Book Review: Bodyworks Healthy Recipes

Title: Bodyworks Healthy Recipes

Author: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office on Women's Health

Date: not shown

Publisher: not shown

ISBN: none

Length: 130 pages

Illustrations: color photos of food

Quote: “Welcome to Bodyworks Healthy Recipes, where you'll find simple, low-cost recipes to make delicious breakfasts, lunches, dinners, snacks, and even desserts.”

Funny thing...I went into the little store across the street where I usually buy lunch in town. Usually I buy nuts or sunflower seeds. So this time there was a big sale on little cans of overpriced "Heart Healthy Mix" nuts. I usually only look at peanuts, cashews, and sunflower seeds because they're the only ones that are good bargains at this store. (There used to be another store where I only bought almonds.) But it occurred to me that I'd never bothered even finding out which nuts were in the overpriced "Heart Healthy Mix," because I'm not inclined to trust anyone who's not my doctor to tell me what's healthy for my heart. And after looking at the overpriced cans, I proceeded to the checkout counter with a packet of peanuts. I do not believe they're less healthy for my heart than any of those mixes of pricier, but equally oily, nuts are.

So...Bodyworks Healthy Recipes is one of those little government “booklets” that used to be mailed out free upon request if you sent the appropriate office the stamp, but it's...grown. It's metastasized. At the taxpayers' expense, instead of just compiling a few popular recipes, this government office has (1) spent hours surfing the Internet for popular recipes, (2) printed them on slick expensive paper with only one recipe to a page and lots of white space, and (3) bulked up the book with lots of full-page, full-color pictures.

Recipes have been ganked from U.S. sources, but some of them are written with distinctly foreign accents—a “Grape Pasta Saute” (well,recipe titles are often meant to sound exotic) calls for “gnocchi or large shelled pasta,” a recipe for “Homestyle Biscuits” calls for 2 cups of flour and ¼ teaspoon of salt and 2 tablespoons of sugar...in the U.K. “biscuits” may be sweet, but in the U.S. they're not.

And I'd accept “low-fat,” or “high-fiber,” or “plant-based” as ways to describe these recipes—and for most people that is relatively healthy—but what's “healthy” for anyone to eat is a very subjective thing. The first actual recipe in this book, on page 12, begins with “wheat and barley cereal.” If you inherited the minority gene for wheat gluten intolerance, that's so far from healthy as to qualify as “poison,” and so is the second recipe (for French Toast). These are followed by two recipes for fruit-and-dairy confections. If you inherited the majority gene for gradually declining lactose tolerance, the one that calls for vanilla yogurt might or might not be acceptable, but the one that calls for actual milk—pretentiously described, not as “skim milk,” but as “fat free milk”--would be certain to ruin your day. Then come three more wheat-based recipes, an egg-and-cheese recipe (egg allergies can be as melodramatic as peanut allergies), those biscuits...biscuits are junkfood even when they're made U.S.-style without a grain of added sugar. (American biscuits do have a sweet undertone, always traditionally produced by the interaction of baking soda and buttermilk, but they're supposed to be a salty contrast to the fruit preserves many people like to spread on them.) Need I go on? Home-cooking to meet the family's dietary requirements is, almost by definition, healthier than eating whatever overpriced, overprocessed commercial garbage the big chain stores try to sell us, but for many readers many of these recipes are, as written, very unhealthy.

Most people will find some recipes for things they can eat in this cookbook. Even those of us on special diets will find recipes we can at least tweak. Recipes tend to get tweaked in any case; you make a few strawberry shortcakes and then all the fresh strawberries are gone, so you try a blackberry shortcake. But if you have to tweak recipes to get results that won't actually put you in the hospital, are we talking about “healthy” recipes?!

From privately produced, corporate-sponsored books we might reasonably expect attempts to market products with overgeneralized, inaccurate, feel-good phrases like “healthy recipes.” From the federal government we should, I think, be able reasonably to expect objectivity. “Reduced-fat recipes for popular North American foods” does describe this book, but it should have been left between patients and their doctors to decide which of these recipes are “healthy”...and which are poisonous.

I am more likely to notice the appealing qualities of recipes in books when I've not been annoyed by claims that something that I know would damage my body is “healthy.” Most of the recipes in this book are anything but healthy for celiacs, as written, but there are some we can use. There is, on page 42, a relatively simple, naturally gluten-free gazpacho where the cook chops only the tomatoes, cucumber, peppers, onions, lemon, and garlic, and relies on V-8 for the murky mix of veggy undertones that make gazpacho great. The corn tortilla soup on page 46 is naturally gluten-free and healthy for celiacs if we can trust our sources of corn and chicken, which these days many of us can't. A grease-glazed barbecue chicken, as photographed, looks like saturated fat on the prowl, looking for arteries to clog, but it wouldn't immediately make celiacs sick. A “Crispy Oven-Fried Chicken,” “Chicken Oriental,” “Jamaican Jerk Chicken,” “Spanish Style Ricewith Chicken,” and “Baked Pork Chops” sound similar. An “Asian Salad” made with chicken, cabbage, carrots, mushrooms, cilantro, cucumber, scallions, and a tangerine,sounds more just plain weird than Asian to me but I could pick at it if someone made it for me and remembered to hold the dressing (I'm a salad nudist). There's a beef and rice casserole, and a beef gumbo with rice, that sound quite a lot like things I've done while experimenting, usually with ground turkey rather than beef. I'm not sure what's Mexican about the “steak and fruit skewers,” not having known or heard of any Mexicans who were into skewering steak, but anyone who likes the combination of super-sweet dried fruit and savory meat would like it. Stir-fried beef served on potatoes is another North American fusion fad thing that might actually taste good, depending on how well your taste matches your potatoes...Note, though, that I'm noticing only this handful of recipes out of forty pages of the book.

One thing we can learn from this book is that private authors and publishers produce better cookbooks than government offices. I wouldn't rate Bodyworks Healthy Recipes either especially high or especially low if it had been a normal collection of recipes some person or persons used, and had put together, investing their own money, for sale. As a use for my tax dollars, thrown out there to compete with so many other cookbooks, of which so many are better...I have to give it a D minus. The federal government does not need to be in the cookbook business.

On Amazon it's actually going "collectible." Well...you can order it here for $10 per book plus $5 per package (4 books of this size will fit into a package) plus $1 per online payment, but first you should try ordering it from the U.S. Government Printing Office for the cost of postage.