Half Changed World

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about D and his limited diet.  I still worry that he’s going to develop scurvy or something, but I’ve pretty much come to peace with Ellyn Satter’s division of labor — we decide what food to put in front of him; he decides what he’s going to eat of it.  For Thanksgiving, he had a miniscule taste of the cheese biscuits and pumpkin muffins.  He’s decided that plain spaghetti is acceptable, so I guess we’re making progress.  He’s active, he’s happy, he’s at a higher percentile on the growth curve than I was at his age, so we’re trying not to worry.

As I commented to Phantom Scribbler this week, dealing with kids’ food issues is incredibly frustrating, in part because everyone has really good advice.  Except that, like us, she’s tried almost everything you can think of, and it hasn’t made a difference.  (And Baby Blue isn’t gaining weight, so she’s under a lot more pressure than we are.)

One of the standard pieces of advice that people give is that kids will be more willing to eat different things if they’re involved in cooking them.  That hasn’t worked so well for us.  D loves to cook dinner, but only because it lets him control the menu — so we all wind up eating peanut butter on ritz crackers, with sprinkles.  So tonight, I told him that if he wants to cook dinner, it has to involve a protein and a vegetable, as well as a starch. 

He promptly pulled out Pretend Soup, which a friend gave him quite a while ago and he ignored, and started perusing the recipes.  We didn’t have the ingredients for most of the recipes, but we did have carrots, and he said that he wanted "carrot pennies."  So we sliced up a few carrots — and miracle of miracles — he ate some. 

T was out of town for a long weekend, and I didn’t want to use up vacation days just to sit around at home, so the boys and I went up the road to Baltimore overnight.  We had a good trip, including visits to Port Discovery, the Aquarium, a real submarine, and a high school friend of mine.  So when I asked the boys what their favorite parts of the trip were, D’s immediate answer was getting to go to TWO different McDonald’s.  Great.  At least N’s pick was the dolphin show.

The two McDonald’s were a study in contrasts.  One was the shiny one that’s attached to the atrium of Port Discovery, the other a somewhat rundown one in downtown Baltimore.  We got happy meals at both places, having surrendered to the cult of the cheap plastic toys. The current boxes have PollyWorld on two sides, Hummers on two.  At the shiny McDonald’s, the boys got toy Hummers in them.  I assume that there’s also a Polly toy, but we weren’t offered that option.  (Please tell me that there weren’t gendered versions of the Pirates of the Carribean and Cars toys we’ve previously received.)  At the rundown one, the boxes were the same, but the boys got a Lightning McQueen and some weird rocket-propelled dragon.  I have absolutely no idea what that’s a tie-in to.  But at the shiny one we were charged separately for the chocolate milk, while at the run-down one, they included it with the happy meals, and threw in free ice cream as a bonus.

I hate going to McDonald’s twice in two days, but I’m just not up to taking the boys to a real restaurant by myself.  I have to spend too much energy keeping them sitting and quiet, and they’re probably going to wind up ordering chicken fingers anyway.  I brought string cheese, crackers, yogurt, and muffins with us, which covered breakfast and snacks.  Away from home, on my own, just isn’t the right time to draw a line in the sand on the nutrition battlefront.  (And yes, it often feels like a battlefront.)  And I’m willing to eat their salads, which is precisely why McDonald’s sells them — it makes fast food an acceptable fallback for people for me.

The friend I visited has a 2 1/4 year old.  They’re pretty crunchy — cloth diapers, a hybrid car, and the kid has only had ice cream twice in his life.  I felt sort of bad bringing my kids with their love of sweets and Happy Meals toys into their house.   At least their son is young enough that I don’t think he quite understood what my guys were so excited about.

Today’s book is The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan.  It has a great deal in common with Peter Singer’s book, The Way We Eat, which I discussed last month.  Where Singer looked at the diets of three families — a conventional American diet, full of processed meat, a diet where the family attempts to eat organic and humanely raised meat, and a vegan diet — Pollan looks at four meals that he eats — a McDonald’s burger, an organic meal from large producers, a meal from Joel Salatin’s Polyface farm, and a meal largely of foods that he hunted (a wild pig) or gathered (morels) himself.

Pollan begins by discussing how the vast majority of the American diet comes from corn in one form or another — either directly processed, or fed to animals.  He visits a corn farm to see how it’s grown, but then points out that corn is a commodity — you can’t connect that corn to any particular cow, or any particular cow to a piece of meet.  Organic food from large companies is produced in a more sustainable manner, with less chemicals, but is equally a commodity.  By contrast, Polyface is a self-contained ecosystem.  Salatin isn’t officially "organic," but invites any of his customers to see what he’s doing.

