“Learn to Live on Lentils…”

The philosopher Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, "If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils."

Diogenes replied, "Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king."

***********************
A few years ago, I saw perhaps the most staggeringly condescending remark ever on the topic of eating healthy. It was a comment under an article in the New York Times entitled "A High Price for Healthy Food"--one of those typical media articles supporting the ugly, offensive and entirely false narrative that healthy food has to be expensive.

The article opened with the phrase "Healthy eating really does cost more" and went downhill from there, citing a hilariously unrigorous cost-per-calorie study performed by "researchers" who concluded, somehow, that healthy eating therefore must cost a lot more than unhealthy eating.

Now, looking at food costs in cost-per-calorie terms is dumb and deeply misleading, and if you're interested you can read more about why here. But sadly, because this study supported the "healthy food costs too much" narrative that's so strangely popular throughout our media, the New York Times ran an article about it.

But here's where it got interesting. The thing is, regular readers are often a lot smarter than journalists and "researchers"--particularly innumerate journalists and researchers. And readers began leaving comments with helpful solutions contradicting the article's false narrative that healthy food costs more. They began offering ideas for many different kinds of nutritious yet inexpensive foods--exactly the kinds of foods the article author and the study researchers seemed to think didn't exist.

One of the more popular examples given of a healthy, nutritious, yet inexpensive food was--you guessed it--lentils. Nutritious, satisfying, delicious, and laughably cheap lentils.

Somehow, the very idea of the existence of lentils angered the author of this article, Tara Parker-Pope, causing her to make the following statement in the comments:

"The solution that people live on lentils which are healthful and affordable is just ridiculous to me. Nobody wants to live like that." *

This is why the beautiful little story above about Diogenes and Aristippus--and lentils--has both literal and metaphorical meaning to me.

Isn't it interesting, in the modern era, how we are buried with study after study from SCIENCE!!! telling us what and what not to eat, telling us which foods cost too much and which foods don't cost enough--when the ancients had already figured everything out for us? We just had to stop listening to twisted, false narratives like "healthy eating costs more" and instead embrace a far more empowering and far more effective narrative: that healthy food does not have to cost more--in fact, healthy, delicious and nutritious food can quite often be laughably cheap and easy to prepare.

This is why lentils, for me, are a metaphor for solution-minded thinking, and for the rejection of false narratives.

In stark, stark contrast, the "healthy eating costs more" narrative literally hurts people. It teaches that low cost and high nutrition somehow must be mutually exclusive. It kills off solutions. It blinds people to all kinds of healthy and incredibly inexpensive meals, like the many healthy, laughably cheap recipes you can find right here at Casual Kitchen. And yet for some inexplicable reason, this untrue and unethical narrative is wildly popular with "researchers," the media--and with journalists who make condescending remarks about lentils.

A lie told often enough becomes the truth. "Healthy eating really does cost more" is one of those lies. Don't support it and don't spread it.

Readers, what do you think?


Read Next: Cooking Up Advantages Out of Disadvantages


And: Bonus Reading!
1) Does Healthy Eating Really Cost Too Much? A Blogger Roundtable

2) Avoiding the Yes, But Vortex

3) The "It's Too Expensive to Eat Healthy Food" Debate

4) Dumb and Dumber: The Flaws of Measuring Food Costs Using Cost Per Nutrient and Cost Per Calorie

5) Guess What? We Spend Less Than Ever on Food


[*] The Times has since made it somewhat difficult to find this specific comment. You have to dig around a bit for it, but it is there. However, note: if you’re not a Times digital subscriber, each time you click for a new page of comments under this single article, it counts as an extra "free article" toward your monthly quota of ten free Times articles. Pretty lame if you ask me.



How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Create Your Own Food Myths for Fun and Profit

One more post on food myths. Sometimes, people and organizations can gain--and even profit--from food myths. And once in a while you’ll find organizations that profit by making up their very own myths.

