How We Eat: The Case for Deep Fat, Hot Fudge

Woody Allen and the Black Broth came to my mind a couple of weeks ago when Surgeon Gen. C. Everett Koop denounced the American diet. Actually, two separate thoughts, the Woody Allen part being this exchange between future scientists looking back on 20th-Century health food in “Sleeper”:

Dr. Melik : You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies? Or hot fudge? Dr. Tryon (smugly) : Those were thought to be unhealthy--precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.

The people who warn the rest of us about our diet are always changing their minds--150 years ago doctors were cautioning against garden vegetables and fresh fruit, because they were “known to develop the deadly cholera . . . and therefore those who would escape the disease in the United States should restrict themselves to lean meat, potatoes, milk, tea and coffee.” So warned a Dr. Martyn Payne of New York, as Waverly Root and Richard de Rochemont note in their book “Eating in America.”

I can even remember a couple of turnarounds in our own time. Once I went to a YMCA camp where the kitchen baked bread every day. It was the first fresh bread most of us had ever had, and we couldn’t get enough of it. Our counselors, though, in tune with the going diet wisdom, were infuriated. “Bread is just starch!” they thundered. “You should be eating protein!”

Now the shoe’s on the other foot and the experts are thundering that we aren’t eating enough starch--pardon me, enough carbohydrates. Protein is still OK, but it’s sort of under house arrest. If it gets outside the garden gate, it’s said to turn into fat.

I can’t go along with all this fuss. We already live longer than just about anybody in the world, apart from some tiny European countries that don’t count the life expectancies of their Turkish and Italian guest-workers, and a couple of Soviet republics where everybody lies about ages. But it’s true that the American diet runs to sugar, salt and fat and we do have a lot of people who drink too much.

And I agree--people who drink shouldn’t drive, especially on nights when I have to take the freeway. Cooks should cool it with the salt, too, because nothing can ruin a cheesecake faster.

But what if we discover, decades from now, after we’ve all given up sugar and fat, a flaw in the surgeon general’s studies? Where do we go to get our hot fudge back?

This is where the Black Broth comes in. Black Broth was the national dish of ancient Sparta; in fact, it seems to have been the only dish of ancient Sparta. All Spartans were required to eat in state-run mess halls where the the menu du jour was always the Black Broth, which all agreed was extremely nourishing.

I know people who think this was a great idea. Public mess halls--what an energy-saving measure! And we’d only have to have one cooking pot per neighborhood; what a saving in non-renewable resources! However, everybody in Greece but the Spartans, who had never eaten anything else and were in no position to judge, said the Black Broth tasted awful.

I’m not saying C. Everett Koop has ambitions to impose the Black Broth on Americans, but I suspect there are those who do. I’m thinking of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which immediately denounced Koop’s denunciation for being “wishy-washy” and “a poor excuse for action.” What sort of action? I’d keep an eye on them--I suspect them of planning federal regulation of menus, footwear and bedtime.

They could try it, too. A couple of months ago when the issue of a mandatory helmet law for motorcyclists was being debated for the millionth time, a new argument was offered: Now that the state sponsors medical care, it is entitled take steps, such as requiring helmets, to reduce its expenses.

I asked my friend the lawyer about this. “Of course,” he said with a professional pleasure in knowing the neat categories of the law. “Compelling interest. If it can be shown that the state has a compelling interest in doing something, it can do it.”

“Who decides whether there’s compelling interest?” I asked.

His voice lowered and became a little less confident: “A judge.”

So a judge could decide the state has a compelling interest in legislating our diet? Today wine, tomorrow butter, then red meat, white meat, transparent meat? “It would never happen, though,” he said. “There’d be an outcry, it would have to go to higher courts.”

Oh, sure. A conspiracy of vegetarian judges, enough bureaucrats who can see the careerist potential of a Department of Diet Control, and what’s to prevent it?

In order to ward off this Pritikinite threat to gastronomic freedom, I think it’s time to take a new, positive look at our national diet. The usual view is that the sugar and fat in it are mere historical happenstance, the first Europeans in this country having come from chilly places like England, Holland and Germany where the culinary tradition was to stoke oneself against the climate with rich food.

I don’t think this is the whole story. Most of our ancestors were fleeing poverty and oppression in various Old Countries, where they had to eat whole-grain bread containing so much wholesome fiber it would get stuck in their teeth. Here, though, there was no hereditary aristocracy skimming off the best of everything. We took the English pie and turned it into the deep dish pie. When we learned of pizza and quiche, we deep-dished them both. This is nothing to be ashamed of. This is an exuberant badge of freedom. We ought to be proud.

One bright spot is that while we as a nation are endlessly willing to be preached to, we have a tendency to do what we want anyway, unconsciously. Our present-day habit of eating cold cereal at breakfast comes from the teachings of a diet reformer and all-round 19th-Century crank named Sylvester Graham, whose name is also preserved by high-bran graham flour and the graham cracker. So what have we done with cereal? Loaded it with sugar, either in the box or in the bowl.

Even health-foodies do it. About the time the sugariness of breakfast cereal was realized and denounced in the late ‘60s, we saw a mania for a self-consciously healthful cereal called granola, which typically turns out to be loaded with sugar (“Golden D Brown Sugar,” that is) and high-cholesterol coconut. Granola is essentially a sort of clumsy, crumbled cookie that can be eaten with an easy conscience because it looks so awful. Our national tastes had triumphed.

So I think we should be vigilant, but it’s not yet time to panic.