Ironically, I found Pollan’s writing more preachy than Singer’s, even though Singer is the professional ethicist.  Singer tells you what he thinks you should do, and he tells you why.  He tells you what he thinks the ideal is (not eating meat at all), and what’s a good fallback position (not eating industrial farmed meat, unless there’s an overriding reason to do so).  Pollan doesn’t ever explicitly say "you should do this" but gives the impression that he thinks he’s more enlightened than you.

In the section on the meal that he hunted and gathered (which Pollan admits freely is interesting only as a one-shot exercise, not as a lifestyle), Pollan writes about the connection he felt to the food.  But I was left with the impression that the true gift he received was the relationships he developed with the people who took him hunting, who taught him to find mushrooms, and who shared the meal with him.  Conventionally farmed food, cooked and shared with love, can be pretty magical too.

Tuesday’s post reminded me that I had never written about Let’s Dish after actually going there (as opposed to the theoretical discussion back here).  Overall, I’d say the experience was less than I hoped for, but the food was better than I expected.

The experience:

Putting the meals together was ok, but less social than I had hoped.  I think it’s mostly an issue of time.  I did the 12-dinner package, which costs a lot less per meal than the 8-meal package, but doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for schmoozing.  They want you in and out in 2 hours, and after leaving time for the orientation, putting your meals away and washing your hands between stations, and checking out, that doesn’t leave a whole lot of extra time.  If I do it again, I’d like to split the 12-meal package with a friend, and then we could talk while we assembled.

They have the process very well thought-out, with the appropriate measuring cup or spoon for each ingredient right there, and the staff replenishing ingredients and wiping down counters every time you turned around.  The ergonomics weren’t great for me — I’m 5′ even, and often found myself straining to reach things.

The process was less sensual than cooking ordinarily is.  You don’t actually cook anything on site, so there’s no good smells coming out.  And everything is prechopped, so you’re mostly just scooping things into plastic bags and then squeezing the ingredients together.

The food:

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the food.  Of the 10 or 11 dishes that we’ve tried, only one of them was really disappointing — the Chow Mein dish was just soggy.  With hindsight, I should have known that stir-frying frozen vegetables was unlikely to have good results.  I found one of the sauces for the steaks unbearably salty, but my husband liked it, and it wasn’t incorporated into the dish, so it was easy enough for me to eat the meat without it.  Everything else has been tasty and easy to prepare.  And the grilled salmon was excellent — that’s a dish I probably wouldn’t have had the confidence to try from a cookbook, but will make again (although probably with a different marinade).

Is it gourmet coooking?  No.  Is it anything that we couldn’t assemble ourselves in advance?  No.  But has it improved the quality and variety of what we actually eat on a day to day basis?  Yes.  We’ve had a lot fewer meals of spaghetti and jarred sauce.  Will I go back?  Probably, especially if I can get someone to split a session with me.

Today’s book is The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, by Peter Singer and Jim Mason.  I requested it from the library after reading the interview with Singer that I discussed last month.  It’s an exploration of the ethics of food, focusing mostly on reducing unnecessary animal suffering and environmental impacts.  Singer and Mason organize their discussion around the diets of three American families: one that shops at Walmart and eats whatever is cheap, convenient and tastes good, one that shops at places like Trader Joes and Whole Foods and tries to make generally ethical choices around food even if it means paying more, and one that follows a vegan diet.

The basic argument behind The Way We Eat is that mass-produced food, especially meat, milk and eggs, is incredibly cheap because the price doesn’t reflect the real costs, both in animal welfare, and in environmental damage.  Singer and Mason don’t think it’s inherently wrong to kill an animal for food, but say that if we have to pay 10 cents an egg more in order to allow the chickens to have the room to turn around and access to grass, we ought to be willing to pay that price.  (More formally, they argue that it is "speciesist" to refuse to take animal quality of life and suffering seriously.)

Overall, I found the book interesting and readable.  (I was a little nervous, since I’ve tried reading one of Singer’s other books and found it inpenetrable.)  Singer’s much less of a moral absolutist in this book than I was expecting. He makes a strong case for avoiding the products of factory farms, but recognizes that it may be more important in a specific case to eat your grandmother’s cooking than to maintain a purist stance.  He doesn’t think that the benefits of genetically modified foods are worth the risks in developed countries, but notes that the calculus may be different in places where starvation is a real threat.  (Although he fails to acknowledge the political problems in trying to explain why GM food is good enough for Africans if it’s not good enough for Europeans.) 

Singer and Mason are also willing to zing some of their allies.  They suggest that it would be a good thing if we could grow cloned meat in vats, since it presumably wouldn’t have any ability to suffer, a suggestion that I think would give most environmentalists the queasies.  As noted in the Salon interview, Singer’s not a big fan of the Eat Local movement, arguing that it may be more sustainable to buy food from far away that is transported by ship and rail than local food that is trucked to market.  And they note that improved taste may be a good thing, but it is not an ethical requirement.

