The Best American Food Writing 2018 by Ruth Reichl

Author:Ruth Reichl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

But why? What is it, exactly, about a PB&J?

In dozens of interviews with players, coaches, executives, nutritionists, trainers, and others in and around the NBA, the most common explanation offered was the most obvious: PB&J is comfort food, and countless players, like countless other humans, grew up on it. “It’s a soothing memory from childhood,” Shanahan says. It’s “peace of mind,” says Brett Singer, a dietitian at the Memorial Hermann Ironman Sports Medicine Institute, who adds, “You feel good, you play well.” Brian St. Pierre, director of performance nutrition at Precision Nutrition, who’s consulted with the Spurs, says it’s not so much a placebo effect but “almost more than that. They just simply believe.” Lakers coach Luke Walton has a theory: NBA players are superstitious nuts, especially when it comes to routines. “Athletes are strange people,” he says. “We’ve got weird habits.” Walton, now thirty-six and in his first season leading the Lakers, still downs a PB&J before every game.

Factor in the NBA schedule—teams flying constantly, red-eyes, bad traffic, rotten night’s sleeps—and on a night-to-night basis, so much is outside a player’s control. It’s all the more natural to cling all the tighter to something quick, cheap, and all but impossible to foul up.

Cute theory. But now let’s engage in a little evolutionary anthropology and travel back millennia to when humans began to walk upright and our ancestors developed cravings for certain qualities in hard-to-find calorie-dense foods: fats, sugars, starches, proteins, and salts. Today the smell of these—even the mere awareness of their proximity—still triggers a release in humans of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which once provided our ancestors with an energy boost for the hunt, along with serotonin, the “happiness hormone.” At first bite of a PB&J, receptors detect the food’s chemical composition and report back to the brain—fats! sugars! starches! proteins! salts!—where reward centers release opioids and, after a few minutes, endorphins, which briefly reduce stress. It’s an effect, St. Pierre notes, that’s similar to sex. They also lower the body’s heart rate, a bonus for an anxious hunter or a player just before tip-off. “These are the exact same pathways that make heroin addicts chase their next fix,” says Dr. Trevor Cottrell, director of human performance for the Memorial Hermann Ironman Sports Medicine Institute.

Heroin, sex . . . peanut butter and jelly. You can see why players might revolt if someone tried to take away their PB&J. So are they actually good for you—or good enough for the physical demands of the most physically taxed athletes on the planet? Perhaps you’ve seen articles in your Facebook feed about the horrors of sugar and carbs. Within that framework, no, PB&J’s aren’t great. The typical PB&J contains roughly 400 to 500 calories, 50 grams of carbohydrates, 20 grams of fat, and 10 grams of protein. As Jill Lane, a Dallas-based sports nutritionist who has worked with NBA players, says, “It’s not the best, but it’s not bad.”

But nutrition may be beside the point. “Even if we argue that physiologically a PB&J isn’t the ‘best’ pregame meal,” St.

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