If Jeannie Marshall were in charge, we’d all be eating like the Italians. Or at least, like the Italians used to eat.
As
a new mother in Italy, Marshall was ready to embrace a culture that,
she believed, would allow her to raise a child more healthfully than she
could have back home in Canada, where fast food and packaged snacks
reign over fresh ingredients and home cooking. She still believes that,
but she’s also seen how that “traditional” culture is rapidly
disappearing, as the food industry continues to take over the world.
The
food industry doesn’t need to be fixed, Marshall decided — it needs to
be abandoned. In its place, she says, we need a new culture: one that
pays less attention to nutrition science and puts a premium on real food
instead. Her book,
, which hits U.S. shelves in January, makes a compelling case for how that can be done.
My son, Nico, is almost 9
now, but when he was first born, I hadn’t really been around children
that much. All of the things that I had to call upon were from my own
experience growing up in Canada, where there were foods for children.
When he started eating solid foods he would be picky about things, and
I’d think, “Well, certainly our culture has made something for this
problem, I’ll just go to the supermarket and look for it.”
I think
I expected that the problem was taken care of for me, that I could go
to the store and buy packages of macaroni in boxes and things like that
which were meant for children. I didn’t find them, and when I did, they
looked so ghastly that it made me stop and think. I started to look
around and I realized that the Italians didn’t do that.
So
from the beginning, the Italians you met were feeing their children
like little adults, and there wasn’t a separate class of food for
children?
Yeah, but it’s changing. I’m sure if I went to a
baby group right now, even in these few years that have intervened, it
would be quite different. But I used to feel this expectation that you
would just cook what you were going to be making for your family and you
would prepare it in such a way that the baby could eat it, by pureeing
it and adding the nice, healthy broth – that you’d also made – to go
with it. Once I started doing it, I realized it’s not hard. In fact,
it’s easier than going out and trying to stock up on all these products
that you have to carry around with you. To actually just feed the child
the same thing you’re eating is so much easier.
Would you say your son’s embraced most of that? Is he less picky than other kids?
He
had some pickiness, for sure, and he still does. It’s not like it’s
perfect. Sometimes when friends have read the book, they come over and
try to find the food he won’t eat, just to show me up. And it’s not hard
to do if you go outside of Italian culture. But within Italian culture,
it’s kind of interesting to me that he will eat just about anything.
That includes things that in North American culture children don’t eat.
He loves anchovies, he loves octopus, he actually wants to eat snails.
At
the same time, we went to an Indian restaurant. He was quite excited by
the different culture and the smells and the music. But he would only
eat plain rice and drink a mango lassi. So he’s very much into Italian
food and that’s a very broad category. But I think we’ll have to wait
until he is a teenager to really get him to explore other cultures and
their foods as well.
You cite a lot of interesting
research about how children start to develop their culture’s taste
through breast milk, and even earlier in the womb. Is there a certain
point where their culture’s food become ingrained, after which it might
be too late to embrace new things?
It’s hard, because
here I think kids are getting much more of a mixture than they would
have had in the past. I haven’t looked at the recent statistics, but
even in Italy, breast-feeding was losing favor for a while. Now it seems
to be becoming more accepted again. That’s pretty essential to
introducing your child to some of the flavors that they’ll have later
on.
Then I think the next step that’s really important is
introducing solid foods when they’re around six months old. What we were
doing was looking for the packages and the jars of food, and what
Italian women were doing was pureeing dinner and making the broth. That
was a huge step in getting children to learn and understand the taste of
their own culture.
But really once their toddlers are walking around, there are a lot more foods that are available to them now. There are these horrible snack cakes that are everywhere – Mulino Bianco.
The E.U. recently shook their finger at them because of a recent ad
they had, where one child says to another, “I don’t eat it because it’s
good, I eat it because it’s healthy.” All they are is white flour and
sugar; there’s nothing healthy in them. Even a lot of my friends will
argue with me, saying “They’re healthy, they’re fine.”