So, has reading this book changed my eating habits?  The sections that made the most impact on me were the discussion of mass poultry production. (I was already more or less aware of the issues in beef slaughterhouses, from Supersize Me and Fast Food Nation, and I don’t eat pork for other reasons.)  Right after reading that section, I walked through the meat aisle at Shopper’s Food Warehouse and found it hard to pick up my usual pack of boneless chicken breasts.  So I left with mushrooms and bok choy, but no meat for the moo shu chicken I was thinking of making.

Later in the week, I made it over to Whole Foods (for the first time in the several months since it opened near me) and started looking at the prices.  I couldn’t bring myself to pay over $4 a pound for chicken that we wouldn’t be able to taste very much of over the sauce, so instead I bought a small package of beef.  I think the beef was slightly more per pound than the chicken, but it wasn’t as proportionately more expensive than I’m used to paying for beef, if that makes sense.  If I were to commit to buying only non-factory farmed meat, I definitely think the costs would help push me toward using less of it.  Which Singer and Mason would approve of, of course.

In her comment on Monday’s Eat Local post, Mary from Stone Court pointed me to this Salon interview with Peter Singer, in which he is critical of the local foods movement.

In your book you say that socially responsible folks in San Francisco would do better to buy their rice from Bangladesh than from local growers in California. Could you explain?

This is in reference to the local food movement, and the idea that you can save fossil fuels by not transporting food long distances. This is a widespread belief, and of course it has some basis. Other things being equal, if your food is grown locally, you will save on fossil fuels. But other things are often not equal. California rice is produced using artificial irrigation and fertilizer that involves energy use. Bangladeshi rice takes advantage of the natural flooding of the rivers and doesn’t require artificial irrigation. It also doesn’t involve as much synthetic fertilizer because the rivers wash down nutrients, so it’s significantly less energy intensive to produce. Now, it’s then shipped across the world, but shipping is an extremely fuel-efficient form of transport. You can ship something 10,000 miles for the same amount of fuel necessary to truck it 1,000 miles. So if you’re getting your rice shipped to San Francisco from Bangladesh, fewer fossil fuels were used to get it there than if you bought it in California.

In the same vein, you argue that in the interests of alleviating world poverty, it’s better to buy food from Kenya than to buy locally, even if the Kenyan farmer only gets 2 cents on the dollar.

My argument is that we should not necessarily buy locally, because if we do, we cut out the opportunity for the poorest countries to trade with us, and agriculture is one of the things they can do, and which can help them develop. The objection to this, which I quote from Brian Halweil, one of the leading advocates of the local movement, is that very little of the money actually gets back to the Kenyan farmer. But my calculations show that even if as little as 2 cents on the dollar gets back to the Kenyan farmer, that could make a bigger difference to the Kenyan grower than an entire dollar would to a local grower. It’s the law of diminishing marginal utility. If you are only earning $300, 2 cents can make a bigger difference to you than a dollar can make to the person earning $30,000.

It’s an interesting argument, and one that makes a fair amount of sense.  (I give the majority of my charitable donations to international aid organizations on the similar grounds that the same amount of money goes a lot further in third world countries.)

What Singer misses is the what Wendell Berry describes as "the power of affection."  Singer is famous for taking utilitarianism to its logical ends — holding that if you have the power to save two lives on the other side of the earth, but it would kill your child, you have the moral obligation to do so, because two lives are more important than one.  Only slightly less dramatically, he argues that it is immoral for any of us to enjoy the typical American (or European) standard of living while children are dying for want of medicines that cost pennies.  (The Salon article notes that Singer gives 20% of his salary to charity, which is far more than most of us, but still way short of the moral standard that he upholds.)

Berry’s response is that it’s fundamentally inhuman to expect us to value strangers’ lives as much as our children’s, to expect us to care as much about pollution someplace that’s a dot in the map as much as pollution in the pond down the road.  In his list of 27 propositions about sustainability, he argues against cities and globalization because:

"XX. The right scale in work gives power to affection. When one works beyond the
reach of one’s love for the place one is working in, and for the things and
creatures one is working with and among, then destruction inevitably results.
An adequate local culture, among other things, keeps work within the reach of
love."

I’m not willing to go as far as Berry.  But I do think that the challenge for our time is that if we’re going to live in a world of globalization, we need to extend the reach of our love.

So where does this leave us on food?  Singer actually has a lot in common with the local foods movement.  He offers a different general guideline:

"Avoid factory farm products. The worst of all the things we talk about in the book is intensive animal agriculture. If you can be vegetarian or vegan that’s ideal. If you can buy organic and vegan that’s better still, and organic and fair trade and vegan, better still, but if that gets too difficult or too complicated, just ask yourself, Does this product come from intensive animal agriculture? If it does, avoid it, and then you will have achieved 80 percent of the good that you would have achieved if you followed every suggestion in the book. "

Plus, this way, you get to keep drinking coffee.

