The Man Who Ate Everything (21 page)

On our second day, my wife’s schedule was so crammed with exercise and pampering that we saw each other only at meals. By dinnertime, her skin was pink and smooth as a baby’s. The skin-care person urged her to wear plastic bags filled with lotion on her hands all night. The skin-care person is divorced.

I spent my time wandering around, watching but not engaging, until I dropped into Gym 4, where they keep the aerobic and strength-training machines, beautiful glittering things in chrome
and brass made by a company called Keiser. The fitness staff were unaccountably squandering their afternoon break lifting weights and futilely trying to climb the StairMaster; when they were done, I asked for a demonstration. Before you knew it, I had completed the full circuit, at modest levels of resistance, of course, and had mounted the treadmill for a snappy walk as I gazed through a huge picture window at the New England countryside. The Appalachian Trail passes just beyond the property.

When I had worked up quite a lather, I signed up for a locker (most guests do this on their first day), tried the men’s sauna, steam, and inhalation rooms, took a cool shower (individual curtained stalls), and, against my better judgment, felt almost terrific.

The herbal room was dim and warm. Calming New Age music seeped in through hidden loudspeakers. I lay on a table tightly swaddled in heavy, hot, wet canvas blankets impregnated with five herbs. The herbal therapist could not remember which five herbs they were—I would have preferred a little more tarragon— but promised they would detox me, get all the poisons out of my bloodstream. Like what? Oh, nicotine, coffee, chocolate, like that. With my sanguinary poisons oozing out all over the canvas blankets, I was surprised that she was not wearing a protective suit and helmet. I have always considered people who believe that chocolate is a poison to be twisted beyond redemption.

Then she left me alone. My arms were pinned to my sides by the herbal wrappers, and for five minutes I considered going into a serious panic. At last I settled into a pleasant reverie. I was in Paris again, tucking into a plate of Joel Robuchon’s ravioli of
langoustines
and his roasted rabbit under a fricassee of wild mushrooms. Presently the scene shifted to La Cagouille, where tiny mussels are grilled without oil on a bare open skillet. When the herbal therapist returned to unwrap me, I was sipping a dark morning coffee at the Cafe de Flore, biting into a crusty baguette. Any of these delights would fit into the Canyon Ranch low-fat, low-calorie regime, yet none of them does. I knew I was in trouble at our very first lunch, the emptiest 285 calories I’ve ever
frittered away. It was a “pizza” with a thin brown leatherette crust covered by a cheese mistranslated as mozzarella and some vegetables that don’t even belong in the same room with a pizza. Coffee was a pallid version of brewed decaf. At dinner I would learn how to order a packet of instant Maxwell House to dissolve in my decaf, and the next day I would meet a waiter willing to smuggle out a cup of real coffee from the staff’s real coffeepot.

Why all this fuss about caffeine? On my last day at Canyon Ranch, I read a delightful story in the newspaper. Researchers at Stanford have discovered that
decaffeinated coffee increases your bad cholesterol (LDLs) by an average of 7 percent!
Real coffee has no such effect. The decaf crowd has got so powerful of late that you can no longer find a cup of real coffee at the end of a dinner party. Although these people have deprived me of pleasure for all these years, I now feel a profound sense of compassion toward them and am thankful to Whoever has guided me upon the low-cholesterol, caffeinated path.

I was never hungry at Canyon Ranch but never satisfied. Executive Chef Barry Correia has a strong background in modern American cooking, but he faces four insurmountable problems: the Canyon Ranch Nutrition Philosophy, the official recipes he is required to follow, the ingredients he uses, and the organization of the kitchen. The directors of Canyon Ranch should either start over from scratch or erase the words “exquisite gourmet fare” from all brochures, pamphlets, and advertising.

The Canyon Ranch Nutrition Philosophy is strict, though not as draconian as Pritikin: 60 percent carbohydrates, mainly complex, 20 percent fat, 20 percent protein, 1,000 to 1,200 calories a day, high fiber, no caffeine, oils high in polyunsaturates, two grams of sodium, almost no refined flour. Some of these rules are arbitrary, some outmoded. There is no medical reason whatsoever for healthy eaters to limit themselves to two grams of sodium a day. The tasteless gazpacho came alive after I had a little dish of salt brought to the table and added two tiny pinches. Though delicious crusty, yeasty bread is the most wonderful complex carbohydrate in the world, all the breads at Canyon Ranch range from boring to gruesome. All are store-bought but one, and this is made with baking soda instead of yeast. Great breads are not made with whole wheat flour and baking soda. Getting my knife into the whole wheat dessert crepes demanded more fitness training than I had undergone. The Canyon Ranch rule against refined flour (oddly they are happy to buy dried pasta made with refined flour) may raise your fiber intake a gram or two, but popcorn does the job twice as fast.

After straightening out their Nutrition Philosophy, the owners should get rid of half the Canyon Ranch recipes and many of the ingredients they buy. The vanilla extract is half artificial. The melons are unripe, the apples waxed, the bananas green. For at least two years now, polyunsaturated oils like soybean and safflower have been considered dangerous compared with monounsaturated oils like olive and canola. I have been told that Canyon Ranch in Tucson switched to canola last July; I saw no canola oil in my tour of the kitchens.

The ubiquitous rubbery skinless chicken breasts should be replaced with juicy low-fat free-range veal from Sumrnerfield Farm in Virginia; the olive oil I saw in the kitchen was not extra virgin or even slightly virgin; the pasta was precooked and cooled, waiting to be reheated in boiling water; the vegetables were presteamed and reheated in the microwave; the “Maine lobster tails” were tough and dry and came frozen from New Zealand.

