In Defense of Food: an object lesson

When I saw the title In Defense of Food, my first thought was that the thing food most needs defending against at the moment is Michael Pollan. His The Omnivore’s Dilemma was the feel-bad food book of the last few years, telling us everything that’s messed-up about our industrialized food-producing system. I have no doubt that it’s fine reporting and largely true, but I just couldn’t bring myself to read several hundred pages of that-- and I have a certain conviction, deep down, that there is a portion of the populace which feels guilty about our comfy lifestyle and likes to read that things are irredeemably doomed and our punishment is on its way.

If Omnivore was Old Testament judgment and wrath, though, In Defense seems to be New Testament hope and practical advice for living the go-forth-and-sin-no-more lifestyle. As Pollan, downright cheerily, says at the end of the foreword, “I doubt the last third of the book could have been written forty years ago, if only because there would have been no way to eat the way I propose without going back to the land… Eaters have real choices now.” Basically his argument-- and who can argue with it?-- is that food is getting ever more unnatural, we shop for nutrients and numbers (fat grams, RDAs, etc.) rather than actual food, and yet we’re fatter and more prone to diseases of affluence than ever, so if we just stop shopping for weird fakey stuff because it promises the magic bullet of the moment and simply hunt for and gather real, whole foods, we’ll be better off.

As it happens— and this is why I am writing about a book after having read only its foreword— just as I was leafing through the book, my own folly had put in front of me a perfect example of, in Pollan’s words, an edible foodlike substance. I took the kids to Panera, where they like the bagels (no, you may not have chocolate chip, you may have Plain), and I should have ordered either the Asiago roast beef sandwich, which is decent, damn the cholesterol, or the Mediterranean salad, which is gooped up a little, but still might actually have some tiny resemblance to the Mediterranean diet.

Foolishly, though, I tried to square the difference by getting a healthier™ chicken sandwich, and found myself ordering something bearing the ghastly neologism Frontega Chicken (its daddy was Frontera Grill, its mama was a Chevy Vega, I guess), simply because it didn’t have bacon in it like nearly everything else (except the chocolate chip bagels).

This proved to be some sort of unnaturally smoked chicken, engoobed in a lucite-like preservative of melted cheese-like substance, warmed-to-mush tomatoes and panini’d-to-crunchy bread, which recalled nothing so much as a brand of microwavable sandwiches I used to take to high school lunch once upon a time, which contained some sort of Soyuz-program cheese goop that would ooze out of the crustily-warmed sandwich like a coolant leak. Like the cheese, my skepticism about Pollan’s message melted away as I ate the minimum necessary to stave off hunger and wrapped the rest to take home, to spend its obligatory leftover waiting period in the fridge before being disposed of guilt-free. The book, on the other hand, will be consumed in its entirety.

Interesting note - thanks. I suspect this book builds on Pollan's NY Times Magazine article "Unhappy Meals".

I enjoyed The Omnivore's Dilemma, surprisingly. I went into it thinking that it would be preachy and not have much new information. I was mostly wrong. Pollan can be a little preachy, but he is an excellent writer and brought me into his personal journeys. He's much more sophisticated than many others writing in this genre. I recommend it, even to the skeptical.

Having said that...I worry that the new book will go over much of the same material.

Mike G wrote:Frontega Chicken ... This proved to be some sort of unnaturally smoked chicken, engoobed in a lucite-like preservative of melted cheese-like substance, warmed-to-mush tomatoes and panini’d-to-crunchy bread.

Just to vouch for this description. I also mistakenly ordered it recently. It caused me to wonder if there was any reason to go to Panera besides the free wifi.

The wifi and/or the kids liking it and it being not too unnatural have usually been the draws for me, but if they're suddenly adding bacon to everything, I wonder if they've hit that phase where the desperate corporate chefs start tarting things up to attract more customers. (A typical example being the house salad at California Pizza Kitchen, which suddenly sprouted candied walnuts after a decade of being simple plain walnuts, gorgonzola and balsamic vinaigrette.) Or maybe I just never noticed bacon on those particular items before. But yeah, that one, at least, fits my oft-mentioned (in one form or another) bad chain food paradigm of "no one flavor is any good, so we'll make sure we have lots of them."

