Food Rules

I have written about Michael Pollan before and no doubt will do so again because food is a proper subject for a running blog and he is one of the best writers on the subject.

He is probably most famous for ‘In Defence of Food’ with its seven word piece of dietary advice: ‘eat food, mostly plants, not very much’. He also coined the phrase ‘edible foodlike substances’ for a lot of things that fill our supermarket shelves. So in 10 words he has said most of what you need to know about nutrition.

Of course there is more to it than that and sometimes you need a book to explain what those word mean but his rules for eating are basically very simple and self-explanatory:

· Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. "When you pick up that box of portable yogurt tubes, or eat something with 15 ingredients you can't pronounce, ask yourself, "What are those things doing there?"
· Don't eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce.
· Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot.
· It is not just what you eat but how you eat. "Always leave the table a little hungry," . Many cultures have rules that you stop eating before you are full. In Japan, they say eat until you are four-fifths full. Islamic culture has a similar rule, and in German culture they say, 'Tie off the sack before it's full.'
· Families traditionally ate together, around a table and not a TV, at regular meal times. It's a good tradition. Enjoy meals with the people you love.

(The only amendment I would make would be to substitute ‘a great grandmother’ for my great grandmother, who I am sure would not have recognised all the exotic fruit and vegetables we now take for granted).

My excuse for bringing this up again is that he has just published another book with more pithy advice on eating. (Food Rules) uses maxims gathered from readers of the New York Times to guide us on our way and make us think about the way we live. The background to the project is explained here and some examples are here. None of them are as good as Pollan’s original seven words but many of them are successful in condensing a way of living into a simple rule of thumb, and that is always pleasing.

I am struck between the parallels of writing about food and writing about running. Essentially all you need to know can be distilled into very few words. Running and eating are both things the species has been doing very well since its inception (otherwise we wouldn’t be here), so we only need to be reminded of a few simple rules. But for both there are shelves full of literature (more for food, obviously, but the comparison still holds), ranging from science to anecdotes, encyclopaedias to top tips. In both cases the interested reader is happy to continue reading essentially the same information presented in different ways with new twists and find it fascinating and inspiring. In both cases there are lessons that can be directly applied,

In more than one way running and food are deeply entwined.

More Gardening, More Running

I have a great admiration for the journalism of Michael Pollan and have written about one of his books before.

His book, In Defence of Food is nicely summarised in an article he wrote for the New York Times. It is well worth reading and contains his famous motto that tells you everything you need to know about diet: “eat food, not very much, mostly plants”. To make those shelves of diet books redundant with just seven words is genius.

This ability to get to the heart of an issue that has been overlayed with too much conflicting information is again displayed in an essay about what to do when faced with a problem as overwhelming as global warming. Would changes in individual behaviour make any difference? If so what would be the best things to do? The helpless logic that says that any carbon reduction I make will be nullified by other people is potent and there is truth in the statement that such a big problem needs to be tackled by national and global institutions. However to get political change in our societies it needs to be shown that the mass of the people are willing to change. It is impossible for political leaders to go too much out on a limb. They can cajole and persuade but that cannot fully act without demonstrable support.

That is why it is important for us all to do something and through that action inspire other people to make changes. Momentum will come through aggregating all of our actions.

One thing he suggests, which can have a big impact, is for us to grow more of our own food. Dig up lawns for vegetables, take on an allotment. If we all did it , it would have a profound effect as it did in the last World War. (Monty Don is saying similar things here and here).

This makes a lot of sense but this is not a gardening blog, it is a running blog and there is something in the essay that I can relate to running

He talks about the mindset which has been formed by 250 years of cheap energy. The industrial model, which has lead to specialisation in work and then in our homes, so that we now outsource many areas of our lives. This leads to internal uncertainty, dependency and the breaking of the link between actions and consequences. Things become the responsibility of others and there can be conflict between underlying beliefs and actions

He cites Wendell Berry:

Nothing was likely to change until we healed the "split between what we think and what we do ... Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognising our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live."

