An Urban's Rural View

When the unhealthy-food police round up the usual suspects, they always cuff salt, sugar and fat. Salt and sugar are given no choice but to plead guilty; no lawyer will take their cases. Fat, on the other hand, occasionally comes up with a public defender.

The most entertaining defense I've read was Ron Rosenbaum's essay, "Let Them Eat Fat," in The Wall Street Journal (http://tiny.cc/…). Decrying the television doctors who suggest "it's better to cook up a batch of meth than to cook with butter" and praising "the beauty and power of fat," he argues that fatty food not only tastes good; it's actually good for you.

For the latter proposition, Rosenbaum cites research on olive-oil-rich Mediterranean diets, showing they help Italians and Greeks live longer, and studies of "sensory-specific satiety points," showing that high-quality fatty foods "overwhelm the brain with pleasure," leaving us satisfied and discouraged from overeating.

"A modest serving of short ribs or Peking duck," he says, "will be both deeply pleasurable and self-limiting."

I can't assess Rosenbaum's science arguments; I eat the stuff because I like it enough to take the risk, if risk there be. Rosenbaum's liveliest passages reflect something of this "I'll do it anyway" spirit:

"Still worse is the ninth circle of food hell to which the fat-phobic ninnies have consigned us: egg-white omelets," he writes. "Is life worth prolonging for a few (alleged) extra months if said life has been spent enduring the repellent slabs of gluey, pasty albumen that so many self-congratulatory "health conscious" types consider to be a sign of their sanity?"

To defend fat is not to say there aren't certain sacrifices worth making in the name of health. Salt? My wife and I haven't had a shaker on our table for 30 years. Sugar? Neither of us drink sodas, and desserts are only for when we're having company for dinner.

But fat? Well, let's just say one of my favorite cookbook authors is the late James Beard, whose motto was that any dish tastes better if you add butter and cream. When our doctor told my wife to limit her intake of cheese, she told him life isn't worth living without cheese.

When I confessed to him that I actually (I know, this is really bad) eat the skin on the chicken, he gave me a gloomy, jealous look and told me his wife never lets the skin get to the table.

Rosenbaum's favorite fatty foods include roast goose, split-shank beef marrow and clotted cream. One of mine is spaghetti carbonara. In the recipe we use, the pasta sauce teems with crumbled bacon that's been fried in olive oil, along with eggs and both parmiggiano reggiano and pecorino romano cheese.

Caveats and disclaimers? Rosenbaum makes a useful distinction between "high quality" fatty foods and "industrial, oil-fried" junk food. And he admits you can have too much of a good thing. He advocates "reasonable servings of superbly satisfying foods."

He might have also added, "Occasionally," and "As part of a balanced diet." It's easier to defend fat from the "fat-phobic ninnies" if you practice everything in moderation. But it's worth defending.

(ES/)

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