The Poland Diet

This summer, I ate full-buffet breakfasts, three-course lunches and three-course dinners every day for a month: huge slabs of pork, piles of potatoes, creamy vegetable soups, meat-filled dumplings, cheese-filled crepes, bread loaded with butter, heavy cakes, sweet tarts. Nothing was off-limits, and I didn't make a single trip to the gym. But somehow, I lost weight. How did I do it? The simple answer: I was in Poland.

I can see why you might not believe me. But it's true. I go to Poland every summer. Every summer, my grandfather force-feeds me homemade cakes. And every summer I come home slimmer. True, I do more walking in Poland than I do here, and living in a Warsaw apartment with no air conditioning makes it easy to break a sweat. There's also the fact that in Poland the bigger meal traditionally takes place in the middle of the day rather than in the evening, giving you more time to burn it off before you go to bed. But the most important reason I can come up with for the success of the "Poland diet" is surprisingly straightforward: The food is just more natural there than it is here.

We've all seen the exposes on the American mass-production of meat, so you probably know that American cows and pigs raised for slaughter are fed growth hormones and antibiotics. Fruits and vegetables, meanwhile, are sprayed with all sorts of chemicals to make them look perfect. And then there's genetic modification. Did you know that fish DNA is sometimes added to tomatoes to make them last longer?

Now, I'm about as far away from being a biochemist as a fish is from being a cucumber, but common sense tells me that human beings are designed to eat what's available to them naturally. Digesting artificial hormones, insecticide residue and bizarre genetic creations simply cannot be right.

I take comfort, at least, that there's another side to food in America. There's an entire world of wheatgrass and soy and ginseng and green tea. People pay ridiculous amounts of money for organic foods and vitamin supplements and antioxidant drinks in order to "eat healthy." But they're not perfect either.

On some counts, I understand where the organic foodies are coming from. I'd rather pay more for a small organic turkey on Thanksgiving than for an artificially huge bird from the supermarket. But there's no need to go overboard. I noticed last week at the Greening Princeton Farmer's Market that there were stations set up for organic farms and herb gardens and gourmet bakers. I found it refreshing to see apples that had bruises and bumps but still smelled like fall, unlike those quasi-plastic fruits you see in the Wawa. Still, I couldn't help but think that I don't really need my apples to come from some fancy organic orchard. Back home in my rural part of Virginia, there are produce stands along the smaller highways where real farmers, the kinds with overalls and plaid shirts, sell apples they grew on small patches at home. I missed seeing them at the farmer's market here. I don't need expensive apples. I just need real ones.

In Poland, you'd be seriously hard-pressed to find an organic vendor or a health-food store anywhere. There's no need for them. Lining the streets of Warsaw are hundreds of tiny produce stands, bathed in fruity scents, with handwritten cardboard price signs out front. Sometimes my parents and I buy a box of raspberries, and we have to be careful as we grab each berry to make sure there aren't any bugs in it before we eat it. The extra step is worth it, though. The lack of insecticides can't keep the fruit flies away, but it does preserve that juicy, tangy taste.

The grocery stores in Poland sell huge slabs of fresh meat, and, of course, an endless variety of kielbasa, and you can rest assured that those sausages are coming from delicious Polish pigs that have been raised on small farms eating scraps of grain and potatoes. Even at the cafeteria of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, where I ate every bit of the multi-course meals included in my meal plan this summer, the sweet cream that topped the potato pancakes came from real Polish milk from real Polish cows. My parents say that the food used to be even better; Westernization and globalization have made some farms in Poland turn to America's mass-production methods. Fortunately, though, a lot of the food in Poland is still made the traditional way, and it's a good thing, because the same factors that make it delicious also make it healthy.

And now I'm off to Mathey to eat my hormone-fed dinner, because, sad though it is, there's no escape. At least there's always the gym. Isia Jasiewicz is a sophomore from Lexington, Va. She can be reached at ijasiewi@princeton.edu.