Price is everything. A problematic $25 lunch is reason for fist-shaking and [burning things down](http://www.mamster.net/ratcm/). A troublesome $7 lunch is comedy.

Yesterday I went to the local community college for lunch. Their culinary school runs two restaurants. I chose the international cuisine restaurant, which was serving a Oaxacan menu. For about $7, you get an entree and soup or salad. I had already decided on the pork mole when the waiter (who is also a culinary student) came over and said, “We have a special today of spicy halibut soup.”

“Great,” I said. “I’ll have the pork mole and the spicy halibut soup.”

“Man, I knew this was going to be a problem,” said the waiter. “The soup is actually available only as an entree.” So I ordered pork mole and tortilla soup.

The tortilla soup was very nice, aside from a few chunks of dried chile that should have been strained out. The mole was foul. The sauce tasted like fish. I called the waiter over and explained the problem. “Let me take it back to the kitchen and see what’s going on,” he said.

He returned and explained that the pot of fish stock for the halibut soup was right next to the chicken stock for the mole, and the cook had mixed my mole paste with a ladle of fish stock. In other words, I got screwed by the same soup twice. But I had a new and tasty mole in five minutes.

I figure the culinary school is kind of like NASCAR. You’re not getting your money’s worth without a few crashes.

Last night I made kung pao chicken from a Fine Cooking recipe. I liked it–it was just the kind of cornstarch-packed Sino-American glop I require from time to time, but better and cheaper than our local takeout options. (Probably next I’ll try the kung pao recipe from Fuchsia Dunlop’s Land of Plenty, for a less saucy and gloopy version. I like it both ways.)

For the most part, I’ve given in to Iris’s antipathy toward spicy foods. Sometimes I serve something with a spicy salsa on the side, but many of my favorites are spicy throughout. Kung pao chicken is like that: trying to fake it with dried chile flakes or hot oil at the end feels like cheating. Even if I might never tell the difference in a blind test, I imagine the hot stuff never quite permeates the dish the way it should.

So I cheated. While the sauce was thickening up, I spooned out a portion into a bowl for Iris, then added a whole minced jalapeño to the rest for me and Laurie. I felt a bit like I was compromising my principles, specifically that when adults and children sit down together, they should eat the same stuff. But then I was like, wait a minute, it’s not like I’m serving Iris chicken nuggets while we eat kung pao, and me eating spicy food is an important principle too.

Iris was suspicious. “That’s not the spicy one?” she asked, indicating the small bowl. I think she was trying to trip us up and make us admit that, okay, they’re both spicy. But she enjoyed the kung pao, almost as much as the rice. I’ll probably play spicy/nonspicy again when the dish provides an easy branch point, but I am *not* making mild enchiladas.

The cover story in today’s New York Times magazine is a landmark piece by Michael Pollan called Unhappy Meals. I think it’s the best thing he’s ever written, possibly because it speaks so eloquently to my own prejudices.

Here’s the short version: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

But the meat of the article, so to speak, is an attack on what Pollan calls “nutritionism”: the ideology that holds that the best way to a healthy diet is to ignore *foods* and concentrate on ingesting the proper amounts and ratios of nutrients lurking within them. This has led to many absurdities, like this one:

> Of course it’s also a lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a potato or carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming about their newfound whole-grain goodness.

As I read, a parallel occurred to me. Every day online, on TV, and at the newsstand, you can read investing tips. Ten hot stocks! Where to put your money now! And so on. A popular term for this type of story is “investment porn,” although I recently read a book that pointed out that this term is unfair, because actual porn delivers results.

The problem with investment porn is not that it’s all wrong. It’s that some of it is right and some of it is wrong, and you have no way of telling the difference. Furthermore, even if you were blessed with the ability to know the good advice from bad, the transaction costs associated with moving your money around all the time to the latest hot stock would eat all your profit anyway. The only way to invest that actually works is to buy the entire stock and bond markets (in the form of index funds) and sit on them for a long time. How boring is that, though?

So it goes with nutrition porn, a category that encompasses everything from a Kellogg’s commercial to the latest press release from Center for Science in the Public Interest. The cost of paying attention to this junk, of running from oat bran to cinnamon to omega-3s, is wrong turns (“Don’t forget that margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim that it was more healthful than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks,” writes Pollan) but also the worst transaction cost of all: stress. “Worrying about diet can’t possibly be good for you,” adds Pollan.

I would go further, then, than Pollan’s opening exhortation. Eat whatever gives you the most pleasure, ignoring nutritional advice as best you can. If it helps you relax, take a daily multivitamin–it won’t hurt, though it probably won’t help, either. (I take one, one of my little superstitions; the joke I’ve heard is that it gives you very expensive urine.) You won’t live forever on this diet, I’m afraid–but you just might outlive some of the nutritional E-trade addicts clutching their fish oil pills. Or whatever it is this week.