Real Food Part 1

Real Food.

WHAT TO EAT AND WHY.

NINA PLANCK.

1.

I Grow Up on Real Food., Lose My Way, and Come Home Again.

First I Explain What Real Food Is.

WHEN I WAS GROWING UP on a vegetable farm in Loudoun County, Virginia, we ate what I now think of as real food. Just about everything at our table was local, seasonal, and homemade. Eating our own fresh vegetables certainly made me proud; they tasted better than the supermarket vegetables other people ate. But I regarded homemade granola, whole wheat bread, and chicken livers- not to mention the notable lack of store-bought processed foods in brightly colored boxes in our kitchen- as uncool. Today, my embarra.s.sment over the simple American meals we ate is long gone, and I regard the food I grew up on as the very best. It's true that in certain quarters these days, sauteed chicken livers are fashionable, but I don't care about that; I prefer real food because it's delicious and it's healthy.

What is real food} My rough definition has two parts. First, real foods are old. These are foods we've been eating for a long time- in the case of meat, fish, and eggs, for millions of years. Some real foods, such as b.u.t.ter, are more recent. It's not absolutely clear when regular dairy farming began, but we've been eating b.u.t.terfat for at least ten thousand years, perhaps as many as forty thousand. By contrast, margarine- hydrogenated vegetable oil made solid and dyed yellow to resemble traditional b.u.t.ter- is a modern invention, merely a century old. Margarine is not a real food.

Consider the soybean. Asians have been eating foods made from fermented soybeans, such as miso, tofu, and soy sauce, for about five thousand years. Without fermentation, the soybean isn't ideal for human consumption. But most of the modern soy products Americans eat are not traditional soy foods. The main ingredient in modern soy foods and many processed foods, such as low-carbohydrate snack bars, is "isolated soy protein," a by-product of the industrial soybean oil industry. This unfermented, defatted soy protein is not real food.

Second, real foods are traditional. To me, traditional means "the way we used to eat them." That means different things for different ingredients: fruits and vegetables are best when they're local and seasonal; grains should be whole; fats and oils unrefined. From the farm to the factory to the kitchen, real food is produced and prepared the old-fashioned way- but not out of mere nostalgia. In each of these examples of real food, the traditional method of farming, processing, preparing, and cooking enhances nutrition and flavor, while the industrial method diminishes both.

* Real beef is raised on gra.s.s (not soybeans) and aged properly.

* Real milk is gra.s.s-fed, raw, and unh.o.m.ogenized, with the cream on top.

* Real eggs come from hens that eat gra.s.s, grubs, and bugs- not "vegetarian" hens.

* Real lard is never hydrogenated, as industrial lard is.

* Real olive oil is cold-pressed, leaving vitamin E and antioxidants intact.

* Real tofu is made from fermented soybeans, which are more digestible.

* Real bread is made with yeast and allowed to rise, a form of fermentation.

* Real grits are stone-ground from whole corn and soaked with soda before cooking.

Industrial food is the opposite of real food. Real food is old and traditional, while industrial food is recent and synthetic. The impersonation of real food by industrial food, by the way, is neither accidental nor hidden. Industrial food like margarine is intended to be a replica of a traditional food- b.u.t.ter. Real food is fundamentally conservative; it doesn't change, while industrial food, by contrast, is under great pressure to be novel. The food industry is highly compet.i.tive and relentlessly innovative, producing thousands of new food products every year. Most of these "new" foods are merely new combinations of old ingredients dressed in a new shape (individually wrapped cheese slices instead of the traditional wheel of pressed cheese) or new packaging (whipped cream in an aerosol can). Or the new recipe has been tweaked to ride the latest food craze (cholesterol-free cheese, low-carbohydrate bagels). Real food, on the other hand, doesn't change because it doesn't have to. My morning yogurt is a masterfully simple recipe for cultured milk, pa.s.sed down for thousands of years.

So that's my custom definition of real food: it's old, and it's traditional. To lexicographers, sticklers, and nitpickers (you know who you are), it's no doubt hopelessly imprecise and incomplete, but I hope it's clear enough for our purposes.

