was a dish that would win the heart of any dietician of the
early nineties.
Unfortunately, the totality of my mother’s—and, in all
likelihood, your family’s—concept of “diet” at the time was
the end result of misguided nutrition science, biased
government policy, and business doing what it does best—
cost-cutting, lobbying, and marketing. And it was all total
bullshit.
It began in the fifties, when Americans were hungry for
a solution to an increasingly urgent public health problem:
heart disease. My mom, born in 1952, grew up in the midst
of what must have seemed like a terrible national epidemic.
Heart disease was believed to be an “inevitable
accompaniment of aging” and something that physicians
could do little about.^1 In The Big Fat Surprise, food
journalist Nina Teicholz recounts the furor: “A sudden
tightening of the chest would strike men in their prime on
the golf course or at the office, and doctors didn’t know
why. The disease had appeared seemingly out of nowhere
and had grown quickly to become the nation’s leading
cause of death.” That is until one outspoken scientist
emerged from the dark halls of academia with a candle.
His name was Ancel Keys, a pathologist at the
University of Minnesota. Even though Keys was not a
medical doctor, he had attained a bit of nutritional “street
cred” during World War II when he created the K ration, a
system of boxed meals delivered to soldiers on the
battlefield. After the war, Keys was enlisted by the
Minnesota Health Department to contemplate the country’s
sudden cardiovascular quandary. Keys’s hypothesis was