The nutritionist vs the cook

BY MEGAN NICOL REED

HE HAD the quail. She had the goat's cheese and beetroot tart. They both had the kingfish. He ate his bread. With butter. He ordered fries. She had a few. He tried every petit four. She tried the salted chocolate caramel and the rasberry macaroon. They both had a Pastis, a glass of red and a coffee to finish.

He is Ray McVinnie. She is Jacquie Dale. He is a judge on MasterChef New Zealand and food editor for Sunday and Cuisine magazines. She is a nutritionist and a Sunday Star-Times columnist.

They both have a lot to say on how we should be eating.

He said: "See that butter? I know what it is. It's animal fat. It's butter, you know."

She said: "It's real."

He said: "And it's natural food and I'd far rather be eating a little bit of that now and again than any of the crap that comes in plastic tubs. And I don't eat it everyday and I know what I'm doing when I eat it.

"I want to eat natural food that has been messed around with as little as possible. I tell people to eat the largest variety of food they can, get some exercise, be really moderate and stop worrying."

We do worry. We worry and worry and worry about food. About food and fat and flab. About carbohydrates, gluten and cholesterol. We measure out 30 grams of something flaky and corny for breakfast, moistening it with thin green milk and yoghurt sweetened synthetically. We eat endless salads. And then we go to McDonald's and eat a burger with two patties, double cheese and super-sized fries, oh, and a Diet Coke. And then we go to bed, filled with self-loathing and vow to start again tomorrow. To worry afresh about food.

And those that don't worry, who eat and eat and eat with abandon, should be worried. They should be worried that their arteries are clogged with plaque, their livers grown fatty, their skin furrowed with stretchmarks and that they'll probably die a premature death from heart attack, diabetes, stroke, cancer or all of the above.

The 2006/07 New Zealand Health Survey found that one in three adults and one in five children is overweight, while one in four adults and one in 12 children is obese.

Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, is worried for us. According to the American science writer, the great paradox of our times is the more we worry about nutrition the less healthy we become. Discussing his latest book, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual, in The New York Times Magazine he claims, "Every trip to the supermarket these days requires us to navigate what has become a truly treacherous food landscape." He laments the amount of highly processed foods available which are marketed as healthy and endorsed by governments and nutritionists. "How did humans manage to choose foods and stay healthy before there were nutrition experts and food pyramids or breakfast cereals promsing to improve your child's focus or restaurant portions bigger than your head?"

Both McVinnie and Dale are fans of Pollan's work, with McVinnie increasingly using his recipes page in Sunday as a forum for propounding similar ideas. McVinnie and Dale have come together, over a slap-up lunch at one of Auckland's best restaurants, The French Cafe, to discuss good food and good nutrition and why increasingly there appears to be a gulf between the two. Here's a man who can whip up a creamy sauce as easily as he can toast a slice of bread, sitting next to a woman who recommends protein shakes for breakfast and carries protein bars in her purse. A battle was expected.

 

Before ordering McVinnie is at pains to clarify the distinction between being fat and being healthy, and which it is we need to be concerned about. Dale is very clear that it's a matter of health. "But I don't think a lot of people realise that. See, fat's just a symptom of your lifestyle or what you eat and how you eat."

"Well, when do you cross that line between being a bit plump and being unhealthily fat?" asks McVinnie. "When you're over a certain body fat percentage," says Dale. "When you've got more kilos of fat."

McVinnie, 57, is a trim, stylish man, with none of the supposed physical endowments of a gourmand. Neither does he do any of the things the so-called diet experts exhort you to. He doesn't eat breakfast and he has a teaspoon of sugar in a very strong coffee every morning. "My body... I'm supposed to be 71-73 kilos according to that."

"But it's not about weight," says Dale. "It's about body composition."

"So it's about when you go like this?" asks McVinnie, grabbing a hunk of his flesh. "What it measures?"

