Wednesday Open Mike: Prance Master (And: Food Book List)

There's a nice article in last week's New Yorker by Sam Knight called "Prance Master," about Olympic dressage. As usual for the magazine, the article has a different title online. Sam—who also wrote the epochal recent profile of the scintillating Ronnie O'Sullivan, the Michael Jordan of snooker—limns some of the mystery and majesty of this very ancient sport. The first dressage coach was the Athenian cavalryman and scholar Xenophon, a student of Socrates.

The article quotes Xenophon's "On Horsemanship" (Περὶ ἱππικῆς, peri hippikēs) for the sport's "ethical rationale," and it leapt off the page for me: "Anything forced or misunderstood can never be beautiful."

Ever since I fought my way through the dense thickets of Spengler* as a young fool, my thinking has been very free about connecting disparate arts and seeing the diaphanous ligatures that connect them (and I wish I could find that quote). I have no problem with the idea that Kerouac is closer to Pollock than either is to Satie. All art is one, really. Just as Chomsky talks about all human languages being the same, taking different forms only because language must take form, or the idea that different religions are different "clothing" for underlying mystical truths that can cannot be apprehended unless clothed.

Anyway I immediately applied that line from Xenophon to photography, and to all our recent discussions about Photoshopping and when a photograph stops being a photograph in its essence. Xenophon's lovely aphorism touches the heart what I dislike about all the "imagery" I object to and why I love the photographs I love.

Fool no one
...However our recent discussions have also made me flip my own thinking about the state of photography. It is always possible to look at something from only one perspective, but there are always more. I tend to look not only at what we have gained in the last twenty years, but what we have lost. So sometimes I mourn for what photography was that it no longer is. But now I've come around to believing it's a fool's errand to try to hang on to the values of the past when the past is gone.

I have more to say about this in the book I've been working on; no use going into it here.

But isn't that a lovely line? "Anything forced or misunderstood can never be beautiful." I used to say that the quality I loved in photography was poetic, but that was never quite right. Xenophon hit the nail more squarely...in a book about horsemanship, from the 4th century B.C.E.!

I think I'll hang that quote on my wall. Love it.

 

[I'll add more to this post in a bit, on a different topic—right now Butters must run!]

 

The only diet book worth beans
Butters is temporarily worn out, after yet another session with the much-beloved tennis ball.

I've been threatening for months to post a list of the best food books I've found in my peregrinations, and today's the day.

I got very curious about the obesity epidemic about 4–5 years ago—I don't really remember exactly when it was—and started reading up. By now I've read at least 40 books on the topic and probably skimmed that many more. Skimmed, because lots of diet and nutrition books conform to "types"—they advocate similar systems and repeat similar beliefs, and are written according to only a few standard formulas.

These are the six I think are the best, or that I think provide the best information, or that I enjoyed reading the most. I recommend all of these as being excellent on the topics of eating for health, agribusiness, and the SAD (standard American diet, now eaten by most Europeans and in many other places in the world as well). In no particular order:

Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. (UK link, Book Depository link.) If there's a classic exposé of opposition to modern industrial nutrition, this 2001 book is it. A racing, bracing, incendiary, briskly-paced page-turner that you'll read on a tear. Reporter Schlosser deconstructs the fast-food industry and its products and all the ways it affects our lives. By the time the book arrives at its core, things have gotten scary and genuinely harrowing: he gives the reader a vivid look at the brutal and scofflaw meatpacking industry, in the process linking his book directly to Upton Sinclair's classic The Jungle of 1906, a book that had a huge influence on pre-WWII reformers and regulators (and that made my doctor sister-in-law give up hot dogs for life). As one review put it, "forget cholesterol—there are feces in hamburger."

Eat to Live by Joel Fuhrman. (UK link, Book Depository link.) Of all the diet books in all the bookstores in all the world, this is the best. Fuhrman is a religious type as much as a scientist: a "true believer." But really, after you've read several dozen diet books, you'll have to conclude that there is no general agreement, at all, except for one thing: fruits and vegetables are good for you. (And some gurus don't even really approve of fruits.) Fuhrman's idea is persuasive: you have to eat, so you might as well pack each calorie you ingest with the maximum amount of nutrients—by which he means eating a whole lot of fruits and vegetables. And, apropos the header for this section, lots and lots of beans. "Empty calories" like sugar and alcohol are anathema to Fuhrman, and he abhors eating meat although his diet permits it. He's not a typical "vegan" in other ways either—for instance, he considers whole grains, potatoes, pasta and rice to be calories that are mostly empty. The diet recommends jumping in with both feet with a strict six-week plan, and it is pretty amazing how much better that six weeks will make you feel. Fuhrman's Nutritarian diet is the ultimate embodiment of the "food is medicine" school of thought.

