Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

If you read only one thing this month, make it Michael Pollan's fantastic article, "Unhappy Meals", in this week's New York Times magazine (registration required, but you can always try BugMeNot). It's about how the rise of food science and "nutritionism" has led to the American obesity epidemic. Excerpt:

"In the years following McGovern’s capitulation and the 1982 National Academy report, the food industry set about re-engineering thousands of popular food products to contain more of the nutrients that science and government had deemed the good ones and less of the bad, and by the late ’80s a golden era of food science was upon us. The Year of Eating Oat Bran — also known as 1988 — served as a kind of coming-out party for the food scientists, who succeeded in getting the material into nearly every processed food sold in America. Oat bran’s moment on the dietary stage didn’t last long, but the pattern had been established, and every few years since then a new oat bran has taken its turn under the marketing lights. (Here comes omega-3!)

By comparison, the typical real food has more trouble competing under the rules of nutritionism, if only because something like a banana or an avocado can’t easily change its nutritional stripes (though rest assured the genetic engineers are hard at work on the problem). So far, at least, you can’t put oat bran in a banana. So depending on the reigning nutritional orthodoxy, the avocado might be either a high-fat food to be avoided (Old Think) or a food high in monounsaturated fat to be embraced (New Think). The fate of each whole food rises and falls with every change in the nutritional weather, while the processed foods are simply reformulated. That’s why when the Atkins mania hit the food industry, bread and pasta were given a quick redesign (dialing back the carbs; boosting the protein), while the poor unreconstructed potatoes and carrots were left out in the cold.

Of course it’s also a lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a potato or carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming about their newfound whole-grain goodness."

This is fascinating, thought-provoking, and makes a hell of a lot of sense. It also makes me feel a little bit better about just making a giant salad every night.

Also, I want to extend long-overdue congratulations to Ryan Hall for absolutely obliterating the American Record for the half-marathon in Houston a couple weeks ago. He ran 59:43, which is 4:33 per mile for over 13 miles, and puts him near the top of the all-time world list at the distance. Simply mindblowing, and it couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

morning run

Any day you see the sunrise is a good day.

This morning I was out the door for a run just after 6:00. I went my usual way up Masonic en route to Crissy Field, and when I dropped down into Lover's Lane in the Presidio it was still dark. Lover's Lane is a soft, wooded path, and it's lighted, so it's one of the rare places you can run on dirt at night. I was barely onto the trail when I was met with an unreal howling, ferocious and eerie, piercing the pre-dawn quiet. Two hundred meters downhill was a tall man with an enormous German shepherd, straining at its leash and barking like crazy as all the neighborhood dogs joined in.

When I got down to the man he stopped me and said, "I wouldn't go that way if I were you." I'm not used to having to change routes, and when I asked why, he replied, "Because there's a pack of coyotes down there, and they're in a frenzy." I looked past him, and sure enough, two hundred meters off I made out a group of four or five coyotes running in frantic circles, wailing and braying. One of the coyotes jumped and twisted in the air, but each time quickly landed to rejoin his pack-mates.

I've been up close to lots of animals on runs, including horses, cows, deer, rattlesnakes, foxes, and the odd tarantula, but I've never been up close to a coyote. I've seen them many times at Rancho San Antonio and the Dish, but only at a distance, and only a brief flash of fur which vanished into the underbrush. However, this morning it was clear that if I had gotten much closer they might have ripped me to shreds.

I turned around, went up the path, and went the long way down the road to Crissy Field. At the Warming Hut, I stretched for a minute in the quiet cold and watched a container ship sail out under the Golden Gate, its engines at a deep rumble. Then I turned and ran back down along the shore as dawn broke over the city.

essential listening for the tenor saxophonist

Once upon a time, I tried to be a tenor saxophone player. I didn't get very far, but along the way I met a very nice bassist by the name of Greg Ryan. I asked him, "How do you learn to play jazz?" He said, "By listening"--and wrote out a list of essential albums.

I've held on to the handwritten list for over ten years, growing my library piece by piece, and by now I've been able to listen to most of the albums on it. It's by no means comprehensive (there's no Lester Young or Dexter Gordon, for starters) or authoritative (there are many other essential jazz recordings by these artists and others), but it's a very good list.

If you are interested in jazz, I highly recommend checking these out. Incidentally, Greg Ryan is the person who first told me about the great hard bop pianist Andrew Hill. Check out "Black Fire" and "Grass Roots."

Greg's list, presented in no particular order:

Miles Davis

• Milestones
• Kind of Blue
• E.S.P.
• Nefertiti

Joe Henderson

• Page One

Sonny Rollins

• Night at the Village Vanguard, Vol. 1 & 2

Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers

• Ugetsu

Wayne Shorter

• Speak No Evil

John Coltrane

• Blue Train
• Coltrane

Hank Mobley

• Soul Station

Paul Motian

• On Broadway, Vol. 1 & 2