| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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here at the academy Thought for Food We know that some foods are good for us, others bad. But what informs our attitudes about different foods and our choices of what to eat? In February, the Academy's sixth Rietz Food Symposium explored this question under the theme "Food, Health, and Healing." The day-long event featured lectures that spanned an array of cultures and foods from the origin of Homo to the present. Afterward, more than two dozen local chefs and food producers offered tastes of their recipes, from pedestrian PowerBars to sublime-sounding Encounter with the Sea Goddess Herbal Soup. The symposium honors Carl Austin Rietz, an inventor and entrepreneur who had a passion for food and a fascination with how various cultures prepare and consume it. Previous symposia covered West Coast seafood, the history of bread, spring food and festivals, and biotechnology and the future of food. The first symposium, in 1988, was on foods of the Americas and resulted in the book Chilies to Chocolate, published by the University of Arizona Press. The Academy houses Rietz's collection of about 2,000 historical artifacts for food preparation, storage, and serving as well as other cultural objects. Carl Rietz was dedicated to educating people about food, and the Rietz Food Technology Foundation that he established provides internships for students to study portions of the Rietz collection and publish their findings on the Academy's web site. Recent intern Karla Wesley studied Peruvian textiles, and current interns Elizabeth Winstead and Anna Gonzalez-Martingale work with, respectively, Coptic textiles and Persian ceramic bowls. At the recent symposium, University of Pennsylvania psychologist Paul Rozin suggested that humans, like cockroachs and rats, are generalists who divide the world into edible and inedible parts. We also share the ability with our primate relatives to eat a wide array of foods, so the origin of human omnivory extends as far back as 65 million years. But we invest what we eat with meaning beyond its nutritive value to obtain cultural sustenence. "Think about putting things into your body," said Rozin. "That's not a minor matter." Several speakers emphasized how food selection and preparation can enhance a sense of cultural identity or general well-being. For instance, the people of Isan in northeast Thailand prefer sticky rice to what they call "ordinary rice." Sticky rice is steamed and stored in individual or family baskets and serves as the centerpiece of a meal, at which everyone dips kneaded chunks of rice into communal bowls of sour, salty, and spicy fare. "The best way to enjoy radiant health is to slowly explore the energetics of various foods," said Nam Singh, who advised the audience to "have a willing tongue and an open mind." Singh personified the symposium's multicultural nature; an Ethiopian Sikh born in the United States and raised in Taiwan, he is a chef and healer who has mastered ancient Chinese herbal medicine and dietary therapy. Dietary therapy holds that the proper combination of tonic and energetic foods can restore balance or prevent illness to body and mind. Singh advised that food "should be enjoyable, but it shouldn't be too exciting." Buddhist monks, he claimed, choose to eat tofu not only for its bounty of calcium and protein but to stifle their libidos. "If you want to calm down your sex life, eat lots of tofu," said Singh, perhaps unaware that Now and Zen Bistro planned to serve Tofu Bourguignon at the post-talk tasting. Physical anthropologist Barry Bogin, of the University of Michigan, showed that we now produce foods that cost us much more energy to process, package, and store than we obtain from eating them--not a recipe for sustainable society. The culinary culprits include chocolate, instant coffee, boxed cereals, and sugars. In contrast, foods from which we derive more than we put into them include baked goods, canned fruits or vegetables, milk, and ice cream. Further caution came from nutritionist Marion Nestle, of New York University, who said that the United States simply produces too much food. That surplus creates a competitive industry around eating, approaching $800 billion in annual sales. Last year alone, 23,000 new food products--mostly condiments and candies--jostled for space on supermarket shelves. The average man eats about 2,500 calories a day, the average woman eats 2,000, but the United States produces 3,700 calories of food per person every day. "No matter how fat we're getting," said Nestle, "there's only a certain amount of calories we can consume." And with so much food close to hand, we do tend to get fat. According to Bogin, the average American's weight and fat level has grown in the past decade, but paradoxically our food is safer and better for us than at any time in history. Though appetite may be depressed by angst when we try to quantify every calorie passing our lips, we've still made some progress in the past 150 years. Said Radcliffe College historian Barbara Haber, in those days, "the typical American diet consisted of corn, pork, molasses, potatoes cooked in lard, and lots of whiskey." Blake Edgar is an Associate Editor of California Wild. |
Summer 1998
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