Mystified at to the cause of the obesity epidemic?
You won't be after you read this.

Potatoes Not Prozac by Kathleen DesMaisons. (UK link, Book Depository link.) This is a readable and engagingly enthusiastic account of a physiological effect that's been well documented in many places: the issue of sugar craving and its effects on blood sugar and insulin. The book has problems: its title offended many people who have been helped by the antidepressant Prozac, and its dietary advice—eat a potato before bedtime—ignored the fact that potatoes have a high glycemic index and are metabolized much like sugar...as used in DesMaisons' regime, they're basically just a sugar substitute. Oops! She even tried to reboot: she wrote another book that tried to address all the shortcomings of the first book. It didn't work—it did address everyone's objections, but the writing in the later book had all the life and energy sucked out of it too. Despite its flaws, I've never read a better or easier-to-understand book on the subject than Potatoes Not Prozac. It makes plain the fact that many people are simply addicted to sugar—since the 1970s the ideal industrial foodstuff, added to everything from soup to bread to barbeque sauce. Even today's onions have been bred to contain many times more sugar than they naturally did. Take this book with a grain of salt (wow, bad expression!), but read it if you, like me, suffer from a "sweet tooth."

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. (UK link, Book Depository link.) This is the book that dozens if not hundreds of critics and organizations named as one of the best books of 2007, and the one that made Michael Pollan a celebrity in the world of food and nutrition. It's also the only book on this list that could be, and I say should be, read for pleasure by any intelligent reader, even those not necessarily interested in food. We are omnivores, and the omnivore's dilemma is: if you can eat anything, what should you eat? (Pandas can only eat bamboo shoots; being a panda means never having to ask what's for dinner.) Pollan's concept was to examine four meals in great detail, ranging from the least to the most local. For the first meal, the one most distant from its production, he ate a McDonald's meal in his car. If you imagine there's nothing to say about that, fasten your seatbelt! Amazingly, virtually all parts of a McDonald's meal are made at least in part from corn—even the milkshake!—and the long account of corn farming, corn science, and corn politics is alone worth the price of the book. Pollan's last meal featured the meat from a wild boar he hunted and slayed himself, and vegetables he grew in his front yard—about as local as it gets. Pollan is a wonderful writer and a very engaging tour guide, and this book is a not-to-be-missed treat.

Eating on the Wild Side by Jo Robinson. (UK link, Book Depository link.) This was recommended to me only a few months ago. The premise of this book is rather astonishing. Robinson makes the point that throughout human agriculture, stretching back tens of thousands of years, there are many reasons why humans have chosen to cultivate certain plants as food—but almost never has the primary reason been because they are good for us to eat. Rather, we've cultivated plants because they're easy to grow, can be harvested all at once, look good for a reasonable time after harvesting, taste good, or are easy to store. In many cases we've taken natural plants that were good for us originally and bred them for properties other than human nutrition, making them worse for us to eat than they were "in the wild." Without doing original research, Robinson spent ten years combing the scholarly literature for tips on how to choose the healthiest plants and how best to prepare them for optimum nutrition (one fun, if discouraging, fact: broccoli is indeed a superfood, but only if you eat it within six hours of harvest. And supermarket broccoli is on average two weeks old). Indispensable information for plant-eaters, and a valuable complement to Eat to Live. I've already given away several copies.

Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss. (UK link, Book Depository link.) I haven't been giving the subtitles of these books, but the one for this book is informative: "How the Food Giants Hooked Us." Remember the Doritos ad campaign, "Bet you can't eat just one"? Turns out vast fortunes and intensive resources have been poured into that very bet. This book takes a close look at the ways in which the food industry gets you to buy, and overeat, its products. From the account of how the industry addressed the crisis of health-conscious people avoiding the chips aisle altogether, to where all the milkfat from skim and 2% milk goes (hint: you're probably not avoiding it), to why most single cans of soup have more sodium than healthy people should eat all day, you'll get a lot of inside scoop here. According to Moss, the unhealthiest foods are processed meats, any kind of chips, and cheese. The culmination of the book is the story of Bob Drane, the inventor of "Lunchables." Drane has had to reconcile himself to being permanently ambivalent. He made millions for his employer, Oscar Meyer, and became a star in his profession—which he's proud of; but he invented a supremely unhealthy packaged meal now fed to millions of children, definitely to their nutritional detriment. He's now retired and a nutrition advocate in Madison, Wisconsin. He's still proud of his spectacular success, but he doesn't let his own kids eat the very product he invented. The book won the Pulitzer Prize.

I'm not saying those are absolutely the best books out there on eating, food, and nutrition, but those are the standouts from my reading so far. I hope one or two of them look interesting to you too.

Mike

"Open Mike" is the off-topic, anything-goes page of TOP, when we uncage the Ed. and let him be not so Hmbl. It now appears on Wednesdays.

*I know the link is to an abridged edition, but, believe me, let's admit the frailty of flesh and the fleetingness of life—you want your Spengler abridged.

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

James Weekes: "It is now printed and up in my office. Perfect quote."

Don: "The best book about food I've read in terms of what it contains and how it affects you would by Roy Walford's Beyond the 120 Year Diet. Although it's about the benefits of low calorie intake and some adherents have taken things to cult-like extreme, it's packed with info. Fuhrman I would imagine was inspired by it: certainly his reads like a recent spin on the central theme.

"Walford investigated the effects of fasting on longevity in mice. He also found himself getting hungry when locked into Biosphere 2 with the Bionauts. I spent three months sailing the Indian Ocean in 1985 crewing a vessel (the Institute of Ecotechnic's RV Heraclitus) along with three of the 'bionauts' that went into that first two-year lock-in of Biosphere 2. I could reveal a few insights into why it turned into a psychological drama with factions that wouldn't talk to each other!

"Anyway, here's the book."

Lorenzo C.: "This is why I read TOP. I love the diaphanous ligatures of disparate domains that effervesce here. Would that my life were not so practically pedestrian, but the TOP aesthetic redeems my daily Sisyphean toil (if not my camera and lens choices)."

Jona: "Thank you for the book recommendations. My wife has a gluten allergy and I always had a bloated stomach...until I stopped eating 'healthy' grains and dairy. I just started a life long dream of a large vegetable garden, but when looking for things to grow all the reviews rave over the sweetest apple, the sweetest squash, the sweetest tomato. I don't want that. As a big believer in eating how we evolved, I know that the first apples were bitter and berries were good for the colors and not the sugar. Breeders have been selecting the sweetest of varieties because sugar tricks our brains and sweet sells, just like the industrial food giants know. So I am looking forward to reading Eating on the Wild Side and growing the varieties of vegetables recommended.

"Thanks also for the Ronnie O'Sullivan article. I have a feeling it will be a great read."

Stephen Scharf: "A wonderful, beautiful quote that could be applied to so many endeavors as well as horsemanship or photography: dance, martial arts, tennis, archery, golf, even motorcyle riding...."

Comments

[Herman]

When you are close to 90 years old, the past is not yet gone.

[Speed]

Anything forced or misunderstood can never be beautiful.

This is how I feel when, after fiddling with an image for too long, I decide that the silk purse is elsewhere.

[Chuck Albertson]

Stephen Colbert called dressage the Sport of the Summer...for people who use "summer" as a verb.

[Moose]

"I think I'll hang that quote on my wall. Love it."

The most obvious and easily read thing above my desk, whenever I look up from my efforts to create beauty in images, is the ancient Egyptian proverb:

"A beautiful thing is never perfect"

_______________________

Next to it at the moment is a photograph I recently bought in which the photographer has somehow used a form of unsharpness that I would usually dislike to make an otherwise pleasant, but ordinary, land/seascape painterly and beguiling.

I don't even know whether the result is intentional.

[Murray Davidson]

"The Big Fat Surprise: why butter, meat, and cheese belong in a healthy diet" by Nina Teicholz
It is, you will be. Just read it. Fascinating research into, amongst other things, the Mediterranean diet - the biggest made-up story (in nutrition and diet) in more than 60 years.

