February 24–March 2, 2000

cover story

Eat the Rainbow

	Fruit of the garden: Family physician Dr. Ana Negron believes that part of convincing people to adopt better eating habits is informing them of different, healthier eating options.

Can this city really change its eating habits? Yes — and you won’t have to touch an eggplant cheeseteak.

by Vance Lehmkuhl

photographs by Trevor Dixon

This is gonna give Ben and Jerry a run for their money," promises Arnold Kauffman. "It’s a dessert and a meal at the same time."

It’s a brisk, sunny morning in Manayunk and I’ve only been in Arnold’s Way café on Main Street for a couple minutes so far, but already I’ve got an earful of information on raw vs. processed food.

Arnold’s offered me a taste of his favorite concoction, a banana whip, while his business partner Carl Kielblock sets up to make another batch of their hot-selling Arnold & Carl Fruit & Nut Bars — the product I’m there to learn about.

"OK," I say, "but just a taste. A little taste. A spoonful."

I don’t want to admit it to Arnold, but, well, I don’t like fruit. I’ve managed to survive for 15 years as a vegetarian on vegetables (which I also used to hate), grains and cheese. Raw apples are OK, and raw bananas, but nothing cooked or blended. Definitely not stuff like pears, strawberries, melons or tangerines.

But I’ve decided to be diplomatic and choke down a spoonful of this whipped-up banana stuff just to keep the interview going.

While Carl squeezes about a cup of lemon through a juicer, Arnold lists the possible banana-based products they’re working on. "We’re working on a banana pizza," he says enthusiastically, "but the crust doesn’t taste right just yet."

Great. Too bad I won’t be hanging around to taste-test that.

"Here you go."

He hands me a generous 4-ounce cupful of banana whip with a spoon.

"It’s today’s special — strawberry banana!"

 

Did I mention that I also don’t like eggplant?

That’s why I winced along with — I suppose — most viewers when John Street made his much-ballyhooed Oprah appearance and touted the "Eggplant Cheesesteak" as an alternative food Philadelphians might get used to.

Street’s Fun, Fit and Free 2000 initiative may be a serious plan to get our city into shape, but it makes easy fodder for good-natured jokes. When Street showed up in Harrisburg to confer with Tom Ridge, the governor unveiled his welcome gift — the "Streetsteak," an overstuffed hoagie with eggplant, onions, peppers, zucchini, lettuce and tomato.

But instead of laughing with him, some are snickering behind Street’s back.

At the Reading Terminal Market, a fellow named Mike looks up from the comics page.

"Diet is a minor problem that could be put on a back burner," he notes. "The city’s known for its cheesesteaks, its cheese fries. Cheese and steak are a good combination. Why try to put something like eggplant in there?"

Tom, stocking up at Braverman’s bakery, agrees: "You have to ask yourself, is Street paying attention to the right issues or is he beating a drum, making a lot of noise?"

"People are so used to eating the same way," offers a young woman named Jin, "eating cheesesteaks, you know? I don’t think they’re going to change much from that."

To some extent the "eggplant cheesesteak" concept plays right into the stereotype of healthy eating. Take something that’s good, remove everything that makes it taste delicious, and you’ve got health food.

 

Rainbow Warrior

Michael Granato, our local Pennsylvania Restaurant Association president, agrees that perception is a problem. "I think if you take 100 percent of the fat and 100 percent of the seasoning out of it, yeah, it’ll taste like cardboard," he admits.

But, he adds, there are options — olive oil instead of butter, for instance. And half the battle in encouraging healthy eating is to get people curious about new options instead of feeling deprived.

That’s the passion of Dr. Ana Negron, a family physician on the faculty at the Montgomery Family Practice Residency Program in Norristown.

"Sometimes we [physicians] get too focused on prohibiting instead of offering more choices," she says. "It shouldn’t be so much about cutting down as boosting up."

Negron finds that her patients’ medical problems are often related to what they eat. "The first thing I do is get a diet history. They tell me they eat meat morning, noon and night, and can’t understand why they’ve gained 50 pounds in the last few years, or have become diabetic, or have hypertension or whatever."

But Negron concentrates more on introducing new foods to people than on eliminating all the meat.

"I tell them to start eating foods with a lot of color," she says. "Use your imagination. Be curious. Go to the produce section and find some vegetable you’ve never seen before. Especially if it has a variety of vibrant colors. That tells you it will have a variety of vitamin content." (See sidebar for more tips.)

As more diversity is added, health is enriched: "Eating with more variety," says Negron, "tends to bump high-fat foods from the diet only because they have to make room for the others."

