Interviews with a Real Foodist

FoodRenegade posted this (following) great interview with the beautiful Nina Planck (of Real Food: What We Should Eat and Why), today in anticipation of Planck’s new book which goes officially on sale today: Real Food For Mother & Baby: The Fertility Diet, Eating for Two & Baby’s First Foods. She’s a wonderful advocate for real food and is an activist in steering us away from our industrialized western diets. Go here to enter to win 1 of 3 copies for your very own, thanks to Nourishing Days!

Nina Planck wrote the book on Real Food. Literally. Many people read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and wondered: now what? They still didn’t know what to eat. They only knew that they wanted to opt out of the industrialized food system in favor of something more sustainable, ethical, and nutritious. Nina Planck’s book Real Food: What We Should Eat and Why answered those questions. [...] Nina graciously agreed to do an interview with me and give me the inside scoop.

FR: What’s your food heritage? What was it like eating in your home growing up?

Nina: My mother raised us on real food, plain old American-style. Meat, vegetables, whole grains, real milk and cheese. She read Adelle Davis and she believed in whole foods. We made our own bread and granola. We had desserts, but not often, and only real desserts with good ingredients and never, ever, too much sugar. My mother used to say, ‘No matter how poor we are, we’ll always have real butter, olive oil, and maple syrup.’

FR: How did you decide to become a vegan, and what made you change your mind about veganism?

Nina: When I was in high school and college the nutritional advice was very clear: eat more plants. Avoid animal foods and animal fats, especially saturated fats. Eat less fat. If that were true, I figured that no animal foods and no fats would be the best diet of all. I ate a clean vegan diet – lots of fruit, vegetables, whole grains, and (a little) olive oil. I ran 6 miles a day, 6 days a week. And my reward for this virtuous diet? I was 20 pounds heavier than I am now and struggled constantly with my weight. I got colds and flu in colds and flu season. I was moody and irritable once a month. My nails were brittle and my skin was dry. My digestion was poor. Since I became a conscientious omnivore, all those symptoms have disappeared. I keep my weight easily eating meat, dairy, and fat to appetite– and (always) lots of fruit and vegetables.

FR: What’s your definition of “Real Food”?

Nina: It’s old and it’s traditional. How old? Grass-fed beef and wild salmon are two to three million years old – in the human and prehuman diet, that is. Milk is about 30,000 years old – 10,000 at the very least. We’ve been making cheese and yogurt the same way for several thousand years. Corn syrup appears (in large quantities) in the 1970s. Not old. By traditional I mean it’s been farmed or raised and processed pretty much the way it used to be. Grass-fed beef, not soy-stuffed, hormone-laden beef. A whole egg, not a pasteurized egg-white only liquid. And real food, of course, is real. I’m for butter, not corn oil pretending to be butter. Real food is never an imitation of something else.

FR: Why do you feel Real Food is under attack?

Nina: Amnesia. No one remembers how we used to eat.

FR: How do you recommend we Fight Back?

Nina: It’s very simple. Pick something you know you can do. For example, consider avoiding industrial corn in all its forms: corn-fed beef, corn oil, and corn syrup. You’d be surprised at how much junk food you’ll stop eating.

FR: What advice do you have for people who argue that eating Real Food takes up too much time or energy?

Nina: No energy to shop or cook and eat = no energy for life. We don’t spend all day and all week with shopping, menu-planning, and cooking. We are not foodies. We eat a lot of roast chicken and veg. Today for lunch I had leftover salmon (baked with garlic, butter, and a spoonful of white wine, a ten-minute dish), chicken stock (with grated horseradish I happened to have), and crème fraîche with maple syrup for dessert. How simple are these dishes? How basic are the ingredients? How long did it take me to cook them in the first place and ‘make’ them for lunch? Minutes.

FR: Do you eat out? If so, how does your food philosophy affect your choices?

Nina: Rob and I do eat out, and we enjoy it. Sometimes I just don’t worry. I’m pregnant with twins, and we were in a few airports when I needed to eat a lot and often to stay sane. I picked the best foods I could. Not great. But not donuts. When we have more choices, we eat (mostly) at restaurants serving ecological real food. I don’t enjoy resorting to the farmed salmon or ordinary beef, but it happens. I’d rather eat ordinary real food – beef, chicken, milk – than imitations and fakes and white sugar and corn oil.