Now this is profound and difficult. Consistency in thinking and doing, and changing the way we live are difficult and daunting projects So difficult it is easier to park them in the 'get round to it when I feel stronger file'. This is where running comes in. Now I am not going to make grand claims that running of itself can heal the soul and solve our problems. No it is just one thing, a little thing that can help put us on the path of looking at such issues.

When we run we directly respond to our own body. We are the only ones who know how it is feeling and what it is capable of doing. We look for advice from others (that is only sensible) but we test it out and either accept it or reject based on our own evidence. After all it only takes a couple of weeks to show that a plan is beginning to work and we can evaluate our own evidence. We are not outsourcing, we make our own decisions and we see how good we are at following-through. We learn more about our body and how it works, more about our motivation and what makes it work. It involves our mind as well as our body and it extends us. In so doing it brings together number of fragments of our personalities. In one small, discrete area it gives us the opportunity of being a complete person

I do not claim uniqueness for running in all those things – there are all sorts of activities (such as the gardening Pollan talks of) that can have the same effect. But they are all activities that need to be done regularly - an occasional run, or an occasional dig means nothing. The continuity means there is a thread that runs through our lives. That thread can make us more self reliant and help us organise the bigger stuff like the coherence (or lack of it) between what we think and what we do.

But then of course it is back to the important question of what we do in the face of climate change and expensive energy.

Hunting and Running

For the last meal in 'The Omnivore's Dilemma' Michael Pollan cooks only what he has hunted or gathered. He has thus gone back to roots of our species, back further than 10,000 years of agriculture.

Although he only learnt to hunt to complete the structure of his book, once he was in the woods, tracking the wild pig, he became entranced and revelled in the sense of heightened awareness and attentiveness. As a modern metropolitan journalist he became almost embarrassed at the purple prose he wrote about his experience, yet he could not help it - he was recording what he felt.

The writer he relies on to support his attitude is Ortega y Gasset, whose 'Meditations on hunting' is a philosophical examination of the activity. In it he talks of the state of awareness of being fully part of nature and contrasts it with people who tramp through the landscape as tourists.

As a runner one of the places I feel most at home, find most pleasure, is in the woods. Although I have written about the attraction of this as feeling you are part of the landscape; on the Ortega y Gasset scale I must be counted as a tourist. The reason being that when running you can never give full attention to the world outside, there is always a part of you concentration on your breath, your legs, your ease, your effort. In some ways you blunder along, alerting all the wild animals to your presence with the noise you make.

Yet, and yet, I still think that all of us exerting ourselves on those trails are more than tourists. We are part of nature. We are using our legs in the way they were evolved to be used in woodland that has been here for who knows how long. Although we do not need the full attention of a hunter we need to be attentive to the path to avoid ruts, roots, slippy slopes and obstructions. We must be careful where we place our feet.

Sometimes the magical can happen. My favourite running moment has nothing to do with racing or achievement. It happened early one morning, when the mist was beginning to rise on what would be a fine day and I was running along a fairly broad grass pathway in the woods. To my left, ahead I saw a group of deer. I slowed and walked carefully as close as I could, stopped and then held the gaze of the deer for several seconds before it moved its head, turned around and loped off. For one moment there had been a connection and we had been two animals in the landscape.

When I am crashing about I might not be very agile or elegant but I am at least aware of being an animal, a participant in the woods not a spectator. Not really a tourist.

Monoculture and Diversity

Mostly I think by analogy. If I read about something I tend to think of it in terms of other things, so it is natural that I would have a blog about running and talk about agricultural systems. Just too obvious really!

This all because I am reading an excellent book (The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan) which investigates our attitude to food. It is wonderful in the way it investigates different methods of food production and how we relate to them, all the time asking questions about why and how we eat the way we do. The central premise is that being an omnivore is a tremendous evolutionary advantage because the species can live in all corners of earth and survive disasters that might affect any one source of food. However the corollary is that the relationship to other species of plants and animals is complicated because there are always decisions about whether something is safe to eat or how to get the full range of nutrients. Up to now we have relied on traditional cuisine to tell us how we should eat but in western countries (particularly America and UK) that relationship has broken down. We eat from a whole range of cultures without necessarily knowing how the elements are combined, and the way the agriculture, food processing, and distribution industries are set-up exert their own pressures on consumption. It has led to obvious problems of obesity and increasing anxiety about what we eat.