Why not steamed mussels, and tuna
tartare,
and cold briny oysters opened on demand, and sashimi sliced at the very last minute, and concentrated, degreased veal or chicken stock for richness and flavor, and naturally low-fat game, and wild mushrooms, and hearty bean stews (a profoundly complex carbohydrate), and vegetables grilled with a little olive oil? What’s needed are the freshest ingredients, recipes that go beyond the health-food theology of the sixties, and lots of skilled labor at the last minute. The Canyon Ranch kitchen is run with seven workers in
the morning and five at night to feed a hundred guests three times a day. One restaurant kitchen I visited in Paris had a staff of thirteen for forty guests.

I gained at least one piece of nutritional information at Canyon Ranch that was worth taking home, and it may well change my life:
Your metabolic rate is directly related to the amount of lean muscle mass in your body.
Doesn’t this mean, I asked young Dr. Robert Heffron, that if I follow a program of weight lifting, I will be able to eat more? Heffron is one of the ranch’s great human assets—up-to-date in both traditional and alternative medicine, open-minded and undoctrinaire, skeptical toward the Food Police and their current edicts. He found my theory unusual but grudgingly agreed. Aerobics may be good for your heart, but weight lifters use up more calories all day long, even in their sleep.

I hurried over to Gym 4 for a consultation with a weight lifter named Richard, who burns 2,600 calories before he gets out of bed in the morning. My goal is not to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, I explained, much to Richard’s relief. He taught me a series of home exercises with dumbbells and barbells and a padded bench. Now all I have to do is go out and buy a set of sixteen weights ranging from two to thirty pounds each. I am confident they will change my life once I have figured out how to carry them home.

Pumping up, purifying, and pampering, strengthening and slimming (I lost four pounds), and just plain thinking about your body for sixteen hours a day are inebriating experiences, and Canyon Ranch is a terrific place to do them all. The Berkshires are a land of calm and beauty, and after five more days there, I might even have believed that Yogurt Carob Parfait, the most comical dessert at Canyon Ranch, was really a hot-fudge sundae.

February 1990

Stirring Things
Up

I love salad, eaten in moderation like bacon or chocolate, about twice a week. Adults who require a salad at every meal are like obsessed little children who will eat nothing but frozen pizza or canned ravioli for months on end. They tuck into the dreariest salad simply because it is raw and green. No matter that the arugula is edged with brown, the croutons taste rancid, the vinegar burns like battery acid. No matter that it is the dead of winter when salad chills us to the marrow and we should be eating preserved meats and hearty roots, garbures, and cassoulets. No matter that they are keeping me from my dessert. They think nothing of interrupting a perfectly nice meal with their superstitious salad ritual—heads bowed, snouts brought close to their plastic wood-grained bowls, crunching and shoveling simultaneously—their power of conversation lost.

Salad gluttons, defined as people who eat salad more than twice a week in winter or four times a week in summer, are insidiously programmed with three related beliefs: first, that all foods are either poisons, which make you fat and feeble, or medicines, which make you sleek and lovely; second, that raw vegetables, including salad and
crudités
, fall into the medicine category; and third, that the plant kingdom has been put there by some benign force for man’s pleasure and well-being. All three beliefs are toxic delusions. I have spent weeks combing the scientific journals for data on the poisons that lurk in every bowl of salad and every
basket of
crudités
. My quarry was not the artificial man-made pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, and hormones that hog the headlines of our daily newspapers. I was after the true perils—the fresh and natural poisons that plants manufacture to stay alive and perpetuate their species, just as a cobra uses its venom. Having completed my research, I can confidently predict that by the end of this century the surgeon general of the United States will require the following warning label on every spear of broccoli and every leaf of spinach: “Excess Consumption of Salad Ingredients Can Cause Vitamin Deficiency, Bad Skin, Lathyrism, Anemia, and, Quite Frankly, Death.”

Imagine that you are a juicy and attractive vegetable. All around you are predators—germs and fungi, bugs and snails, birds and animals—who see you as nothing more than their next meal. You have no house to hide in, no feet for running away, no money with which to buy a gun. It’s a real jungle out there, and even the neighboring vegetables covet your place in the sun. What do you do? You pull yourself together and evolve a complex system of chemical warfare.

Like the walnut and eucalyptus trees, you can secrete a growth inhibitor through your leaves that the rain will wash down into the soil to keep your neighbors at a safe distance, or you can secrete it directly through your roots as apple trees and wheat do. If you lack subtlety, imitate poison ivy and produce an oil so noxious that human predators will teach their children to avoid you like the plague. If you approve of contraception, concoct a brew of juvabiones to delay the reproduction of insects that bite you, or ecdysones to accelerate their growth right past the childbearing years. If you excel in Byzantine plots as the snake-root does, you might consider tainting the milk of cows that forage on you so that Abraham Lincoln’s mother will die when she drinks it. Think of the publicity.

So much for the benignity of the plant kingdom. Generally speaking, there are four categories of chemical weaponry that salad deploys against its human predators: nutrition blockers, toxins, mutagens (which alter genetic material), and carcinogens.

Nutrition blockers are the most delicious of the four, morally delicious, that is, because they rob salad gluttons of the one excuse for their obsessive behavior—the belief that salad is good for you. Nutrition blockers are chemicals that bind with some desirable vitamin or mineral and prevent your intestines from absorbing it. My favorite is the oxalic acid in raw spinach, a vegetable exalted for its high content of calcium and iron. Oxalic acid, it seems, forms an insoluble complex with calcium and iron— not only the calcium and iron in the spinach itself but other sources of them as well—and renders uncooked spinach a non-nutritious green. Lots of oxalates are also found in raw beet greens, Swiss chard, and rhubarb. (But rest assured that the recorded cases of death following the eating of raw rhubarb were probably due to toxic anthraquinone glycosides.)