I grilled filet mignon one night recently and ate it with salad greens tossed with buttermilk blue cheese dressing. The meal sounds retro, as if it should be served in a dark booth by a waitress pushing martinis.
It was actually new American cuisine, Bethesda-style. The steak came from Nick Maravell of Potomac, who raises certified organic chickens, turkeys and grass-fed cattle in the Frederick Valley. I bought the salad greens at a Chevy Chase farmers market from the man who grew them: Brett Grohsgal of Even’ Star Organic Farm in Lexington Park. Even’ Star makes boxed deliveries to Bethesda nearly year-round for members of the farm’s Community Supported Agriculture program or CSA.
Now that the health problems associated with a Western diet of highly-processed, commercially-produced foodlike substances loaded with cheap sweeteners have become well known, affluent places like Bethesda offer a cornucopia of healthier options. In my ZIP code, kale is the new Wonder Bread. It’s such a household staple that panicked shoppers strip every leaf from produce aisles in grocery stores whenever hurricanes or snowstorms threaten.
John Norman remembers when most Americans thought of kale as a garnish—if they thought of it at all. He’s lived that cultural shift. He and his brothers started selling fruits and vegetables from roadside stands in 1987. In 2007, the Potomac-based Norman’s Farm Market opened a CSA program offering locally-grown fruits and vegetables. It now has 1,000 members and seven pickup locations in or near Bethesda each week, and uses social media to communicate schedule changes instantly to customers.
Still, having choices isn’t the same as finding clarity. Growing up in the suburbs in the 1960s, I remember being taught just a few simple food rules, such as “never talk with your mouth full.” Proliferating options and information have made eating so complicated today that Michael Pollan, the best-selling author and foodie intellectual, felt compelled to write Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual (Penguin Books, 2009). It’s full of pithy guidance, such as “avoid foods containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce” and “the whiter your bread, the sooner you’ll be dead.”
I’ve come up with a few of my own rules for navigating the healthy-food revolution:
Don’t be greenwashed. Greenwashing is the new whitewashing. As demand for healthy food burgeons, so do incentives for portraying products as somehow good for you—whether they are or not. Hence the proliferation of the largely meaningless label “natural” affixed to products such as oversweetened box cereals that are anything but healthy. Last time I checked, the chemical element arsenic was “natural.” But I wouldn’t want to eat any.
Know your farmer. If you want to know what you’re eating, there’s no substitute for asking the farmer who grew or raised the food. Maravell, who sold me that steak, serves on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Organic Standards Board and advocates for stricter food labeling laws. Grohsgal, who sold the salad greens, is a cookbook author and former chef who has degrees in botany and soil science. I trust their advice and the food they sell.
Don’t just read labels, demand better labeling. The Food and Drug Administration doesn’t require food labels to say if a product was made with genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. Polls show that most Americans want to know. Vermont this year became the first state to require labeling of GMO foods. In Maryland, similar legislation never made it out of committee.
Follow the money. Conglomerates that manufacture heavily-processed food products have bought many of the smaller organic brands associated with the healthy-eating trend. That should concern consumers, according to Michigan State University Associate Professor Philip H. Howard, who tracks such consolidations. Some large corporations have weakened ingredient standards for their new subsidiaries and lobbied against the kind of full-disclosure labeling that their organic customers likely favor.
If you need a primer on why it’s important to be vigilant when grocery shopping, look no further than the legal battle between POM Wonderful, which made pomegranate juice a best-seller, and Coca-Cola. At issue is a beverage sold under Coca-Cola’s Minute Maid brand that is prominently labeled “Pomegranate Blueberry” but contains just 0.3 percent pomegranate juice and 0.2 percent blueberry juice.
POM Wonderful sued Coca-Cola for false advertising. Lower courts dismissed the suit, deciding that calling a beverage “Pomegranate Blueberry,” even when it is 99.4 percent grape and apple juice, doesn’t violate FDA rules. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, recently allowed POM Wonderful’s suit to go forward, saying that Coca-Cola’s labeling practices “allegedly mislead and trick consumers, all to the injury of competitors.”
Even so, I’m not sure there’s a clear moral high ground when it comes to the big business of selling commercial juices. The Federal Trade Commission found last year that POM Wonderful had deceptively advertised its juice and dietary supplements and had insufficient evidence to support claims that its products reduced the risks of heart disease, prostate cancer and erectile dysfunction. The commission banned company marketers from claiming that its products are “effective in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment or prevention of any disease.”
In the interest of keeping life simple, I try to avoid foods that require the services of corporate legal departments. I’ll be serving steak again soon. Only this time I’ll make cauliflower “steak,” thick slices of the dense vegetable, seasoned, seared and topped with herb salsa verde.
If I want a glass of juice with that, I’ll make my own.
April Witt is a former Washington Post writer who lives in Bethesda. To comment on this column or suggest ideas, email aprilwitt@hotmail.com.
