100 Million Years of Food (26 page)

I have lunch with a young family in one Cretan village. The father is a truck driver and busy that afternoon. The mother, pale and pretty, eyes darting nervously behind her spectacles, does her best to look after her three children, two boys and a girl. Lena serves us a lovely meal of slow-cooked goat, potatoes fried in olive oil, yogurt, and a salad bathed in olive oil. There is a telephone call; Lena goes out, waits for a school bus, collects her daughter, then holds her hand as cars careen by in either direction before they can cross the street back to their modern, spacious house. One of the boys gulps down his meal so that he can get to the part that he really wants to eat, the sweets. The other boy is extremely hyperactive and races outside as the mother calls to him to get inside and eat lunch. The girl is quiet and chubby and wears glasses.

“I want her to lose weight,” the mother says wistfully. After lunch, all three children sit down to watch TV; first one show, then another. Lena is prediabetic. I ask her how much exercise she does every day.

“I have no time for exercise,” she answers.

Given the glorious surroundings and the mild, sunny climate, I am surprised at first, but upon reflection, I realize it is the same answer that any of my friends with kids might give in California, which has a mild, dry climate like Crete's. When Lena drives me to the village, I suggest that we walk instead. She seems puzzled, then grateful for the chance to exercise—but it is less than a five-minute walk.

As a counterpoint to Crete, consider the Greek island of Hydra, situated about sixty-two miles southwest of Athens. Hydra has been a magnet for writers, artists, and musicians; Leonard Cohen was productive during his frequent stays there. Due to the close proximity of the hills and the steep terrain, the island's roads have never been favorable to motorized vehicles. Donkeys and getting about on foot are the best forms of transport here. In 1991, the Piraeus prefecture government formalized the status of Hydra as a car-free haven. The island now pulls in droves of tourists, and it's easy to understand why, once you wander along the maze of lanes, with nothing to overtake you except for plodding donkeys, no noise to disturb your peace except for church bells and cats. Hydra is scaled to human walking distances and speed. Complete the picture with the Mediterranean weather, the glistening waters, the ready access to the company of other people, and the bounty of red wine, and you can begin to understand why artists found more inspiration here than in the rush of city life.

Ironically, ever since Greece slipped into a debt crisis, the quality of life has improved in places like Athens. When I first arrived in Athens four years ago, at the start of the recession, the air was the color of pea soup and the streets were choked with cars, motorbikes, taxis. Now the streets are quieter. My Athenian friend and I hike to the top of a hill overlooking Athens. We are able to see far across the valleys, the hills sparkling with whitewashed homes, the cargo boats plying the ocean. After the recession began, many people left the city, returning to the countryside to look for work. People in Athens started using their cars less; some people took up cycling. The air quality showed improvement in concentrations of notorious acid rain components like nitric oxide and sulfur dioxide, and the ozone layer was replenished, as vehicle emissions decreased (though a new tax on oil use caused people to switch to burning wood, causing smog levels to increase).

When Greece's economy finally revives, people will likely go back to their old ways, ditching the bicycles and driving cars again, polluting the air and erasing any health gains attained from the temporary flurry of increased exercise. The reason Hydra is a car-free paradise has little to do with farsighted city planning and much to do with being located on hilly terrain on a small island. This is not to say that it is impossible to ban cars; around the world, many communities, particularly in Europe, and particularly islands, forbid or greatly restrict car traffic to make their streets safe and quiet. Once this is achieved, the communities become attractive places to visit and live, and much better for the waistline.