Which brings us to the two worst examples I've seen of a someone creating and profiting from food myths. Coincidentally (or not), both examples come from the same organization: The Center for Science in the Public Interest.

The CSPI is an attention-hungry watchdog group with the laudable mission of protecting and advocating for consumers. The organization's thirst for media attention, however, led to the publication of their infamous Ten Riskiest Foods report a few years ago, giving us our first example of a profitable myth: the myth of the "epidemic" of food poisoning.

I encourage readers to take a moment to look at my fisking of the Ten Riskiest Foods report. Under the guise of warning us of a seemingly serious health risk, the CSPI did a few things:

1) It encouraged consumers to avoid several perfectly safe and healthy foods because of massively exaggerated fears of food poisoning.

2) By manufacturing a health scare it drew attention and resources away from real health policy issues.

3) The CSPI itself gained an enormous amount of media attention, thanks in large part due to its own exaggerations and sensationalism.

Points 1 and 2 could be dangerous, point 3 is merely self-serving. But if we take all three points together, we severely stretch the boundaries of public health ethics.

On one level, the Ten Riskiest Foods report was well-played. There's a lot going on in the world, and people can only give their attention to a fraction of the things happening out there. "Food poisoning by ice cream" is the kind of thing that grabs readers, which is why so many people saw and heard media reports on this study. And of course nobody--certainly not the journalists repeating the myths--bothered to break out a calculator to figure out that the total number of cases cited in the report worked out to less than a rounding error.

Interestingly, despite an incredibly low incidence rate, we all seem to have a vague sense that food poisoning is a serious and growing problem. And yet, like airline crashes, we only hear about every single event because they are so rare. Which further serves to illustrate the power of myths.

The result? The CSPI gets the publicity, and we get a myth. A myth that greatly misleads us about the actual risks we face in life. This is one of the many reasons why in the modern era, when life is the safest it has ever been, we all feel more fearful than ever.

But perhaps an even worse example of CSPI mythmaking came long before the Ten Riskiest Foods report was a even glint in this organization's eye. This example dates all the way back to the 1980s, when the CSPI got media attention by pushing for increased use of transfats. Yes, increased.  That was until it changed its own myth--and got still more media attention--by later advocating against them. This excellent article from the Media Research Center summarizes the story here.

Granted, an organization is free to change its mind, and many nutrition scientists did just that about transfats: they decided they were a lot less healthy then they thought before.

What's glaring here is how the CSPI benefited from holding both positions without ever having to own up to being wrong. They voted for transfats before they voted against them!

Perhaps it isn't quite fair to single out the CSPI. It's far from the only group out there standing to gain from mythmaking. Plenty of food pundits employ the "healthy food has to be expensive" myth to rationalize all sorts of subsidies, food bans and politically imposed food policies. Even New Jersey's own Cory Booker, a perfectly good guy, helped spread that myth--admittedly inadvertently--when he did his incompetently executed food stamp challenge. Booker got positive media coverage and political credit for showing empathy with the poor. The rest of us got more "proof" that it costs a lot to eat healthy.

But do you want to know who is the quintessential exemplar, right now, of someone who gains from food myths? The Food Babe--with her downright freakish talent for manufacturing phony health scare myths on a near-weekly basis.

One final thought: A good myth is hard to debunk. It can take years. Think of when a newspaper runs something inaccurate, and then later runs a correction. The original story usually runs on the front page, where everybody sees it. The correction runs in tiny print on page A-29, where nobody sees it.

Remember these two examples from the CSPI. They got the publicity, the donations, and the reputational benefit of (supposedly) fighting for the consumer. We got stuck with conflicting information and still more myths. Heads they win, tails we lose.

Readers, is it ethical for advocacy groups to bend the truth to gain attention for their cause--even if it's ostensibly a good cause? What do you think?


Read Next: The Tragic Tale of Peat Village: A Natural Resource Fable


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Food Myths

Over at Jayson Lusk's blog, this post about a hard-to-kill food myth about iron in spinach got me thinking about the various myths we hold about food, fitness and health, and how difficult it can be for the truth to win out over lies.

