Real Food (2006)
Nina Planck
343 pages, $23.95

Everyone has heard of the scientific method, but few people seem to understand what it is. As a former science teacher, I feel a sense of responsibility about this, so here’s the one-minute version. The scientific method works like this:

1. Make an observation.
2. Form a hypothesis that fits the observation.
3. Design and perform an experiment to test the hypothesis.
4. Based on the results of the experiment, either toss out the hypothesis or say that the experiment supports the hypothesis. If many experiments performed by many different investigators support the hypothesis, you reach a scientific consensus–as close to “fact” as you can get with science.

But that’s no fun, is it? Doing experiments is expensive and messy. Here’s a more popular version of the scientific method.

1. Make an observation.
2. Form a hypothesis that fits the observation.
3. There is no step three.

This version is awesome. It saves a bundle of cash and you get to spend your time writing books and appearing on talk shows instead of pipetting. It doesn’t work at all, but hey.

It’s the streamlined scientific method on display throughout Nina Planck’s _Real Food_, an appealing but thoroughly frustrating polemic. It’s not a cookbook: it’s a renegade (sort of) scientific analysis of what we should and shouldn’t eat. There are chapters on meats, fats, dairy, vegetables, and so on.

_Real Food_ is appealing because Planck likes to eat the same kinds of things I do. She’s in favor of lard, cheese, eggs, organic produce, and other tasty things. Basically she likes all the things you get at the farmers market, which is perhaps not surprising, since she heads a farmers market organization.

Planck is admirably skeptical about some nutritional research. Much of this mainstream research, the kind that suggested that low-fat diets protect against heart disease, is based on observational studies. You recruit a group of people, examine their behavior, and correlate their behavior with the medical outcome you’re studying. At the same time, you attempt to control for confounding factors like sex, race, income, and so on.

This approach is a great start. It’s step one of the scientific method. If you notice an interesting correlation (maybe people who eat lots of yogurt get the flu less often), that takes you to step two. If you then form conclusions based on your hypothesis, you are in a state of scientific sin.

When mainstream researchers make this mistake, which they do all the time, Planck pounces on them. She then promulgates fringe research that, while based on interesting observations, is on even less sure footing than the mainstream research.

For example, on page 93, Planck claims that breast, testicular, and prostate cancers are have risen substantially since 1950 because of synthetic hormones in cattle. Well, that’s certainly an intriguing hypothesis. Let’s take a look at the research she cites. Oh, wait, there’s no citation.

If hormones are the enemy, omega-3 fatty acids are the white knight. They cure depression, schizophrenia, obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. Here Planck does give a citation–to a book by a psychiatrist called _The Omega-3 Connection_.

Look, I’m not saying that cow hormones are good for you and omega-3s aren’t. At least in the case of omega-3s there are actual intervention studies which have found that, for men, increased consumption of fatty fish lowered death rates–although it’s impossible to say from that whether the improvement was due to omega-3s or something else.

This is a book about food, and Planck seems to think this makes her free to ignore any health effects not related to food. She spends a lot of time talking about the remarkable health of hunter-gatherer societies compared to industrial societies. Let’s accept that assertion (although Planck doesn’t offer a whole lot of evidence). Wouldn’t you expect traditional and industrial societies to differ in ways other than food? What if all of the effects she’s talking about are related to stress rather than diet? I certainly don’t know if this is the case. Neither does Planck.

Let’s go back to the issue of dietary fat for a minute.

A causal relationship between consumption of dietary fat and cardiovascular disease has been suspected since the 1950s. There have been hundreds of observational studies on the topic, but the first large intervention study was completed in 2006. The study cost $415 million, which is why studies like this don’t happen often. I know you heard about this in this news, but the finding was entirely negative: that is, there was no evidence that reducing dietary fat intake reduced the risk of cardiovascular disease.

