Monday, May 12, 2008
An American expat discovers why eating very bad things is very good for you.
Apr 16, 1999 | My first full-blown dinner in Paris began with thick, creamy slices of homemade foie gras sprinkled with coarse Guerande salt on toasted poilane bread. Along with several bottles of Bordeaux, the liver was followed by a truffle-stuffed cheese souffli littered with peppered chicken morsels, garlic-butter lamb navarin with black Corsican olives and laurel, potato gratin dashed with olive oil and crhme franche, five different kinds of heavy, thick-rinded pungent cheese served with fresh chestnuts and oak-leaf salad, and Baba au Rhum. At the end of this meal I remember thinking: I will die if I keep eating this way. But I will die old and happy.
Several years later, when I asked for her longevity secret, 98-year-old sculptress Beatrice Wood replied: "Everyday: meditation, chocolate, a glass of port wine and flirting with young men." This luxurious acknowledgment of the relationship between gastronomy, pleasure and health is not new. Famous French centenarian Jeanne Calment was a chocoholic. People on the island of Crete outlive their Western neighbors thanks, in part, to a lustful appetite for olive oil, goat cheese and wine. Instead of perishing in their prime, people in the Pirigord region of France push the age envelope with a diet that includes goose pbti, cheese and Armagnac. The French in general, for that matter, outlive Americans by about two and a half years and suffer 40 percent fewer heart attacks.
All things being equal, the common ground here is an almost libidinous pleasure in food. Could this pleasure principle, this unbridled enjoyment in guilt-free, often ritual-bound eating, contribute to overall health? American supermarkets are filled with fat-free, sugar-free, salt-free, cholesterol-free products, but we top the scales in obesity. We live in a land of breathtaking abundance, but we corner the market on eating disorders. Like an insatiable teenager, America stalks the refrigerators and check-out stands of the nation to satisfy a rapacious appetite. Europe leans back on its vintage sofa with cognac in hand, shaking its head in weary disbelief. In the end, good balanced health may all boil down to living and eating with what Diane Ackerman, in her book "A Natural History of the Senses" called "sensuous zest."
In America, sensuous zest has been eaten away by worry. What's good for you one day is bad the next. Like the garrulous American who tells you his life story at a bus stop, the entire country seems to wear its chronic food and health pathologies -- its clogged heart, its guilty bingeing -- on its shirtsleeves. Even Bob Dole smiles wryly at us from a Pfizer ad, talking about his erectile dysfunction.
This type of public purging is both baffling and unthinkable in Europe, where the relationship between eating and pleasure, including the relationship between food and sex that goes back to orgiastic Roman dining, is deeply bound up in social mores.
All this, of course, is not to suggest that the French are the picture of perfect health. They smoke too much. The few gyms that exist have a theatrical or desultory air about them, and big spaces for athletic activities, at least in Paris, are almost nonexistent. Their socialized healthcare system grants women stunning maternity benefits and provides low-cost medical check-ups for all, but it also is partly responsible for creating the most avid consumers of pharmaceutical products in the world.
And the consumption of American-style fast, frozen and junk food is slowly changing the landscape here. But by and large the French in particular and Europeans in general enjoy a level of overall health that is free of fear and rooted not only in deep sensual pleasure, but also in a sense of common sense -- something that, in the jungle of diet divas and "techno" foods, has completely escaped Americans.
What's "bad" in America is not only "good" in Europe, it's usually a basic, fundamental staple in the overall European diet, a part of the joie de vivre that's been the bedrock of Latin culture for centuries. Consider, for example, what the Italian response might be to Dr. Barry Sears' hugely popular book "The Zone." "BASTA WITH PASTA" the book jacket screams. "WARNING: EATING THESE CARBOHYDRATES COULD BE DANGEROUS TO YOUR HEALTH." The blacklist that follows includes bananas, cranberries, apple juice, carrots and rice -- foods whose virtues (Fiber! Potassium! Beta carotene!) have been vigorously endorsed by nutrition experts and health organizations worldwide. Curiously, while denouncing the humble carrot stick, Sears promotes snacking on instant corn muffin mix and ice cream, and his obdurate claims underscore an almost burlesque relationship to food: "Food may be the most powerful drug you will ever come in contact with," the book warns and (my personal favorite), "You can burn more fat watching TV than exercising." Follow "The Zone's" advice and you'll even "reset your genetic code."
Reset your genetic code? Most of us can't even reset the timer on our VCRs. With books like "The Zone" coming out every year, each one contradicting the other and selling by the millions, and with diet doctors gnawing on the excrescence of our ever-expanding insecurities and our imperfect bodies, it's no small wonder that for many Americans eating has been entirely robbed of both pleasure and common sense. The stressful mental workout required to "stay healthy" has become unhealthy, and it is often an act of sheer courage to surrender to lascivious cravings for, say, steamy artichokes stuffed with chopped sausage and bacon or an oven-baked profiterole au chocolat.
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