Perhaps this is because some food myths have more than just one lie protecting them. With the "spinach is an excellent source of iron" myth, there are--believe it or not--multiple nested lies. Here's the first:

The myth from the 1930s that spinach is a rich source of iron was due to misleading information in the original publication: a malpositioned decimal point gave a 10-fold overestimate of iron content [Hamblin, 1981]. Once a paper with misleading information has been published, it is almost impossible to stop citation. (pp. 448–449, emphasis added) [1]

How is this a lie? Because the story about the misplaced decimal point isn't true. There never was any such decimal point error made! And yet through a series of unusual coincidences, this "falsehood about a falsehood" was repeatedly cited in both academic journals and general media reports.

It gets worse. Dr. Terry Hamblin, the accidental architect of our first myth, also perpetuated yet another myth--one that's found its way into our modern popular culture: that "Popeye was created in order to promote spinach for its iron content." Here's the real truth:

According to Sutton (2010a: 13–14), Elzie Crisler Segar had an entirely different nutrient, vitamin A, in mind when he invented Popeye and contributed to a massive increase in spinach consumption in the United States during the 1930s.

Today, of course, we know why spinach is a poor source of iron, and it's not because spinach doesn't contain any. It does! Rather, it's because the human digestive system simply cannot absorb the iron present in spinach. [2]

So, what we have here is a myth inside a myth, inside another myth--which brings us, in a roundabout way, to the truth. Sort of.

This isn't to criticize Dr. Hamblin, who, from what I've read about him, strikes me as a genuinely good guy who gladly and sincerely owns up to his errors.

Nevertheless, the spinach myth offers us an intriguing example where scientists weren't just wrong: they were wrong about how they were wrong. And then wrong about how they were wrong about being wrong. And after multiple academic journals as well as the general media propagate this myth into the collective consciousness of, well, everyone, it becomes nearly impossible to set things right.

Which brings up a logical question: what other myths have we been fed? Sure, the myths about spinach turned out to be more or less harmless, but it's easy to think up several food and health myths that were once widely considered "true" but are now thoroughly debunked--and with far from harmless outcomes. Some examples:

* Our "food pyramid" should be built on mostly grains and carbs.
* Dietary cholesterol is a major driver of blood serum cholesterol.
* Eggs are bad for you.
* Vaccines cause autism.
* Margarine is better for you than butter. [3]

I can add to this several politicized food myths that I've sought to help debunk myself here at Casual Kitchen. For example, the myth that there's logic to banning large sodas. That we're running out of food. That locavorism is good for the environment. That "never from concentrate" orange juices are natural and not heavily processed. That vegetarians are Nazis looking to take away your meat. And so on. Finally, Casual Kitchen's core principles are based on debunking the ludicrous and dangerous myth that healthy food has to be expensive.

One final thought: These are just the myths we now know are myths. What other things do we currently "know" to be true now that haven't yet been debunked? What things do we confidently assume today that just haven't yet been outed as myths? Come back in twenty years and I'm guessing you'll have a list several times as long as the one above.

Think about that for a moment or two and tell me that's not incredibly sobering.

Readers, what do you think? I want to know.


Footnotes:
1) The academic paper that’s the source of the italicized quotes above is entertaining, and very much worth reading in its entirety. I'd like to thank Jayson Lusk for pointing me to a sobering look inside the world of academic studies and how they often--inadvertantly or otherwise--propagate misinformation.

2) Don't take this to mean you have to stop eating spinach! You may not get much iron, but you can get many other nutrients from it. In fact my own eye doctor wife recommends spinach (as well as other leafy greens like kale, collard greens or swiss chard) to her patients for good long-term eye health.

3) The butter/margarine myth is a fascinating special case. It started out as "butter is better for you than margarine"--a true statement that was later debunked, and then still later, undebunked.


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.