The study was criticized on several grounds. Maybe the researchers didn’t look at saturated fat intake. (They did.) The results only apply to older women. (True, but based on what we know about lipid metabolism, they’ll probably generalize to older men.) Finally:

> But the scientists declined to call the $415 million venture a failure, pointing to signs of less breast cancer in women who cut out the most fat, and in less heart disease in women who ate low amounts of the worst kinds of fats.

That’s called cherry-picking, rummaging around in your data for *something* statistically significant. Bad idea–it means you’re looking for an answer that the study wasn’t designed to provide.

What does this have to do with _Real Food_? Well, the link between fat and heart disease is one of the best-established tenets of our nutritional orthodoxy. There is a ton of evidence suggesting a relationship between saturated fat, cholesterol, CHD, and stroke. It was smart to make dietary recommendations based on this very suggestive data.

It cost $415 million to determine that these recommendations were probably wrong. Maybe not. Maybe the subjects were too old to make a difference. Maybe the hypothesis was correct but the results weren’t statistically significant. You can’t make an all-encompassing conclusion on the basis of one study.

But this is the *best evidence we have*. It’s much better than the evidence in favor of fish oil or blueberries. It’s much better than the evidence against white sugar and trans fats (two more of Planck’s demons).

I wanted to like this _Real Food_ as much as I like lard, eggs, raw-milk cheese, and fresh marionberries. There is scant evidence that any of these things are bad for you, and if you enjoy them, you should eat them. If only Planck had stuck to that message.

Yesterday I went to the Columbia City Farmers Market in search of a chicken, and I came home with the chicken, some tomatoes, skinny green beans (you really can’t say *haricots verts* without sounding like a dick, can you?), squash blossoms, and tomatillos. Clearly I’m a tomatillo addict. Put me in front of a box of them, especially purple ones with snug husks, and I’ll buy them even if I already have a bunch at home. But this story isn’t about tomatillos. It’s about beans.

I also spent a little time showing farmers market pioneer Nina Planck (former director of the NYC Greenmarkets) around. Progress was admirably slow. She would stop at a stand (admiring, say, the lettuces at Tolt River Farm) and indicate her approval. This happened at nearly every stand. I’ve seen it before. You bring someone someone from another part of the country and get them up close and personal with Northwest produce, and they won’t want to go home. I say this like Nina Planck and I are buddies, but this was the first time we’d met, and I liked her enough that I will feel mildly guilty about posting critical (along with favorable) things about her book tomorrow.

Tonight, I made what I think constitutes a classic bistro salad. I blanched the skinny beans in heavily salted water and shocked them in ice water. I set them aside while I made the dressing. I diced some Nueske’s and crisped it up in a pan. Added some olive oil because there wasn’t quite enough fat. I minced shallots and toasted sliced almonds in the fat, then added a dash of cider vinegar to make it a vinaigrette. (Why cider vinegar? I thought it might help it go better with the enchiladas. It didn’t, really, but it was still good.) Dried the beans, tossed them with the warm dressing and a little pepper, and we were all set. Iris ate the almonds and bacon and did not condescend to try a green bean. Even Gloria of Bread and Jam for Frances fame likes to practice with a string bean when she can.

The salad was great, but I wondered how to get the dressing to integrate with the beans a little better. I think I just found the answer. I remembered having a similar salad at Pike Place Market’s Café Campagne, which was topped with lovely slices of grilled bacon. According to the menu, it is:

*Haricots verts marinated with lemon vinaigrette and shallots, topped with grilled bacon*

Marinated, hmm. I guess next week I’ll be buying more–sorry to be a dick about it–*haricots verts*.

We drink tea. Not as much as the English people we know, but a couple of cups a day. Our favorite tea is PG Tips, which is the bestselling tea in England. It’s about what you would expect of the bestselling tea in England: unthreatening. It’s smooth and not very tannic. The second-bestselling tea in England, Typhoo, is very tannic. I guess it’s like the choice between red delicious and granny smith apples.

Sometimes I flirt with other teas. I tend to order lapsang souchong, the smoked tea, whenever I see it on a cafe menu, because I’m not allowed to make it in the teapot at home: it makes the next six pots of tea smokehouse-fresh. But I always come back to the familiar flavor of PG Tips.

