by David Sax
Zarate was doing his best to break that loop or, at least, inject his own influence into it. Whether something from his kitchen becomes a trend will be up to fate as much as his own kitchen magic. After eighteen courses the table of bloggers and writers were served Maine lobsters that had been split in half and stuffed with lobster meat, aji amarillo béchamel sauce, and an herbed-panko breading. “It’s like a Peruvian lobster thermidor,” said Kang aloud as he took his umpteenth photo of the night. “Yeah, you got it,” said Zarate, watching as everyone put down their phones and took their first bite. The lobster was fantastic. It was buttery, tender, and just spicy enough that it cut through the richness of the béchamel. The table was littered with the debris of Zarate’s various attempts at impressing the crowd, and everyone was so full that they refused dessert, an action I found unconscionable, but it was apparently par for the course among Los Angeles foodies, who always seem to be following the latest diet trends, which, in many ways, are even more powerful than chef trends.
Satisfied, Kang put down his napkin and delivered his verdict to me: The meal was great, but “I don’t think he has that killer dish yet,” he said. “You need that pork bun.”
“Gluten is just a term for things that are bad for you. Like calories or fat, that’s all gluten.”
—Seth Rogen
“As far as vitamins go, if I take a few with each meal, over time I can usually get in quite a lot before the latest study confirms they’re worthless.”
—Woody Allen
The morning after my marathon dinner at Picca I drove up into the mountains north of the city to the suburb of Westlake Village and the manicured headquarters of the Dole Food Company. Dole is the biggest produce company in the world, a corporate juggernaut that dominates whole swaths of the fruit and vegetable trade, in everything from bananas and pineapples to plastic fruit cups and ready-to-drink smoothies. I waited in a soaring lobby, decorated with three-story murals of abundant fields overflowing with fresh fruits, detailed models of Dole’s shipping fleet, vintage Dole advertisements, and every painting of a pineapple ever produced. A huge pineapple sculpture anchored the center of the room. It was encased in glass, like a precious gem.
Marty Ordman, the company’s vice president of marketing and communications (who bears a striking resemblance to the comedian Tom Smothers), came out to meet me. We walked to a large events room in the building’s rear where the Dole Healthy Lifestyle Blogger Summit was beginning its second day. Over a buffet breakfast of mimosas, coffee, Dole fruit platters, and blueberry scones, ten bloggers (all women) were talking about last night’s dinner. They ranged in age and background, from Los Angeles–based wellness blogger Erin Haslag and Arizona grocery chain dietician Barbara Ruhs, to Chicago’s Jennifer DaFonte, who writes the Mom Spotted blog. Dole had flown everybody out and put them up at the nearby Four Seasons for two nights, though none of the bloggers were being paid for their time and they weren’t obliged to write anything about Dole.
After breakfast everyone walked to a small windowless test kitchen in the middle of the building. With its beige laminate cupboards, white electric appliances, shelves lined with canned pineapples, and fruit wallpaper trim running around the perimeter of the drop ceiling, it felt like a slice of 1980s suburbia. The group gathered around a large butcher block–topped island as a procession of Dole product managers demonstrated new products, recipes, and gadgets, ranging from chicken breasts marinated in mango and orange juice (they didn’t taste like much); a healthier version of Dole’s classic pineapple upside-down cake, Yonanas; a machine that pureed frozen bananas into something resembling ice cream; and a new line of frozen, chocolate-dipped banana slices that was a particular hit with everyone.
Midway through the morning Naomi Hanson, a fit, confident product manager for Dole’s new Nutrition Plus line of products, stepped up to the counter and laid out her case. “Have you all heard of chia?” she asked. “And not just the toy.” Everyone laughed as the Chia Pet’s unforgettable “ch-ch-ch-chia” jingle sprung up in their heads. Hanson was here to talk to the group about eating chia seeds, which the Dole Nutrition Plus brand had been launched to promote. There were canisters of whole chia seeds and milled chia seeds, small single-serve packages of chia seeds that could fit into a purse or a pocket (chia dime bags, essentially), and chia-and-fruit clusters, which baked chia seeds into sweet, bite-sized crunchy snacks that came in mixed berry, cranberry apple, and tropical fruit flavors and were seriously addictive. Everyone in the group passed around the different Nutrition Plus products.
“I’m kind of put off by people making all sorts of crazy claims in this category,” one of the women in the group said. Especially if she or her readers didn’t regularly shop at places like Whole Foods.
