Books |
Connecting the Dots: How Sweet It Isn’t
By
Published: Jan 01, 2007
Category:
Food and Wine
It was a dinner so healthy I’d be a monster not to share the recipe. It’s from The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook, by Ina Garten, who also wrote Barefoot Contessa Parties.
Indonesian Ginger Chicken
serves 4 to 6
1 cup honey
3/4 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup minced garlic (about 8 cloves)
1/2 cup peeled and grated fresh ginger root
2 chickens (quartered, or, if you prefer, in eighths)
Cook honey, soy sauce., ginger and garlic in a small pan over low heat until warm. Arrange chicken pieces in a shallow baking pan. Pour the sauce on, cover with aluminum foil, marinate overnight in refrigerator.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Place baking pan in oven, bake for 30 minutes. Remove tin foil, turn chicken, raise temperature to 375 degrees, bake for 30 more minutes. [We find it may take 45 more minutes.]
My wife had gone to the farmer’s market for the chicken. Ginger and garlic are traditional tonics. In Real Food, Nina Planck makes a powerful case for fermented, unprocessed soy products. And honey is Nature’s best sweetener. So I felt like a model citizen as I repaired to my reading chair after dinner, and, over a thimbleful of brandy, opened the more amusing of the local newspapers, The New York Post. There, to my physical and psychic distress, I encountered an op-ed by Elizabeth Whelan, Kellogg’s, A Sad Cereal Sellout.
If you’ve been reading the papers, you know that Kellogg’s has announced it will reduce the sugar level in its cereals — or stop marketing them to children. Had that decision been voluntary, many would have cheered a forward-looking corporate gesture. But it was not exactly voluntary. Kellogg’s faced a lawsuit from citizens’ groups; the giant ($11 billion) cereal maker clearly decided there was no public relations victory in claming that the culprits for childhood obesity were video games, overeating and lack of exercise — in short, that the responsibility for Young Fatty begins and ends with parents.
In this op-ed, Elizabeth Whelan — identified as president of the American Council on Science and Health — argues:
….pre-sweetened cereals do provide calories, but for non-obese kids, calories can be a good thing: They provide energy. And if the cereal is not pre-sweetened, the child may just do the sweetening with scoops from the sugar bowl — often adding even more sugar than there would have been in a pre-sweetened product… The bottom line is that cereal — pre-sweetened or not — is a nutrient-dense product, so you get a lot for that caloric intake, far more than you would with, say, fruit juice.
I am not a nutritionist, nor do I play one on the Internet. My mission here is to cut through the hype about new books, music, movies and the occasional product and find the stuff, new and old, that’s authentic and good. I wandered into food because I discovered you like cookbooks. And because there suddenly appeared a sprinkling of books that presented a way to look at food as a preventive medicine — a way of living better and living longer.
I’ve been slow to see that, taken together, these books — The Omnivore’s Dilemma (here and here), Deep Economy and Real Food — make an implicit political argument: You cannot count on the government or corporations to look after your interests. You’re in charge. You’re responsible. And that starts with what you eat.
I know I have sworn to keep politics off the site. But here it creeps in — and through the kitchen, at that.
Or, rather, through the opinion pages of our newspapers. Which made me wonder: Who is Elizabeth Whelan, and what’s her claim to expertise?
Dr. Whelan — she’s not an MD, she has a Sc.D from the Harvard School of Public Health — founded the American Council on Science and Health in 1978. Although she has railed against tobacco manufacturers from the beginning, they are the only companies she seems not to like. In her 1976 book, “Panic in the Pantry”, she claims that chemicals in food are not inherently dangerous. And she’s continued to argue that the call for “natural” foods is unscientific.
Who finances ACSH? In the beginning, she says, the Scaife Foundation and John M. Olin Foundation. [For those with spotty memories, Richard Mellon Scaife is best known, over 40 years, as the largest single donor to conservative Republican causes. He was prominent in the campaign to impeach Bill Clinton, and, more recently, in the “Swift Boats” controversy. He is a funder of the Dominionist Movement, a group of radical Right Christians whose goal is to replace the Constitution with Biblical law.] Whelan says that Barbara Walters canceled a TV appearance with her, “calling me a ‘paid liar for industry’" — others have also suggested she is a nothing but a PR agent for the food industry. Today, she says, “about 40% of ACSH funding comes from private foundations, about 40% from corporations, and the rest from the sale of ACSH publications.”
Nicholas Martin, who worked at ACSH for six months, has written:
It as my experience that ACSH was little more than a play toy for founder Elizabeth Whelan, who made little effort to remain informed herself about the topics the organization addressed.
Before I quit the organization in disgust, the spring of 1989 was approaching and Dr. Whelan considered having the group issue a new booklet defending the safety of lawn chemicals. As I was doing the fundraising for ACSH at that time, I was told directly by Dr. Whelan that no such booklet would be produced unless the Professional Lawn Care Association made a donation for its production. By the time I left… no donation was forthcoming and no booklet produced. Also while I worked for ACSH, a draft of a booklet on the health effects of alcohol was sent to the Stroh Brewery Co, (a donor) for editorial recommendations.
Another booklet was produced before my stint there, but I was told by ACSH’s assistant director that the organization’s booklet on the healthfulness of sugar was printed in-house by the Hershey chocolate company.
None of this direct collaboration with funders has ever been publicly acknowledged by ACSH to my knowledge.
If Dr. Whelan has answered these accusations, I can’t find her response.
It’s tempting to say that, if Kellogg’s is being attacked by Elizabeth Whelen, we may conclude it’s probably doing the right thing. But even if that might be the truth here, it’s too easy, too knee-jerk.
The better point to make: Food moves to the front line of personal politics.
This is not a radical point. The poor and uneducated eat cheap meals, often from fast food restaurants; they become prime candidates for obesity and diabetes. We who have advantages have the luxury to research our diet. We can find out what “organic” and “free range” mean — and what they don’t. We can be exposed to the case for milk only from grass-fed cows and against soy milk. And, above all, we can learn how high fructose corn syrup came to be so ubiquitous in processed foods and what a questionable product it is.
Let’s look back at Dr. Whelan’s op-ed. She continually makes reference to sugar. But the sweetening in Kellogg’s cereals — in most cereals produced by large corporations — is far more likely to be high fructose corn syrup than sugar. To Dr. Whelan, that seems to be unimportant. If you’ve read some of the books I’ve been writing about, you may feel differently.
In a slow news week, the Kellogg’s decision was a big deal to the press.
In an editorial, The New York Times praised Kellogg’s, calling this “one small move in the right direction.”
The Wall Street Journal — which has long endorsed Elizabeth Whelan’s work — ripped Kellogg’s: “Sweetened breakfast cereals aren’t the cause of obesity among children. They’ve been around for decades and are a source of nutrition for children who will find a way to sweeten plain corn flakes in any case.”
I’m not pushing a point-of-view; I don’t know enough. I am pushing the issue; I think it’s important, especially if you have kids in the house. The title of the Journal’s editorial? “Cereal Killer.” The Journal means to be ironic. But what if the joke is on those who go on eating industrial food when better science suggests it’s unhealthy?
Whatever our literary interests, I think we all need one more: food.
