One of my first catering jobs was for a dinner party given by a cardiology group to honor a colleague who’d come to lecture at SIU Medical School. I thought it would be a creative challenge to come up with a meal that would be “heart healthy” as well as delicious, satisfying, sophisticated and beautifully presented, and spent hours planning and refining low-fat, high fiber menus.

As I enthusiastically made my presentation, I began to realize that my audience was silent. She wasn’t frowning, but she certainly didn’t look happy.

When I finished, she hesitantly said, “Well, I was thinking more along the lines of beef tenderloin.” I was flummoxed. “I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I thought, being cardiologists, you wouldn’t want things like that.”

Just like Ralphie’s teacher in the movie A Christmas Story, she looked at me as if I had lobsters coming out my ears and replied, “But this is a special occasion!” Duh! I don’t remember the entire menu she settled upon, but the main course was herb-roasted beef filet with a choice of three sauces: Bordelaise (a stock-reduction wine sauce, finished with butter), béarnaise (a classic variation of egg-yolk-and-butter-based hollandaise that adds shallots and tarragon) and a green peppercorn stock-reduction finished with cream. It was accompanied by twicebaked potatoes with caramelized onions and bacon. Dessert was white chocolate cheesecake with fresh raspberries.

“Now there’s a heart attack on a plate,” people snicker. It might be about a steak and twice-baked potato, or a horseshoe, or a heap of fried walleye. But the reality is that no single plate of anything, no matter how many calories or how much fat or sugar it contains, will ever cause a heart attack. It’s every day eating habits over the long run that determine health – heart or otherwise – not occasional splurges.

The problem is that so many foods that used to be special treats have become the everyday norm in many Americans’ diets, not the exception. Contributing to the problem is that we’re eating those things in increasingly larger portions. Locally, not least among them are horseshoes; I’ll be writing about the supersizing of that Springfield specialty soon.

To counteract the effects of what’s become Americans’ everyday eating, we lurch from one dieting extreme to another. We’re equally seduced by ads for weight-loss businesses whose chipper spokespeople tout their programs’ ease and effectiveness as we are by corporate advertising for chain and fast food restaurants and packaged and highly processed products containing lots of sugar and fat and little of anything nutritious: “Thickburgers,” “Fourth Meals,” buckets of fried chicken, and 64 oz. (½ gallon) sodas for 89 cents.

“How did we ever get to a point where we need investigative journalists to tell us where our food comes from and nutritionists to determine the dinner menu?” asks Michael Pollan in his seminal book, The Omivore’s Dilemma.

“For me the absurdity of the situation became inescapable in the fall of 2002, when one of the most ancient and venerable staples of human life abruptly disappeared from the American dinner table,” he writes. “I’m talking of course about bread. Virtually overnight, Americans changed the way they eat. A collective spasm of what can only be described as carbophobia seized the country, supplanting an era of national lipophobia [fear of fat] dating back to the Carter administration.”

“So violent a change in a culture’s eating habits is surely the sign of a national eating disorder. ...there are other countries, such as Italy and France, that decide their dinner questions on the basis of such quaint and unscientific criteria as pleasure and tradition, eat all manner of “unhealthy” foods, and… wind up actually healthier and happier in their eating than we are. We show our surprise at this by [calling it] the “French Paradox,” for how could a people who eat such demonstrably toxic substances as foie gras and triple crème cheese actually be slimmer and healthier than we are? Yet I wonder if it doesn’t make more sense to speak in terms of an American paradox – that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily.”

I’ve quoted Pollan before and almost certainly will again. Author, UC Berkeley journalism professor and frequent New York Times contributor, Pollan is not a food writer as the term is commonly understood. His food-related books aren’t about recipes or cooking techniques. He’s achieved national prominence because of his investigative food journalism: discovering how America’s food is