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Another region renowned for its diet and health is Okinawa, an island group that is part of the Ryuku Arc in southern Japan. After reading about the miraculous food and health of the Okinawans, I am eager to see the tropical islands with my own eyes and to sample famous dishes such as bitter melon, the zero-calorie root extract known in English as konjac or devil's tongue, and pig's ears. At the first opportunity, I catch a plane from Sapporo to Naha, the Okinawa Prefecture capital. Back in 1949, Okinawans consumed on average 1,800 kcal per day, yet exertions from their mainly farming lifestyle burned up around 2,000 kcal per day, resulting in a deficit of energy and wiry proportions (the mean BMI was 21.2). Not only did they consume few calories; their protein intake of 1.4 ounces per day made up just one-tenth of their energy intake. Most of this protein came in the form of miso soup (fermented soybean paste mixed with dried fish, kelp, or shiitake mushroom stock) and tofu. Some scientists believe that the calorie-restricted traditional diet accounts for the robust health enjoyed by the Okinawans several decades later, when the average life span stretched out to 83.8 years, a full year longer than people in mainland Japan, already the world's longest-lived country, and five years longer than Americans. What made this achievement especially remarkable was that Okinawa was considered to be Japan's most impoverished, backward region.
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True to billing, the topaz waters around the islands are a delight to snorkel, though I stupidly skimp on sunscreen, hoping that the melanin in my skin will shield me from sunburn. Dream on! The skin on my back, after months of enduring blizzards and frost in Ottawa and Sapporo, blisters like pork fat on a grill. As for the remarkable age-defying Okinawan cuisine … I find instead sausages, Spam, eggs, and burgers, everything deep-fried, stomach-clingingly greasy. What happened?

In a plot twist the Marquis de Sade could not have devised with more cruel irony, the prefecture went from being Japan's healthiest to one of its sickliest in just a few decades. The “26 Shock,” as locals call it, saw male life expectancy nose-dive from fourth place among Japanese prefectures in 1995 to twenty-sixth place five years later.
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To sketch out the dietary debacle of Okinawa, we need to go back to April 1, 1945, the day when 50,000 troops drawn from the XXIV U.S. Army Corps and the III Marine Amphibious Corps landed. After the Battle of Okinawa, or the “Typhoon of Steel,” as locals refer to it, weary Okinawan survivors spent the first few months in internment camps, completely dependent upon American rations: Spam, biscuits, dried ice cream, powdered milk, Lucky Strikes, even military jackets for those who had no clothing left. The humaneness with which they were treated by the American occupiers was sometimes overshadowed by the brutal incompetence of the postwar administration of Okinawa. The islands became known as a dumping ground for unwanted bureaucrats (some twenty-two bureaucrats cycled through the top post during twenty-seven years of occupation) and unsavory soldiers. During one half-year crime spree in 1949, American soldiers perpetrated twenty-nine murders, eighteen rapes, sixteen robberies, and thirty-three assaults on the Okinawan populace.
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Okinawa became a Cold War pawn. The Japanese government and imperial household, eager to be rid of their American conquerors but also valuing the Americans as a counterbalance against the Russians, made secret overtures to hand the Okinawan islands over to the United States as a convenient location for American military bases. Okinawa fell under the trusteeship of the U.S. military (officially the U.S. Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands, or USCAR) and became a critical staging point for military conflicts in Asia. USCAR played up the cultural “Ryukyu” distinctiveness of the Okinawans (who have a different cultural history and language than Japanese mainlanders), hoping to drive a wedge between the locals and the Japanese, and built lavish cultural friendship centers around the islands. Okinawans quickly became hooked on beef, coffee, fast food, cars, and other staples of the occupiers, tossing aside the elders' mainstays of sweet potatoes and seaweed as famine food. As much as the Americans were an oppressive and much-hated presence on the island, native Okinawans couldn't help but adopt the American diet and lifestyle.

One night in Naha, after searching in vain for wholesome traditional Okinawan food, I end up in an open-air bar just off the main drag, where a barmaid shakes cocktails under a strip of electric blue lighting and brays at customers' jokes. I chat with a middle-aged Ryukyu man with puffy bags sagging under his eyes. “We don't like Japanese. We don't like Americans,” he mutters drunkenly.

