B O O K   R E V I E W

Let Food Be Thy Medicine

Eating On The Wild Side

Jo Robinson
407 pages; $27.00
Little, Brown & Co.

Two noted American excuses are “Everybody’s Doing It” and the diet book. In the country with the world’s most fads and the world’s most food, there are two certainties–fads are easy to start and diet books are easy to sell.

Nutritionists today who are not determined to get fat on easy money diet book royalties have done a hail mary around spinning yarns out of food theories and now basically repeat what most of our great grandmothers said, “if you eat too much of that your goin’ to get fat.”

Jo Robinson, in Eating On The Wild Side, goes well beyond that. No out to the fringes of common sense cockamamie schemes to eat more, weigh less, get healthy and have plenty of cocktail party food theories to put everyone to sleep with, but rather a mix of sound basics about food and a few nutrition history nuggets that can make your mind’s jaw drop. Robinson brings scientific data to great grandmother’s food aphorisms.

This book is not about losing weight or dieting, but it is about new food science, health, disease and nutrition. Part of the nutrition problem for Robinson is finding it. If the so-called “healthy” foods in the supermarkets, fruits and vegetables, are not all that healthy, what do you do?
Robinson has researched the nutritional value of wild foods and some cultivated foods that have remained more like their wild ancestors and found varieties of foods worth eating. She also writes about food preparation techniques that preserve the nutritional value and flavor of these foods.

When European explorers first arrived in the Americas they found tall healthy clear skinned athletic native Americans. The short, disease ridden, plague scared and half starved Europeans were in awe.

Eating On The Wild Side compares the foods available in supermarkets today with what our ancestors likely picked in the wild and or grew back to the early years of agriculture. These early plants were more healthful, well adapted, abundant and fundamentally more nutritious.

Robinson is not a scientist and fortunately she doesn’t write like one. What she writes in very fluid, clear and simple language is backed up by a 26 page section of scientific references. She writes that she gleaned the information in the book from over 1,000 scientific papers and documents. Robinson focuses on foods with nutrients that build resistance to disease. Scientific research in the last decade has shown that phytonutrients and other elements in some plants exist to protect those plants from disease and insects. When we eat them they protect us from many common diseases, from obesity to cancer.

For centuries farmers experimented with cross breeding plants for various characteristics. Modern plant genetics over the last 150 years or so made more changes. The inseparable marriage of modern industrial farming and the supermarket supply system has brought on the demise of nutrition in many fruits and vegetables. Breeding and treating foods for this industrial system has produced many tasteless substitutes that lack enough nutritional value t support good health.

These foods have been bred to grow uniformly, ripen after harvest, ship well over long distances, look good in the store and last long on the shelf, but do little to help us do the same.

Eating On The Wild Side shines a light on an area of what we all do -eat- and raises questions for us all, healthy or not, thin or not, of means or not. In that glaring light a rose is a rose is not necessarily a rose in the modern super market. Foods bred and raised for shipability, shelf life have lost things along the way, the things that made them foods. Hippocrate’s famous saying “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food” describes the premise of this book. While this is still possible it’s a lot more difficult in the age of Pop Tarts and Illini Xtra-Sweet corn.

This book explains why your kids won’t eat that attractive shiny red supermarket apple. Turns out they’re right to reject it. It’s tasteless, mushy, has the texture of wet cardboard and almost no nutrients. Based on their low nutritional and disease resistance value, fast food chain offerings are the most expensive food on the planet.

Avoiding a daunting wall of data Robinson selects a few foods in each chapter for facts and tips. This is a guide-book, not a comprehensive desk reference. She focuses on a few factors key to making each food valuable. Her presentation style is easy and breezy. There is no preaching, health threat claims, no science mountains to climb. We’re talking about food here, enjoy!
One chapter, as an example, is focused on apples - different varieties, qualities, benefits, best parts to eat, preparation and cooking.

Robinson’s writes we have to shop for and buy food, so why not get the food that keeps us healthy, it doesn’t cost any more. It’s pretty clear we are not all going back into the forest to gather wild phytonutrient rich whatevers. Robinson suggests being more selective in the supermarket. Depending on where you live that may also mean being more selective about what supermarket your in. Many of these plants can be grown in the back yard.

Robinson spends a lot of time with the phytonutrients in plants that fuel our body’s ability to resist disease. The fact that phytonutrients are believed to play a role in checking cancer, among other diseases, has given them a central place in this book.

There are a few token recipes in the book that the marketing department probably insisted on. More than a cookbook, Eating On The Wild Side can serve as a reference book. Robinson provides a varied range of information on each food she describes. For example, two stone fruits, same price and they look similar. One tastes great, is loaded with antioxidants, phytonutrients and other health benefits and the other has none of these characteristics, except it may look better.

Whether you spend your lunch time plucking peeled baby carrots out of little a recycled paper bag, while sitting barefoot on the grass gazing out over the company pond or force feeding yourself one of Big Chucky’s 3/4 pounder triple cheeseburgers, nasal gasping while eating in your car in the parking lot because Chucky won’t let you smoke inside any more, Eating On The Wild Side has enough about what, how and why our race has been eating what it has been eating for at least the last 10,000 years to interest both readers. It will also explain why both of you could have made a better choice for what to ate for lunch.

We all eat and we’re all getting less for the effort today. Meanwhile Big Ag, Big Med and Big Pharma are burping all the way to the bank. This book offers a wake up call that is worth reading for the introduction alone.

Eating On The Wild Side is a book for those interested in food for more than calories and 3 minute recipes. It is for readers who like food, want to know what really good food is and why. It’s for those who want to get the responsibility for their health into their own hands and somehow believe all this does not have to be drudgery. For foodies? Beyond foodies.