FR: You have a new book coming out in April on Real Food nutrition for fertility, pregnancy, and baby’s first foods. What inspired you to write the book?

Nina: Our son Julian! I found the advice about prenatal care and diet spattered with myths and misunderstandings. I found we’d forgotten the traditional diets of our past – fertility diets, for example, were common. Instead of taking a folic acid pill, our maternal ancestors ate wild fish roe, fatty crabs, and grass-fed butter when they wanted to get pregnant and were pregnant.

FR: You’ve earned a reputation as a food renegade thanks to quite a few controversial stands you take concerning raw milk, saturated fats & cholesterol in the diet, and even veganism. What’s the most controversial thing you argue for in your new book?

Nina: Everything I recommend is based on tradition and science. Once all milk was raw. Pregnant women didn’t avoid it and they didn’t avoid raw fish and raw milk cheese. The foods aren’t inherently bad. What’s wrong is the food supply. That’s where we need reform. We need safe foods – whether they are industrial or traditional. Women think (because the OBs tell them) that swelling is a normal part of pregnancy or that it’s caused by eating too much salt. But the real cause in most cases is lack of protein. No poor person the world over would choose beans and rice instead of a piece of chicken if she could get it. Protein is just too valuable. You can’t build a baby without it. If people think nursing your baby until he’s two (or older) is strange, they need only examine their own culture. The world average for weaning is four years or so.

FR: Are you hopeful about the future of food in the U.S.?

Nina: Everything I care about is growing – ecological foods, raw milk creameries, grass-fed beef, the return of coconut oil to baked goods and snacks and candies, hey, even midwifery and home birth. How could I fail to feel hopeful?

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Here’s another great interview (in case you missed it in February) with Michael Pollan on NPR’s “Fresh Air”: Michael Pollan Offers President Food For Thought

Back to the Garden

Where does your food come from?

“Only he can understand what a farm is, what a country is, who shall have sacrificed part of himself to his farm or country, fought to save it, struggled to make it beautiful. Only then will the love of farm or country fill his heart.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900-1944)

wanna see the trailer?

Edison’s Day

Sorry, for some reason wordpress won’t let me embed this but if you have any interest in alternative education and childhood, this is a must-watch video; Edison’s Day is about a typical day in the life of a 20 month-old boy being raised by his Montessori-trained parents. In it you will find abundant ideas on how to set up a home environment for a young child. Some faves? How he goes about “Feeding the Cat” practical life exercise and the water spout at child’s height. I just adore how his activities are dispersed throughout the house and aren’t corded off in his room. He’s clearly involved in every aspect of daily life in their household, and I love the “help please mom.”

Some Tips for A Would-Be Philosopher

I didn’t even know there was a Philosophers Magazine…here is a philosopher’s letter to his Intro to Philosophy class, explaining what philosophy is and how to do it.

Welcome To My Philosophy Class

Lecturer Wayne Buck has written a letter to his students explaining what philosophy is, and how to do it.

Note to the reader: After teaching introductory philosophy courses for several years, I realized that many students immediately get off on the wrong foot, struggling with the material much more than they need to. Discussions with those students revealed that they often bring several common assumptions about what philosophy is into the classroom. I wrote this letter as a counter to those assumptions, making suggestions about how to approach the challenges of reading and writing philosophy. Inevitably, embedded in these suggestions is a certain view of the nature of philosophy. Whether this stance on the nature of philosophy is correct or incorrect, the suggestions in the letter have had the practical result of noticeably improving how well students do in the course.

Dear Student:

Welcome to my philosophy class. You are approaching a strange subject, and I wish to alert you to some of its peculiarities. My remarks are meant to warn off some, make others apprehensive, but to help the majority grapple with the course.

