In Defense of Real Food

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma.

In his new book, "In Defense of Food,"  what Michael Pollan advocates is nothing less than a wholesale rejection of the modern American food chain. It's a radical proposal in a time when "cooking from scratch and growing any of your own food qualify as subversive acts." Pollan argues convincingly that in recent decades, we have shifted from the traditional diets of our ancestors to what he calls the "western diet" - industrialized food, reconstituted, repackaged and redefined to conform with the latest whims of nutritional science.

It is a red shift that Pollan believes has set us adrift in a "treacherous food environment," bereft of "cultural tools to guide us through it." All this has brought us increased obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes along with the troubling paradox that "the more we worry about nutrition the less healthy we become."

In his earlier book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma,"  Pollan described the feedlots where cattle up to their knees in their own manure and explained how industrialized farmers have sacrificed nutritional value in the quest of growing crop yields and how much organic foods has strayed so far from its 1960s counterculture roots that they are today little different from their industrialized counterparts.

"In Defense of Food"  Pollan boils our culinary salvation it down to seven common-sense words: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Industrialization of our food chain has not only robbed us of all sorts of micro-nutrients and ruined the environment, it has also left us adrift in a confusing maze of fad diets and conflicting health claims.

Pollan marks the demise of real food with the 1977 Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, which, in a compromise with the beef and dairy industry, altered dietary guidelines advising Americans to cut down on their consumption of red meat and dairy products to read "choose meats, poultry, and fish that will reduce saturated fat intake." According to Pollan, that change in wording caused how we thought about food and health to undergo a huge shift by changing the focus of health concerns from particular foods to the nutrients inside them.

Pollan's recommendation is that we "eat well-grown food from healthy soils," and advises us to reject most of what we find at the supermarket and shop instead at the rapidly growing legion of farmers markets.His sensible and decidedly counterintuitive advice is: "Don't eat anything that your great-great grandmother would not recognize as food."

It's divided into three sections. The first third. "The Age of Nutritionism," is a history lesson: how, during the last half of the 20th century, well-intentioned politicians and scientists created a culture that places more emphasis on consuming nutrients (protein, potassium, Vitamin C) than basic foods (meat, bananas, orange juice).

The middle of the book, "The Western Diet and The Diseases of Civilization," discusses how a diet rich in processed food and added fat and sugar has led to increases in such things as cancer, heart disease, even tooth decay. Pollan zeros in on Go-Gurt, the portable tubes of yogurt marketed as a healthy "fun food" for kids. "Imagine your grandmother or your great-grandmother picking up this tube, holding it up to the light, trying to figure out how to administer it to her body -- if indeed it is something that goes in your body -- and then imagine her reading the ingredients," he writes. "Yogurt is a very simple food. It's milk inoculated with a bacterial culture. But Go-Gurt has dozens of ingredients."

Unfortunately, with the planet's population topping five billion and growing fast, industrialized food may be the only hope of feeding the world- regardless of the consequences for the environment and our health.

Posted by Casey Kazan.

Related Galaxy posts:

Food for Thought! Boost Your Memory & Brain Function -A Galaxy Classic
Super Heart-Healthy Chocolate Discovered
Genetically-Modified Food -The Big Debate

Links:

http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/books/la-bk-reynolds30dec30,1,1437555.story?coll=la-headlines-bookreview
http://www.michaelpollan.com/indefense.php
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17725932

Comments

[eric y]

eric and jay whitlow were just talking to a friend about this yesterday, the friend having read the book, and the simple truth of eating real food is just too simple for some people i guess and whitlow wonders how it is possible to cram fast food crap into your mouth?

[Morf]

I have a student this quarter who "loves" McDonald's food - and went 60 days eating nothing but McDonalds's menu items.

Truly spooky - but unfortunately most young adult college age student see nothing unusual about this.

The tragedy,of course, is that everything is wrong with this diet; high fat/cholesterol, expensive, non-existent nutrition and the trash generated by all the packaging is horrifying.

To step away from the fast food train, take a look at "Why McDonalds fries taste so good" at http://www.rense.com/general7/whyy.htm

Where's great grandma when we need her?