Trapped in the crossfire of empires, politics, and war, Okinawans have much to be resentful about. This time around, however, the enemy is not a soldier in a uniform wielding a rifle or bayonet but the burger, fries, and soft drink wielded by a pimply teen in a different uniform, as well as the car used to get to the fast-food joint. The evil rotting the prefecture's health comes in the form of cheap and addictive processed foods, the availability of motorized vehicles, the convenience of one-stop shopping at a supermarket or mall instead of visiting scattered stores, the television that obliterates social life, and the steady smoking habits of its citizens. As a result, Okinawans have experienced a surge in lung cancer rates, type 2 diabetes, waistline size, and suicides, and the aforementioned drop in life expectancy. As one doctor in Okinawa has put it, this is the second Battle of Okinawa, fought behind cultural lines, with perhaps just as many lives at stake.
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This chapter has so far dealt with calorie intake and consumption. However, we should not neglect the topic of what happens to food as it exits our body (or refuses to exit, in the case of constipation sufferers, who comprise some 15 percent of people in North America
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). Throughout our evolutionary history, squatting was the normal way of having a bowel movement. Sitting toilets, which became common in Western nations from the nineteenth century onward, create an unnatural 90-degree bend for the passage of fecal material, and thus straining is required to expel feces. When we squat, this angle is straightened out completely, and therefore much less time (around one minute to complete a bowel movement from a squat versus two minutes on a sitting toilet, according to one study) and effort are required to expel feces. This might explain why constipation, hemorrhoids, and diverticulosis (a condition causing pouches to form in the colon) are much more common in Western populations than in Asia and Africa, where squat toilets are the norm.
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Online stores sell kits to convert sitting toilets to squat toilets, or you can build your own convertible squat/sitting toilet using online examples as guides. Be forewarned: If you didn't grow up using squat toilets, it takes practice to learn how to poop from a squat. At least one study has found that there may be increased risk of a stroke from shifting to a squat-style toilet, due to the effort involved in squatting and standing, so the elderly and people with high blood pressure should consult with a physician before switching to squat toilets.
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THE FUTURE OF FOOD

When the hype is greater than the science it burns all of us.

—
K
.
L
ANCE
G
OULD
, quoted in Shari Roan, “A Slow Change of Heart”

Most people today agree that something is wrong with our lifestyle habits, but there is sharp disagreement among both experts and the public on what needs to be done to restore our health. Are today's food and health activists on the right track or misguided? I met with three of the leading proponents of nutritional advice—Dr. Dean Ornish, a cardiologist and proponent of low-fat diets; Sally Fallon Morell, a booster of traditional American farm diets; and Mark Sisson, an ex-Ironman athlete and a blogger and writer on the Primal (Paleo) lifestyle—to see why smart people reached opposing perspectives on the optimal diet. I also visited food idealists in Australia, Canada, and the United States who, with courage and determination, are trying to change the way we live and eat or raise food, particularly foods that are more ecologically sustainable; happily, it turns out that eco-friendly foods are also more suitable for our nutritional needs. As we shall see in this chapter, however, these activists are being confronted with major hurdles due to the nature of capitalism and our fear of novel foods.

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Dean Ornish is a busy man. Besides teaching medicine at the prestigious medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Ornish was appointed by President Barack Obama to the White House Advisory Group on Prevention, Health Promotion, and Integrative and Public Health. He had previously been appointed to the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy by President Bill Clinton, and has served as “a physician consultant” to President Clinton since 1993 and to several members of Congress. Through his numerous books and articles, Dr. Ornish advises the public to eat less fat (preferably around 10 percent of their total daily calories), stay away from saturated fat and cholesterol, eat little meat, limit alcohol consumption, and eat a lot of whole grains. (In his other suggestions, such as eating vegetables and fruits, staying away from processed foods and sugar, spending time with loved ones, and exercising, Dr. Ornish is in agreement with most other food and health writers.) In several studies that he led, there is evidence that his low-fat/low-meat diets, in combination with moderate exercise, stress management, cessation of smoking, and group psychological therapy, lower the risk of heart disease without the use of lipid-reducing drugs.