First, philosophy is not an easy subject. In fact, it is rather difficult. This is true even for introductory courses. You will have to apply yourself to a degree matched only in science or mathematics courses. Despite rumors to the contrary, reading and writing about philosophy is not like reading and writing about novels or poems or the movies. Nor is writing philosophy an expression of one’s feelings or ideas about life. Philosophy consists of a series of problems and investigations into those problems. One attempts to solve each problem by making claims which purport to be true, and by backing those claims with arguments.

Philosophy is akin to science in this respect. It is also like science in that it asks about the nature and functioning of various things. However, the two disciplines are concerned with quite different questions regarding these things, and this difference is what makes philosophy and its problems so peculiar and difficult. As scientists, we want to know, for example, what gravity is and how it operates; or what blood is made of and how it functions in the body. As philosophers, we ask more fundamental, and hence more abstract, questions. We want to know, for example, what a person is, and how persons are different from machines or other animals; or we want to know what knowing itself is, and how it is possible to know anything at all.

Many of the difficulties in understanding and doing philosophy come right here, at the beginning. Because we are rarely confronted with explicit philosophical problems in everyday life, it is hard at first to grasp their distinctive character. Sometimes, it is hard to see that there is a problem at all, or to appreciate the problem’s importance. I hope the three problems I have chosen for the course – the nature of science, the essence of a person, and the morality of torture – are particularly accessible in this regard. I think you will find each part of the course interesting, and I hope that at least some of it will be entertaining. Just because philosophy is often concerned with serious issues does not mean it cannot also be playful.

The course will nonetheless be difficult and at times frustrating, as is the case with philosophy generally. I will ask you to think in a way that is ‘unnatural’. Most of you will do philosophy badly – at first. Indeed, there is a certain injustice here, since from the beginning I will ask you to do things you cannot be reasonably expected to do until the course is over. (Perhaps in this respect philosophy is like life – no one is really prepared to ‘do’ life well until it is mostly over.) This is the paradox of learning any skill, however. A swimming instructor teaches you by demanding that you swim at the very beginning – he simply allows you to swim badly and then helps you correct your mistakes.

Some advice on how to study philosophy may therefore be in order. First, reading philosophy.

Philosophy articles and books cannot be read as you read a novel or a newspaper article. You have to study each book or article, re-reading it several times. You must dissect its contents using your own unique intelligence, and then put it back together in a way that gives you personally a clear and distinct understanding of its arguments. The author must be interrogated – forced to admit to the hidden assumptions in his arguments and the flaws of his reasoning. At the same time, you should bend over backwards to give him the benefit of the doubt, to see your objections as potential misunderstandings of what he means. If you find a mistake in the argument, you must do your best to patch it up for the author and make his case as strong as possible – especially if you disagree with the argument. For only if you can imagine how the author would respond to your criticism can you be assured of not misunderstanding him or of not overlooking a point in his favor. So reading a philosophy text is an activity. Make outlines, mark up the page with comments and questions and doubts, read from the middle, from the end – from the beginning, even – and discuss it with your classmates or philosophically-minded friends.

[...]

Unfortunately, it is next to impossible to learn to read and write philosophy by listening to lectures in a classroom. In class I will explain the substance of each reading and reconstruct its argument in a clearer and (inevitably) simpler form. I require my students to read each book or article before class. In class they should take careful notes, then go back and analyze the piece in earnest, using the notes as a guide to the author’s purpose and the development of his argument. This puts the students in a good position to convincingly argue their own beliefs.

[...]

There is an old teaching adage that goes ‘Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you’ve told them.’ Adopt this policy in writing philosophy. Announce at the very beginning what problem you’re going to discuss. State the problem clearly and concisely. Think of your audience as the interested layman who has perhaps read about the issues in question, but who does not clearly understand them. Your task is to explain to the intelligent and critical, but confused and perhaps uninformed reader, what the problem is, and what the various possible solutions are – and then to convince him that the solution you prefer is the best. I suggest that after stating the problem, you let your reader know what your solution is going to be. In arguing for your conclusion, make only those claims and arguments that are relevant to the problem at hand. Go methodically, step by step, through the relevant arguments – don’t wander off. And don’t bullshit. Bullshit can be spotted a mile away in a philosophy argument.

