Give Bessie a Break

I just got back from a trip to Santa Monica, California, a place so foreign to my experience and sensibilities that I felt like Marco Polo encountering the Mongolians. The ways of the Santa Monicans are strange indeed, and wonderful; I came away with a few observations about the natives that I think are worth sharing.

When you make eye contact with a Santa Monican, any stranger passing on the street, she smiles at you. The teeth she displays in that smile are inevitably flecked with green, making her no less beautiful. The Santa Monican owes her glowing complexion, her trim physique, and her happy nature to the raw food and the green leafy vegetables she eats five times a day. People in Santa Monica carry around whole Thai coconuts, sipping out the milk with a straw, in the same way the Uruguayans are never without a gourd full of maté. They carry whole avocados in their backpacks as "snacks." They congregate in raw food cafés like Euphoria Loves Rawvolution on Main Street, where they consume shakes made from maca, goji berries, and agave; eat lunches of hemp seed tabbouleh and coconut jerky sandwiches; and finish off with spirulina cashew pie. When they fall off the raw/vegan wagon, they head over to Le Pain Quotidienne for organic, free-range, soft-boiled eggs with rustic, homemade, multigrain toast; or to Urth Caffé for a cup of fair-trade, shade-grown, organic, sustainable, fair-wage cappuccino with organic raw milk (raw milk and cheese are legal in California, as are pot brownies... but that's another story). If they cook at home, they've got ingredients from the Wednesday/Saturday organic greenmarket that range from tiny, wild frais du bois and sweet dried plums to basketball-sized artichokes; from Meyer lemons to weedy greens like lambs quarters, all grown to locavore standards. Between meals, of course, they're in yoga class.

Santa Monicans are always in some phase of detox. You wouldn't think these heavenly bodies would have accumulated many poisons on such a rigorously nutritious diet, but cleanse they do: Everyone is either beginning, in the middle of, or just off a regimen of liver, colon, or kidney flushing. Frank and enthusiastic discussion of the state of one's internal organs, bowel movements, and gas production is considered a fair topic of polite discourse. Restaurants have adapted by offering menus of juices, nectars, broths, and elixirs; they've hired mixologists who are part-shaman, part-nutritionist, part-psychologist, part-chef.

I'd be inclined to make merry with all this if I hadn't run across a brilliant lecture by Mark Bittman, the food guy at the New York Times, posted on Ted.com. Bittman basically summarizes the research of culinary ethicists like Michael Pollen (The Omnivore's Dilemma), Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Marion Nestle (Food Politics; Safe Food), and others, but he does so within the TED construct: 18 minutes to give the "talk of your life." Bittman speaks as if his and our lives depended upon it, beginning with a series of startling facts. "After energy production, livestock is the second-highest contributor to atmosphere-altering gasses. Nearly one-fifth of all greenhouse gas is generated by livestock production..." Methane is 20 times more poisonous than CO2... half the antibiotics produced in this country are administered not to people but to animals... Livestock production in the U.S. contributes to land degradation, water pollution, water shortages, loss of biodiversity... 10 billion animals a year are slaughtered to feed us... Thirty percent of Earth's land surface is directly or indirectly devoted to raising the animals we eat, and this percentage is predicted to double in the next 40 years.

And the kicker: "Our demand for meat, dairy, and processed carbohydrates drives us to consume way more calories than are good for us; and those calories are in foods that cause, not prevent, disease. The evidence is very clear that plants promote health."

Scoff at the rawists, the vegans, the locavores, the bunny-huggers, but the evidence of our own eyes and the warnings of researchers, physicians, and social scientists are building to a crashing crescendo. Fifty percent of American children will be overweight or obese by 2010 (that's two years away, folks), and this is no matter of mere aesthetics. With childhood obesity comes a slew of diseases: diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol. That's half of all kids in the U.S. whose parents may well outlive them. We're raising the sickest generation in history.