People everywhere love traditional foods. They're fond of a nice steak, the crispy skin of roast chicken, or mashed potatoes made with plenty of milk and b.u.t.ter. But they're afraid that eating these things might make them fat- or, worse, give them a heart attack. So they do as they're told by the experts: they drink skim milk and order egg white omelets. Their favorite foods become a guilty pleasure. I believe the experts are wrong; the real culprits in heart disease are not traditional foods but industrial ones, such as margarine, powdered eggs, refined corn oil, and sugar. Real food is good for you.

Does that mean you should enjoy real bacon and b.u.t.ter not because they're tasty but because they're actually healthy} In a word, yes. Some might mock this as a characteristically American case for real food- call it the Virtue Defense. Gina Mallet, an Anglo-American "food explorer" who defends real foods, including beef and raw milk cheese, in Last Chance to Eat: The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World, calls the modish philosophy healthism - and her intent is not to flatter. As scientists began to blame the diseases of civilization on diet, Mallet writes, "a new philosophy emerged, based on the notion that death could be delayed, perhaps even cheated, if a person monitored every single piece of food she ate." I'm concerned about nutrition, but I wouldn't call myself a healthist. For one thing, living forever doesn't interest me, and for another, flavor does.

Someone else- a French chef perhaps- might take a different approach in defense of real food. Less interested in health, he might champion pleasure for its own sake. Great- I'm all for pleasure. If the sheer sensual joy of eating shirred eggs or homemade ice cream is enough for you to shed your guilt, throw away phony industrial foods, and return to eating real foods, all the better. I'll leave the nature of taste and satisfaction, guilt and pleasure to the cultural critics and moral philosophers. This book is about why real food is good for you.

We Become Vegetable Farmers in Virginia.

MY PARENTS CHOSE TO FARM, but I didn't. My father had a doctorate in international relations from Johns Hopkins and taught political science at the State University of New York in Buffalo, where I was born in 1971. A bright young professor, he got tenure early, and he could teach anything he wanted. My mother, for her part, was at home with three young children and very happy. But they always had unconventional plans and Utopian ideas: unsatisfied with our local public school in Buffalo, they started and ran a neighborhood school with other parents. They loved physical work and kept a plot in a garden outside of town.

In January 1973, our friends Tony and Mariette Newcomb came to see us in Buffalo. They brought eggs and beef they had raised on their farm in Virginia. "We were knocked out by that," my father said. That very year, Dad quit teaching and we moved south to Virginia to learn vegetable farming from the Newcombs. Committed to farming before they'd even tried it, they also bought sixty acres of farmland in Loudoun County, Virginia, for seventy-five thousand dollars they cobbled together with loans from friends and family. My sister, Hilary, was ten years old, Charles was six, and I was two. They wanted us to grow up on a farm.

Our first years farming as apprentices to the Newcombs were wonderful and strange, very different from the life of a professor's family. Mom and Dad worked all the time, and we lived simply. With no kids my age to play with, I was often lonely hanging around the farm or playing at make-believe grocery shopping at our farm stand. In many ways it was a hard life. But however sore and tired they were, my parents loved farming, and soon we moved west to our own place, in the tiny hamlet of Wheatland, Virginia. We arrived at the farm late on Christmas Eve in 1978. All our things, including a few pieces of farm equipment, were tied up in a rickety pile on the back of our green flatbed Ford. There was too much snow to drive up to the house, and there was no driveway anyway, so we parked at the edge of the property and walked a quarter of a mile.

The old tenant house had little charm. The kitchen floor was covered with a dirty mustard carpet. Under that was linoleum; under that, plywood, hiding yellow pine floorboards. The sink drained through the kitchen wall into the backyard. We heated the house and water for baths with wood fires. But my parents are relentlessly cheerful and practical, and over the years we fixed up the house, scrubbing, sc.r.a.ping, and painting, with the simple faith that natural materials, such as wood floors, are beautiful no matter how modest or worn.

In the spring of 1979, we became farmers. While other kids played soccer and went to the beach, Charles and I spent the long humid Virginia summers hoeing, weeding, mulching, picking, and selling vegetables. Some farm ch.o.r.es are part of the past; now we mulch every crop to keep weeds down, so there's hardly any hoeing, but I spent many dusty hours hoeing rocky pumpkin fields back then. Other lost tasks I think of more fondly. On the mulch run we brought home scratchy hay bales from local farms. You had to be strong to toss them up onto the wagon to the stacker, but today we unroll little round bales like carpets down tomato aisles. It's much more civilized but less romantic.