The asiago roast beef sandwich ought to be guilty of the same-- any use of asiago cheese is presumed guilty-- but it's actually a decently balanced and restrained sandwich.

As Pollan would no doubt tell us, eat food and not products, and you won't have this problem.

I will defend the Sierra Turkey and some of the soups.

Darren72 wrote:Having said that...I worry that the new book will go over much of the same material.

I read it, and this was exactly my feeling - same book, different package.

This proved to be some sort of unnaturally smoked chicken, engoobed in a lucite-like preservative of melted cheese-like substance, warmed-to-mush tomatoes and panini’d-to-crunchy bread.....

"Engoobed" is my new favorite word -- you get a perfect picture. It made me laugh out loud.

I own this book but have yet to read it. I got backlogged on my reading due to school, however I will be starting it soon.

Also I didn't take The Omnivore's Dilemma as a feel bad book, but used it as the first step in trying to change where the food I eat, comes from. At least as much as my budget will allow me too. I tend to think of it as a book that everyone should read. Not to make everyone feel bad, but to try and motivate people to change at least some aspects of the way they eat and think about food.

Oh and I like the French Toast bagels with honey-walnut cream cheese at Panera. Really though, I just like the honey-walnut cream cheese, I can eat that stuff with a spoon.

I've read the book and enjoyed it but not from a "preachy" sense. It's one of those books that's so simply written that you can't help but take notice and perhaps do something about it. After reading it, I gave it to my wife, she gave it to her mom, and so on. Simple ideas like - pretend you're shopping with your grandmother and don't by anything she wouldn't recognize. Or, don't buy packaged foods that have more than five ingredients.

This book is one of the reasons why I started a roof garden (and have been eating lettuce, broccoli, onions, and now zucchini form plant to plate for the past 5 weeks). That has led me to seek and develop dialog with people like Bruce F (great video on vimeo btw) and a couple other roof top gardeners. It's now leading me to figure out how to extend our growing season and have a continuous variety of produce off of my roof. Hopefully, I can extend that knowledge to community programs here in Chicago.

It's not the main catalyst but a good one for the mainstream reader.

Kennyz wrote:

Darren72 wrote:Having said that...I worry that the new book will go over much of the same material.

I read it, and this was exactly my feeling - same book, different package.

I went into the book with that suspicion, but I thought there was enough new material to easily justify a new book. The central perspective remains the same, of course (both books being written by the same guy and all), but I would encourage any one who read the one to read the other without fear of going over the same stuff.

tyrus wrote:This book is one of the reasons why I started a roof garden (and have been eating lettuce, broccoli, onions, and now zucchini form plant to plate for the past 5 weeks).

Maybe I'm easily impressionable, but I share the feeling that this book is a powerful motivator with a number of super-simple precepts that are already influencing my everyday food choices (e.g., Avoid all foods that make health claims on the packaging, Shop the periphery of grocery stores). I understand how some might feel that precepts of any kind can become preachy, but I never get the feeling that Pollan is falling into a holier-than-though tone.

If I had any criticism, it'd be that some discussions become a little arcane (e.g., the omega-3 vs. omega-6 fatty acid debate), but for anyone who loves food as much as we do, this book, like Omnivore's Dilemma, seems required reading.

I've been meaning to write on this thread but could never marshall my meager brain wattage to give it a go. Maybe I'll try now. I very much like the book, and believe the advice, although as noted, sometimes both preachy and common-sense-ish, worth hearing. His best advice, or the advice I like the best, I do not believe has been mentioned in this thread. In fact, let me backtrack a second. The same reason I have not responded to date is the same reason I have not written my best selling diet book.