But Negron cautions that no one can motivate someone else to change their habits. "People go through stages. First there’s ‘Pre-Contemplative,’ when they have no interest in changing, forget it, don’t even bother. Then there’s "Contemplating," usually when people have started to feel sick… and they’re open to information. That’s when you give them as much information as they want."

Negron teaches a course in parenting at the Juvenile Justice Center, and "the first session is healthy nutrition. I have them bring in two items from home and we look at the Nutrition Facts, demystify all those numbers.

"People start thinking about what they’re paying for. Hopefully, they see that there’s a difference between consuming a given food because it’s what is fed to us and eating foods because we want to choose them."

This is one of the initiatives of Howard Waxman, founder and manager of Essene at Fourth and Monroe. "We give free classes on Wednesday nights," he says. "Nutrition, health, cooking classes and other issues like that."

For Waxman, the trade-off is obvious. The more people know about what’s in their food, the more likely they are to look for varieties of food that are only available at or through Essene. For Negron, it is the possibility of being a resource for people’s optimum health.

"When people get to the active stage — ‘Enough information, I’m ready for action’ — I give them some strategies, some games or simple things to keep in mind. The most basic is, at the end of the course when they come in, I ask them if they’ve eaten all the colors of the rainbow that week."

 

Fostering Good Health

What makes Mayor Street think Philadelphians will be able to make this enormous shift in their eating patterns?

It may have something to do with his upbringing as a Seventh-day Adventist, a religion whose central tenets include vegetarianism.

Although Street is not a vegetarian, he was probably exposed early to tasty food alternatives in his home and at church events. It’s no coincidence, then, that his hand-picked health and fitness czar, Gwen Foster, is a childhood friend from the Ebenezer Seventh-day Adventist Church in South Philadelphia.

Foster brings solid skills to the job, with a master’s degree in public health from Loma Linda University in California and 22 years as health director of the Allegheny East Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.

The Seventh-day Adventists started out as such in Battle Creek, Michigan (yes, there is a Kellogg connection as well as a Philly connection — see sidebar) in the 1860s. Although the doctrine had an almost Puritan asceticism (spicy foods were condemned along with meat), the church blossomed in the 20th century into a major player both religiously and scientifically, establishing educational institutions and swelling to 8 million members.

Many of those members, of course, adhere to the teachings to varying degrees, and a Loma Linda University study from 1958 to 1985 tracked the differences in health and mortality between those who stuck to the vegetarian diet (and exercised more often) and those who did not. Unsurprisingly, the study found not only that Seventh-day Adventists live longer than the average American, but that those in the vegetarian group lived longer than other Adventists.

This outcome might be expected from an Adventist institution, but the conclusions have been replicated by other studies worldwide in the past couple of decades.

Arnold takes it even further.

"As long as someone’s eating meat," he says as I stare at the strawberry-banana whip in my hand, "they’re gonna have higher blood pressure than they should have. And it’s also a factor in depression."

Carl, meanwhile, is about to open a fresh box of walnuts. I notice that I’m stirring my frozen treat, which is a little silly, because it’s already whipped.

"There’s not another box already open, is there?" Carl asks.

"I dunno," Arnold responds, quickly adding, "If people want to get better health, they’ve gotta take full responsibility for it. Get rid of processed foods, meat, chicken, fish, dairy, eggs. The best way is to start slowly, eliminate some of the things, wean yourself off one kind of meat, then another."

Now Carl is measuring dates, and I know I’m going to have to start eating pretty soon, but Arnold is showing me his hair, which is dark brown.

"See this? It used to be gray. Wheatgrass turned that around. Gray hair has to do with a lack of nutrients. That’s why I eat raw foods. As soon as you cook something over 180 degrees, you’re destroying nutrients."

"Aw, Arnold," Carl says, "you’re talking so much, you made me lose count of the dates."

While Arnold is distracted, I take a bite. I’m hoping it will be like in a commercial, and an ecstatic smile will quickly spread across my face as I realize what my life has been lacking.

But the earth does not move. It’s OK. Tastes too much like strawberry, of course.

Even if Arnold’s delivery is overwhelming, his point about raw foods has some backing. Paul Schmid, Director of Food Services for the Philadelphia School District, points out that they’re offering raw fruits more frequently in the high schools. "And we’ve already been implementing a lot of changes," he says, "especially with the soy factor. We were analyzing for the percentage of fat to calories before the USDA even came up with this."

In December, the USDA officially allowed the addition of soy protein in place of meat on the menu. "So far," says Schmid, "it’s been mainly mixed into the ground beef, to give it a lower overall fat content."

part 2