When I was eight years old, I began to sell our vegetables at roadside stands in the towns near our farm. After my parents dropped me off, I would set up the table, umbrella, and signs, and wait for people to buy our tomatoes, zucchini, and sweet corn. Stand duty was often lonely, and sometimes scary for a young girl, especially when it got dark. More to the point, we couldn't make a living this way- not with sales of $200 here or $157 there. That winter, my parents took part-time jobs- Dad as a handyman, and Mom waiting tables at the Pizza Hut in Leesburg- to make ends meet.

Only one year later, in 1980, the first farmers' market in our area opened in the courthouse parking lot in Arlington, Virginia, and everything changed. We picked and bunched beets and Swiss chard and drove into town. Scores of grateful customers flocked to our vegetables, as if they had waited all their lives for roadside stands to come to the suburbs of Washington, D.C. That summer we took our vegetables to three weekly farmers' markets, and soon we abandoned roadside stands altogether. With farmers' markets, we began to make a modest profit and farming became a lot more fun. Today, my parents are in their midsixties, and they still make a living exclusively from selling at farmers' markets. They sell twenty-eight varieties of tomatoes, a dozen different cuc.u.mbers, garlic, lettuce, and many other vegetables at more than a dozen markets a week in peak season.

We never liked the term back to the landers for people who gave up city jobs for farm life. How can you go back to a place you've never been? Yet that's what people called us. I always thought of us as farmers, because farm life was all I ever knew. I have no memories of being a professor's daughter with a stay-at-home, intellectual mother, only of my parents coming in wet from the morning corn pick in the very early days farming with the Newcombs. Even now, after living in Washington, Brussels, London, and now New York City, I still think of myself as a farm girl, happiest when I'm around tomatoes and bugs and creeks.

I Am Forced to Eat Homemade Food.

MY MOTHER WAS A natural, if amateur, scientist with an interest in biology, nutrition, and babies. She read about the pioneering experiments of Clara Davis in the 1920s and '30s. Davis set out healthy, whole foods for infants and let them eat anything they wanted for months at a time. The smorgasbord included beef, bone marrow, sweetbreads, fish, pineapple, bananas, spinach, peas, milk and yogurt, cornmeal, oatmeal, rye crackers, and sea salt. At any given meal, the choices babies made could be extreme: one baby ate mostly bone marrow; others loved bananas or milk. One occasionally grabbed handfuls of salt. Over time, however, the babies chose a balanced diet, rich in all the essential nutrients, surpa.s.sing the nutritional requirements of the day, and they were in excellent health. The nine-month-old boy with rickets drank cod-liver oil (rich in vitamin D) until his rickets was cured; then he ignored it.

The Clara Davis experiments were limited, and to my knowledge, never repeated. Proven or not, the idea made a deep impression on my mother. She believed that anyone, even an uninformed baby or child- perhaps especially a baby or child- could feed himself properly on instinct alone if you gave him only healthy foods, and that was how we ate- at home anyway. There was some leeway for junk food on car trips (Oreos were a treat), and on the rare occasions when we ate out, we could order anything we wanted. At home, however, there was only real food, and my parents never told us what to eat or how much or when.

My mother's other nutritional hero was Adelle Davis, the best-selling writer who recommended whole foods and lots of protein. Before dinner, Mom put out carrot, apple, or turnip sticks so we would eat raw fruits and vegetables when we were hungry for a snack. Main dishes were basic American fare: fried chicken, tuna salad, spaghetti, quiche, meatloaf, potato pancakes with homemade applesauce. There were many frugal dishes, such as chicken hearts with onions, and we ate a lot of rice and beans. At dinner we always had several vegetables and a large green salad.

Most of our food was local and seasonal, which is no doubt why I fondly remember the exceptions, such as the boxes of oranges and grapefruit we bought each winter. We drank fresh raw milk from our Jersey, ate bright-orange eggs from our free-ranging chickens, and a couple of times we slaughtered spent laying hens for soup. Our honey came from a local beekeeper. Occasionally, there was venison or blue fish when we let local people hunt or fish on the property. In those days, few farmers nearby were raising meat and poultry for local markets, so we had to buy those foods at the store, but today our beef, bison, lamb, and chicken come from farmers we know.