That’s a strange interpretation of “healthy.”
I
think they argue that because they look sort of like the sweets
Italians might make in their homes. But what they are not realizing is
that when you make sweets in your home, you might eat them once a week.
Kids are eating these things several times a day — morning snack,
afternoon snack, they’re just carrying these things around. So that’s
probably introducing a lot more sugar into the diet of children here
than they would’ve had 20 or 30 years ago.
Sometimes Italians will
say something is healthy when it isn’t, when it’s just traditional. I
think that is an interesting confusion that they make. Because for the
most part, their traditional food is healthy. Even having that slice of
cake at the end of the meal on the weekend is healthy, because you had
it at the end of the meal and it makes you happy and you’re eating it
with your family. I think that probably plays a role in their health
right along with the green vegetables and all of those other things. So
sometimes I think it’s not just the individual food, it’s the way the
whole thing works together.
It’s funny, though, because we get
obsessed with individual foods – I certainly do myself. Now I’m noticing
that a lot of my Italian friends are talking about what vitamins are in
certain vegetables when I swear three years ago they had no idea. They
just knew that you eat all these foods; it’s part of their culture and
their culture, for the most part, is healthy.
And what do we know
about what’s healthy anyway? The next study that comes out will probably
tell you that kale isn’t good for you.
You make a pretty
strong argument that the science of nutrition and food labels and all of
that are hurting more than they’re helping, because they’re causing
people to focus on the wrong aspects of food.
I think
that that is true. A few nutritionists in Canada got in touch with me
and told me they agreed with me, and I was really surprised. I met a
woman for lunch who was coming to Rome, and she felt the same way, that
the whole science of nutrition is still very new and sensitive in many
ways. But we take those studies and we think that they are sometimes
more meaningful than they really are. Sometimes the industry distorts
the studies or will use them to promote some of their own products. So I
think we just get so confused. And to me, it just seems like, let’s not
pay quite so much attention to it, because it
is confusing.
And it detracts from the pleasure that you get from eating as well. If
all you are thinking about is the nutritive quality of the food, it’s
not very pleasurable.
That might explain why protein bars sell.
Yeah,
I had visitors coming and they drove me crazy because they were just so
obsessed about bread and pasta — they couldn’t believe that people ate
bread and pasta here. And the olive oil: everything is finished off with
a nice little dollop of lovely, fresh olive oil. I have a tiny
sister-in-law who watches her weight carefully, and she was just
horrified by that. She thought it’s not good for you, or it’s too much
fat and I said, “Just go with the flow.”
It’s easy to see
how some of that culture is being lost when you’re looking at a place
like Italy, because there is a strong, traditional diet there. What
would a return to a traditional diet look like in Canada or the U.S.?
In
some ways, looking at Italy has helped me to imagine that, because it’s
not so strange. If I were in India it might be a little bit different,
because there are things that are not so readily available. We need to
just step back from these discussions we’ve been having about how to fix
our food problems, how to feed our children, and just look at the
problem from a distance, look at it in other cultures. I tried to help
the reader step out of their culture and see that what is normal for you
isn’t normal in other places. Once we feel unsettled about these
things, it kind of opens us up — we can see what works in other places,
and see what works for us, and we can try to adapt it.
I think
we’re getting ahead of ourselves a little bit, because we’re trying to
create a food culture when we don’t completely understand what’s wrong
with the one that we’ve got. The devil is trying to reform the food
industry and I think, “Just stop worrying about what they’re putting in
the food. Just don’t buy it.” I guess that’s easier for me to say
because there isn’t as much of it here in Italy. But if you start to do
that, if you’re a family and you decide you’re not going to go to fast
food restaurants and you’re not going to buy packaged foods, you can
influence other people as well. So you might be able to create a little
biti of a food culture in your own sphere.