I noticed over at Life Begins at 30 that they’re doing the Eat Local challenge again.  Their goal is, for the month of May, as much as possible, to eat only locally grown foods.  The idea of eating food that is fresher, that hasn’t been bred for maximum durability, that you know where it comes from, is very appealing.  Of course, it’s a lot more appealing in May than in November, at least in these climes.  (There’s a great Margaret Atwood story in which the protagonist worries that her lover, a Canadian opposed to NAFTA, will "smell the kiwi on her breath" in winter.)

And then I read this article at Mother Jones about one of the advocates of local food, Joel Salatin.  I was somewhat bemused by the idea that he made Michael Pollan drive to Swoope, Virginia in order to buy one of his chickens.  I’m sure it was a delicious chicken, and Pollan learned something from the trip, but the gas consumed driving down there almost certainly outweighed any environmental benefits.

Last week was T’s birthday, and by trash day we had quite an impressive and slightly appalling pile of boxes from Amazon and other stores to put out on the curb.  But would it have been any better for the environment for me to drive around to half a dozen stores looking for things rather than having the UPS guy able to deliver everyone’s packages in one trip?  I’m not sure, and I don’t know how to figure it out.

Susan at Crunchy Granola had a post recently in which she asked her readers what each of us are doing to balance our needs with those of the planet.  It reminded me of a book I read a while back, The Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choices, put out by the Union of Concerned Scientists.  This book argues that there’s a handful of decisions that we make that really matter from an environmental point of view — especially where we live, how much we drive, and how much meat we eat — and that we should pay attention to these choices and not sweat the small stuff. 

My computer just ate the post I was writing, and since it’s getting late, I’ll just say Happy Free Cone Day!  The boys are in shock that we let them skip dinner for ice cream cones.

Our flavor choices:

• Me: Coffee
• T: Strawberry cheesecake
• D: Chocolate chip cookie dough
• N: Cherry Garcia

The Times has an article today about those poor deluded moms who think that they’re cooking when really they’re just assembling. 

I haven’t been to Dream Dinners or Lets Dish, but I’ll probably give it a try when they open their franchises near me.  (So far, the only ones in the area have been in the distant suburbs.)  I like to cook, but the need to figure out what I want to make, make a shopping list for T, and then find the time to actually cook before the veggies turn into limp blobs means that some weeks we wind up eating an awful lot of pasta with jarred sauce and frozen meals from Trader Joe’s.  The idea of having a freezer full of meals ready to go for those nights is awfully appealing.  (I do wonder whether we can fit the meals in the freezer and still have room for everything else that’s crammed in there.  Do they assume that everyone has a stand-alone freezer?)

I was surprised by the quote from one of the founders of Dream Dinners saying that customers tend not to come in with friends after the first few times.  The social aspect is definitely a big part of the appeal to me.  One of my friends hosts "international dinners" every couple of months where she picks out the recipes and buys all the food and a group of us come over and cook.  We make amazing meals, but the goal is not to have food to take home, but to eat it that night (although there are usually leftovers).  It’s a lot of fun.

In modern society, cooking is probably the domestic task that is most easily outsourced.  You can pick up meals to go from every supermarket and convenience store, let alone a restaurant.  The fact that people are choosing these meal assembly places over take-out is testament to the emotional appeal of home cooked meals.  I think that’s the real story.

The Julie/Julia Project was the first blog I ever read, back when I didn’t really know what a blog was.  I think someone posted a link to it on one of my email lists, several months into the project, and I read a few posts and was hooked.  In it, Julie Powell documented her attempt to cook every single recipe in Volume 1 of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the course of a year.  She wrote about the dishes that turned out great and the dishes that she tortured her friends with, the days when she was interviewed on television and the days when she didn’t get home from work until 8 pm and had to start cooking a dish that takes at least 3 hours to cook.

So, I really wanted to like Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen.  But I didn’t.  It wasn’t as funny as the blog, didn’t have the detailed information about the food and, of course, didn’t have the element of uncertainty that was in the blog.  By the very fact that I was holding the book in my hand, I knew that Julie finished the project, got a nice book contract, and was even able to quit her crappy government job.

Maybe the book would be more compelling to someone who hadn’t read the blog and so hadn’t heard many of the most interesting stories already.  But I’m not sure.  One of the recurring themes in both the blog and the book is the crappy little kitchen that Julie had to work in.  In the blog, she mentioned several times that it’s so small that she had to perch her food processor on top of the trash can.  That’s a wonderful image, bringing the scene to life.  She never uses it in the book.  What happened?

Last week, Julie was quoted in the NY Times as saying that she no longer searches for herself on blogs.  I hope that’s true, because I feel mean for saying negative things about the book when I got so much pleasure from the blog.