Above all, we grew truckloads of vegetables. The simple act of picking vegetables for dinner- a pleasure known to all kitchen gardeners, one that feels maternal and generous to me- is positively extravagant on a real farm, where there are acres of fresh things to choose from. In June I might set out from the kitchen with a basket and a rough plan of attack- to find lettuce, zucchini, and young fennel- and come back with a wheelbarrow-full, seduced along the way by the old spinach patch (abandoned in the hot weather) or by a head of green garlic, still too young to sell but irresistible. If I'm feeling lazy, there's no need to go to the fields at all. In the cool, dark bas.e.m.e.nt, beans, eggplant, and peppers sit in baskets, ready for market.

Our berries, lettuce, herbs, and vegetables made a feast of every meal from April to November. In the old, strict days when every penny counted, the first picking, however tiny- a dozen spears of asparagus or two pints of raspberries- went to market, not to the kitchen. But once each crop was in full swing, we ate as much as we wanted. We grew only the best-tasting varieties, such as Earliglow strawberries and Ambrosia melons. What we didn't grow, we bought or bartered for at farmers' markets. In the winter, we ate our own canned tomatoes and frozen red bell peppers. We all ate huge amounts of vegetables- four ears each of b.u.t.tered corn, giant plates of sliced tomatoes, enormous green salads- and still do. I've never met anyone who eats more vegetables than my family. To me, a half-cup serving of cooked broccoli is silly, a doll's portion.

Everything we ate was homemade. We made whole wheat bread and buckwheat pancakes from fresh flour ground in an electric mill, and apple, beet, and carrot juice in the juicer. Making granola was a weekly ch.o.r.e for us kids. On winter car trips we packed our own food, typically large pots of beans and rice, bread, apples, and peanut b.u.t.ter. The everyday dessert was apple salad with yogurt or mayonnaise, walnuts, coconut, and honey. When we had proper desserts such as vanilla pudding, cherry pie, and strawberry shortcake- which was not often- they were always made from scratch. Portions were big, leftovers prized, and nothing was wasted. Eggsh.e.l.ls and vegetable sc.r.a.ps went in a bucket for the chickens.

It all sounds perfect now, but jars filled with blackstrap mola.s.ses and homemade granola did not impress me. I wanted American food, the kind normal kids ate. By far the biggest taboo in our house was junk food, and for that very reason it was deeply compelling. When I had stand duty in the town of Purcellville, I made a beeline for the High's convenience store to buy ice cream sandwiches- and told no one. On my eleventh birthday, my parents said I could have anything I wanted for dinner, and I greedily ordered a store-bought cake. I can still taste the faintly metallic neon frosting. Yet I ate it gamely, unwilling to admit that my hideous cake was inferior to the dessert my mother always made on our birthdays: chocolate eclairs with real milk, b.u.t.ter, and eggs, and good chocolate. The first time I laid eyes on an all-you-can-eat salad bar, at the Leesburg Pizza Hut where my mother waited tables that first winter, I ate a bowl of tasty-looking bacon bits with a spoon. They made me very sick- and embarra.s.sed, too. No one told me you don't eat bacon bits- the lowest form of pork, if they aren't imitation bacon made of soy protein- straight.

These wince-inducing memories suggest that the Clara Davis experiments- sometimes referred to as proving "nutritional wisdom"- work only when all of the choices are good ones. Sure, the baby cured his rickets with cod-liver oil, like a little instinctive scientist, or a wild animal self-medicating by eating certain plants. But Davis gave the babies only good foods to eat. What if the babies could have eaten ice cream sandwiches, neon pink cake frosting, and bacon bits? To my knowledge, no one has tried such an experiment- unless you count our daily exposure to all manner of cheap junk food- but the evidence is not encouraging.

In the short term, at least, availability seems to determine what we eat, rather than instinct for health. Squirrels, given the choice between acorns and chocolate cookies, take the cookies. The natural diet of sheep is gra.s.s, but when offered dense carbohydrates- the ovine equivalent of store-bought cake- they will binge until they are listless. Even a modern hunter-gatherer will drink honey until his teeth rot, if he can get enough.

