A Pledge for Healthy Eating

Or as Patrick puts it:  Monica's Treatise on Healthy Eating

You know that phrase that used to be uttered around the playground when we were young – “When you point your finger at someone, you have 3 fingers pointing back at you”?  I can't help but apply this to a lot of the criticism being thrown at Paula Deen in the wake of her type 2 diabetes announcement earlier this year. 

Known for passionately promoting food laden with butter, sugar, mayonnaise, and other artery-clogging ingredients, now she's admitting that she was diagnosed with diabetes three years ago and kept silent about it.  Many are condemning her for continuing to promote unhealthy eating during this time, and others are angered by the fact that she timed her truth-telling to coincide with an endorsement deal for the drug she's been taking and with the start of her son's healthy cooking show, "Not My Mama's Meals." 

But is any of this really that surprising?  It’s as if we needed Paula Deen herself to tell us that the food she cooks is bad for us and can potentially lead to diabetes.  Or that she’s the first to benefit monetarily at something harmful to our health.  Or that she's the first person to change her ways only because their health condition forces them to.  I’m not trying to let her off the hook – it’s hard to support someone's change of heart when it has a clear financial motive behind it.  But rather than cast stones, we can definitely learn from her experience and realize that Paula Deen is not the problem with our society, but a product of it.   

Like many, I’ve never been a fan of Paula Deen’s cooking.  Her appeal is built upon a sort of sinful “We know it’s wrong but we do it anyway” approach to cooking, frequently featuring highly fattening foods that are euphoric going down, but feel like a heart-strangling punch to the gut later on.  Consider her restaurant’s "brunch burger" - a burger topped with cheese, bacon, and a fried egg and wedged between two Krispy Kreme donuts:

Source

Appalling?  Yes.  Unacceptable that anyone should eat this or offer it on their menu?  Yes.  But an isolated incident?  Sadly, no.  She’s not the first celebrity chef (or any chef for that matter) to feature butter, cream, and bacon prominently in their recipes.  She just happens to be notorious for it. 

But at least in her case, it’s an obvious, smack-you-upside-the-face kind of unhealthy, so when you sit down to this type of meal, you know very well the toll it’s going to take on your body.  But the reality is, there are a lot of chefs serving comparably unhealthy dishes that are not as upfront about it or are not being criticized in the same manner.

As the New York Times writer Frank Bruni states : “When Deen fries a chicken, many of us balk.  When the Manhattan chefs David Chang or Andrew Carmellini do, we grovel for reservations and swoon over the homey exhilaration of it all.  Her strips of bacon, skirting pancakes, represent heedless gluttony.  Chang’s dominoes of pork belly, swaddled in an Asian bun, signify high art.”  (And I would add cute cupcakeries to that statement as well.)

That said, consider all the chefs who prepare high-caloric food on TV and indulge in a few bites before the cameras turn off, leading us to believe this is how they eat on a daily basis when in real life they are all on strict, pervasively green, or juice cleansing diets.  (Giada De Laurentiis immediately comes to mind… there’s no way that tiny woman can eat all those desserts and pasta dishes on a regular basis and look the way she does.  For more on this, read this interesting article).  

Just like in Paula Deen’s case, unhealthy food is a business. Having just graduated from culinary school, where many classes felt like an education in how to utilize butter, cream, duck fat, and sugar in a new way, it’s pretty clear we were preparing for induction into an industry more concerned about sales than the rising cholesterol level of their customers. 

And let’s be honest, great-tasting foods sell.  So chefs are going to do everything they can to make sure a constant stream of customers are walking through their restaurant doors.  The problem is, this type of food is meant to be eaten in moderation (as in not on a regular basis).  But unfortunately, while restaurant-going was at one time reserved for special occasions, it is now not uncommon for people to eat out 3-4 times a week. 

So are restaurants culpable for the high incidence of obesity in our society?  I’d say just about as culpable as grocery stores are for selling butter.  I don’t think we can entirely blame restaurants for offering unhealthy dishes.  I think it’s ultimately up to us to be responsible for how we eat and to be aware of what we are consuming. We’re at a point now where we have a pretty good idea of what is good and not good for us (or our kids, but that’s a whole other blog post…).

At the same time, I do think it’s necessary that society as a whole also start acting more responsibly about health and start advocating for better eating options out there.  Again, I have to defer to Frank Bruni on this one:  “… we are too fat and must address that.  But getting Deen to unplug the waffle iron doesn’t strike to the core of the problem any more than posting fast-food calorie counts or taxing soft drinks do.  A great deal of American obesity is attributable to the dearth of healthy food that’s affordable and convenient in low- and even middle-income neighborhoods, and changing that requires a magnitude of public intervention and private munificence that are unlikely in such pinched times.” 

But I do think we are trying (very gradually) as a society to be healthier and more mindful of what we eat, and we need to continue to grow in this struggle.  Mark Bittman recently wrote that there are growing rates of people cooking at home.  And these days there are so many great blogs dedicated to our well-being - it's just a matter of making an effort to access them.  

Conveniently, this whole Paula Deen debacle coincides with my own pledge to eat healthier.  From this point forward I’m going to try to start being more mindful of what I eat and regularly share recipes on here as a resource for those who also want to start eating better.  I'm out to prove to myself and everyone else that there is an approach to healthy eating that doesn't require ingredients like butter to taste great but also doesn't require ridiculous substitutes or deprivation.  Hopefully others will join me in this endeavor to transcend the rising diabetes and obesity cases in our society and help make it so that wholesome eating is the norm, not the exception.  

oo,