Pirello 'Mad as Hell' about processed food

OK, now Christina Pirello is angry.

Mad as hell, to crib a portion of the title of the South Philadelphia health-food guru's new book, an indictment of Big Food wrapped in a vegan cookbook.

"What the food industry has done to us is criminal." . . . "Let's take a look at some of this toxic waste masquerading as breakfast food on our supermarket shelves."

She is just warming up.

This is not the happy vegan chef extolling the qualities of brown rice vinegar and sea salt on the PBS show Christina Cooks.

Pirello's previous books have been chipper celebrations of whole foods and a vegan diet, which she says contends helped rid her of cancer when she was in her 20s. In her 1997 debut, Cooking the Whole Foods Way, she posed for the cover with a Carmen Miranda-style vegetable basket perched jauntily on her head as she mugged with a chile pepper.

Contrast that to the cover of I'm Mad as Hell, and I'm Not Going to Eat it Anymore! (Perigee), which features an illustration of Pirello, mouth agape, eyes narrowed, as she threateningly holds a rolling pin in one hand and a spoon in the other.

Pirello begins I'm Mad with a short course in U.S. history, in which she cites the Industrial Age and the 1903 invention of trans fats as the beginning of the end of wholesome eating. Processed food - pumped through with lab-created flavorings and polysyllabic preservatives - is the evil. Ethnic diets that sustained people healthfully for thousands of years were no match for the Western diet.

And the government, she contends, is complicit by allowing manufacturers too much leeway in labeling.

Pirello was talking to her publisher, ranting about Lucky Charms being called a "good source of whole grain," she said in an interview.

Although that claim passes muster with the Whole Grains Council, Pirello believes the amount of true whole grain in a serving of Lucky Charms - and most other "whole grain" breakfast cereals - is much less than it should be to qualify as healthful. "That wording arrangement came as a result of an FDA deal with a lobby group," she said.

Called to testify at the Agriculture Department as an expert on the benefits of a plant-based diet, she said she realized that every other expert had been paid to testify on behalf of powerful lobbies, including the beef, poultry, sugar, and grocery industries. "Lobbies would have you believe that there is a place in a healthy diet for processed foods," she writes. "It's hard not to be fat today."