Are We Really What We Eat?

A noted nutritionist once referred to nutrition as the Rodney Daingerfield of the healing sciences. Like the late Rodney Daingerfield, nutrition “don’t get no respect.” The fact that nutritional science is not respected by a large segment of the medical profession and is dismissed by not a small segment of the general population is due to the fallacy of the conventional wisdom of nutrition, summed up in the adage “You are what you eat.”

The fact is, we aren’t what we eat. And this is a very good thing. Let me give you an example from my personal experiences.

About twenty years ago, I spent a short time working at a clinic in a developing nation in Asia. We had a large bowl of white rice at every meal. For between-meal snacks, we had white rice steamed in banana leaves. White rice provided 80 to 90 percent of our daily calories. At least once a day, usually at breakfast, we’d also have a vegetable harvested from the courtyard (usually long green beans or sweet potato greens), a green banana perhaps, or an occasional piece of fruit picked fresh from the tree or a green papaya shredded for a salad. Every breakfast came with a nutritious spoonful of fish, rotted fish.

Tiny tilapia were left in open jars out in the sun until they completely disintegrated into fatty oil, so fatty that it effectively suffocated the bacteria that rotted it. The resulting fishy elixir was the main source of both fat and protein, except for the bugs that often found their way into the rice bowl.

Milk was virtually unknown in this part of the world. The only kind of milk you could get was instant, contributed by a US AID program. The locals referred to it as “that fine American white cement.” I never actually saw anyone drink it. (They fed it to pigs.) Although meat was available, it was seldom consumed.

An average family of six might consume a half dozen eggs a month and a chicken once a year, or two. Pork was strictly a banquet food, and seafood was sold to government buyers who traded it for foreign exchange. Since the country was in an economic crisis and under martial law, there was no imported food of any kind. Most Americans would regard the diet as primitive, but malnutrition (except for vitamin A deficiencies in infants and toddlers) was very rare.

Shortly before I returned to the States, I was the guest of honor at three banquets. My hosts spent a large part of their savings to feed the attendees at each of these banquets. Under such circumstances, one graciously eats what one is served.

Fresh fish was served at the first banquet. All kinds of fish had been caught in the middle of the night, sneaked past the harbor police, and wrapped in banana leaves and cooked over coals early in the morning. The scent of ginger and smoke was enticing. About a hundred people gathered around the long seafood-laden table. They all waited for me to eat the ceremonial first dish, a delicacy—a bowl of fish eyes.

I ate them. They were chewy. The other banqueters got the rest of the fish. I was only served the eyes, although my hosts did save me some sea bass with ginger from the leftovers. They sent it with me in the local equivalent of a doggie bag, made from banana leaves.

At the second banquet, my host had bought not one or two but twenty chickens. Twenty chickens equaled the lifetime consumption of poultry of many families. After an hour or two of chickens cackling in protest and feathers flying from the kitchen, the aroma of barbecued chicken filled the air. Once again, the community gathered at the table. And once again, a delicacy was placed before me—a bowl filled with twenty chicken beaks.

I ate them. They were chewy. And once again, my serving was the choicest part of the bird, the beak, although I was also offered some steamed chicken feet in red pepper sauce just before dessert.

The third banquet was hosted by the local bishop and was to be held at a nearby restaurant. The official name of the restaurant was Ding Qua Qua, but locals laughingly referred to the restaurant as Ding Meow Meow. In an attempt to avoid being the recipient of yet another local delicacy, this delicacy one that purred, I politely asked the bishop’s assistant if he could arrange for the banquet to be at a restaurant where I could get a kosher meal.

The next evening, the bishop and his staff took me to the local pizza place. Since the economic crisis prevented imports, the pizza emporium had no cheese or wheat flour, so the cook made the pizza dough from rice flour. The round, rice cake pizza was topped with tomato sauce, green papaya, garlic, ginger, and the meal’s main event—whole baby squid, possibly purchased but probably purloined from a local fish vendor. Of course squid are not kosher, but they were certainly more holy and wholesome than kitty chow mein.

I ate them (the squid, that is). They were chewy.

After my adventures with whole foods in Asia, I am happy to report I did not grow fins or start breathing through gills. I do not crow in the morning and I have neither wings nor feathers. At last inspection, I have two arms, not ten tentacles. I’m not what I eat, and neither are you.

The role food plays in our lives is a lot like a lottery in which every participant is a winner. Any food we eat has nutritional value, even if it just the provision of empty calories, which are, as we tend to forget, essential to life. Our bodies are “hard wired” to honor the lives of the plants and animals that become our food by finding nutrition in a practically infinite number of ways. In and of itself, no food is junk. Some foods are more healthful than others.

The value of food to human health, however, doesn’t depend on the food as much as on ourselves. Physiologically, our bodies have to make a token investment in claiming their prize. A minimum level of basic nutrition is necessary for our bodies to extract a maximum amount of benefit from particular foods, but our own bodies determine the fate of our food. We aren’t what we eat. We aren’t even what we digest. Physically, we are what our bodies make from food.