I Are What I Et

by Dennis Green

After six heart attacks, bypass surgery, and five stents, including a “stent sandwich,” (a stent within a stent), I got the message. I’m also an old, stove-up cowpoke so don’t run, ski or even manage to do my T’ai Chi anymore. So I changed my diet, radically.

I don’t eat beef, pork or chicken anymore. Only “Wild Alaskan Salmon” and occasionally Rainbow Trout or Dungeness crabmeat. I avoid processed food and limit myself to potatoes, beans, fresh sweet corn, crisp lettuce and cucumber sushi. Yummy!

My cholesterol numbers are way down from an unhealthy 220, to under 80 points, ten points below my partner Diane, who runs several miles every day. I got a congratulatory email recently from my cardiologist, and feel better than I have in years, with all that Omega-3 and fish oil, even walked the other day several miles to, from and around the Tut Exhibit.

I still indulge in some sinful foods and snacks — love Kit-Kat wafers, Dreyer’s “Fun Flavors” Mocha Almond Fudge ice crème, and a pint O’Guinness just about every day. But I also drink iced tea and V-8 and plain old spring water. I don’t think of myself as “Vegan” or even as being on a diet. I just don’t care for certain foods.

I was teasing a playwright friend the other day, as he scarfed into a big piece of fall-off-the-bone chicken, with that old saying, “You are what you eat!” and he made a clucking sound. I thought he was going to lay an egg. And I’m sure those salmon I devour once had intelligent life within them, as you know if you’ve ever tried to coax one with live bait or a lure…

So I’m not getting up on some moral high horse here. But then, a report comes on PBS about what the fast food industry has done to the whole food system in America — not just the industrial feedlots and farming, nor the toxins and food poisoning that actually kills people, but how completely unregulated the whole thing is. The FDA has very little power, and less now than it’s had in decades.

The number one subsidized crop that so many of our tax dollars are going to support? Corn. And corn is processed into almost everything else we eat or buy, including the little fiber plate you get your burger on at McDonald’s, the company that buys more ground beef and more potatoes than any other company in the world.

Salmonella is only the most frequent and obvious offender when it comes to sickness and even deaths from food poisoning. It has been found on everything from spinach, (“I yam what I yam and I likes what I yam!”), to grapes and apples. An apple a day? Depends on where it’s been…

Slow food, local farms, organic farming and other movements against the big, industrial agribusiness practices create a rare patch of common ground among food lovers who also are willing to pay a little more for wholesome and delicious food. I’ve switched my own buying from Safeway, (and how “safe” is that?), to Trader Joe’s, where the fish is mercury-free, or the Farmer’s Market, and buy very carefully.

There are even more reasons today to watch what we eat than there were in the Sixties, when these questions began to be asked for the first time. For me, it’s not a religious or spiritual matter at all, but just uncommon sense.

©2010 Dennis Green