That’s why I was excited about [Amazon Grocery](http://amazon.com/grocery/). Thanks to Grocery and one of the Amazon Prime free trials they’ve been giving out, we got six boxes of Tips (240 bags) for about half what we would have paid at the supermarket. Then I got all excited. “If we can save 50 percent on tea, think of all the other savings we will achieve through Amazon Grocery. We will have that pony in no time.” The pony does not qualify for Amazon Prime, but millions of other great products do!

So I spent half an hour browsing and turned up absolutely nothing else I wanted. Not microwave popcorn. Not lavender dishwashing detergent. Not La Tempesta Grande Biscotti (almond, semi-crunchy). I believe “La Tempesta Grande” is Italian for “the perfect storm.”

If you’re in England, I assume 240 bags of PG Tips is a week’s supply. Then again, if you’re in England, you don’t have Amazon Grocery.

First, I have no idea whether to use the spelling “kebab” or “kabob.” I will switch randomly.

Second, I didn’t eat any kebabs. Be forewarned.

My friend Liza told me a mouthwarming story about how people showed up late to her cookout with a bunch of Whole Foods kebabs. Sadly for them, the propane tank was cashed, so Liza appropriated the kabobs.

This made me especially jealous because I’ve never had those Whole Foods kebabs, and they look really good. Every time I go past the kabob counter, which always features a few employees threading and marinating kebabs, I say to myself, “Hey, those look really good, but I’m not going to pay some guy a 100 percent markup to thread kabobs when I can do it myself.”

How many times have I actually done it myself? Zero.

I don’t have a grill, but next time I go to Whole Foods I am going to buy some kabobs and broil them, and we are going to like it.

It’s hard to catch any member of my family going on a self-help tear. This is partly because we are already awesome and partly, at least speaking for myself, because I tend to discount advice that might actually be useful on the grounds that it can’t be all that clever if I’m not already doing it.

But this week I’ve been reading a self-improvement book. It looks like a home improvement book, but that’s a disguise. The book is called Apartment Therapy, and it’s written by an interior decorator. Unsurprisingly, he recommends curtains and expensive furniture. That’s not what moved me to action. What got me was the author’s insistence on getting rid of a whole bunch of crap, including stuff you think is important.

It would be easy to dismiss this as new-age Voluntary Simplicity claptrap, except that he’s got a good reason: his own apartment is 250 square feet. I cannot beat this guy, although I guess I could argue that because our apartment is larger than 250 square feet, I have plenty of room for all the stuff he thinks I should get rid of.

Oh, okay, I know he’s right. I know because last year we moved from a larger apartment into a smaller one. We had to move a large number of books, including nearly all of my non-food-related books, into storage. We ripped all of our CDs to iTunes and got rid of them (this was an awesome call and I highly recommend it). Probably we also had to store other stuff I’ve forgotten about. In the ten months since we moved, I have gone looking for a book that was in storage exactly once, and the book was Stanley Park, which is food-related and probably should have gone on the cookbook shelf.

So after reading some Apartment Therapy, I told Laurie we could go ahead and get rid of any of my books that are still packed away. I don’t know what they are and I don’t want to know, because then I might start saying, “You were going to get rid of *this?* Are you crazy?” where *this* is something like a book of urban planning essays that I haven’t read since 1994.

The books were easy to let go of, because they were already half-gone, and that’s the A.T. guy’s clever innovation. You’re not getting rid of stuff, you’re just putting it into an “outbox.” It’s a trial separation.

Of course, now I’m wondering if I might be able to do the same with the kitchen. I love the idea of the panini grill, but I’ve actually used it once since the move, I think. And why do we have three one-quart saucepans?

Laurie, if you’re reading, don’t worry–I’m not going to wheelbarrow out the kitchen while your back is turned. And I really do use both of my three-quart saucepans at once sometimes.

How about you, readers? Ever scaled back your pantry? How did it go?