[Sca-cooks] Medieval Cooking goes mainstream

[Jim Davis]

 From today's L.A. Times:  http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/ 
commentary/la-op-critzer12feb12,0,4644177.story?coll=la-news-comment- 
opinions

Diet tips from the 16th century
By Greg Critser, Greg Critser is the author of "Generation Rx" and  
"Fat Land."

IN THE HALLS of academe, publishing and medicine, where national  
dietary policy grows like so many inedible mushrooms in my basement,  
it was a highly unappetizing week. A huge new study blasted a super- 
sized hole in the long-held notion that a diet low in fat can curb  
the risk of heart disease and cancer. Burp. You could almost hear the  
retooling of PowerPoints, the renaming of conferences and the  
reworking of grant proposals. Fat: good.

The fat-cancer link, to be fair, has always been weak, but the notion  
that one can't lower one's risk of heart disease by keeping the  
plumbing unclogged by eating low fat — that was the paradigm buster.  
As Dr. Jules Hirsch, physician in chief emeritus at Rockefeller  
University in New York, put it, the study "should put a stop to this  
era of thinking that we have all the information we need to change  
the whole national diet and make everybody healthy." The end of an era!

In a sense, "the era" was neo-Galenic, by which I refer to the 2nd  
century physician who believed that all bodily ailments could be  
righted by balancing bodily humors with the right foods, bleeding and  
herbs. Such is the function — if not the stated intent — of our focus  
on finding and popularizing perfect dietary content. Right food,  
right bodily reaction, right health.

Unfortunately, in the modern, consumerist environment of plenty, that  
seemingly reasonable tack was swamped by the twin admonitions of "eat  
all you can of this" and "avoid all you can of that." Any notion of  
promoting dietary moderation — a key to good health — was overwhelmed  
by three new social, political and economic forces: First, the newly  
agile food industry, which learned how to retool its products swiftly  
to use dietary guidelines to its benefit (witness new low-sugar Froot  
Loops); next, agile academics who benefit from grants to research  
specific foods and who get to avoid the un-PC issue of dietary  
restraint (so moralistic!) by doing so; and, last, the health media,  
myself included, who would have a lot less to write about were it not  
for dietary villains. That's not to say that there are not any  
dietary villains. It's just to say that trying to banish just this or  
just that, without changing basic overconsumption, will never work.

Yet if the old, neo-Galenic moment is over, what will the new era bring?

I say: Bring back an old era — the Renaissance. And forget the tights  
and floppy hats. Let's look at how elites in another period of  
abundance and change thought about eating. For the last few years I  
have been working on a biography of the 16th century humanist- 
merchant Alvise (Luigi) Cornaro. A friend and mentor of everyone from  
Palladio to Cardinal Bembo, Cornaro is mostly unknown outside Italy  
and a few circles in the humanities. But for the last 450 years, his  
book "La Vita Sobria," the first book to seriously argue that dietary  
moderation can extend one's life, has never been out of print.

At its core, Cornaro's philosophy of moderation — his "divine  
medicine" — could be marketed in classic Oprah fall-and-redemption  
mode (with the added bonus that it is true). As a young man, Cornaro  
partook of the great feast of merchant life — eating, drinking,  
staying up late and spanking a few random maidens when he got a  
chance. Then came the piper: At 35, Cornaro found himself in such bad  
health — he probably had what we would call Type 2 diabetes — that  
his doctor told him that he probably would not live longer than 40 if  
he continued his ways.

Cornaro, who had the aspirations of a Donald Trump, couldn't abide by  
that and, rooting around in classic medical literature, came to  
believe that if he ate less as he aged — and if he engaged in most  
things moderately, including work — he would live longer. The key was  
not what one ate but how much one ate and — here is where today's  
dietary gurus can learn — eating only what agreed with you. Although  
he never set hard limits, his focus was on routinely pushing back  
from the table before he was satisfied. As he put it, he focused on  
"not eating or drinking more than the stomach can easily digest,  
which quantity and quality every man should be perfect judge by the  
time he is 40."

So what and how much did Cornaro eat? Estimates vary, but most put  
his caloric intake at somewhere around 1,500 a day — but that was  
Cornaro late in life. The menu is what might be called Old Italian  
Man: some milk with bread in it for breakfast, broth with egg in it  
for lunch, a small piece of goat or veal meat and perhaps a vegetable  
later in the day.

And about two cups of wine (white and "new"). This last he termed "my  
milk."

Advocating such a regimen, Cornaro intuited today's scientific  
inquiry, still ongoing, into caloric restriction and aging — how, in  
essence, too many burned calories lead to too many free radicals,  
leading to maimed body cells and illness and death. But Cornaro was  
not about caloric restriction. He was about something much tougher,  
and much more honest: the recognition that to make a habit is  
viscerally human, but to control a habit takes something from above —  
the head.

It was a dietary guideline that got Cornaro, all but dead at 40, to  
age 83.