To research the book he visited or participated in the different methods of food production and tried to follow the path from earth to plate. In the first section he looks at how industrialised agriculture works. He visits a corn farm in Iowa and, more disturbingly a CAFO (confined animal feeding operation), where they pen the beef cattle together and unnaturally fatten them up with corn. The point about these methods is that they increase the yield per acre but for the farmer everything is simplified down to a limited range of activities e.g. in the rich lands of Iowa the land is totally given over to corn and soya, the human input is reduced, and the intellectual effort is outsourced to the scientists who formulate the fertilisers, the manufacturers of the machines and the demands of the regulators and large firms who dominate the market. It produces cheap food but in all other ways the price of this monoculture is high.

This is contrasted in the next section with a pastoral idyll, an organic, sustainable, grass-based farm that only sells its produce locally and is so transparent it allows visitors to see everything, even the way it kill their chickens. Their website shows that Polyface is no ordinary farm enterprise. “We are in the redemption business: healing the land, healing the food, healing the economy, and healing the culture.” The article Pollan wrote for Mother Jones explains the philosophy of quality and localism but doesn't really expand on the agricultural principles, which are about diversity and using different plants and animals in mutually supportive way.

The heart of the farm is grass and the cattle are continually moved to different areas, in strict rotation, by means of mobile electric fences, so that they cut back the grass enough to stimulate further growth and improve its quality. Three days after the cattle have left a pasture chickens are brought in. They eat the fly larvae in the manure and sanitise the field, also they spread that manure and of course their own droppings are very high in nitrogen and there is no need for extra fertiliser. Trees are important in the way that they retain water, provide shelter, alter the micro-climate, provide chippings and biodiversity of the forest helps protect the farm from predators by providing other prey. Everything is related.

(If you want to listen to Joe Salatin, the farmer, the BBC made a Food Programme about him in 2006, which is still available.)


So onto the running bit.

Agricultural has no connection with running but I did wonder if there was any analogy between the differing virtues of monoculture and diversity and ways of training.

There is no doubt about the specificity of training. The way to improve your running is to run; other exercises use different muscles. You can tell this if you have a gap, say for an injury, but maintain aerobic fitness with other exercises, when you start running again it is all a bit hard. There is thus a philosophy of training that just emphasises churning out the miles. The equivalent of monoculture.

Monoculture produces the highest yields per acre and might well be the best way for a number of people to improve their times. Up to a point there is a direct correlation between the miles run and performance. However I wonder if it is necessarily the best route for overall fitness. Firstly, and most obviously it concentrates on a particular group of muscles and a limited range of movements, whilst he body needs so much more flexibility and strength. Secondly, and perhaps related, a highly repetitious load carries the risk of injury.

I am convinced that the only way to improve your running is to be consistent and the only way to achieve consistency is being uninjured. Avoiding injury is therefore an important strategy. If you can do this on high mileage, fine, but we all need to find our limits and the amount we can push yourself before breaking down. If those limits are fairly low then we need other things to compensate; mixing cycling and running for example.

Also lack of strength in other parts of the body can cause problems. We are all now aware of the importance of the core muscles but there are other areas, shoulder for example which also need to be strong. These areas all require work and an increasing amount of work as you age and lose muscle mass. They are best tackled through things like pilates, yoga or resistance training.

If you are mixing running with other things you enjoy it can also help prevent running becoming a chore. The one thing thing that is central to the soft-core manifesto is that running is play, not work; so we must guard against it feeling like a duty.

You can see I am convincing myself of the need for diversity. For some reason I do not like the term cross-training (I could not tell you why, it just sounds wrong in my ear). Instead I like to think of it as integrated training. The ideal being to mesh together activities so that you can run well but be generally strong and fit enough to find maximum enjoyment in your physical exertion, whilst feeling alert for all the other things in your life.

A sort of Polyface running.