultry, fish, crabs – and in some regions they are glad if they can find a squirrel to skin and roast. But farmers would not feed their livestock antibiotics for better growth rates – if agro-business wouldn’t push them.
• Easy to cook: Farmers don’t have time to concoct gourmet meals, and read one cookbook after the other. They follow old recipes. Their fare has to be easy – sometimes using slow-cooking that does not need further attention once the pot is filled and on the fire.
• Filling: Farmers wouldn’t dream of leaving out fats for slimming down – they need the energy fats provides. But they get in good fats: olive oil, coconut oil, butterfat.
• Tasty: Like everybody else, farmers want to eat something that tickles their palates. Fresh vegetables and healthy meats automatically taste good. Fresh herbs spruce up the taste. And adds nutrients like polyphenols. .
This is what I will call what I have been cooking every evening for so many years, making my family healthy and happy: Peasant food. Read More
Blog: On Health. On Writing. On Life. On Everything.
A Hodgepodge Letter From Jerusalem
May 31, 2011
If you think that America is a melting pot – Israel is the most colorfully mixed country, the loudest and the most silent, the most hilarious and the saddest.
Jerusalem is the most beautiful city in the world. I know you might fight me over this – and I have indeed seen beauty all over the world. The bustling daring of New York, the lovely harbor of Sidney, the classical stones of Florence, the young energy of the new Berlin – you get it.
Jerusalem has something else: An ordinance in place for many thousand years – precisely since King David, I was told – that every house in the city has to be built of the local stone, at least the façade. The house might be an old synagogue or a modern high-rise - they all are clad in the same white-golden sandstone; even most pavements use this stone. When one approaches the city from afar, it looks like a dream dwelling: a white city shimmering on the hills.
That this thousands-of-years-old ordinance is still in place shows a will to community: The individual burgher might have preferred a modern glass building or a brick castle; nevertheless, he abides by the rules. Compare an American town with billboards and every-which style of architecture: There the individual will wins out, under all circumstances. I can’t make up my mind, which one I find the more useful guide pole – individualism or communal thinking - but I know that Jerusalem is singular, and beautiful.
Another thing I like about Jewish life: They cherish family, books, history. We all should live thus (I am saying this knowing full well that family life can be stifling, even in the best of cases).
Certainly, you want to hear about the food here: A meal starts with several fresh salads. The other night, with little appetite, I ordered only two appetizers: cauliflower and chopped liver. The cauliflower was delicious but so gigantic that I shared it with the whole table, ate until I was bursting – and then there was some left over. The chopped liver was a mountain into which I could only bore a little hole – and nobody wanted to share; I have a thing going for liver since childhood, but mostly avoid it now as liver is the main detoxifying organ in the body – even of a cow. Nobody at the table seemed to share my liver thing …
Our Government plans to abandon the Food Pyramid (about time!!), and replace it with the Dinner Plate. So, my Israel proportion shock comes just in time: For healthy nutrition you need to know really only two basics:
1. Freshness – everything you eat should have grown somewhere.
2. Portion size – your meal should fit on a small dinner plate. If you have to lose weight, make it a breakfast plate; they are smaller. No snacks – that goes without saying.
And a last observation from Jerusalem: The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is owned communally by several branches of the Christian faith: Western Church (Italian and French Catholic) and Eastern Church (Copts, Armenians, Greek and Russian Orthodox). And if I believe the tour guide, it is a mess: Those Churches are in constant fight over every inch of the church – so much so that the key is kept in the hands of a neutral third, the Muslims. It says something about religions if the message of Peace for the World is not heeded in the very church building it once started (or presumably started – history and archaeology are messy in the Holy Land).
In the Knesset, I heard the President of Israel, Shimon Peres, give a speech in Hebrew. I did only understand two words: Tikwa and Shalom – hope and peace. Good enough for me. Read More
… And Then You Die: Hazel Rowley (1951-2011)
March 21, 2011
Hazel Rowley (1951 - 2011)
A few weeks ago I had chosen this title for a blog entry because I wanted to tell (again!) how short and precious life is. Then I had no inkling that my friend Hazel Rowley would die in New York on March 1st, unexpectedly.
Hazel was a fellow writer and biographer. Only last fall, her new Roosevelt biography had come out: “Franklin and Eleanor” - a book that I couldn’t put down, reading till late in the night. In November, on her birthday, I met her for the last time. She was full of sparkle and wit, and doubts and insecurities, and dazzling intelligence; nobody would have foreseen her sudden death.
When I asked her if she was planning another couple’s book (before “Eleanor and Franklin” she had done Sartre and de Beauvoir in “Tête à Tête”, she laughed and said that she was done probing deeply into the relationships of people. She had found lasting love and felt secure in it, ready to probe other issues. She said the McCarthy era interested her.
The period between book projects is always a brittle time for a writer. In short order, the love fell apart, a resistant bug settled on her heart, little pieces of the infectious growth broke lose, settling in her brain, and putting her into a coma, from which she, mercifully, never awoke – Hazel Rowley would not have wanted to live with half a brain.
Born in London, raised in Australia and England, she roamed the world – in Paris she lived for nearly two years - before settling in New York early in the millennium. When Hazel was young, Simone de Beauvoir had become her hero: a woman who wrote about women’s disadvantages in a male world, and who opened new paths for women of our generation; Hazel wanted to be where Simone de Beauvoir was: an woman writer, and an equal partner in a lasting relationship.
Christina Stead was Hazel Rowley’s first subject. Stead had made child abuse the subject of an autobiographical novel – in 1940! Christina Stead was a fellow Australian; her American publishers famously – or notoriously – made her set her novel “The Man Who Loved Children” in America. Hazel felt kinship to her lonely compatriot, a writer, a woman with a complicated love life, a woman often on the edge of society. And a woman who carved out for herself an independent literary existence – even before de Beauvoir.
Hazel’s second biography took on the black author of “Native Son,” Richard Wright, who in his life found no real home and only scattered success, ending up (and dying) in Paris, much too young. This is the only book by Hazel Rowley I haven’t yet read; I assume it was Simone de Beauvoir who directed Hazel to this American expatriate writer in whom de Beauvoir was greatly interested. But think: A young, rather unknown Australian white woman writing about an American black man – how dare she?!
Paris is also the setting of Hazel Rowley’s third book “Tête-à-tête”, the book about Sartre and de Beauvoir’s relationship. The two famous writers don’t get away scotch-free – this reader felt rather repulsed by their sexual predatory shenanigans. But as Simone de Beauvoir had been the one who showed us that traditional women’s roles were not written in stone, Hazel Rowley wanted to know if promiscuous sexuality would be worthwhile and livable - if you ask me: no - exploring the Sartre/de Beauvoir relationship objectively, without taking sides.
Her new book “Franklin and Eleanor,” probed another famous relationship. To me the book seemed especially timely, because the Roosevelt’s Great Depression and the present Great Recession share some commonalities, which takes the book to a higher level than even “just” being about male-female relationships. Eleanor Roosevelt had built a public and private life for which she had no role models – she did it with what was given her: her wit, her caring, her curiosity.
Neither Simone nor Eleanor were abstract feminists or men haters. On the contrary, men were invited into their lives. But they never gave up being a person and pursuing their own goals in life.
At her memorial in New York recently, so many people spoke eloquently about Hazel’s wonderful, bright presence – she had nothing lukewarm about her. Unable to speak in tongues myself, I played “Songs Without Words” by Mendelssohn for Hazel – badly, as always – but she would have wanted me not to chicken out.
Hazel had many more books in her, it was so clear – how I wish she had more time! Read More