We zig-zagged up the steep terrain as the road undulated up and down and sharply cut side to side. We were nearing the end of our several hour drive through countless olive fields in the Basilicata region of Italy after leaving the beautiful and incredible city of Matera. At times, we could barely see more than a foot in front of us through the dense fog. When we finally reached an opening in the fog, we found ourselves sharing the road with dozens of crossing sheep, forcing us to pull over. We excitedly jumped out of the car. I ran up to the shepherd who was herding his flock, muttering “Il mio bisnonno era un pastore qui più di un secolo fa!” (My great-grandfather was a shepherd here over a century ago!).
Much like in the “Big gulps, huh guys. Whelp, see you later” moment in Dumb and Dumber, he just looked at me, sharing absolutely none of my excitement, and said “oh, bene.” We snapped a couple more pictures and then hopped back in the black Peugeot to resume our ascent back up the side of the mountain, inching closer to San Lorenzo. Days before we had acquired my great-grandmother’s birth certificate in Cersosimo, a similar town etched into the mountainside and expanded over the past hundreds of years. I even got a picture with the mayor! We were now on our way to acquire an official copy of my great grandfather’s birth certificate. Leonardo, the protagonist of Leonardo’s Legacy, left the small, beautiful San Lorenzo for America just before the turn of the 19th century, and my family has not been back since.
Unlike the encounter with the unimpressed shepherd, upon pulling into the town, we were greeted by a much more hospitable and enthusiastic local. He seemed pridefully absorbed in our story and the fact that we came all the way from America with the primary purpose of visiting his small town. He also happened to look like George Clooney. I mean he really looked like him. Like it could have genuinely been him. (I mean he really really looked like him – to the degree where Juli laughed a little too enthusiastically at all his jokes and felt it was necessary to talk about him for the rest of the trip. She even brings him up sometimes out of the blue). We explained our mission to the George lookalike and he immediately took us to the head of the city administration office, who was, like everyone in the town, eating his lunch and relaxing as we arrived mid-day. He told us to come back in a couple hours, at which point George loudly argued with him, exclaiming “come on, they came all the way from America.”
The man relented and took us to archives room several buildings over. As we walked through town, I spoke to him in my mediocre Italian:
Me: My great-grandfather left here in the late 1800’s. His name was Leonardo Pesce. His father and mother were Lorenzo and Caterina Pesce.
Him: My grandparents were Lorenzo and Caterina Pesce.
Me excitedly: That’s amazing! Are we related?
Him: Probably not, most of the town is named Lorenzo, Leonardo, and Caterina, and Pesce is the most common last name.
This whole entertaining episode made me consider how we got our names which, as always, led me down a winding path that somehow ended up at our dietary recommendations…
Please enjoy this month’s newsletter. I will get into the discussion on dietary recommendations at the closing. Also, thanks for all the amazing feedback about Leonardo’s Legacy. Please leave comments on Amazon if you get a second. Also, I turned 40 today, so I’m officially all grown up! Bittersweet birthday…
Seeing Like a Human
I recently finished the long book Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. I was referred the book by an architect as a good description on soulless modern city planning and how it rarely considers the diversity of individuals. It also discussed how names were initially created for keeping track of individuals in terms of wills, inheritance, and most importantly, taxation by the state – it is hard to tax people who do not exist. However, the book hit on much more. Chock full of information, my copy is now tabbed and marked up to no end, illustrating what an interesting and important read it is. The author, James C. Scott, is a professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale who has studied politics, agrarian and non-state societies, and anarchism. He is an expert on the history of top-down planning, and where it went wrong. The book has some incredible chapters that describe city planning and its downfalls, and the overlap with health “planning” was uncanny. When I read the following quote, I realized just how much this could be talking about our failed dietary recommendations:
“Such plans all but require forms of simplification that strip human activity to a sharply defined single purpose.”
I have spent a large part of my life in dietary research and science, and also examining and creating recommendations. My conclusions at this point, is a question as opposed to an answer:
Should we have any recommendations?
I now more strongly than ever think the answer to this question is probably no. Dietary recommendations can be added to the list of rules (mostly) created with good intentions, but via a top-down, patriarchal approach that fails to consider the people it is attempting to help and instead strips them of their cultural underpinnings. Such attempts often end with elites telling us “ignorant” plebes how to eat, and often these elites trample our traditional diets as they enjoy their plant-based protein shakes that most of society cannot afford while peering down from their ivory towers. It’s a wonder how Leonardo and all of our ancestors survived on their “backwards” practical diets without recommendations from above. Yet, somehow, they were often a lot healthier than us, and certainly slimmer.
Any authoritarian attempt to “guide” us to health will commonly be simplified and generalized, and both (the latter especially) means failure from the start when it comes to our immensely varied diets that are based on important social and cultural variables that cannot be homogenized by those higher ups as they claim to know more about what is healthy for us, often ignoring thousands of years of trial and error and dismissing practical advice. Calorie counting, food pyramids, food plates, pie charts, and other geometric objects, and dismissal of nutrient-dense foods that we survived on for tens of thousands of years is a modernist attempt at medical and dietary taxidermy. As Scott tells us, “the simple reflex of high modernism is…a contempt for history and past knowledge.”
This is not meant to be some political rant (I hate politics), but keep in mind how many actions and rules are created, not only for our good but the ease of rule by our “leaders.” No failure in this regard has been larger than the health of the people, from the non-research based Food Pyramid, to the non-research based Food Plate, to the multitude of studies created after the fact trying to prove these dietary recommendations not based on tangible research (the research is supposed to come first, then the recommendations and not the other way around). Scott refers to it as the inability to distinguish “facts on paper from facts on the ground,” and also the tailor cutting the client to make him fit in the suit. Dietary recommendations consider us as machines, while cultural diets consider us as people with a history. Instead of thinking of people and their cultures and building from there, these paternalistic recommendations instead take a bulldozer to thousands of years of culture and trial and error.
The issue, much like Scott’s title, is that anytime the state sets out to change our health, they have no choice but to “see like a state.” This is less a criticism of the state or government, but more an open admission of the barriers they will surely face in the process of approaching our health for society as a whole, instead of our health for us. These barriers are so large that it currently leads me to the question of whether no recommendations by the government would have been the best option. We are the only ones capable of making and keeping ourselves healthy. Others can make us sick, but others are not responsible for making us healthy. It is the same reason Covid recommendations are the same for those with a tiny risk versus those at very high risk – nuanced conversations have been avoided for ease of state-wide black-and-white recommendations. Sounds familiar?
All of this is not to admonish all public health approaches now or in the past, but rather, to recommend we consider the course of how these recommendations often come into play. These approaches can and may work in some aspects of our life. Our diet happens to not be one of these, or so it seems.
Now that I think about it while reminiscing about our trips to Matera, San Lorenzo, and Cercosimo, and the amazing, delicious, and cultural foods that we ate there, this may not be such a bad thing.
Have a great month everyone. I am 40 now, I guess this gives me even more reason to take care of myself.
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