“Well, there’s a lot of misinformation, rumor, and myth around these foods,” Hanson replied.
“What I had always been led to believe was that chia was better than flax seed because you don’t have to mill it,” said another.
“What about milling it in your teeth?” asked Nicole Presley, an East Los Angeles–based food blogger. “I know it’s popular in Latin culture to make chia lemonade with whole seeds. They make a kind of gel out of it.”
“Honestly,” said another woman in the group, “I’ve never heard of this before.”
Hanson began to rattle off the chia gospel in response: chia seeds had twice the Omega-3 alpha-linolenic acid (ALA) of walnuts, twice the fiber of oatmeal, three times the calcium of cottage cheese, and 68 percent more than a glass of milk. A single serving of chia boasted nearly the same protein as an egg and as much iron as spinach. “You can put it in smoothies, breads, anything at all,” Hanson said, growing more animated as she reeled the group in. “You could sprinkle it onto a salad, into pasta sauce, into a meatball!”
“I’d buy this stuff today!” one of the women blurted out, instantly convinced.
Ordman passed around a tray with cups of Dole pineapple juice mixed with chia seeds, which had expanded to form a tasteless, gray sludge floating in the mix. “It’s not the prettiest color,” Hanson said. “And the whole seeds get this frog egg look to them, but it tastes just like pineapple juice.” She was right. The chia, which is an entirely flavorless and odorless grain, was more of a textural addition to the juice, a slimy crunch that you could detect, but it didn’t really change the taste at all.
“There’s some beautiful chia recipes on Pinterest,” said Ruhs, who had already tested a mango chia smoothie, chia-fortified pancakes, and a chia pudding over the past few months.
Hanson interjected to let the group know that Dr. Oz, Oprah Winfrey, and Martha Stewart’s websites already featured chia recipes. “Lots of people are getting into chia,” she said with a salesman’s knowing grin.
Eat more fiber, but be sure to eat less carbs. Drink three glasses of milk a day, so long as you avoid lactose and dairy. Beef is filled with much-needed iron and protein, but you should steer clear of red meat entirely. Eat fish, unless it (almost certainly) contains mercury. Margarine is the evolutionary replacement for butter, although it turns out margarine should be avoided like the plague, so how about some more butter? The perfect food is açai, bananas, blueberries, bran, coconut water, flax seeds, and goji berries, so be sure to eat as much of these as possible, as well as chocolate and red wine, too (not too much of any of them … but enough that it will make a difference, which is too much). Eat donuts and organ meats, and especially bacon and eggs for breakfast. Avoid white foods, brown foods, and anything that aggravates the blood, as it leads to disorders like masturbation and blindness. Eat whatever you want. But don’t finish it. And make sure it contains no gluten, because gluten is certain death. Be sure to read the labels on your food, but do not for one second trust the information printed there. You really shouldn’t be eating foods that come in boxes anyway.
In the dizzying world of food trends, there are perhaps none more compelling and confusing than health and diet trends. Compelling because they
hold the promise of a longer, happier life simply through the foods we eat, and confusing because they seemingly shift with the tides, vacillating from salvation to damnation. For as long as human beings have had enough to eat, they’ve worried about eating the right thing and have tackled that anxiety by devising diets and exalting certain foods. Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, who ruled in the second century BC, died after eating mercury pills made by his court’s alchemist to provide immortality. In the eleventh century obese English king William the Conqueror took to bed and consumed nothing but alcohol to shed pounds, a practice many of his countrymen seem to continue to this day. Around the same time Persian physician and philosopher Avicenna advised the fat to eat a bulky diet with little nutrition so they’d have to work extra hard to expel the constipating mass stuck in their bodies (the Four-Hour Crap Workout!). Sixteenth-century Italians advised drinking more wine than eating food, and the low-carb and -sugar diet in vogue today was initially heralded by Jean Anthelme-Brillat Savarin, a French lawyer and politician who is regarded as the father of modern foodies and who regularly consumed great quantities of fowl and ale with the ostentatious greed of the Coney Island Hot Dog Eating Contest.
