Fear of food - Harvey A Levenstein

There may be no greater source of anxiety for Americans
today than
the question of what to eat and drink. Are eggs the perfect
protein, or
are they cholesterol bombs? Is red wine good for my heart
or bad for my
liver? Will pesticides, additives, and processed foods
kill me? Here
with some very rare and very welcome advice is food
historian Harvey
Levenstein: Stop worrying!

In Fear of Food Levenstein
reveals the people and interests
who have created and exploited these
worries, causing an extraordinary
number of Americans to allow fear to
trump pleasure in dictating their
food choices. He tells of the
prominent scientists who first warned
about deadly germs and poisons in
foods, and their successors who
charged that processing foods robs
them of life-giving vitamins and
minerals. These include Nobel
Prize-winner Eli Metchnikoff, who advised
that yogurt would enable
people to live to be 140 by killing the
life-threatening germs in their
intestines, and Elmer McCollum, the
"discoverer" of vitamins, who
tailored his warnings about vitamin
deficiencies to suit the food
producers who funded him. Levenstein also
highlights how large food
companies have taken advantage of these
concerns by marketing their
products to combat the fear of the moment.
Such examples include the
co-opting of the "natural foods" movement,
which grew out of the belief
that inhabitants of a remote Himalayan
Shangri-la enjoyed remarkable
health and longevity by avoiding the very
kinds of processed food these
corporations produced, and the
physiologist Ancel Keys, originator of
the Mediterranean Diet, who
provided the basis for a powerful coalition
of scientists, doctors, food
producers, and others to convince
Americans that high-fat foods were
deadly.

In Fear of Food, Levenstein
offers a much-needed voice of
reason; he expertly questions these
stories of constantly changing
advice to reveal that there are no
hard-and-fast facts when it comes to
eating. With this book, he hopes
to free us from the fears that cloud so
many of our food choices and
allow us to finally rediscover the joys of
eating something just
because it tastes good.