Author: Michael Pollan
Food. There's plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it. So why should anyone need to defend it?Because most of what we're consuming today is not food, and how we're consuming it -- in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone -- is not really eating. Instead of food, we're consuming "edible foodlike substances" -- no longer the products of nature but of food science. Many of them come packaged with health claims that should be our first clue they are anything but healthy. In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion. The result is what Michael Pollan calls the American paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become.
But if real food -- the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food -- stands in need of defense, from whom does it need defending? From the food industry on one side and nutritional science on the other. Both stand to gain much from widespread confusion about what to eat, a question that for most of human history people have been able to answer without expert help. Yet the professionalization of eating has failed to make Americans healthier. Thirty years of official nutritional advice has only made us sicker and fatter while ruining countless numbers of meals.
Pollan proposes a new (and very old) answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. By urging us to once again eat food, he challenges the prevailing nutrient-by-nutrient approach -- what he calls nutritionism -- and proposes an alternative way of eating that is informed by the traditions and ecology of real, well-grown, unprocessed food. Our personal health, he argues, cannot be divorced from the health of the food chains of which we are part.
In Defense of Food shows us how, despite the daunting dietary landscape Americans confront in the modern supermarket, we can escape the Western diet and, by doing so, most of the chronic diseases that diet causes. We can relearn which foods are healthy, develop simple ways to moderate our appetites, and return eating to its proper context -- out of the car and back to the table. Michael Pollan's bracing and eloquent manifesto shows us how we can start making thoughtful food choices that will enrich our lives, enlarge our sense of what it means to be healthy, and bring pleasure back to eating.
Pollan's last book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, launched a national conversation about the American way of eating; now In Defense of Food shows us how to change it, one meal at a time.
LATIMES Review:
In a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times, Michael Pollan quotes Tom Harkin, chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, on the farm bill now before Congress: "This is not just a farm bill. It's a food bill, and Americans who eat want a stake in it." Pollan may be skeptical about whether American eaters can thwart passage of a bill that includes $42 billion in subsidies for the big cash crops -- corn, wheat, rice, soybeans and cotton -- but he firmly believes that "the eaters have spoken [and] a new politics has sprouted up."
That optimism fueled two of his earlier books: "The Botany of Desire," about our relationship with food, and "The Omnivore's Dilemma," which urged variety in our diet. It's most evident in the last of the trilogy, "In Defense of Food," whose simple message is "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." The good news is, he thinks we can do it. Twenty years ago, it might have been difficult, but today organic, regionally grown food is more available than it has been since the food industry began controlling our consumption.
Pollan subtitles his new book "An Eater's Manifesto," but he's way too polite to tell us what to eat. Instead, he uses his familiar brand of carefully researched, common-sense journalism to persuade, providing guidelines and convincing arguments. "[W]hat other animal needs professional help in deciding what it should eat?" he asks. Once, we had culture ("just a fancy word for your mother"), but culture has been replaced by "scientists and food marketers (often an unhealthy alliance of the two)." Americans are "increasingly sick and fat. Four of the top ten causes of death today are chronic diseases with well-established links to diet: coronary heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and cancer."
We have been buffeted so often by conflicting studies that we've stopped thinking of food as food. We think of it as nutrition. (Recess at my children's schools in Santa Monica is no longer called recess, but "nutrition.") Pollan argues that food needs defending from "nutrition science on one side and from the food industry on the other -- and from the needless complications around eating that together they have fostered."
"In Defense of Food" is in three parts. The first explains the perils of "nutritionism," like most isms a reductionist, contextless ideology. Nutritionism divides our food into nutrients (Pollan shows the complexity involved by listing the astonishing number of antioxidants in thyme) and pits them against each other: fats versus carbs, carbs versus proteins. Moreover, it "has trouble discerning qualitative distinctions among foods," allowing marketers to avoid thorny issues of how food is grown and how humans process it. Nutritionism is a boon to food marketers, not only because it helps with splashy packaging but also because it lets them advise buyers to eat more of a particular food, exacerbating an already imbalanced, unvaried diet.
There's an all-too convenient relationship between the scientists and the marketers, he writes: "The food industry needs theories so it can better redesign specific processed foods; a new theory means a new line of products, allowing the industry to go on tweaking the Western diet instead of making any more radical change to its business model." The medical community also benefits; Pollan notes that as Americans spend less on food, they spend more on healthcare.
The second part, titled "The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization," begins with a 1982 study, in which a group of Aborigines who had left the bush, taken up a Western diet and developed Type-2 diabetes were returned to the bush and their native diet. The diabetic abnormalities all but disappeared. Pollan uses this and other studies to show how we can regain our own lost health. "What would happen," he asks, "if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?" If we consume foods grown in degraded soils, or beef from cattle that have eaten grasses grown in such soils, or milk and cheese from those cattle, we won't get the nutrients we need. This is why processed food so often has to be fortified (something marketers trumpet as a bonus).
The third section offers rules (rather, gentle suggestions) for how to "escape the Western diet." Many are familiar, if you've spent any time paying attention to what you eat -- for example, don't eat packaged foods with lots of chemical ingredients. Some involve behavioral changes: Eat mostly plants, avoid supermarkets whenever possible, buy a freezer, "don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food," pay more to eat less and don't buy food where you buy gas. Some are more about how we eat than what we eat -- for example, do all your eating at a table, don't eat alone, eat slowly.
