"You Are The Salt of the Earth (and the Sugar and the Fat)"

Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
November 15, 2009

“Paul Rozin is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has dreamed up some of the more imaginative survey questions ever asked of American eaters; the answers he’s collected offer a pretty good index to our current befuddlement and anxiety about eating.  A few years ago, Rozin presented a group of Americans with the following scenario: ‘Assume you are alone on a desert island for one year and you can have water and one other food.  Pick the food that you think would be best for your health.’
The choices were: corn, alfalfa sprouts, hot dogs, spinach, peaches, bananas, and milk chocolate.  I’ll let you take the same test – pick one of those foods, and just keep it to yourself.  I’ll repeat them: corn, alfalfa sprouts, hot dogs, spinach, peaches, bananas, and milk chocolate. 
The most popular choice was bananas (42 percent), followed by spinach (22 percent), corn (12 percent), alfalfa sprouts (7 percent), peaches (5 percent), hot dogs (4 percent), and milk chocolate (3 percent).  Only 7 percent of the participants chose one of the two foods that would in fact best support survival: hot dogs and milk chocolate.

He has found, … that a third of us believe that a diet absolutely free of fat-a nutrient, lest you forget, essential to our survival-would be better for us than a diet containing even just ‘a pinch’ of it.  In one experiment, he showed the words ‘chocolate cake’ to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. ‘Guilt’ was the top response.  If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of the French eaters to the same prompt: ‘Celebration.’ ‘Fat,’ Rozin writes ‘seems to have assumed, even at low levels, the role of a toxin in our dietary imaginations.’  He points out, ‘Worrying so much about food can't be very good for your health.’”'

This is the second sermon in a series I am giving on the UUA Congregational Study Action Issue for 2008 thru 2012 called Ethical Eating: Food and Environmental Justice.  A Congregational Study/Action Issue, or CSAI for short, is an invitation for all of us to spend time in learning and reflection on one of the great concerns of our lives.  The Ethical Eating CSAI gives us an opportunity to share our thoughts about the intersection of our values about food and our UU Principles. 

“Today, we can get almost any food, from almost anywhere, in any season. We have a cornucopia of choices.  It truly seems a grocery shopper’s paradise, but at what cost?  People are beginning to recognize that the true cost of food is far greater than what we pay at check out. Choosing our food may not be so easy – if we want to live in right relationship with the Earth and all its inhabitants.  We are fortunate as Unitarian Universalists to have a superb framework to help us navigate between the rows of cereal and fruits and vegetables.  Our 7th principle, respect for the interdependent web of all existence, tells us we should question agricultural practices that cause pollution, reduce biodiversity, and destroy land integrity.  When we consider the inherent worth and dignity of every person, we remember the migrant workers who are exposed to dangerous pesticides and can’t even get decent medical care.  As we participate in the Ethical Eating CSAI Unitarian Universalists are learning how to employ more ethical, compassionate and sustainable food consumption and to make it part of our spiritual practice.”

Paul Rozin’s research on Americans’ beliefs about food came from a book by Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, which is recommended as background for discussing the Ethical Eating CSAI.  Pollan talks a lot about how we’ve become so focused on the nutrients in our food, which was very interesting, but it took me awhile to understand how this connected to Ethical Eating.  This morning I hope to make that connection for you and then you can read the book if you want to know more about the science of nutrition, and what he recommends we should eat.  As we study Ethical Eating and Environmental Justice, we can’t just complain about the big bad corporations or government policies; we will need to bring some attention on the topic of what we ourselves are eating.
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People are omnivores– which means we can eat just about anything.  Throughout human history people have used around 80,000 different foods, and until recently did pretty well without expert advice on what to eat.  “To guide us we had, instead, Culture, which, at least when it comes to food, is really just a fancy word for your mother.”   Today, in America, food culture is changing at a dizzying rate.  I remember in the 50s and 60s my mother quit using her mother’s dishes and started buying all the latest fads in food, from Chef Boyardee Pizza mixes to fish sticks to cake mixes, and we kids thought these were the fun foods!  So even mothers quit looking to their moms for guidance, and now we need expert help to tell us how to read labels on boxes to decide what is good to eat.  Pollan calls this an ideology of nutritionism which has perpetrated a myth – that what matters is not the food, but the nutrient, and that “the purpose of eating is to promote a narrow concept of physical health.”  The paradox of nutritionism is the American people, who are so preoccupied with eating healthily are becoming more and more overweight and increasingly suffering from diabetes, heart disease and strokes.  These have become so identified with our culture they are called “The Western Diseases.”