[No sale here. A variant on the dangerous no carb / lo carb fad, written by a nonspecialist. I quit after forty pages. --Mike]

[Chuck Albertson]

Be sure to pick up Eric Schlosser's "Command and Control" as well. You'll never think the same about nuclear weapons after reading it.

[Michael Perini]

It is true of many things that elegance, symmetry , spareness are hallmarks of everything from music , to architecture to scientific equations . I remember reading a quotr from Einstein that sometimes he worked backwards when trying to solve a problem---asking first what would be beautiful and seeing if it fit. Often it did.

[D]

That is a great quote! And as I am just starting to study Ancient Greek, it's a bonus that I was able to read and translate (somewhat) the Greek letters.

Another good food book that is doing me a lot of good in the past few months is "Always Hungry" by Ludwig. It is a book on the science and practice of good eating, and includes recipes.

The appetizing (!) thing about his approach is that while it omits bread/sugar, as do many others, they are replaced with whole-milk dairy. The idea is that the "lusciousness" of cheese and rich dressings helps to make you feel full, while losing weight. And I do, and I have.

[Tom Burke]

I like the Xenophon quote. Here are a few from William Morris:

"Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful"

"If you cannot learn to love real art, at least learn to hate sham art and reject it."

"History has remembered the kings and warriors, because they destroyed; art has remembered the people, because they created."

There were lots of things wrong with Morris' work, not least the fact that the price of his beautiful objects restricted them to the few, regardless of what he said, but I can't help feeling he was on the right track - just a few decades too early.

[Michael Walsh]

Hi Mike
Highly recommend as essential reading - The Big Fat Suprise by Nina Teicholz - (utterly shocking re the Medical Idustrial governmental complex😂) Great read and got me hoping mad
And a fantastic book by a Prof at UCL Tim Spector - The Diet Myth will get you eating cheese and butter again
All the best
Mike

[PaddyC]

I'm currently enjoying a high-fat, high-carb, high-alcohol summer diet. Perhaps I should write a book?

[MikeR]

Well, I clicked through to Amazon and ordered "Eat to Live." Cheaper than a camera or a lens. May I recommend Michael Pollan's "Cooked?" Key quote: "First we cooked our food. Then it cooked us."

I have a gluten sensitivity. Pollan's essay on bread-making, and a recipe for sourdough bread, transformed my breakfasts, and allowed me to eliminate high glycemic index GF bread substitutes. He notes that, over the years, seed companies have developed high-gluten strains of wheat that suit the needs of commercial bakers. That commercial bakers have highly refined (!) the yeast-rising of bread, to reduce its time to just about an hour. And that Italian researchers, in a country with a very high celiac rate (who would have suspected, with all that pasta and pizza?), have shown that a long fermentation time somehow locks up the gluten protein so that it has a much reduced effect on the small intestine.

If you are interested, I can send you my own refinement and tweaking of Pollan's method. I usually start a loaf on a Monday, and finally bake it on a Friday. It is a bread much like what I knew from the 1940's, and an absolute delight. Despite the mystique surrounding sourdough starters, it's really not that hard to pull off.

[robert e]

Thanks for highlighting Xenophon's wonderful insight (via Knight). Clearly it resonates with you, and to many of us. Why not apply it to writing as well? Some aesthetic like it may explain, in part, the quality of effortlessness in your writing. Will head for the article first. Thanks for the book recommendations, too.

[Bob Rosinsky]

I push the cart up and down the aisles at the supermarket. I realize 99% (conservative estimate) of the products are not healthy. So, I come home with some greens, some fruit, some high-fiber low-carb cereal, Finn Crisp crackers, skim milk, a paltry amount of swiss cheese, an "all natural" chicken, and a 90% cacao chocolate bar. Once a week I take delight in eating a slab o' meat. That's all there is to it. So now that I've shared my grocery list, anybody out there want to do my shopping?

[Russell Guzewicz]

Living not too far from you,I enjoy what I grow and eat that.Might be nice to eat that with you.

[John Krumm]

I've read a couple of those books and recommended "Eating on The Wild Side." I need to read it again, just to refresh. I was in the habit of taking much better care of my greens after reading it but I have become lax. I still poke holes in gallon Ziploc bags though.

