Interview Primer
I first met Steve Gagné somewhere around 1990. I was looking for someone to write for a magazine I was publishing at the time, and I knew about Steve as a renegade teacher in the Macrobiotic community. I say renegade beccause Steve was one of the first senior teachers in that community to buck the dogma in the way the Macrobiotic Diet was being promoted by Michio Kushi, considered the leader of the Macrobiotic movement at the time. Considering that my publication was called, The Real News, I knew Steve could give out a dose, when it came to the topic of whole food nutrition, in particular.
Steve is a pioneer in the concept in Food Energetics, which offers the "why" behind the notion that "you are what you eat". In a world of diet and eating concepts based in counting calories, glycemic indexes, and numbers-driven methods of nutrition, Food Energetics looks at the subject through the "qualitative" lens, presenting one's relationship with Food as an art to be practiced as a way of life.
-CG
Despite the array of philosophies on how and what to eat, ranging from low-fat and low-carb, to blood type and zone eating, and not to forget Weight Watchers, modern Americans seems more confused than ever about their relationship to food. What does the concept of Food Energetics offer that makes it different from all the rest?
Rather than being the latest dietary fad, Food Energetics is a comprehensive approach to food that is based on global cultural traditions. As a foundation to Food Energetics, the traditional foods and diets from around the world are considered first by ingredients, then, among those ingredients we look for consistencies. For example, Southeast Asia has a long tradition of consuming rice whereas Northern Europe has a long tradition of consuming barley and wheat. However, both have long traditions of grain consumption, thus, a consistency among those cultures exists in grains. Various types of animal products too have their global traditions and consistencies, as do vegetables, seafoods and so on. Few modern approaches to diet and health take into consideration these global food traditions. When they do it creates a solid time tested basis for dietary reason and commonsense.
Beyond the traditional foods and dietary patterns of consistency among global traditions, Food Energetics incorporates the various principles of ancient healing modalities. These include the temperaments of hot and cold, dry and warm and others commonly found in Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurvedic medicine. In addition to these principles, observations of growth patterns, seasonal effects and more, are incorporated. While it sounds complicated it really is quite simple. For example, a carrot is a root vegetable that grows under the ground, as opposed to a leafy green vegetable that grows above the ground. The carrot, like all root plants has a specific function in its environment and that is to absorb and assimilate inorganic substances, water and so forth from the ground for the life of the plant. In other words, its primary role as a section of a plant is to absorb and assimilate. Now, it just so happens that we too have organs that perform the same functions of absorption and assimilation. These are the intestines. Thus, Food Energetics respects this correspondence and suggests that root plants have an effect on one’s ability to absorb and assimilate. In addition to this energetic effect, we can include various elements of nutritional science. Carrots are high in carotenoids, have fat-soluble Vitamin A, etc. All these particulars help to define the carrot as a root vegetable and these particulars are different from say, a radish, also a root vegetable. The carrot is long and straight and the radish is round. The carrot is sweet to taste and the radish is spicy to taste. All these factors define each food. The chicken is an active animal with a tendency to be high strung and a cow is more passive and slow moving. You get the idea. Each food has a unique effect on us as consumers, depending on how much, how often, and what quality one consumes.
Overall, then, Food Energetics not only helps one to understand why we are what we eat, it explains how that process takes place based on correspondences and the relationships between the consumer and the consumed. No other approach to food offers such a comprehensive understand of the intimate relationship between food and people.
The new edition of “Food Energetics” is almost 600 pages and is packed with useful information that can help anyone with an interest in food and health.
Well, that's a very informative, yet very esoteric answer. I mean, how would the average American find benefit from your approach?
Almost everyone interested in health is on some kind of diet. In fact, most are diet obsessed to the point of missing the basic points of nutritional health. Most of these diets are focussed on losing weight. But these diets are lacking well-balanced nutrition. Food Energetics gives one the opportunity to lose weight and become healthy simply by changing the quality of what one eats. Everything from steak to chocolate cake can be eaten without worry. Why? Simply because the quality of the food is different, since we are thinking in terms of nourishment as opposed to dieting. Well-nourished people are not fat or extremely thin. They look healthy and they feel nutritionally satisfied to where they aren’t going crazy with cravings, over eating and other extremes. So, to begin with if we want to began a diet for better health we need only think about consuming traditional foods naturally raised foods in a balance way.