OK, maybe my well-known girth has not fully kept me from this thread, but it has kept me from the wait loss bonanza I deserve. I believe, if I can just shake about 40 lbs (or so), I can write my book based on Pollan's ideas. The idea, one of the central ideas of his book, is that there are no bad foods, no bad REAL foods. The problem is, as I believe, and Pollan, is the way we eat. He argues that basic or indigenous cuisines are healthy because they are organic (not in the granola sense) and complete. In other words, the Mexican diet, based on beans, corn and lard is just as healthy as the Vietnamese diet of rice, veg and fish. It's the same reason why French can eat foie gras, the Italians tons of pasta and the Greeks bread with their pasta. And the reason is not some magic bullet like red wine (of course the disgust with the search for that magic bullet is one of the things that motivates Pollan). It's that over time, people have learned to how to eat in their area based on their foodstuffs and culture and what not. They achieve stasis. They know. They know just how much foie gras to eat for instance. The USA problem, the problem of enriched cultures and cuisines is that firstly lose our stasis, but more important, we dabble.

This week it's low fat high carb eat like the Okinawan; next week, it's more animal protein than the Intuit. It's a big plate of pasta and a big T Bone in the same weekend. We mix and match our systems so much that we have no system. Pollan's advice, which is interesting, is to essentially pick a cuisine. I believe he says eat like your grandparents, but he also says they do not have to be your grandparents. Wanna be French. Your grandparents were now named Pierre and Pauline. You can just as easily be Japanese or Mexican or whatnot. The secret, he argues, is you have to be that. He would argue that all of these diets are healthy if you follow them in totality--with one of the key factors often being the use of less meat.

Like I say, no one's gonna buy diet advice from a fat man. Still, I think with my focus on local eating, I am moving towards something akin to what Pollan advocates. Eating local gets you to a Pollanesque diet in a few ways. First, and most important, it focuses you on real food. My favorite line from the book is "there's no high fructose corn syrup in your CSA box." My family and I just do not eat a lot of processed foods anymore 'cause they aint local. Second, and related, our diet is focused so much on fruits and veg because that's what we got. Third, we eat a lot less meat. This happens not the least because local meat is a hassle, frozen, and more expensive. Meat is the centerpiece usually on only one meal a week, although some meals may use meat as an adjunct, like the big salads we love. I'm following Pollan's advice. You should too.

Vital Information wrote:He argues that basic or indigenous cuisines are healthy because they are organic (not in the granola sense) and complete. In other words, the Mexican diet, based on beans, corn and lard is just as healthy as the Vietnamese diet of rice, veg and fish. It's the same reason why French can eat foie gras, the Italians tons of pasta and the Greeks bread with their pasta. And the reason is not some magic bullet like red wine (of course the disgust with the search for that magic bullet is one of the things that motivates Pollan). It's that over time, people have learned to how to eat in their area based on their foodstuffs and culture and what not. They achieve stasis. They know. They know just how much foie gras to eat for instance. The USA problem, the problem of enriched cultures and cuisines is that firstly lose our stasis, but more important, we dabble.

This week it's low fat high carb eat like the Okinawan; next week, it's more animal protein than the Intuit. It's a big plate of pasta and a big T Bone in the same weekend. We mix and match our systems so much that we have no system. Pollan's advice, which is interesting, is to essentially pick a cuisine. I believe he says eat like your grandparents, but he also says they do not have to be your grandparents. Wanna be French. Your grandparents were now named Pierre and Pauline. You can just as easily be Japanese or Mexican or whatnot. The secret, he argues, is you have to be that. He would argue that all of these diets are healthy if you follow them in totality--with one of the key factors often being the use of less meat.

I read The Omnivore's Dilemma but haven't read In Defense of Food. I agree with Pollan's recommendations and "world view", so to speak. But the passage above makes me wonder: is this based on any kind of research? Or is it Pollan just saying "This makes sense to me". It makes sense to me also, but I know that I don't really have any kind of expertise in this area and I'm sure that my folk-wisdom view is just that, folk wisdom.

I think that's an excellent question for anyone promising that most sought-after philosopher's stone, the perfect diet.

What makes sense to me is that given our choice from the world's cuisines, we tend to pick the high-fat choices as most obviously appealing. So the idea that our dabbling in them is out of whack with their own internal logic seems, well, logical.

