Nom Nom Paleo: Food for Humans (3 page)

My waking thoughts are preoccupied with food: finding it, cooking it, savoring it. Perhaps it's genetic: my family has always shared my obsession with all things gustatory. In Cantonese—my parents' native tongue—my mother, father, sister, and I can all be described as
wai sek
: we live to eat.

In fact, I like to think that my parents chose to settle in Northern California in part because of the region's collective enthusiasm for fresh ingredients and flavors. (Reality: they moved here from Hong Kong to be closer to relatives.) Regardless of how they ended up in the San Francisco Bay Area, my sister and I benefitted from growing up in the very heart of the slow food movement. Even as children, we knew in our bones that food is much, much more than fuel; it's one of the singular pleasures of life.

My love for food started with the tastes, sights, and aromas of my mother's kitchen. My mom was (and is) an excellent cook, and as a child, I was her little shadow as she prepared supper each night. It didn't take long for me to master the art of lingering next to her cutting board until she'd hand me a scrap of succulent roast duck or barbecued pork.

My mom's kitchen skills were enhanced by her uncanny ability to identify individual ingredients by taste and reverse-engineer recipes. “I can make that,” she'd say after trying a dish at a restaurant. I'd scoff, but she was always right. Through years of close observation, I managed to learn a thing or two from my mother—and in particular, how to create splendid meals from pantry items: savory pan-fried chow mein, steaming bowls of soup noodles, and juicy dumplings with spicy dipping sauces.

My mom was the first of my many food idols, and from her, I gained a deep and abiding love for magically transforming simple ingredients into mouth-watering family feasts. And yes, I'm using the word “feast” for good reason. Here's what a typical weekend dinner looked like at our house:

In keeping with Chinese tradition, our cramped little house was a multigenerational one. We lived under one roof with my grandparents, and my aunts and uncles regularly gathered around our dining room table for cozy, family-style suppers. And night after night, my mom somehow managed to create multiple dishes by herself
from scratch.

Here's the mathematical formula my mother used to calculate the number of courses she'd prepare:

I often catch myself wishing that I'd inherited my mom's culinary chops. (My older sister certainly did.) There is, however, one thing my mom most certainly passed down to me: an infatuation with food and flavor.

But as I was growing up, so was the industrial food complex. I was a child of the
1970
s and
1980
s—the same decades that saw an explosion in the global manufacture of factory-processed foods. Flavor scientists were ushering in a brave new world of chemically enhanced food products, and Madison Avenue was pushing these concoctions through television screens right into our living rooms.

Forget home-cooked meals; you can now start your day with rainbow-colored cereals and end it with a trip to the fast food drive-thru window. Who needs fresh produce when you can pick up some fruit-flavored gummy snacks and a bag of chips? And who wants to slave over a hot stove when you can just nuke a plastic tray of macaroni and fake cheese that's been expertly engineered to massage all the pleasure centers in your brain?

A good chunk of my childhood was spent planted in front of the television, so not surprisingly, I had a long and torrid affair with some of the unhealthiest, most highly processed concoctions pitched over the airwaves. The more flavor-enhancing chemical additives, the better. Want examples?

Needless to say, I loved sweets. When I was
15
, I landed an after-school job at the frozen yogurt joint down the street, which meant I could slurp up all the sugary, artificially flavored froyo I wanted. (Hey—the stuff's non-fat, so it must be healthy, right?) I used my tip money from the yogurt shop to purchase my school lunches from the vending machines. My meal of choice: two bags of chips, chased down with a can of soda.

If it weren't for the fact that my mom continued to whip up dinner from scratch every night, I'm sure I would've turned fluorescent from all the food dyes I was ingesting.

It wasn't until I moved to Berkeley for college that I realized that it was much cooler to be “health conscious.” Those scrawny young hippies on Telegraph Avenue were all about salads and whole grains, so I decided to do my part to fit in with all the patchouli-oiled, sandal-wearing masses. I chomped on whole-grain loaves and lugged around a gigantic box of gravel-like grain clusters, shoveling handfuls of it into my mouth at every opportunity. Shockingly, I failed to detect any improvement in my health.

But I wasn't ready to give up on processed foods. Better living through chemistry, right? I decided to major in Nutrition and Food Science so I could become a flavor scientist and create Frankenfoods.

I'm not joking. At the time, I idolized a friend's mother, who held the patent on a chemical spray that made microwaved meals turn golden brown, thereby mimicking the effects of oven-cooked food.

Somehow, through it all, my love for food and flavors remained, and even blossomed. I met a boy in school (who later became my partner-in-crime and husband), and together, Henry and I made excursions around the San Francisco Bay Area to the best restaurants we could afford on our student budgets.

After Henry and I got student jobs on campus, we blew entire paychecks on lavish meals at places like the iconic Chez Panisse—but we also loved cheap eats. Berkeley's Cheeseboard Pizza was one of our haunts, and we sought out the area's best ethnic grub whenever possible, from freshly sliced sashimi and fiery North Indian chaat to overstuffed burritos and rib-sticking Eritrean stews served with injera bread. Every Thursday night, a small group of us would venture across the bay to explore yet another hole-in-the-wall eatery in San Francisco.

I was in food heaven.

Over the course of many great meals made with fresh, local ingredients, I came to fully appreciate the importance of food quality. Sure, I still subscribed to conventional wisdom about the benefits of low-fat eating, but I started making regular visits to farmer's markets and seeking out organically grown whole foods. I was lucky enough to enjoy some of the freshest, most flavorful ingredients in the Bay Area, and the scales were finally falling from my eyes. I no longer dreamed of a career developing flavor compounds for food conglomerates.

Instead, when I graduated from college, I decided to use my foundation in biochemistry to become
...