Here's the manifesto part. Pollan isn't just asking us to consider changing the way we eat. He's asking us to join a movement that's "renovating our food system in the name of health . . . in the very broadest sense of that word." By "health," he means avoiding diseases that kill us, but he also means happiness, pleasure, community -- factors ignored in studies or marketing plans or by government agencies such as the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, chaired by George McGovern in the late 1970s, so vulnerable to free-market bullying. Government and business together can stand between human beings and their instincts. That pernicious link has been weakened, Pollan believes; it has certainly become a weak link in the food chain. We know what to eat. We just have to remember it.
IHT Review:
Not all scientific study of Mars is about extraterrestrial exploration. Some of it is about chocolate. Scientists at Mars Corporation have found evidence that the flavanols in cocoa have beneficial effects on the heart, thus allowing Mars to market products like its health-minded Rich Chocolate Indulgence Beverage.
In the same spirit, nutritionism has lately helped to justify vitamin-enriched Diet Coke, bread bolstered with the Omega-3 fatty acids more readily found in fish oil, and many other new improvements on what Michael Pollan calls "the tangible material formerly known as food."
Goaded by "the silence of the yams," Pollan wants to help old-fashioned edibles fight back. So he has written "In Defense of Food," a tough, witty, cogent rebuttal to the proposition that food can be reduced to its nutritional components without the loss of something essential. "We know how to break down a kernel of corn or grain of wheat into its chemical parts, but we have no idea how to put it back together again," he writes.
In this lively, invaluable book — which grew out of an essay Pollan wrote for The New York Times Magazine, for which he is a contributing writer — he assails some of the most fundamental tenets of nutritionism: that food is simply the sum of its parts, that the effects of individual nutrients can be scientifically measured, that the primary purpose of eating is to maintain health, and that eating requires expert advice. Experts, he says, often do a better job of muddying these issues than of shedding light on them. And it serves their own purposes to create confusion. In his opinion the industry-financed branch of nutritional science is "remarkably reliable in its ability to find a health benefit in whatever food it has been commissioned to study."
Some of this reasoning turned up in Pollan's best-selling "Omnivore's Dilemma." But "In Defense of Food" is a simpler, blunter and more pragmatic book, one that really lives up to the "manifesto" in its subtitle. Although he is not in the business of dispensing self-help rules, he incorporates a few McNuggets of plain-spoken advice: Don't eat things that your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize. Avoid anything that trumpets the word "healthy." Be as vitamin-conscious as the person who takes supplements, but don't actually take them. And in the soon to be exhaustively quoted words on the book's cover: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." An inspiring head of lettuce is the poster image for this mantra.
Do we really need such elementary advice? Well, two-thirds of the way through his argument Pollan points out something irrefutable. "You would not have bought this book and read this far into it if your food culture was intact and healthy," he says. Nor would you eat substances like Go-Gurt, eat them on the run or eat them at mealtimes that are so out of sync with friends and relatives that the real family dinner is an endangered ritual. Other writers on food, from Barbara Kingsolver to Marion Nestle, have expressed the same alarm, but "In Defense of Food" is an especially succinct and helpful summary.
Among the historical details that underscore a sense of food's downhill slide: the way a Senate Select Committee led by George McGovern was pressured in 1977 to reword a dietary recommendation. Its warning to "reduce consumption of meat" turned into "choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated fat intake."
When McGovern lost his seat three years later, Pollan says, the beef lobby "succeeded in rusticating the three-term senator, sending an unmistakable warning to anyone who would challenge the American diet, and in particular the big chunk of animal protein squatting in the middle of its plate."
Pollan shows how the story of nutritionism is "a history of macronutrients at war." If the conventional scientific wisdom has moved from demon (saturated fat) to demon (carbohydrates), creating irreconcilably different theories about the health benefits of various foods, it has also created an up-and-coming eating disorder: orthorexia.
"We are," he underscores, "people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating." This book is biliously entertaining about orthorexia's crazy extremes. A recent "qualified" FDA-approved health claim for corn oil makes sense, Pollan says, "as long as it replaces a comparable amount of, say, poison in your diet and doesn't increase the total number of calories you eat in a day."
Since a Western diet conducive to diabetes has led us not to improved eating habits but to a growing diabetes industry, complete with its own magazine (Diabetic Living), Pollan finds little wisdom from the medical establishment about food and its ramifications. "We'll know this has changed when doctors have kicked the fast-food franchises out of the hospitals," he says.
Until then he recommends that we pay more attention to the reductive effects of food science, recognize the fallibility of research studies (because to replicate the healthy effects of, say, the Mediterranean diet completely, you need to live like a villager on Crete) and dial back the clock. Pollan advocates a return to the local and the basic, even at the risk of elitism. He recommends that Americans spend more on food: not only more money but also more time. Eat less, and maybe you make up the financial difference. Trade fast food for cooking, and maybe you restore some civility to the traditional idea of the meal.
"No, a desk is not a table," he points out. Though he shouldn't have to tell us that, readers of "In Defense of Food" will be glad he did.
