Worth a look with a critical eye

If you're reading this blog, you are probably trying to steer away from processed "food" and toward natural, unprocessed fuel. In a sense, that's the direction Nina Planck takes with her book, Real Food: What to Eat and Why.

Planck, who started the first farmer's market in London, talks about her childhood on a sort of Utopian farm, where the family produced most of its food and sold the rest. Planck talks about going out into the field and picking the exact vegetables she wanted as part of the family dinner. Wouldn't that be nice? But for most of us, that is an impossibility. Picking up veggies for dinner means staring down mounds of questionably fresh vegetables under the fluorescent lights of our local supermarkets. Let jealousy ensue.

And while Planck does a great job of preaching the values of fresh, seasonal fruits and vegetables for all — even those of us miles away from the nearest farm — she gets a bit out there with her views on fattening traditional foods like butter, cream, whole milk and eggs. While worth reading if not just for a different point of view, her ideas on these foods fly in the face of conventional wisdom.

Planck, who doesn't have a degree in an medical or science field, says that because we've eaten these fattening foods for hundreds of years, it's okay to have them in abundance. She says it's GOOD for you to be heavy on the butter and cream. Your body wants these foods, it's the processed foods of today that are bad. Go for it, and have lots!

That's kind of like how in the 1990s, as fat-free foods became all the rage, it became okay to eat an entire box of Snackwells cookies. Remember that? Or when Atkins was the go-to diet and suddenly apples and carrots were the enemy.

I agree whole-heartily with Planck that the aisles and aisles of processed foods at our local stores are making us ill beyond belief. The diseases of modern America are decidedly food-related, for sure. And many doctors agree with that theory as well. I'm not about to throw away their opinions on high-fat traditional foods just because I like this woman's line on fruits and vegetables.

Moderation friends, even for these traditional foods. And if you take away anything from this book, it's that processed foods are poor, and natural foods are rich, real fuel — even if you have to harvest them under fluorescent lights.