January 22, 2003

OVER THE YEARS I have let lapse my subscriptions to the various food magazines, usually because I'd come to see them as too food-porny (Bon Appétit, Gourmet), less often through negligence or indifference. At some point, no matter how attractive an article or recipe, I would think, I've seen this before.

Yet while the world of food porn might be gorgeously static, the wider world of food is not. Our knowledge of nutrition, in particular, has been rapidly evolving, so that the United States Department of Agriculture's much-touted "food pyramid" of the early 1990s is increasingly seen as unhelpful and even wrong. So says Walter Willets, of the Harvard School of Public Health, in an interview in the current edition of Eating Well, a food magazine on a mission to reconcile pleasures of the table with the requirements of proper nutrition.

The Willets interview (by Allison Cleary) perfectly captures the appeal of Eating Well, and for that matter of eating well. Willets is all about healthy eating, naturally, but he repeatedly makes the point that fats are not per se unhealthy. Trans fats – the "partially hydrogenated" soybean or other vegetable oils you almost always find listed as an ingredient on boxes of cookies and crackers and countless other processed foods – are indeed bad for you. Saturated fats (generally from animals) aren't great, either, though not as bad as trans fats.

But mono- and polyunsaturated fats not only provide the calories that keep people from binge snacking between meals; they actually "have been shown to reduce fatal heart arrhythmias." If there is a nutritional villain other than trans fats, Willets suggests, it's starch.

"Farmers have known for thousands of years," Willets says, "that the way you fatten up animals for the table is, first of all, to restrict their physical activity and, second, to feed them carbohydrate diets. In some sense we've created a whole national feedlot on this low-fat, high-starch diet."

Duly enlightened by the Willets interview, I moved on to an excellent recipe for mushroom risotto in which the rice is baked (instead of cooked on the stovetop) and seasoned at the end with a bit of balsamic vinegar. Excellent, though of course I felt a bit guilty that I had used regular arborio rice – a refined starch; I pictured Willets frowning – instead of the brown rice the recipe called for. The fire next time will be used to cook the latter kind.

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And now for something completely different: The headline "Ich bein ein vegetarian" (Jan. 1), a play on President Kennedy's famous 1963 comment at the Berlin Wall, should have read "Ich bin ein vegetarian." The former is a nonsense. Mea culpa.