So approaching the world's cuisines on the basis of eating in them more deeply and carefully, and not just for their best sellers, seems both wise and, ultimately, more interesting and enlightening.

That said, I'm convinced that level of physical activity is the secret hidden in plain sight among most of these foreign diets. Walk to your market, chop your own wood, chase your sheep around your pasture, bingo, you have a Mediterranean figure even if your diet is largely based on pork dumplings. Watch TV while drinking a Big Gulp, bingo, you don't.

Mike G wrote:
So approaching the world's cuisines on the basis of eating in them more deeply and carefully, and not just for their best sellers, seems both wise and, ultimately, more interesting and enlightening.

In a similar idea, Pollan points out that "cuisine" is about much more than just food - it's about tradition and culture as well. Eating high-fat French foods probably won't work if you fail to also adopt French practices like preparing meals with care and aforethought, treating second helpings as taboo, and considering dinner a lingering social event where family and/or friends converse about the day, the meal, and life in general. It aint gonna cut it to slap half a pound of fois gras on a sesame seed croissant, dip your supersized bag o' frites in aioli, and slurp red wine out of a 32 oz paper cup while you drive down Route 66.

This week it's low fat high carb eat like the Okinawan; next week, it's more animal protein than the Intuit

http://content.etilize.com/images/300/1011174226.jpg

I'd say more fat and fiber than protein in that.

Seriously, a very valuable post, and good advice, which I take just as seriously from a gourmand as a fitness guru. Wisdom abounds.

That said, I'm convinced that level of physical activity is the secret hidden in plain sight among most of these foreign diets. Walk to your market, chop your own wood, chase your sheep around your pasture, bingo, you have a Mediterranean figure even if your diet is largely based on pork dumplings. Watch TV while drinking a Big Gulp, bingo, you don't.

Or ride your bike while eating croissant, pate, frites:

http://www.lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=19724

or tacos:

http://www.lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=20125

In general, I agree with Pollan's view. But every once in a while, he puts in some things that irritate me and cause me to stay away from his books.

Example 1: "Don't eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food."
Well, off the top of my head, that would include: sushi, kimchi, tofu -- who are we kidding? My grandmother (not to mention my great-great-grandmother) would rather have fainted from hunger than be compelled to eat almost any Asian food of any kind. Among the common things we eat, broccoli is a mid-twentieth-century food, unknown to most Americans and Europeans in the 19th century. And take a look at cookbooks, newspapers, or even novels from the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and you'll discover that many of our great-grandparents thought garlic was about as appealingly exotic as typhoid.

Example 2: "Avoid foods containing ingredients you can't pronounce." What, so huitlacoche is bad for me now?

Example 3: Eat one regional cuisine, that is, eat the way your grand-parents would have taught you to eat. Well, their generation of immigrants frequently suffered from pellagra and a host of other illnesses caused by poor nutrition. Pollan seems to adopt the view that people in previous centuries ate the kind of "ethnic and regional cuisine" today enjoyed by members of the Slow Food movement in Italy or France. In fact many people had very limited, monotonous, often inadequate diets that made them even more susceptible to the diseases of the day. Furthermore, the 19th century was a heyday for all kinds of nutrition and health fads (look at men like Sylvester Graham or John Harvey Kellogg and their miracle foods), as well as vitamin tonics and herbal restoratives.

We can't go back to the past, before cultures intersected, and we certainly can't go back to a mythical past that never existed. He has a set of guidelines for limiting what we eat now, and he is trying to make that look less restrictive by "naturalizing" it, suggesting that it is what we would have eaten, had modern food production not led us away from Eden.

Anyway, as I said, I agree with Pollan's general advice about what type of food to eat, but I have problems with the historical and cultural framing of that advice.

Maria Theresa, a very smart response to some of Pollan's glib precepts.

The advice about eating the way great-grandma ate contains a germ of truth (i.e., eat food that's less processed, closer to the beginning of the food chain, etc.). but I have to concur with your quite humorous observation that following this ruling would rule out much of the very healthy ethnic food extolled on this board.