I tested high for both blood pressure and cholesterol at age 50. I've taken care of the blood pressure with a little pill and plenty of exercise, but the cholesterol takes more serious intervention.... a vegan diet. Unfortunately it has worked, dropped 40 points. Carb consumption went way up. but fiber from fruits, beans and veggies too. I say unfortunately because it is so difficult to cook good tasting vegan food if you are a foodie who loves all sorts of stuff. There is a learning curve. Recently we've added back fish on occasion, and we eat meat if we are with friends, but have to be strict at home. We have a doctor friend in great shape who says his cholesterol drops like crazy when he works in India and eats so many legumes, but he takes statins in the U.S. because he likes hamburgers too much.

[BruceK]

>Remember the Doritos ad campaign, "Bet you can't eat just one"?

I _think_ that was a Lay's potato chip slogan...

[Kristine Hinrichs]

Mike I would also recommend Gina Kolata's work. She writes for NYT and just today has an article about the failings of research in this area. Her books "Rethinkinh Thin" and "Ultimate Fitness" look at the research behind many fitness and nutrition "truths" - how many people were in these studies, how they were reviewed, and who stood to gain from the findings. Notably she found that the universally accepted (and universally questioned on an individual basis) target heart rate standards came from a couple of guys looking at just a few data points. Then the heart rate monitor people ran with it... She won't teach you what to do but will certainly makes us better consumers of all the advice we find in the press.

[Lynn]

MikeR: Please let the rest of us in on your sourdough recipe tweaks! Your bread sounds wonderful.

[Wes]

You can significantly lower the GI of potatoes by adding a little fat: olive oil, butter, sour cream, cheese etc.

No one can take away my potatoes; the Irish part of me won't allow it. Adding the fat lowers the GI and the guilt.

[Ken Jam]

Thanks for the list of your favorite food diet books. I also have been facinated by this subject, more from an eating healthy perspective, and an interest in the amazing variety of opinions, and have read many books on the subject, including some of these.
I enjoy your off topic posts. We have many similar interests, except for billiards

[nic]

I've read there is a return of facial angularity as when younger and loss of weight when not eating after sundown due to various factors - circadian and etc. Some of this is covered on Dr. Jack Kruse' FB. https://www.facebook.com/drjackkruse/posts/1327407307323620

[Jay Pastelak]

As books on food and cooking go, Tamar Adler's An Everlasting Meal was pretty inspiring. She starts with boiling water (if you can boil water you can cook) and goes from there. It's less a recipe book (it has some) than a book about the philosophy of cooking.

[Joe Q.]

I quite liked reading "Eat Drink and Be Healthy" by Walter Willett. It's a very science-driven book (as much a nutrition book can be).

I have mixed feelings about "The Omnivore's Dilemma". Like you, I enjoyed the sections about corn - they alone make the book worth reading. I was less enamoured of the anti-science strains in it - Pollan's chemistry-related comments somehow got by his fact-checkers - made the sections on preservatives, etc. almost embarrassing to read.

[Steve Caddy]

Great line of thought, Mike. I find the inspiration from painting, music and poetry much easier to act on photographically than the inspiration from other photographs. It's too direct. Or is it not direct enough in the things that matter?

As D.A.H. councils: "Shoot what it feels like, not what it looks like."

On the old v new, you're on the right track. Have a look at what David Allan Harvey and John Stanmeyer are doing with Instagram stories. (And while you're there, look up @_xst ... amazing work.)

[Steve Caddy]

To make it easier, here's a link: https://www.instagram.com/_xst/

[Sean]

That quote pairs well with

"What I cannot create, I do not understand."

Richard Feynman

[jorit aust]

Hello, the best book about food that i ever read and the basic of modern cooking:
Auguste Escoffier: A Guide to Modern Cookery (ISBN-13: 9781108063500).
You will learn a lot about what went wrong since then.
Have a good time in the kitchen!

[Steve Jacob]

I have managed to lose around 30 lbs since 2010 without reading any diet books or starving myself. I just applied common sense and did some research of my own, and lost about 7-8lbs a year for the first four years, which was relatively painless.

I've been about the same since 2014, which is well within the 'normal' BMI range.

But it's not a 'diet' except in the general sense. I just exist on a wide variety of staples (around 50 items) which I restrict myself to, but it includes a lot of variety and is anything but arduous or boring. In fact it makes shopping a lot easier.