I know that’s hard —
even when we go back to Canada for short visits it’s hard to avoid these
things, partly because they are exciting and new for my son and also
just because it’s normal. It’s so hard to step out of what you’re used
to and see that it’s not normal somewhere else. Maybe we could make it
not normal here. That’s partly what has to happen. Even the complex
problem, if we break it down we can see that some of the essential steps
are within our grasp. We can decide, okay, there are certain things
we’re just going to eliminate. Stop worrying about the food industry,
stop worrying about fast food. Just don’t eat it. Cook more.
Once
you start to do it, it becomes easier and then you can start looking at
the harder things that we can’t change as individuals. Collectively, we
can start to work to ask our governments to think about our best
interests and our health rather than only profits and the interests of
business.
I think our food culture could look like Italy’s
culture. I don’t know why it couldn’t, really. It’s just that we have to
strip away all of these other expectations and all of these other ideas
of normal and redefine that first. Then we can start to deal with the
foods we’ve got. We need to start creating some basic foods we all share
that we all agree are good and work from there.
A
lot of things you’re advocating for would be difficult or impossible
for everyone to carry out. Having the time and money to shop organic, to
grow your own food, to cook for your family every night. Is that really
something that you think could happen on a large scale, for people with
fewer resources than you?
Well, you know I think it
could be, but I think, again, it’s this big problem with lots of
tentacles. You have start untangling some of these issues. What I think
is really hard is when parents have three children and you have to give
them all breakfast in the morning. Then you have to pack their snacks.
Then you have to pack their lunch. You do all that stuff and then when
they get home you have to make their dinner. It does seem impossible.
And
I have to say we are really lucky in Italy right now because I don’t
have to do any of this. If only we could create these kinds of systems
in the United States and Canada. I make my son’s breakfast in the
morning, but then he goes to school, and the parents in his class agreed
to do a communal snack, where each family takes responsibility for the
snack for two weeks. Lots of families have been bringing in things that
are more traditionally Italian, like frittata. When it was our turn we
brought in cheeses, some prosciutto, some bread and some olive oil. We
brought some raw nuts, too — kids don’t have nut allergies here like you
have in America.
Right, at a lot of schools here you’re not allowed to bring in homemade food because of all the allergies.
Isn’t
it incredible? It’s just the opposite of what this is. But anyway, for
two weeks we had to do it and it was fun for the two weeks. Now it’s
over for the whole year; I don’t have to make another snack. Then he has
a two-course lunch at school. For the most part it’s easier for the
cooks, because they only make one meal, and it’s easier for the kids,
because they just sit together and they eat. They don’t have the
expectation that they can choose something else. It’s just never been
offered to them. It’s harder to change kids who are used to having the
choice, but I think once you get that going, the next generation won’t
have the same expectations. And that’s great.
So
they’ve eaten this great meal, and by the time it’s dinner usually I
just cut up some vegetables Nico can eat while I’m cooking. But it
doesn’t feel quite so onerous to make dinner, because I know he’s eaten
well all day and I haven’t had to do most of it.
You
know, we talk about all the pressure that working families have to
face, and particularly working mothers, and I think this a huge one. I
am so lucky that I don’t have to deal with it. Why isn’t this system
used everywhere? It’s so good for families, and it’s so good for
children. In this case, they use all organic produce sourced from four
different farms – the cost difference wasn’t very much. But you don’t have to have organic. Organic’s better, but as long as you have fresh food, it’s great.
It
does take a communal effort; you can’t do it completely on your own.
I’m not saying that I expect everyone to cook every single meal. But to
create cultures where kids can have food that has been cooked for them
is just as good. If we pay attention to culture, and not just to food, I
think we may be able to change the system, and fix the problems that we
have now.
(Credit: Ahturner via Shutterstock)
Lindsay Abrams is an assistant editor at Salon, focusing on
all things sustainable. Follow her on Twitter @readingirl, email
labrams@salon.com.
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