One more thing about writing philosophy. After I give an assignment, students often ask me “Do you want my personal opinion in the paper?” I never really know what to answer, because I’m never sure what the student means by the words ‘personal opinion’. Certainly philosophy papers or books are not simply book reports about the claims and arguments others make. My students’ papers should not be just a recounting of the articles and lectures. So in that sense, yes, I want your ‘personal opinion’. On the other hand, I don’t want your ‘feelings’ on the issue. A philosophy piece is not a report on your ideas, attitudes and beliefs – although it will include your ideas and beliefs. This may confuse you, for it may seem that there is nothing else philosophy could be. This is not so.

Suppose you are a member of a geology research team. Some soil samples are brought in, and your supervisor asks each member of the team to take one sample and analyze it. Would you ask your supervisor whether she wanted your ‘personal opinion’ on the soil’s characteristics? No. You would do the physical and chemical analysis, come to some conclusion about the soil sample, report that conclusion, and support it with evidence developed from your analyses.

Suppose further that your supervisor gave you analyses of the same soil done last year by another research team, and she asked you to evaluate their findings. How would you write your research report? You would first present the conclusions and analyses of the previous team as impartially and as clearly as possible. Then you would point out the perceived errors and weaknesses of their analyses, as well as indicating the acceptable and worthwhile aspects of their research. Then you would present your own findings, and the evidence in favor of those findings. Your evaluation would not simply be a report on what others found, nor simply your ‘personal opinion’, but a reasoned and convincing presentation of your findings.

You should look at writing philosophy in the same way. I encourage students to consider the class as a philosophical research team: I am your supervisor, and you are one of the team’s research staff. The readings are research reports written by previous teams. I will assign research problems to the team, and you are to write research reports on these problems, evaluating previous analyses and then doing an analysis of your own.

What I have said so far might sound pretty discouraging, and perhaps has convinced you to drop the course, or stop philosophizing altogether. But you do not need to be a gifted writer or a genius to do well in this course, or write sound philosophy generally. You need only pay attention, read the works carefully and make a sincere effort to write clearly and accurately.

There are practical benefits to be gained from studying philosophy. First, it will improve your ability to reason, and to think originally. In reading and writing about abstract problems, you practice and develop analytical, critical and argumentative skills which are useful in many other endeavors. In turn, this will give you confidence in yourself and in your ability to think through problems and come to your own conclusions. It will make you less dependent on others and their thoughts, and put you in a better position to understand yourself and others.

Second, you will learn something about the philosophical tradition. Philosophy has been and still is a central force in Western culture and intellectual life. It is philosophers who have most clearly and thoroughly elaborated the values, ideals and theories which shape the way we live and think, even today. This is true not only for morals and religion, but also for the natural sciences, for political science, for economics and for literature.

you can read the rest here.

Wayne Buck received his PhD in Philosophy from Yale University and has taught at Carleton College, Yale and Southern Connecticut University. His research interests include Continental Philosophy, social ontology and business ethics. He has an MBA from Wharton and is an experienced business executive, entrepreneur and consultant.

Tonight’s the Night

8:30PM local time, wherever you live on planet earth. Saturday 28 March 2009

The hero is the one who kindles a great light in the world, who sets up blazing torches in the dark streets of life for men to see by.  The saint is the man who walks through the dark paths of the world, himself a light.  ~Felix Adler

A Farm for the Future

Thanks to the BBC series on The Natural World for bringing us this piece in which wildlife film maker, Rebecca Hosking, investigates how to transform her family’s farm in Devon into a low energy farm for the future, and discovers that nature holds the key. With her father close to retirement, Rebecca returns to her family’s wildlife-friendly farm in Devon, to become the next generation to farm the land. But last year’s high fuel prices were a wake-up call for Rebecca. Realizing that all food production in the UK is completely dependent on abundant cheap fossil fuel, particularly oil, she sets out to discover just how secure this oil supply is. Alarmed by the answers, she explores ways of farming without using fossil fuel. With the help of pioneering farmers and growers, Rebecca learns that it is actually nature that holds the key to farming in a low-energy future.