"As stupid as these choices seem, one can't really blame them on a lack of nutritional wisdom," writes Susan Allport in The Primal Feast. "During the course of evolution, squirrels, sheep, and humans have rarely encountered large quant.i.ties of concentrated, high-energy foods. Why should the food selection mechanisms of animals include protections against overeating these things? Our human tastes for foods evolved and enabled us to survive in the forests and the African savannas where animals were lean and fibrous, food shortages were a fact of life, and sugar came only in the form of ripe fruits and honey, foods that were available only on an intermittent, seasonal basis." It seems that animals and humans both lack brakes for runaway junk-food craving.

Once you grow up, of course, you have to take responsibility for what you eat, and my parents believed in Emersonian selfreliance. When I was ten or so, they decided that Charles and I should learn to cook, and we drew up a dinner and dishes schedule. We all cooked the same way, building simple meals around our abundant, gorgeous vegetables. The ingredients weren't fancy, and the recipes weren't sophisticated. I loved my night to cook, especially the grown-up feeling of providing for my family, and here and there I made a stab at something original. Once I prepared Chinese noodle soup by boiling vegetables and pasta in water with lots of soy sauce. My mother wasn't impressed- it probably tasted terrible- but I was proud of my creation and the memory of her reaction hits a tender spot. Another time I baked chicken with rosemary. "It's good," said Charles, "except for the pine needles." My cheeks flushed with shame for introducing a fancy- and risible- ingredient to plain old chicken. Simplicity was a virtue, and culinary experiments weren't much encouraged.

What was prized was the idea of the farm as physical paradise.

We were encouraged to sigh with delight over the sound of the spring peepers, the flash of the fireflies, the scent of honeysuckle, and- most of all- the flavor of our own melons and tomatoes. I was already a nature lover and took huge pleasure in our beautiful farm and unsurpa.s.sed vegetables. But I never understood how appreciation of nature conflicted with making dinner a bit different- tastier, fancier, s.e.xier. Wasn't nice food also a gift of nature?

Now it's obvious that I lived in a kind of paradise about food. My mother's philosophy- provide good homemade food on a budget and then leave your kids alone to eat what they like- was working. Charles and I were healthy, physically active, never picky eaters like other kids we knew- yet looked down on. As for me, it all seemed simple. We grew the best vegetables in the world. At home there was only good stuff, which I ate happily. From time to time, there were treats- like Danish b.u.t.ter cookies- or compelling, but quite possibly regrettable, stuff in restaurants. Mostly, I was ignorant about the big world of food and therefore unashamed. When the school princ.i.p.al sent me home with a free turkey for Christmas, it seemed like nothing more than a stroke of good luck. If my parents didn't care that we didn't have a lot of money and ate simple food, why should I? Above all, I wasn't neurotic about food or my body or my appet.i.tes. An untroubled child with lots of energy, I ate what I wanted, when I was hungry for it. Naturally, it didn't last.

My Virtuous Diet Makes Me Plump and Grumpy.

A TYPICAL TEENAGE GIRL, I was anxious about all sorts of things, and placed my anxiety squarely on- what else?- food. The experts said that many of the foods I grew up on- like Yorkshire pudding topped with a pool of hot b.u.t.ter- were unhealthy. The smart advice was to be a little bit more vegetarian: eat less meat, less dairy, less saturated fat.

The medical wisdom began to dovetail with our somewhat alternative subculture. Our farming friends and the college students who worked on our farm each summer were health-conscious and green. In those circles, being a vegetarian- better yet, a vegan- was environmentally, nutritionally, and ethically correct. In the worker kitchen down by the little pond, the famous vegetarian Moosewood Cookbook was the bible, and communion was rice and beans. Times have changed. Now the workers buy raw milk, eat local venison, and dream of keeping chickens, goats, and cows on their own farms.

The ecological and political arguments for a vegetarian diet came to the fore in 1971, the year I was born. In her seminal book, Diet for a Small Planet, Frances Moore Lappe argued that modern beef farming was ecologically unsound (it wrecks natural habitats), politically unjust (you could feed more people on the grain cattle ate than on the steaks), and nutritionally unnecessary (we don't need all that protein). The idea that a vegetarian diet was healthier clinched it for me, and I became a vegan in high school. It was perhaps my only act of rebellion against my stubbornly tolerant parents. My state of mind is still vivid. With all the bad press animal foods were getting, the quickest route to salvation seemed clear: eat only plants.

