吃出长命百岁！ | 经济学人文化

Culture | World in a dish

文化 | 盘中知世界

Culture | World in a dish

文化 | 盘中知世界

How to eat to 100

吃出长命百岁！

Dan Buettner’s book explores America’s healthiest cuisines

跟随丹·比特纳的书一起探索美国最健康的饮食

Nearly 70% of American adults are overweight; over a third are obese. Grocery shops contain aisle after aisle of salty crisps, sugary drinks and processed snacks. Cues to eat unhealthily abound. But if this is your archetypal American diet, argues Dan Buettner in “The Blue Zones American Kitchen”, a work of anthropological reporting posing as a cookbook, you are looking in the wrong places.

近70%的成年美国人超重，其中肥胖的比例超过1/3。杂货店里咸味薯片、含糖饮料和各种加工零食塞满了一排排的货架。不健康饮食的诱惑无处不在。如果你觉得上述的情形代表了典型的美国饮食，那么在这本丹·比特纳所写的借食谱谈人类学研究的著作《蓝色地区内的美国厨房》中，你会发现你找错地方了。

Mr Buettner studies and writes about “Blue Zones”, areas where people tend to live long, healthy lives, with unusually high numbers of centenarians and long life expectancy in middle age. In this book, he finds the principles of Blue Zone diets—very little meat and processed foods, with most calories coming from whole grains, greens, tubers, nuts and beans—in the cuisines of four demographic groups: Native Americans, African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans.

比特纳研究并撰写了关于“蓝色地区”的书籍。所谓“蓝色地区”就是人们普遍长寿、生活健康，百岁老人比例特别高，且中年时期的预期寿命长的地区。比特纳在书中讲述了蓝色地区饮食的主要原则——极少量的肉类和加工食品，并且大多数卡路里来源于全谷物、绿色植物、块茎类食物、坚果和豆类。而美国有四个人口族群的饮食都遵循了这个原则——印第安人、非裔美国人、拉美裔和亚裔美国人。

注：常见的块茎类食物包括土豆、红薯等薯类以及芋头、山药等。

The recipes that Mr Buettner presents do not necessarily represent what most people in these groups actually eat. For a variety of reasons, for instance, Native Americans and Latinos suffer higher obesity rates than non-Hispanic whites—which would probably not be the case if they all ate as this book recommends. But, historically, each of these groups had healthy cuisines, and Mr Buettner talks to people trying to revive them.

比特纳给出的食谱未必展现的是上述群体大部分人的实际饮食。举例来说，美洲原住民和拉美裔的肥胖率均高于非西班牙裔的白人——如果他们真的都遵循本书推荐的饮食，也许就不会是这种局面。然而，过去这些民族的饮食都相当健康，而比特纳访谈的对象也是正在尝试复原这种健康食谱的人。

African-American cuisine is often unfairly maligned for over-relying on fried and processed foods. Mr Buettner says this aspect of it is an artefact of the Great Migration, when black people left bountiful gardens in the South, which provided greens, beans and root vegetables, for industrial northern cities. And so the recipes in this part of the book feature crops such as okra, collard greens and Carolina Gold rice, a delicious west African strain. All these played crucial roles in African-American diets for centuries.

非裔美国人的饮食一直因为过度依赖油炸和加工食品而遭到不公平的批评。比特纳认为，（当下的黑人饮食）受到了黑人“大迁徙”的影响。“大迁徙”时期黑人离开盛产绿叶蔬菜、豆类和根茎蔬菜的丰饶南方种植园，迁至北方的工业化城市，（生活环境的改变造成了他们饮食结构的改变）。所以，书中这一章节的食谱主要包含秋葵、羽衣甘蓝，以及卡罗莱纳黄金大米（一种原产西非的美味大米）等农作物。（因为）几百年来，这些都是非裔美国人的主要食物。

Diverse as the recipes collected here are, most rely on seasonal, fresh produce, often home-grown. Mr Buettner recounts his confusion when following his GPS directions to meet a Hmong woman in her garden, and ending up in the car park of Target, a department store. Behind a row of trees, he found a five-acre garden bought by Hmong refugees in the 1970s that, he says, “looked like Cambodia in the morning, [with] fields of bitter melon and zucchini, and people walking around with wicker baskets.”

书中收录了各式食谱，但绝大多数食谱都采用的是季节性新鲜食材，且往往都是自家种植。比特纳记述了一次自己找不到目的地的经历：他要前往一位赫蒙族女性的花园跟她见面，导航却把他带到了塔吉特百货超市的停车场。穿过一排树木，他才找到那处5英亩大小的菜园。菜园是赫蒙族难民于上世纪70年代买下的。他写道：“（进入那片菜园）仿佛来到了清晨的柬埔寨，地里长满苦瓜和栉瓜，人们穿行其间，个个手提柳条筐。”

注：

1、越南和老挝自称为“Hmong”的人群是中国说苗语西部方言的苗族迁徙过去的，被越南和老挝其他民族称之为“赫蒙族”，中国的学者习惯上称之为苗族。

2、Target是仅次于沃尔玛的第二大零售百货集团，在美国共设有1,800多家门店。

He says the encounter left him convinced that “there’s so much culinary genius in America that also lines up perfectly with the dietary patterns that produced the longest-lived humans in history. It’s so easy if you look for it.” The truth is a bit more complicated. For urbanites without a garden, these recipes may prove expensive and time-consuming. And as Mr Buettner’s other work on Blue Zones attests, food is just one part of the longevity puzzle. Centenarians tend to live active, purposeful lives centred on family and community.

比特纳表示，那次菜园之行令他坚信“美国不乏优秀的烹饪技巧，并且与历史上最长寿人群的膳食结构相吻合。只要有心寻访，此类例证可谓俯拾即是。”但现实却更加复杂一些。对没有菜园的城里人而言，参照这些食谱恐怕费时又费钱。此外，比特纳关于“蓝色地区”的其它著作也证实，食物仅是揭开人类长寿之谜的其中一环。百岁老人通常积极参与有意义的家庭和社会生活。

So this book is not a shortcut to a 100th birthday. But anyone who wants a shot at a century should probably eat less meat and munch more legumes and whole grains.

如此看来，本书并未提供长命百岁的捷径。不过，若想提高长命百岁的概率，不妨少啖荤、多茹素、多啃谷。

翻译组：   

Gretle，爱翻译，爱生活

Momo, Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Kin，译术学徒一枚，积微言细，自就鸿文。

校核组：

Very，男，电气民工，经济学人资浅爱好者

Rachel，学理工科，爱跳芭蕾，热爱文艺的非典型翻译

Nikolae，新手人民教师，声优探索者，乃木坂47与AKB49

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