The Copenhagen Interpretation of Diet

"You are what you know that you eat"

Pronkstilleven met ham, kreeft en vruchten, Jan Davidszoon de Heem

I’m riffing on the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics, which is a riff on the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Read the substack post below for a more original take on a more important topic. And/or stay here and read about cooking. Your choice!

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics

I’ve noticed that when I am teaching people how to cook, they often balk at the amount of salt, sugar, and fat I tell them to use, even when—especially when—their normal diet, consisting of things they didn’t cook, has more salt/sugar/fat per meal, and often in forms that, if you asked them to make the comparison, these beginning cooks would immediately say were less healthy than the stuff I’m telling them to cook with: high fructose corn syrup instead of white cane sugar, hydrogenated oils instead of butter.¹ I’ve started calling this the “Copenhagen Interpretation of Diet” in my head, because they eat as if only the ingredients they’ve observed/interacted with can effect their health.

People who do this can tend to a barbell thing of cooking extremely spartan meals and also eating out a lot/eating convenience foods a lot. This isn’t necessarily irrational. It kinda makes sense to go super healthy with the food that you can totally control, to make up for the food you can’t totally control.

But this heuristic only works if “the worst meal you can cook” is about as bad as “the worst meal you can buy.” I think a much more realistic/useful heuristic is that you almost can’t cook a meal from scratch as bad for you as the Standard American Diet premade meal, whether that’s convenience food or restaurant food. Sysco, McDonald’s, etc are out there brewing up stuff that isn’t good for you, that will show up in most premade meals, & that you are unlikely to be including in your own cooking.

So here is my apparently paradoxical advice, if you have enough to eat, and you have time/productivity slack to learn how to cook, and your goal with learning how to cook is to eat healthier: your impulse may be to focus first on learning to cook super healthy food, to make up for the other less healthy food you’re eating, but even just healthwise you’re better off focusing first on learning how to cook food that you will want to eat/food that you will want to cook. It is more important to replace industrial meals with homecooked meals than it is to learn to make super healthy meals that aren’t tasty/convenient enough to displace industrial meals in your diet.

Once you feel confident in your ability to cook food that competes with industrial food on these axes—when you can make food that you genuinely enjoy eating, when you’re comfortable enough with technique and just used to the habit enough that you don’t kind of dread the work of cooking—that’s the time to start thinking harder about health goals. But by then, you might find you don’t need to! Just displacing industrial food with homecooked food might solve enough of your problems.

1. This conflicting desire—to both learn how to cook from me, and to not cook like me—might make sense to me if there were some obvious reason they would want to eat food that tastes like the food I cook, without eating like I eat. But honestly, I both feel and look pretty healthy. When they have preexisting health stuff like diabetes or gallbladder issues, or structured eating goals like bodybuilding, or when they just obviously already look and/or feel better than me, I also get the reluctance, but in this situation these factors aren’t usually in play.