For as long as we’ve been foraging, humans have been trying new berries, leaves, potions, herbs, and more, all in service of the special cocktail that would make us well. Doctors or pharmacists originally devised Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray, 7-Up, and pretty much every major soda on the market as health tonics, claiming they would cure everything from hangovers and depression to malnutrition and nausea, and, in the case of Schweppes Tonic Water, to preventing malaria. Since the late nineteenth century, diet and health trends have increasingly focused on weight loss and vitality. They’ve ranged from the Fletcherizing diet, which advocated chewing each bite of food thirty-two to eighty times until it was a suitable mush, to the Paleo diet, which theorizes that we really haven’t evolved since our knuckle-dragging days and should basically eat as much grass-fed meat as possible. There are grapefruit diets, cookie diets, graham cracker diets, martini and steak diets, cabbage soup diets, macrobiotic diets, extreme calorie reduction diets (which is really just starvation), and a diet that advocated consuming a live tapeworm, which, the theory went, would literally suck your pounds away. People move toward diets in herds. For ten years a significant percentage of my friends and family suddenly discovered they were lactose intolerant and went out to buy Lactaid-brand pills, lactose-free milk, and other products. Now those very same individuals have switched to eating gluten-free, buying gluten-deprived breads, flours, and pastas as well as products that haven’t changed but now label themselves as gluten-free, like orange juice, simply because it sells more cartons. Of all of these acquaintances, only one of them actually has celiac disease, the disorder in which the body cannot process gluten. The rest have adopted the diet because they believe it will help them shed pounds, gain energy, clear their skin, and, in one case, have an easier time becoming pregnant.
Each new diet or health trend plays off the emotions of consumers, who are driven by powerful feelings of insecurity, hope, and fear over their bodies and look to the market for answers. Over the years I’ve watched my father endure dozens of weight loss diets. He’s a fit man who eats well, works out regularly, and bicycles over a hundred miles a week, but he also has a fondness for donuts and hamburgers and is consistently trying to shed a few extra pounds. He has tried Weight Watchers, the Atkins Diet, the South Beach Diet, the All-Bran diet (in which you basically load up on so much fiber that you live on the toilet), diets that required special shakes, and diets that required calorie calculus. He has also embraced new health trends with particular zeal. He boiled pungent Chinese herbal teas for asthma; switched from sugar to aspartame, to honey, to agave; and spent a few years eating a lactose-free cheese that even our golden retriever wouldn’t touch. One day I’d find the fridge filled with bottles of cranberry juice, a year later it would all be replaced with bottles of pomegranate juice, a year after that it would be brimming with Greek yogurt. One day he’d be eating boiled eggs, and the next he’d be microwaving egg whites. Partly this was for weight and partly for heart health, but the health trends swung with each season, as the stash of discarded bars, powders, and diet snack products in the basement pantry gathered dust in an increasingly large pile.
My late father-in-law was even more devoted to health trends, especially after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in his fifties. He only ate organic products and supplemented heavily with “ancient grains” like amaranth and quinoa. He once boiled a sea turtle to make soup, which supposedly stank up the house so badly that my wife and her siblings slept over with friends for a week. When his cancer returned a decade later he sought treatment at a Florida health spa that advocated a raw vegan diet, centered on a round-the-clock regiment of wheatgrass juice shots. Suddenly, the house filled with bags of sprouted mung beans and jugs of steeped almond milk as a dehydrator rendered vegetables like carrots and kale into jerky. The fridge burst with bags of wheatgrass—it basically looked like someone had emptied the lawnmower each day—and the pungent, intense shots they produced tasted like bottled chlorophyll. We dined out regularly at a number of newly opened raw restaurants, a budding diet trend, where we ate raw “lasagna,” raw “hamburgers,” and raw “cheesecake,” made by dehydrating, emulsifying, pressing, and reforming everything from coconut milk to cashew butter to thinly sliced zucchinis.
My father-in-law’s friends, family, and physicians initially dismissed each of these health foods he embraced as fringe hippie fads, only to find them make their way into the mainstream of health and diet trends sooner or later. A decade and a half ago he had to go to patchouli-scented health food stores and seasonal farmers markets to procure organic lamb and beef from the freezer case. Today, you can buy organic meat at nearly every supermarket. Wheatgrass juices are now available prebottled and ready mixed in delicious flavors, and there are hundreds of raw snack bars, cookbooks, and restaurants out there, with more opening each day. Because health trends are so powerful in their message and motivation (i.e., if you don’t eat this, you’ll die), the successful ones find their way into the mainstream in a big way. Food companies take notice and adapt to service these trends, whether they do it with a menu item (the McLean hamburger, from McDonald’s) or a consumer-packaged food (eggs, Tropicana Orange Juice, and granola bars fortified with Omega-3s).
