5 thoughts on “Food Rules”

  1. “The whiter the beard, the sooner you’re dead” is a good one, but it’s been around forever, in Jewish, Mormon, and probably many other ethnic-religious circles. I’m surprised that Pollan apparently first heard it from a radio talk-show caller.

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  2. “The whiter the beard, the sooner you’re dead”…has been around forever, in… Mormon circles”
    Really? I’ve never known a bigger bunch of wonder-bread eating folks than the Mormons I knew and know (many friends and family) in Idaho and parts of Utah. My mother would sometimes bake nice whole-wheat, but that was seen by most people I knew as special and unusual.

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  3. Really? I’ve never known a bigger bunch of wonder-bread eating folks than the Mormons I knew and know (many friends and family) in Idaho and parts of Utah.
    I guess that just goes to show the diversity even within mostly enclosed communities like us Mormons, Matt. I grew up on Wonder Bread, and so did many others I knew, and of course I heard the same goofy stuff you probably did about how anything besides white bread would be “inappropriate” for the sacrament (communion). But I also knew lots of members (including a bishop of ours) who were fairly obsessive about wheat bread, even going so far as to grind their own wheat, and I heard the “whiter the bread…” slogan from seminary teachers and at BYU, from numerous sources. The wheat-thing continues very strongly amongst a lot of the Mormons I know today (though perhaps living in Kansas is the explanation there).

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  4. even going so far as to grind their own wheat,
    Yes, I guess there are competing strains going on here. My mother did this, too. (I even remembering it being a big deal when she got a fancier wheat grinder one year as a gift…) It does make for nice bread. And I think my parents still have several big containers of wheat in their basement.

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  5. I didn’t listen to the Pollan talk yet, but Harold McGee (on Food and Cooking) says that refining flour makes it easier to absorb the nutrients, so even though whole wheat bread technically has more nutrients, many of them are passed through the body rather than digested. He says white bread has a marginal nutrition advantage, while whole wheat bread has a fiber advantage. In well-nourished populations it doesn’t make much difference (and white bread is almost always fortified in America anyway) but that in World War II, when only whole wheat bread was available, the combination of unrefined bran and dairy shortages resulted in an epidemic of rickets in Dublin.
    Anyway, I tend to push whole wheat bread at our house for fiber reasons but I thought that was interesting. McGee also said it was our old friend Sylvester Graham (who was notoriously obsessed with moral/physical cleanliness via clearing the bowels) who first got America excited about whole wheat. Before that whole wheat bread was peasant bread.

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