A Matter of Taste 



Breaking Bread, Tradition, 

 and a Long Run 



After two decades of columns, our food writer pushes back from the table 



by Raymond Sokolov 



Exactly twenty years ago, I began writ- 

 ing this column without the slightest idea 

 of what it should be. All I knew was that it 

 should be about food and "reflect the in- 

 terests of the Museum." Since my main 

 experience at the American Museum of 

 Natural History before 1974 had been ac- 

 companying young children excited by the 

 simulacrum of the giant whale and various 

 stuffed large mammals, I briefly consid- 

 ered printing recipes for blubber and har- 

 tebeest steak. 



Sensing that this was not the correct ap- 

 proach, I made a solo pilgrimage to the 

 Museum, passing through gallery after 

 gallery devoted to artifacts of daily life 

 among peoples from hot and cold lands 

 with distinctive solutions for survival. 

 There were baskets and masks and 

 weapons and costumes; totems and pad- 

 dles and canoes. You could stand there and 

 imagine culture after culture from the ma- 

 terials in those cases. Yes, but what did 

 they eat? That was what I needed to know 

 to write a column for Natural History. 



I ascended to the hbrary, the old hbrary 

 with the leaky roof. And I found. . .almost 

 nothing. The ethnography of food was not 

 a Uvely field, never has been. There were, 

 of course, brilliant — and brilliantly er- 

 ratic — exceptions. But by and large, one 

 had to make one's way as best one could. 



I learned to squeeze the anthropological 

 Uterature for tidbits dropped among the 

 exhaustive studies of kinship, geomancy, 

 and body decorations. While slogging 

 through this swamp of data, I learned a 

 new word, or thought I had: balanophagy, 

 "eating acorns." A Uttle learning is a dan- 

 gerous thing. I dropped that mouthful in a 

 column, only to get a hooting letter from a 

 medical student in Boston pointing out 

 that the Greek word balanos was an alter- 

 nate anatomical term for glans. He asked 

 for further information. 



After a column on cannibalism, for 



which I scoured the literature to determine 

 what adepts considered the best cuts, I was 

 encouraged to shift my focus from anthro- 

 pology to botany. Now the documentation 

 was vast. Edible plants had been studied 

 from every angle, and the cookbook hter- 

 ature of the post-World War 11 period of- 

 fered rehable accounts of food preparation 

 in most major cultures. So I embarked on 

 a series of monographs on com and pota- 

 toes and coriander and on and on, until the 

 editor encouraged me to get out of the h- 

 brary and hit the road. 



First I pursued endangered American 

 regional dishes among hostile Indians and 

 wary heartland farmers. In southern Indi- 

 ana, outside the hamlet of Gnaw Bone, a 

 dog bit me while I gathered native persim- 

 mons from a field next to a dilapidated 

 house. The reward was that back home in 

 New York County (a k a Manhattan) at a 

 Museum event, the distinguished anthro- 

 pologist Marvin Harris dignified my hap- 

 less forays by calling them fieldwork. 



Well, I was spending a lot of time in 

 fields. But soon my travels extended to 

 South America and even the Phihppines, 

 in search of the colonial heritage of 

 cuisines created by the collision of cul- 

 tures in the Spanish empire after 1492. 

 Most recently, I have been getting back to 

 basics, thinking about grain. At the same 

 time, I have been trying out a new diet that 

 treats grains almost like poison. 



I'm speaking of the much-ballyhooed 

 diet of Michel Montignac, the self-pro- 

 claimed Descartes of weight loss and au- 

 thor of ye Mange, Done Je Maigris (I eat, 

 therefore I reduce). In America, he has a 

 book called Dine Out and Lose Weight, 

 but the idea is the same and just as radical: 

 Avoid consuming carbohydrates when 

 eating fat. 



The theory, roughly speaking, is that 

 sugars and starches have the effect of pro- 

 voking a sudden increase of insuUn in the 



blood. And when that insulin butts up 

 against fat, it wraps its arms around the fat 

 and stores it. If there isn't any carbohy- 

 drate, there isn't any insulin; so the fat 

 does not get stored. 



Ergo, peel the bread off that ham sand- 

 wich. Throw out your pasta and Frosted 

 Flakes. Kiss potatoes goodbye. Eschew 

 coffee, which also stimulates insulin pro- 

 duction. And tell your friends who have 

 followed current nutritional orthodoxy and 

 filled their larders with bulgur, quinoa, 

 amaranth, and other grains that they are in- 

 dulging in glycemic folly. You can also 

 stop counting calories. Montignac is with- 

 ering on calories as well as exercise. 



It isn't hard to see why this diet would 

 have a certain appeal to people who don't 

 want to give up animal fat and who hate 

 going to the gym. But does it have any sci- 

 entific validity? Since in some ways it re- 

 sembles diets prescribed by conventional 

 doctors for diabetes, the Montignac diet 

 makes theoretical sense (in its own terms) 

 only if there is reason to believe that over- 

 weight people are quasidiabetic, that is, if 

 their sugar-insulin metabolism is out of 

 whack. 



Some researchers believe this may be 

 so. I am certainly unqualified to pronounce 

 on any of this, but I have been impressed 

 by dramatic weight loss experienced by 

 several former fatties of my acquaintance 

 who have been following Montignac. See- 

 ing them, I thought I should try Montignac 

 too, even if there was nothing to his hy- 

 pothesis. Results were what mattered, 

 after all. 



Well, it didn't work for me because I 

 simply could not deal with the bizarre 

 mayhem the Montignac diet does to cuU- 

 nary tradition. My friend Jeffrey Stein- 

 garten, the Vogue columnist, reveled in the 

 freedom Montignac offered him to have 

 eggs and (lots of) bacon for breakfast. I 

 found it almost impossible to enjoy the 



76 Natural History 3/94 



