Preface to the Tenth Anniversary Edition When I set out to write Food and Healing in the early 1980s, I intended to lay out a unified field theory of the effects of food on health, and to include practical information on the uses of food as nourishment and as medicine. In the ten years since the book’ s publication, I’ ve been deluged with positive feedback from readers and students who have applied its principles. I am delighted to have the opportunity, in this preface, to add to the original edition a few comments that incorporate additional information. Just about the time that the book came out, I moved The Natural Gourmet Cookery School out of my home and into its own space fifty blocks downtown. With two kitchens, a lecture room, and office space, it had room for many more students. And paraphrasing a famous line, after I built it, they did come. In 1987, we started offering a six hundred-hour chef’ s training program in natural-foods cooking with a food and healing component in it; licensed by the New York State Department of Education, to this day it is the only program of its kind in the country. The school also offers cooking classes to the general public, which are taught by many fine teachers, some of whom are graduates of our programs. I recently resigned as president so as to spend more time teaching and writing, and to pursue further education beyond my 1991 certification as a Certified Health Education Specialist( CHES). SEVEN CRITERIA FOR FOOD SELECTION The increased number of classes in the school, as well as numerous lectures all over the country, put me in touch with many more people intent on studying health and nutrition. I have been delighted to see that the principles and mental models I delineated in this book are still holding up successfully. For my classes and lectures, I streamline these principles into a format that helps set the parameters for appropriate food choices. Here, then, are the criteria I have for choosing healthy food. Whenever possible, choose foods that are 1. Whole: As nature provides them, with all their edible parts( grains with their bran and germ, apples with their skin— but not if it’ s waxed); cooked or raw vegetables and fruits rather than juices or vitamin pills. Whole foods supply all of nature’ s nutrients in a team, as well as providing us with the life energy of the food. 2. Fresh, Natural, Real, Organically Grown: Not canned, not frozen, certainly not irradiated or genetically engineered; free of chemical additives, colorings, preservatives. The foods we choose should be the real thing, full of their life energy, not imitations( like margarine or artificial sweeteners), which invariably turn out to have some health-damaging effect. Organically grown foods not only have been shown to be higher in nutrients, but also taste far superior to the commercial kind. 3. Seasonal: To be in harmony with our environment, it is a good idea to choose summery foods in the summer, wintery foods in the winter. Fruits and vegetables in season are cheaper and do not lose nutrients like foods that have been transported long distances. They also taste better. In addition, seasonal eating means salads and fruit in the summer, soups and stews in the winter. On the whole, most people do eat that way. However, with the advent of refrigeration, freezer trucks, and worldwide transportation, we can get raspberries in December and yams in July. We also ignore this natural order when we go on restricted diets, such as raw food and juice regimes, which require us to eat lots of fruits and vegetables in the winter, or cooked and salty macrobiotic meals in the summer. With these diets we go out of sync with our environment, and we might feel cold in the winter, cranky and depressed in the summer. 4. Local: Local produce tastes better, costs less, and is more nutritious because it is picked riper and does not lose nutrients in travel. The best restaurant chefs in the country have already discovered this and make an effort to obtain the freshest organically grown local foods, which they consider top quality. 5. In Harmony with Tradition: We should pay attention to what our ancestors ate and incorporate those foods into our modern diet whenever possible, maybe with some modifications( less salt, less fat, less sugar). For example, our staple grain will taste more appropriate if our ancestors ate it as well— barley and oats from the British Isles; rye and wheat from Europe; kasha from Eastern Europe and Russia; millet, teff, and sorghum from Africa; millet and rice from Asia; corn and quinoa from the Americas. 6. Balanced: It’ s important to make sure there is enough protein, carbohydrates, fat, and micronutrients in our diet as a whole, and to pay attention to the expansive / contractive, acid / alkaline, and Five-Phase Theory systems I describe in this book. For sensory and aesthetic satisfaction, we also need to include foods with a variety of flavors, colors, and textures. 7. Delicious: There is no point in eating“ healthy” food if it doesn’ t taste good! Besides, our taste buds can guide us, when encountering whole, real, natural foods, to what we need and what we don’ t need— and we’ d do well to listen. These seven criteria can help us find healthful food wherever we are; they are not dependent on laboratory studies, tables of calories and fat content, or individual nutrients, all of which are subject to endless changes and revisions over the years. They are based on age-old principles and observations, and have been proven good in the laboratory of life. For that reason, this model is“ fad-proof” and flexible. When following it, people feel less constrained, less guilt-ridden, less anxious about picking the right food.“ It’ s very freeing,” I’ ve been told over and over.