"You're fine," assures Dale, who at 44 doesn't have the expected sparseness of someone who instructs others to shed fat for a living, but rather the soft skin and supple shape that are the benefits of a pure diet. "I don't care what you weigh, even if you weighed 150 kilos."

Of course, says McVinnie to a suggestion of wine with lunch. "God, yes. It's lunchtime, you have to be civilised."

What both McVinnie and Dale believe is uncivilised is the manner in which modern societies eat, where any craving can be satisfied 24/7, people no longer cook or know how to and the couch and the telly have replaced the table and conversation.

McVinnie: "I'm saying wind it back. I'm saying get those kids cooking in schools. Every single person should have to learn to cook. They can decide whether they're going to or not when they're adults. `I hate it.' `I'm bad at it.' `I'm not going to do it.' That's their choice. But you can't have a choice 'til you know what the story is."

Dale: "That's a massive cultural change."

McVinnie: "And the other thing is the huge amount of cultural things that go with sitting at the table. Where do you learn everything? At the table. You learn your manners. You learn to laugh. You learn to shut up. Everything. Don't you? You take that out of a society, which I think is what's happening to a lot of people. What has it been replaced with? Can someone tell me? Where are they learning? It's hugely important."

Dale: "People don't have dinner together. Kids are watching TV and the mother's on Jenny Craig so she gets her little box out of the freezer. They're just too busy."

As a society we have a notion of being very time-poor. We drive fast, eat fast, live fast. McVinnie thinks it's a nonsense.

"Why do they think they don't have time? Who told them? My grandmother would have had less time. She had a wringer washer. She cooked on a coal range. She still cooked every day.

"If you think something's really important, you make time. Otherwise why would people have extramarital affairs, you know. You must think it's really important to do all that hiding and whatever you have to do. You've got time for anything you think is important."

"People don't think food's important," says Dale.

"Well, not when you can go and buy french fries 24 hours a day," says McVinnie.

The villain, they both agree, is the industrialised food industry. The biggest change in our diets in the last 70 years, says McVinnie, is the industrialisation of our food. Rather than eating the simple, good food that our grandparents grew up on, meat and vegetables, fruit and wholegrains, cheese and eggs, we're eating heavily processed foods we think we should be eating, that we're told we should be eating.

"Where did they learn to make all that stuff that goes into those foods? You know all that amazing technology that goes into food these days," asks McVinnie. In the war, he says, referencing Pollan. "If you're going to send thousands and thousands of people overseas that you've got to feed in battle, what are you going to give them to eat? Are you going to have chefs standing there cooking for you? Nup. Dried, preserved, anything they can carry with them. We've got whole populations living on field rations. All that technology came from what they learned during the war. Dehydrated rations, preserving food. Making cheap food last longer and not go off. Basically everyone's living on field rations."

Money is what it comes down to, says McVinnie.

"Companies want to make a profit. Get that crystal clear. I'm a company, I want to make a profit. But you can't trick people like they do.

"Look, you don't make money out of selling broccoli, you make money out of chopping it up, putting a sauce with it and charging three times as much."

"Rolled oats are the only cereal that have got only one ingredient on the packet," says Dale. "And they're the only cereal that aren't advertised on TV. But they're the best cereal you can buy."

"So it's marketing," says McVinnie. "All this is marketing hype."

Dale sees people on a daily basis who are in crisis, severely overweight yet undernourished. "What's happened with the western world is we don't know what food is any more. We honestly get people in over and over again and they don't know what food is." She says they are confused by the abundance of messages purporting to inform as to what's healthy and what's not. She was recently asked to endorse a new low GI sugar. She refused. "All they're doing is spraying the polyphenols back onto the sugar that they took off when they refined it. And then they went, `Oh, that lowers the GI.' Funny that."

Products marketed for their supposed healthy properties – Low-fat! No carbs! – are a particular bugbear of McVinnie's. "It's a scandal. It's got to be stopped. A whole lot of people think that if something's low-fat it's going to be healthy food.

