January 7, 2003

CURIOSITY KILLS THE occasional cat and – if expressed to publicity types – also results in the sending of the occasional review copy. A massive specimen answering to this description arrived on my desk last week; it is Wellness Foods A to Z, by Sheldon Margen, M.D., and the editors of the UC Berkeley Wellness Letter (Rebus, $39.95). The book makes a worthy companion to The Nutrition Bible and The Food Bible, both of which I consult regularly on questions of antioxidants and other such health-related issues in eating. If Margen et al had called their treatise The Wellness Bible or The Food Wellness Bible, I would have had a neat trinity.

But we must not judge a book by its ... title. We must assess its substance. Wellness Foods is comprehensive and nicely alphabetized; it makes a creditable case for what it calls a "semi-vegetarian" diet, in which animal foods are seriously restricted. It also warns against trans fatty acids, or "trans fats" – the hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated vegetable oils that bedevil so many commercially made crackers and cookies; it exonerates coffee while praising tea and wine. If you don't have The Food Bible, Wellness Foods is a good substitute, but it doesn't really add much new information.

The book did disturb me in its one-dimensional understanding of human wellness, as if all that matters is what we eat and not how we go about getting it. It recommends farmed salmon, for instance, as being higher in heart-protective omega-3 fatty acids without acknowledging the ecological waste that results from salmon farming. The book does not purport to be about sound agricultural practice, true, but at the same time it seems to honor false divisions among methods of food production, eating habits, and human health, all of which are profoundly interrelated.

But perhaps Wellness Foods' shying away from the tangle of these issues is useful after all, because it does indicate the degree of difficulty in finding – and enjoying! – healthy food for ourselves while at the same time accepting responsibility, through those choices, for the health of the planet generally. We are besieged by temptations: to be sanctimonious, to be cheap, to be indifferent or lazy and let other people sort it all out.

I suspect the last is the greatest temptation in an age when food tends to be seen either as entertainment or convenience. It is neither, really; its proper place is as the central ritual of our daily lives. If we are able to acknowledge that, we will be able – with imperfect but real aid from food bibles – to find a sunlit path through the thicket.