The summer of 1989 was the last season I lived and worked on the farm. In late August, still the height of the season, my parents drove me to Oberlin College, with the stereo shelf my mother built and my other things in the back of a pickup. Later I transferred to Georgetown University and set up house with my boyfriend in Washington, D.C. In my own kitchen, I was free to invent my own philosophy about food. But I'd lost my instincts and didn't trust my appet.i.te. Eating became an intellectual question. How many people could you feed on the grain it took to raise one steak? If saturated fats are dangerous, why eat any? The vegan experiment ended fairly quickly- I liked yogurt- but for many years I was a vegetarian.

Fear of fat and cholesterol dominated our little kitchen in the row house on Twenty-seventh Street in northwest Washington. Even a hint of slippery, creamy food on the tongue sent me into panicky disapproval. Peering at labels, I stocked the pantry with low-fat foods. In those days, I believed the conventional nutritional wisdom: that unsaturated fats were good for cholesterol and saturated fats were not. Monounsaturated olive oil- the star of the vaunted Mediterranean diet- was the only fat I trusted . . . but not much of it. The taboo on cholesterol and saturated fats meant no beef, eggs, cream, chocolate, or coconut. Our only dairy was nonfat yogurt, and there was plenty of rice milk and soy ice cream.

MY VIRTUOUS DIETS.

At the height of my various nutritionally correct diets (vegan, vegetarian, low fat, low saturated fat, and low cholesterol), this was the picture: Real Foods Off the Menu.

Beef, lamb, game, poultry, fish, and sh.e.l.lfish.

Milk, cream, b.u.t.ter, cheese, and eggs.

Chocolate and coconut.

Real (But Rich) Foods Strictly Limited.

Olive oil.

Avocados.

Nuts.

Real Foods I Ate Plenty Of.

Fruits and vegetables.

Brown rice and beans.

Whole wheat bread.

New Foods I Tried to Love.

Various imitation foods made with soy and rice.

Fat-Free, Sweet Things I Ate Quite a Lot Of.

Juice.

Nonfat frozen yogurt.

Today it's hard to picture what we ate. I loved to cook, but most foods were off the menu- no beef, pork, lamb, chicken, fish, milk, or eggs. We ate lots of fresh local vegetables, large green salads, burritos, and bean soups. I ate mountains of rice, beans, and pasta. For dessert there was fruit salad, but without the mayonnaise of my youth. A well-used recipe for nonfat oatmeal bars with pineapple springs to mind, and on special occasions I made fruit pies with b.u.t.ter crust. Now and then I grated low-fat cheese over salad or treated us to grilled shrimp from the waterfront fishmonger.

Now it's clear why my boyfriend gave me a cookbook on my nineteenth birthday: the poor fellow was desperate for variety. It was Martha Stewart's Quick Cook Menus, and I read it from cover to cover in one sitting, fascinated with the fancy foods she touted, like balsamic vinegar, creme fraiche, and homemade mayonnaise. Now Martha Stewart is famous for all the domestic arts, from antique paints to pine cone crafts, but in those days she was a champion of simple, seasonal meals- and her recipes always worked. Quick Cook was my first cookbook, it bears the marks of many good meals, and I still use it.

As for my health, I felt terrible. My digestion was poor, and I was moody, tearful, and tender in all the wrong places before I got my period. In cold and flu season, I got both. I was depressed, too. Partly to stave off the gloom, I ran three to six miles a day, six days a week. On this virtuous regime I also gained weight steadily- and before I knew it, I was plump. How plump? Well, women and weight is a treacherous topic; no one agrees on the definitions and people get touchy, so I'll try to be objective. I'm almost five feet five inches tall and weigh 119 to 125 pounds, much of it muscle. In my vegetarian days, I was 147 pounds and soft all over. That's a body ma.s.s index (BMI) of almost 25, squarely in the "overweight" category.1 Back home on the farm in Wheatland, meanwhile, my omnivorous parents were the healthiest people I knew, lean and cheerful as they tucked into fried eggs and pork chops. Something was wrong with me, but I certainly didn't suspect my perfect diet. In 1995, in this none-too-healthy, somewhat muddled state, I moved to Brussels to work for NATO's parliamentary arm. I was twenty-three going on twenty-four, it was my first time going to Europe, and I was full of anxiety. My friend Indya had to rea.s.sure me, "There are vegetarians in Europe."

In London I Am Rescued by Farmers' Markets.

