Transcript

Nina Planck:  My mother raised us on real food and she was a fan of Adelle Davis who was the pioneering slightly out of the mainstream nutritionist, but a laywoman, right and so then a lot of people attacked her for not knowing enough, who came out of California.  In the ‘60s and ‘70s she had a pretty big following and Adelle Davis had very simple principles all of which have been pretty much borne out by the subsequent science, whole food, B vitamins, real meat, real milk, traditional fats.  She has a few clunkers that don’t survive the test of time, which you come across in her books, but on the whole everything she said proved to be true and so my mother raised us on whole wheat bread and the proverbial blackstrap molasses.  We made granola once a week.  The children had an assignment to make granola.  We also ate all the meats.  It was not a vegan, hippie commune, our little farm, so we had very traditional simple American meals like fried chicken, meatloaf.  I remember a food I regarded as one of our super frugal meals was macaroni with tuna and cream sauce, which I loved.  My mother used to dip her toast in the bacon fat and nothing was off limits except white sugar and white flour.  Those would have been my mother’s standards and she used to say no matter how little money we have we’ll always have real maple syrup, real olive oil and real butter.  We also had a cow and chickens in addition to the vegetables we were growing on our vegetable farm, so we drank raw milk.  We didn’t make any cheese or dairy products.  That would have been more homesteady than we were and we were really busy as commercial vegetable farmers, but we did have fresh eggs and fresh milk and then what we couldn’t raise ourselves we bought or bartered for at the farmers markets and in the dead of winter we shopped at the supermarkets.

Question: What is "real food?"

Nina Planck: My concept of "real food" was grounded in my mother’s lessons for us, which were that it should be whole.  It should be nutritional.  It should be simple.  It shouldn’t be processed, a small number of ingredients.  And then I sort of went off track and in my teens and twenties became a vegan and a vegetarian and tried low fat diets and low saturated fat diets and low cholesterol diets and the reason I did that was not so much a thumb in the face of my mother, although perhaps we’re all acting against our parents in some ways, but more because it was the conventional wisdom of the time in the late ‘80s and the early 1990s that less fat was good.  Less saturated fat was good.  Less animal fat, less cholesterol, more plant foods, so I assumed that if all those things were true that a nonfat vegan diet was probably the best of all and that’s what I tried. And things went along fine.  No one would have called me sick, but on vegan and low fat diets in fact, my health suffered and I was 25 pounds heavier than I am now and I had a host of minor complaints and no one really would have ever called me ill or certainly they wouldn’t have suspected my perfect diet because I was not a junk food vegan or vegetarian.  I ate brown rice and beans.  I ate olive oil.  I ate fruits and vegetables.  I just didn’t eat many traditional foods, how I now understand it.