The practice is very simple and less taxing on the body and mind than any other approach. All we have to do is take from three to five minutes a day to think about our food. During that time, we decide what we will have for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. All of these meals should include natural wholesome foods and one of these meals, depending on our work schedules, should be a well-balanced meal. The other two needn’t contain all the basic elements of a balanced meal.
Here are the options for making this work for us.
1. Prepare these wholesome foods ourselves.
2. Consume them at a healthy restaurant.
3. Have them prepared by a natural foods chef.
4. Purchase them already prepared from the health food store.
5. Any combination of the above.
If this approach is considered without dogma and fanaticism anyone, children, elderly…all will benefit more than on any diet. The book explains more details of what healthy foods are and what foods are not healthy to consume on a regular basis. When we are well nourished by foods free of chemicals, trans fats and other toxins we will feel satisfied and emotionally balanced. With Food Energetics, the results are fast and sure because there is no guilt involved and no food taboos. All natural traditional foods qualify and this is a tremendous relief for anyone considering diet and health.
OK. So we choose clean, natural foods, and strive for a sense of balance. What about specifics, however? For the millions of people trying to lose weight, for instance, in there something more you can say about how whole, natural foods can help maintain a healthy weight over processed alternatives?
Research has shown that natural organic foods are higher in nutrients than those produced from factory farming methods. When factory farmed foods are processed even more with chemicals and preservatives they become even more denatured in nutritional value. This is why processed foods are fortified with synthetic vitamins and minerals. When we eat these foods our bodies recognize this lack of nutritional support and often results in overeating and strong cravings. The tendency then is to eat more food, more processed food in a desperate attempt to nutritionally satisfy our body. And if this isn’t enough, the book “Fast Food Nation” exposed what used to be a little known fact about processed foods, fast foods; that many of them have chemicals that stimulate appetite causing people to eat more! This is very different from natural foods that can increase appetite without serious side effects.
Most "natural" diets lean towards vegetarian as healthier and more ethical. Your book is different, in that you present the effects and values of both plant and animal foods. What's your position on vegetarianism?
Good point, about diet, I mean, because Food Energetics really isn’t a diet but rather it supplies the tools and techniques needed to design the perfect diet for anyone. And it is true that most diets do tend to lean toward vegetarianism but I find this to be the result of extremely poor quality foods that have made up our dietary history for at least the last 50 years. It’s funny how rather than simply changing the quality of our foods, the trend has been to react to them with extreme diets. And yes, I do consider vegetarianism an extreme diet for some. Not everyone, but many people do not thrive on a vegetarian diet and this is due in part to modern vegetarians taking the easy way out and attempting to nourish themselves with “healthy” junk foods, processed foods like soy hot dogs, corn chips, and other foods that just were not around in the 60s and early 70s vegetarian circles. In those days vegetarians were preparing well balanced meals of grains, vegetables, some dairy foods and eggs, and sometimes thriving. Not the case today among many vegetarians. The ethical issue is something else all together. However, this has it’s origin in factory farmed mass produced animals and individual spiritual beliefs which often become part of the “religious” aspects of dietary beliefs. It is a complex issue and I’ll leave that to individual choice. That said though, it is important to know that naturally raised animals do not fit the usual ethical concerns vegetarians have about animal food consumption other than the fact that they are killed for their meat. It is a different process from factory-farmed animals. Food energetics offers enough for us to become vegetarian, if we choose, but it makes sense out of doing so.
The real point here, is that rather than risk nutritional shortcomings through an extreme diet, it is a lot easier to change the quality of ones foods based on global traditions and eat that way for a while, from a balanced perspective. We can always fine tune our diets from there based on individual needs. But to jump into a new diet simple because it lowers cholesterol or adds more fiber or is thought to be what our ancestors ate when they were evolving from apes is really not giving it much thought. Energetics is really about nourishment on a physical, mental, and spiritual level. Most modern “health” diets are not about that. They tend to be based on a specific effect, or a number of effects. I call these "diet promises". Weight loss, better digestion, cleansing, etc. While some of these diets can support these changes, they often do so at the expense of good commonsense nourishment.
Steve sees himself as an ordinary man investigating extraordinary information. An independent investigator/researcher, and alternative historian, Steve is one of the most versatile and experienced teachers in whole foods nutrition. His 30 years of teaching throughout America and Europe have earned him a reputation as a progressive and informed wholistic educator who brings a lively, innovative intelligence to his work.
For more about Steve Gagné, and to purchase his new book, visit his website @ www.SteveGagne.com
Now Age Interview