ON JULY 4, 1996, after a year in Brussels, I moved to England as a journalist for Time magazine and found a place on St. Paul Street in Islington, a groovy north London neighborhood. A typical London row house, it had a little, overgrown garden, which I cleared out, hauling away many buckets of shattered concrete from an old patio. A farmer from Cambridgeshire delivered a load of well-rotted compost, which I had fun digging under. I laid a stone path to a spot where the morning sun fell, and put a bench there. One other place got sun, and there I built a raised bed, barely four feet square, for zucchini, herbs, and lettuce. It was a tiny patch, nothing like sixty acres in Virginia, but it was mine.

Apart from the clouds, I loved everything about England and made lots of friends, but soon I was homesick- not for Virginia but for local produce. My sunny patch was too small for all the vegetables I wanted to grow. I tried several whole foods shops and what they call "box schemes" (a weekly delivery), but they all disappointed. The produce was organic, but it was often wilted, bland- and imported. I took the Tube to London's famous street markets, which, not long ago, featured local produce from Kent ("the Garden of England"), but they mostly sold Dutch peppers and Israeli tomatoes and T-shirts.

Imported fruits and vegetables couldn't compare to the ones we grew at home. I longed for ripe strawberries in season, fresh asparagus with its scales unfolding, and traditional apples instead of the standard commercial fare: underripe Granny Smiths from Australia or insipid Red Delicious from Washington State. Desperate for good produce, I rented a site near my house, set about finding farmers, and opened London's first farmers' market on June 6, 1999. The minister of agriculture rang the opening bell, Prince Charles (a keen organic farmer) sent a letter of congratulations, and all the major papers and the BBC turned up. The farmers, many of whom had never sold at retail, were doing a roaring trade. Soon they wanted more markets, and people in other neighborhoods were calling. By September, I'd opened two more, in Notting Hill and Swiss Cottage. In January 2000, I quit my job- by this time I was a speechwriter for the U.S. amba.s.sador to Britain- to start more farmers' markets.

After many years as a fairly dedicated vegetarian, I had begun to eat fish, partly because I had a great fishmonger, but probably more because the experts said fish was good for you. In 1999, a terrific book on brain chemistry, Potatoes Not Prozac, persuaded me to eat eggs again and to cut back on juice, honey, and white flour. Very quickly, I felt better and began to need new, smaller clothes. But I was still fat- and cholesterol-wary, quite afraid that meat, b.u.t.ter, and eggs would give me a heart attack.

My own farmers' markets rescued me. Here was real food on my doorstep, just like at home- only better, because there were also new foods I'd never eaten: dried beef, pork pie, creme fraiche. Overnight I stopped using the supermarket, except for things like olive oil, chickpeas, and chocolate. For The Farmers' Market Cookbook, I wrote recipes for beef, lamb, pork, poultry, even rabbit- and ate them all. Without really trying, I stopped thinking about food and started tasting it. Beef and lamb didn't thrill me (nor do they now), but I loved roast chicken and bacon. I never meant to lose weight, only to eat more real foods (more ice cream, less nonfat yogurt) and tastier ones (more chicken, less tofu). The pounds did their proverbial melting as I swapped rice and beans for roast chicken, bacon, and cheese.

My other complaints disappeared too, along with the colds and flu. As a vegetarian, I would have scoffed at the idea that my diet was anything but ideal. Now it's clear my body was depleted of protein, saturated fat, fish oil, and vitamins A, B, and D. Among other virtues, protein and fish help keep you trim, B vitamins and fish prevent depression, vitamin A aids digestion, and saturated fats boost immunity. I knew nothing about that, of course, only that the more meat, fish, b.u.t.ter, and eggs I ate, the better I felt. Health and good cheer restored, I became curious about the claims for a vegan and vegetarian diet. What I learned surprised me: we are not natural vegetarians- and no traditional culture is vegan.

Humans are omnivores, meant to eat everything from leaves and fruit to meat and eggs. Our anatomy is a hybrid of the herbivore and carnivore, with flat molars to chew vegetables and sharp teeth to tear into meat. Our digestive tract is neither very short (like a dog's) nor very long (like a cow's), but somewhere in between. All over the world, omnivores eat different foods: fish on the coasts, caribou in the woods, beef on the range. But dinner for a cow (gra.s.s) or a tiger (meat) is the same everywhere.