Nutrients have been known to science since the early 19th century when English doctor and chemist, William Prout identified the three principal constituents of food-protein, fat and carbohydrates.  German scientist Justus von Liebig, one of the founders of organic chemistry, added a few minerals to the big three, and claimed the secret of human nutrition had been solved.  We now call these the “Macronutrients.”  He concocted the first baby formula, consisting of cow’s milk, wheat flour, malted flour and potassium bicarbonate.  However, doctors soon observed babies on Liebig’s formula failed to thrive – not surprising in that the formula lacked several essential ingredients.  In 1912, Polish biochemist Casimir Funk discovered a set of micronutrients necessary for good health, and called them vitamins.  Vitamins began to explain why certain foods prevented diseases like scurvy and beriberi, and nutritional science’s stock began to rise.

In 1977, responding to an alarming increase in diseases linked to diet, Senator George McGovern held two days of hearings and then staff, not doctors or scientists, created a draft of “Dietary Goals for the United States.”  Included in this document, were recommendations to reduce eating meat and dairy products based on the “Lipid Hypothesis,” the assumption that dietary fat and cholesterol were responsible for rising rates of heart disease.  When his committee issued the dietary guidelines, the red meat and dairy industries unleashed a firestorm of criticism, and they were re-written to change “reduce consumption of meat” to “choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated fats.”  This compromise changed the focus from foods to nutrients. The lesson learned from this episode; McGovern was defeated in the next election with lots of help from the beef industry; was that government guidelines would never again contain plain talk about whole foods, but would instead speak in terms of nutrients.  The age of nutritionism had arrived.  Since then, all of America has learned this lesson, too.  We can all say nutritional terms like polyunsaturated, transfat, antioxidants, fiber, and carotenoids, even though most of us really have no idea what we’re talking about.

We try to choose our foods by the kind of nutrients they contain, and we religiously read those tiny labels on the side of all those boxed and highly engineered food-like substances in the grocery – if we can only remember which of the fats are good and which are bad.  The Lipid Hypothesis, which said we should reduce animal fat in our diets, brought us Oleomargarine.  Margarine, made from vegetable oils, was supposed to be a healthy substitute for butter.  In order to make vegetable oils solid they were infused with hydrogen; they were hydrogenated.  We now call partially hydrogenated oils “Trans-fats” and have recently removed them from all foods because they are so bad for our health.  Well, even though for the last 50 years I had been thinking I was doing something good for my body when I was actually eating something that might give me a heart attack I guess I should forgive the nutritionists and the food industry.  They didn’t know back then that their manipulation of a safe food actually made it less safe.  But, now we are hooked on “nutrition science” for guidance on eating, but the advice keeps changing.  Can we really trust it?  By the way, doctors are abandoning the Lipid Hypothesis.
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In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “You are the salt of the earth, but if salt loses it savor, how shall the earth be seasoned?”  In the Moroccan city of Fez, the Jews mined salt.  They were considered very useful to the community, and it is claimed the expression ‘salt of the earth’ originated there.  The Romans paid their soldiers an allowance of salt called a salarium - hence our word salary, and the phrase ‘worth one’s salt.’  Anything described as 'salt' was valuable; so Jesus was telling the disciples their message was important to the world.  Our bodies use salt and we crave it.  There are many layers of meaning in the simple element of salt.  Pablo Neruda’s Ode to Salt tells of our spiritual connection to salt.
I saw the salt
in this shaker
in the salt flats.
I know
you
will never believe me,
but
it sings,
the salt sings, the hide
of the salt plains,
it sings
through a mouth smothered
by earth.
I shuddered in those deep
solitudes
when I heard
the voice
of
the salt
in the desert.
Near Antofagasta
the entire
salt plain
speaks:
it is a
broken
voice,
a song full
of grief.
Then in its own mines
rock salt, a mountain
of buried light,
a cathedral through which light passes,
crystal of the sea, abandoned
by the waves.