Nor do I go hungry. I eat when I want to, but small amounts and often rather than large meals. This reduced my appetite without even having to think about it, but I do always have breakfast.

In short, I just cut down on sugars (except fruit), substituted high-fibre carbs for most regular ones, and omega-3 fat sources for most saturated ones. Not exclusively, but to a large extent.

I still eat a full range of carbs, sugars, protein and fat, but the balance is very different and I tailor it somewhat according to activity levels.

I did cut down a lot on alcohol and cheese, and eliminated chocolate and other confectionary completely. That was the really hard bit.

I also substituted fromage frais and skimmed milk for yoghurt and real milk.

I also walk at least 20 miles a week, including 3 days of at least 5 miles. I just take a camera and go somewhere interesting. On those days I allow myself a treat or two, like some parmesan on pasta and meatballs. I love Italian food.

This was all much harder when I worked in an office and had limited food choices, vending machines full of Snickers bars and lots of enforced socialising (in the bar).

I also don't have any sugar-crazed kids to worry about, and my girlfriend, who is French, loves my cooking and eats a lot of the same stuff herself. She does have a bit of a chocolate fetish, but she does that in private ;-)

In the end, it's all about calories, but cutting out sugar and alcohol alone makes a big difference, far more that regulating my fat intake, which in calorie terms is more or less the same.

It's also about burning calories, but the trick is to burn them when you eat them, not three days later.

Exercise, fibre and omega 3 are also very good for cholesterol and blood sugar, but you don't have to go crazy on the exercise. A five mile brisk walk with a camera is fun, and far from boring - unlike an exercise bike which is neither. I did try cycling but in London it's far too risky.

[Karl]

I do watch what I eat and will offer these simple morsels (ha, see what I did there!) of information that anybody can put into use right this minute and benefit from:

- Eat only real food. That simply means you have to recognize it as a food that's more or less in it's natural state. There are no Hungry Man Dinner tree's out there or corndog fields. Meat, veggies, potatoes, fruits, rice, eggs, etc - that's what you want. If it's not real food, get rid of it and don't buy any more of it.
- Good fat is good for you - whole eggs, avocado, some nuts, extra virgin olive oil, etc. Dorito's and Domino's pizza aren't good fats.
- Look at the labels. If it's full of ingredients you can't even remotely pronounce, you don't want to eat it.
- Portion control. This one is so obvious it's amazing it's not mentioned enough.
- Time your carbs. Going to do a lot of physical activity like a run or going to the gym? Good, carb up before and after, with lots of protein. Shortly before bed after a lazy day? This is the last place you want to ingest carbs.
- Keep a nutrient journal. As you prepare your foods write down (for the portion size you are injesting) the carb, fat and protein makeup. After a few days look at it and make adjustments where necessary. This one will be a BIG eye opener. Personally I was so totally disgusted after making my first meal like this that I completely revamped my eating habits.

As one of the exercise guru's I follow has a habit of saying, "you can't out exercise a bad diet." If you don't exercise regularly, then you REALLY have your work cut out for you.

[Graham Byrnes]

"...or misunderstood can never be beautiful"

That would just about rule out humans as photographic subject matter then, no?

[Doug Thacker]

. . . sometimes I mourn for what photography was that it no longer is. Now I've come around to believing it's a fool's errand to try to hang on to the values of the past when the past is gone.

I would counter that the values of the past are the only values we have. Xenophon, 4th century B.C.E. being a case in point. Maintaining those values is always a struggle, and sometimes an outright fight, but without them we have no future worth having, and no birthright.

The Xenophon quote is excellent. "Anything forced or misunderstood can never be beautiful." It's incumbent on the artist not to force or contrive his work, but in order to be understood - not misunderstood - he is depending on shared values.

My favorite "diet" books are The Larousse Gastronomique Encyclopedia of Food, Wine & Cookery, and Escoffier Le Guide Culinaire (With the latter I only ever owned the abridged version published in the 70s, but apparently the Van Nostrand Reinhold edition - which I think is what I linked to - contains all 5000 recipes from Auguste Escoffier.)

I think the healthiest aspect of food is joy. Joy and passion trump calories and carbohydrates, and define healthy eating - which in my book consists of fresh, locally sourced, mostly non-industrial ingredients and moderate portions. None of it means anything, though, without joy - which is why I sometimes like hole-in-the-wall diners and kebab shops and street food.