Health trends can create tectonic shifts in the way we eat. When I was writing a book on the Jewish delicatessen business a few years back, deli owners charted their fortunes on which diet was in fashion over the decades. The low-fat movement of the late 1970s and 1980s was a serious blow to the full-fat corned beef and pastrami sandwiches that defined these businesses. Sales plummeted, and in response, Jewish delis upped their offering of low-fat turkey and chicken options. Customers were requesting lean and extra-lean corned beef, and so the delis not only trimmed the fat but also asked their suppliers to send only lean briskets. The suppliers, seeing this shift in demand, passed along requests to the ranchers, who began raising leaner cattle. When the low-fat diet trend faded and was replaced by the Atkins diet craze, which identified carbohydrates as the devil, the delis began selling lettuce wraps and thin burrito-style wraps with their sandwiches. These same customers complained that the meat was too dry—because it had been shorn of its succulent fat—and that the delicatessen was no longer as good as it once was. Thousands of delis shut down during this time, and many of the owners blamed health and diet trends for this. Today, these same delis are scrambling to recast dishes like cabbage rolls as gluten-free options and are tinkering with how to make matzo balls without the matzo.
Today, the big driver in health trends is single ingredients. These so-called superfoods have an advantage over more complicated dietary regimens, which prescribe a balance of certain foods at the expense of others. Superfood trends come with a simple message: This one thing is so good for you that you basically need to eat as mu
ch of it as possible. The term itself is fairly recent, popularized in 1998 by the nutrition writer Aaron Moss, who wrote, “Humans have many options when it comes to fueling their bodies, but the benefits of some options are so nutritious that they might be labeled as superfoods.” The term, which is no more than a brilliant spark of marketing speak, quickly spread through the food world, as various diet practitioners, nutritionists, and food companies used it to sell their products and services. In 2004 Dr. Steven Pratt published his book SuperFoods Rx: Fourteen Foods That Will Change Your Life, furthering the definition by claiming that a superfood had three qualifications: (1) it is readily available to the public, (2) it contains nutrients that enhance longevity, and (3) its health benefits are backed by scientific studies. Salmon, broccoli, spinach, berries, and green tea were among his favorites because “they contain high concentrations of crucial nutrients, as well as the fact that many of them are low in calories.” Pratt’s website, SuperFoodsRx.com, claims that “foods containing these nutrients have been proven to help prevent and, in some cases, reverse the well-known effects of aging, including cardiovascular disease, Type II Diabetes, hypertension and certain cancers.” The nutrients these foods contain have become household names in their own right: flavonoids, Omega-3 fatty acids, polyphenols, and, of course, antioxidants, which have been held up—by those trying to sell them to you—as the best defense against cancer.
Even with so many conflicting health trends already around, we never seem to lose our appetites for new ones. Chia seeds are the latest and greatest “superfood.” The plant Salvia hispanica L. is an herb, related to mint, which was originally found in central and southern Mexico and Guatemala and later cultivated in other areas of Central America. For thousands of years it was central to the Aztec and Mayan diet as a staple food, in which the small black seeds were ground for flour, pressed for their oil, or simply mixed with water and drunk straight. Aztec rulers received chia seeds in tribute from their subjects, and the seeds were incorporated into religious ceremonies. After the Spanish conquest of Latin America, chia’s use declined in all but a few areas, as the Christian conquistadores banned it for use in religious ceremonies, and the imported European flours, grains, and foods overtook it in the Latin American diet. In Mexico people still made chia frescas (a sugary limeade with chia seeds in it), but for the most part chia was forgotten as a food, cultivated in only a handful of farms. Chia was so undervalued, in fact, that it was used as a decoration by artisans in Oaxaca, Mexico, where the moistened seeds were spread onto terra cotta figures and molds. As they sprouted, a garden of green hair seemed to grow from the figures. In 1977 Joe Pedott, an American marketing and advertising maven, came across the chia figures at a trade show and acquired the rights, rebranding them as Chia Pets in 1982 and adding the ubiquitous “ch-ch-ch-chia” television jingle that assured their fame. His company, Joseph Enterprises (which also produced the Clapper), built a multimillion-dollar business off the verdant backs of Chia Pets, which have included molds in the guise of Elmer Fudd, Hello Kitty, and two different versions of President Barack Obama as well as his electoral rival Mitt Romney. No one ever thought to eat their Chia Pet, however.