And then on every table
on this earth,
salt,
your nimble
body
pouring out
the vigorous light
over
our foods.
Preserver
of the stores
of the ancient ships,
you were
an explorer
in the ocean,
substance
going first
over the unknown, barely open
routes of the sea-foam.
Dust of the sea, the tongue
receives a kiss
of the night sea from you:
taste recognizes
the ocean in each salted morsel,
and therefore the smallest,
the tiniest
wave of the shaker
brings home to us
not only your domestic whiteness
but the inward flavor of the infinite.

So, if we are the salt of the earth, and our bodies need salt – as by the way we need sugar and fat, too, why have nutritionists in recent years warned us off these three basic food elements?  It is good to eat natural foods, and our bodies naturally crave these naturally occurring essentials.  Telling us they are not good for us is confusing and leaves us spiritually unsatisfied – so much so that we routinely ignore this advice and eat large quantities of salt, sugar, and fat anyway – and then we get sicker and sicker.  Not to mention that since the advent of nutritionism we don't enjoy eating as much.  Are we just weak willed, immoral people, or is there some other explanation for what’s going on here?

Well, yes there is, and the story of wheat illustrates it.  Wheat grain is processed into flour for baking, and this used to be accomplished by grinding between two stones.  Stone grinding left the kernel, which is high in fat (omega 3, the good kind).  Whole wheat flours made breads brown and the fatty kernels would turn rancid relatively quickly thus spoiling the flour and also making it attractive to insects and rodents.  When wheat began to be processed with steel rollers, the kernels could be removed creating white flour which solved the spoilage problem and made pretty white breads and cakes.  However, removing the kernel also removes almost all the nutrients and flavor from the flour – which solves the insect and rodent problem because all they care about are nutrients.  At first, only rich people could afford white flour, so of course it became a prized commodity, and when the price came down, almost everyone converted to it and today, white wheat accounts for about a third of Americans’ daily dietary intake of calories.  Food manufacturers add many ingredients to breads, cereals and cakes to give them flavor and make us want to eat them.  These added ingredients consist mostly of sugar, fat and salt – things that are usually present in only small quantities in whole foods.  They also “enrich” flour by adding back in vitamins, fiber, etc. so it can be marketed as containing whatever nutrient we’re currently worried about.

So, we would like to think that by eating foods marketed as nutritious, we could rely on the food science behind these claims to keep us healthy.  But even as the food industry has increased crop yields and reduced spoilage the nutritional value of foods has gone down considerably over the last hundred years.  The Western diet has grown more deficient in some essential nutrients as it has made us eat more calories to get what we need.  Which is just fine by the food industry which has generally concentrated on selling us ever larger quantities of lower quality food.  “Foods with artificial colors, synthetic sweeteners, and fats confound the senses.  They are processed in ways specifically designed to sell us more food by pushing our evolutionary buttons – our inborn preferences for sweetness and fat and salt, inducing us to consume much more of them than is good for us.”

However well intentioned the food industry, food scientists, and the American public may be, there is something important missing from the nutrition equation.  This is how Michael Pollan’s book got onto the Ethical Eating reading list.  What’s his solution?  According to him, it’s very simple: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”  If that’s a little too simple for you, I’ll recommend you read his book for more detail than I can give here today.  When he says eat food, he means real food, whole foods.  Eat more leaves and less seeds.  Eat things your great grandmother would recognize as food.  Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.  Also it is important that we remake our associations with food providers and our connections with the earth.  Eat organic and locally grown foods.  Local produce is picked ripe and is fresher, tastier, and more nutritious.  Go to farmer’s markets and get to know the providers of your food.  And lastly Pollan recommends slow food – that is food you cook and sit down with family or friends and take your time and enjoy eating.  Remember, after all is said and done, at the deepest level of ethical eating, it’s really all about relationships. “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”