"I walked around the supermarket one day and said, `Right, let's see what's meant to be healthy?' And I came across chicken nuggets – 13 chemical ingredients in chicken nuggets!"

Doesn't he think though that if someone drinks Coke more often than they do water like some of Dale's clients, and their primary energy source is from chocolate, then switching to products which are low-fat has to be an improvement? "Could be. Could not be. Because I think it's not just foods laden with fat, salt and sugar – and these are the three things which sell fast foods because those things are very uncommon in the natural world. You know it's hard to find fat, salt and sugar in hunter/gatherer societies, that's why people climb up trees and get honey from wild bees. But then that's not the only thing to worry about. The other thing you've got to worry about is processed food."

Dale is slightly more pragmatic. While she doesn't believe low-fat, supposedly healthier foods constitute the ideal diet, she says they can be an improvement if they reduce someone's overall calorie intake.

McVinnie isn't convinced. "I see the whole thing with fast food as being like the tobacco industry 20 years ago. People are only just starting to take it seriously. These things will kill you. A very slow death. Saying if you exchange those things for low-calorie processed foods is like saying if you exchange Marlboroughs for Marlborough Lights.

"Imagine if drug companies were allowed to do exactly the same thing that food companies are – take bits of the medicine out and put things in there that aren't the active ingredient. It would be outrageous, wouldn't it?"

Both agree that food isn't just about eating.

McVinnie: "It's about control."

Dale: "About love."

McVinnie: "It's about love."

Dale: "And keeping quiet."

McVinnie: "It's become so laden with guilt."

Dale: "What people do is they make bad choices for four days because they had to make a bad choice at the garage and they couldn't handle that emotionally. So then I'm just going to make poor choices for the rest of the week because I'm fat and I'm a loser and I can't stick to the plan that I think I'm supposed to follow because that's what they told me to do."

McVinnie compares the availability of fries to heroin, noting we'd have a lot more junkies if it was as accessible. Dale says sometimes she feels like she's dealing with heroin addicts. "Except there's heroin available every time they go to the gas station. And they believe, because of the marketing, that they deserve it."

McVinnie: "And have you noticed it's cheap to buy that stuff? Good food costs money."

McVinnie believes that if we all cooked, producing most of what we eat from natural ingredients and from scratch, things like fries, which made properly are costly in both time and money, would become a special treat rather than the staple they've become.

"Cooking empowers you. It expands your food choices. It teaches you what's in it. And when you've got to prepare food you tend to eat less. A really good example is french fries. They're a real performance to make. To make them right, I couldn't be bothered."

Dale: "Where I'm at is that we're actually trying to get people to take that action. Because people are lazy and they watch TV and they believe everything they see."

Listening to McVinnie and Dale talk, it's easy to think, well it's OK for you, you're not trying to feed a demanding family, quickly, on a limited budget.

With two almost grown-up children apiece, both say they've been there, done that. "We went to McDonald's," admits McVinnie. "Because they wanted to go to the playground and that's cool. We had this rule. You can have something, but it was never allowed to be a meal. It was never to be taken seriously.

"We cooked most days. Chicken stew, schnitzel, they'd get them every week with vegetables. We soon worked out that they loved broccoli if we put a bit of vinegar over it, you know a bit of vinaigrette. And we got to the stage where they were getting pickier and we just said, `No, stuff this. We've got good food in this house. That's dinner'."

Dale: "I have parents coming to me all the time saying, `Oh they don't eat vegetables.' But actually when you look at it, they don't put vegetables out. They just provide other stuff."

McVinnie and Dale have both enjoyed an excellent meal in which all the supposed baddies – fat, salt, sugar and alcohol – have played their part. Boiled down to its essence their argument is simple. Turns out the chef and the nutritionist are cooking from the same recipe after all.

He said: "What you've got to do is eat less food."

She said: "Yeah, of everything."

He said: "You just don't eat too much. Isn't that the whole point? I don't exclude anything, do you?"

She said: "No food's bad."

- © Fairfax NZ News