In Defense of Food

I finished reading Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
a few weeks ago. I definitely planned to blog on it but had no idea where to begin. The subtitle is "Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants." These directives are much trickier than they initially sound, hence most of the book being devoted to them.

"Eat Food" is perhaps most central, because Pollan does not consider much of what we consume today to be food. His first directive is "Don't Eat Anything Your Great Grandmother Wouldn't Recognize as Food," which eliminates a huge portion of what's in the middle of any supermarket. One's great grandmother, he points out, might look at Go-Gurt and ask "Is it a food or toothpaste"? (148)

Another useful adage is "Shake the hand that feeds you" (160) i.e. buy from farmer's markets or CSAs. The low quality of America's soil (due to a focus on maximizing short-range yields) has led to less nutritious produce, which agribusiness has actually argued is a good thing, because people will need to buy more vegetables to feel satisfied. Would a farmer you were friends with ever think this way?

Pollan spends a large portion of the book critiquing the idea nutritionism, i.e. the idea that food can be reduced to an analysis of its vitamins, fats, minerals, etc. Whole foods (i.e. unprocessed foods) provide a healthiness that no processed food can, despite massive fortifications of vitamins, fiber, etc. Ironically, some of the worst foods to buy are those with health claims.

Pollan's book is highly informative and deeply disturbing about what we generally eat, what fills our supermarkets, and the basic limitations of what food science can accurately tell us about what we eat. He admits at times that he himself falls back on such reductionism, though, but I don't think he sees the full extent to which he does so. His final pieces of advice, "Not Too Much. Mostly Plants" both break down based on his own critiques.

In our culture the advice "Not Too Much" probably elicits instant agreement. But the phrase itself is tautological. If you're eating "too much," then obviously you shouldn't be doing so. More importantly, though, he tends to view obesity as a problem rather than a symptom of "The Western Diet." While these may seem similar, a disease itself is clearly a problem, but a symptom may or may not be an indicator of a disease (e.g. diabetes, cancer, etc.). Obese people have a lower mortality rate for surgery and overweight people survive illness better than "normal" weight people. How can we explain this? Pollan cites Bruce Ames, a Berkeley biochemist, as hypothesizing that "a body starved of critical nutrients [i.e. one that subsides on processed foods] will keep eating in the hope of obtaining them" (123). Pollan sees this as problematic because it leads to both malnutrition and obesity. He doesn't look at the possibility, though, that an increase in eating may be somewhat successful in obtaining these nutrients, particularly if a person eats both healthy food and "junk." Just as reducing a good diet to the consumption of certian micronutrients is deeply flawed, so is reducing it to a prescribed weight or level of food consumption. Pollan repeatedly tells us that what you do eat is more important than what you avoid, however.

Then again, Pollan's directive towards the "Slow Food" movement and to eat like the Italians and French, savoring every morsel of intensely flavored food rather than gorging, is extremely appealing. Our hope of acheiving this is somewhat undermined by the following passage, however:

...you have to wonder whether it's realistic to think the American way of eating can be reformed without reforming also the whole American way of life. Fast food is precisely the way you'd expect a people to eat who put success at the center of life, who work long hours (with two careers per household), get only a couple of weeks vacation each year, and who can't depend on a social safety net to cushion them from life's blows (195).

It would be great if some of this changed under Obama, but, in the meantime, I'd be more comfortable with the directive "Eat lots of plants." I find myself continually strapped for time and, especially as part of a family with children, fully escaping from convenience meal planning is virtually impossible. And I don't think it's necessary or even desirable to try to completely renounce American ways of eating.

"Mostly plants" makes great sense as general advice in our cultural context. If you eat the corn and soy fed animals widely available in supermarkets, then, yes, you definitely need to cut down on meat. The animals have been eating empty calories and the lack of nutrition is passed along to you. If, however, you eat only grass (or other vegetable) fed, properly cared for animals, you're probably in good shape even if you eat a lot of meat. Pollan mentions a lot of cultures that thrive on mostly meat. Today, however, eating mostly healthy animals would be prohibitively expensive. And, as Pollan and many others have pointed out, the level of meat we consume is not environmentally sustainable.

Perhaps the most basic advice I got from Pollan's book is that every time you go shopping and look at the price of something, you should think "Why is this so cheap?" or "Why is this so expensive?" With the exception of cross-continent transportation costs, the price of something is often an indicator of its health. Processed foods filled with bleached flour, sugar and "healthy" additives are cheap because they are easy to produce and never go bad--but they have almost no value to your body. Produce from a farmer's market, a CSA or even Whole Foods may cost a lot more per calorie, but the health benefits (AND TASTE!) you get from such food is more than worth it. The one exception to this rule, as far as I can see, would be beans, which are very cheap but, prepared well, are highly satisfying and nutritous.

"Not everyone can afford high quality food in America," Pollan writes, "and that is shameful; however, those of us who can, should" (184).