Avoiding food containing ingredients the eater cannot pronounce does, I think, put an unfair burden on one's literacy as a prerequisite for good eating. I'm never quite certain how to pronounce "quinoa," but I'm sure Pollan would agree that it's probably a very good thing to eat.

MariaTheresa wrote:every once in a while, he puts in some things that irritate me and cause me to stay away from his books.

Example 1: "Don't eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food."
Well, off the top of my head, that would include: sushi, kimchi, tofu -- who are we kidding?...

Example 2: "Avoid foods containing ingredients you can't pronounce." What, so huitlacoche is bad for me now?

Example 3: Eat one regional cuisine, that is, eat the way your grand-parents would have taught you to eat. ...

We can't go back to the past, before cultures intersected, and we certainly can't go back to a mythical past that never existed. He has a set of guidelines for limiting what we eat now...

Anyway, as I said, I agree with Pollan's general advice about what type of food to eat, but I have problems with the historical and cultural framing of that advice.

Interesting, but I don't think you are quite getting at what he is really saying.

In example 1, he follows that statement with a couple pages clarifyng that he is talking about not eating processed foods - not foreign ethnic cuisines. Example 2, he explains that he is talking about food additives and preservatives, not foods with foreign names. Example 3, does he really say this? I can't find the quote. He does say "Eat more like the French, or Italians, or Japanese, or Greeks..." to describe the benefits of foreign cuisines, but I didn't say any quote about eating Just One regional diet.

I do agree that he can be a little pedantic, but he did subtitle the book "An Eaters Manifesto" and what good is a Manifesto without a list of life guiding principles?

That said, there is one rule in particular that I have taken from this book and try to incorporate into my life. The first line of the book: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Having written about Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food before reading it, I thought it might be nice to write about it after, too.

As noted before, Pollan-- the author of the our-food-chain-is-messed-up book The Omnivore’ Dilemma-- is here trying to put a positive spin on that message by showing how it’s possible to arrive at a reasonable and healthy diet by, basically, following the principle on the book’s cover: Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.

Pollan’s overarching target in the first half of this book is what he calls Nutritionism-- the unnatural practice, as he paints it, of breaking our diets down into scientific processes. He is very compelling, first, on how this has caused a major shift in how we eat that few of us have really noticed:

In the case of nutritionism, the widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. Put another way: foods are essentially the sum of their nutrient parts. [p. 28]

This brings us to one of the most troubling features of nutritionism... when the emphasis is on quantifying the nutrients contained in foods (or to be precise, the recognized nutrients in foods), any qualitative distinctions between whole foods and processed foods is apt to disappear. [p. 32]

This is one of Pollan’s key points: an emphasis on nutrition rather than eating has actually made our food worse for us, because it strongly favors Big Food’s latest product over the little farmer and the real food from the soil. Food marketing requires novelty. Carrots are pretty much carrots, a commodity. But new Totally XTreme Asian Ranch Whole Grain Num-Os are an improvement over last year’s Partially XTreme ones, or at least they can be if some science can be rigged up to let you make a claim that they cure heart disease. And that’s what nutritionism’s reductive view of eating is: find a magic bullet, hype the hell out of it, and sell sugary salty gloppy glop because it has a supposed single virtue. A mere carrot hardly stands a chance against such marketing muscle; “the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over in Cereal the Cocoa-Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming their newfound ‘whole-grain goodness’ to the rafters.” [p. 39-40]

The problem with this is not only that the claims are often dubious (he shows how malleable supposedly legally-defined terms such as “whole grain” are) but that the science underlying so much of this is, simply, bullshit. This is perhaps the most eye-opening and valuable part of the book, a long section in which he shows that, as Dr. Happy Harry Cox put it, everything you know is wrong, or rather, everything the largely self-appointed experts have told you is built on evidence ranging from flimsy to nonexistent. Take one of the things everyone knows, that a high-fat diet leads to heart disease. That’s like saying sunlight leads to plant growth, right?

In a recent [Harvard] review of the relevant research called ‘Types of Dietary Fat and the Risk of Coronary Heart Disease: A Critical Review,’ the authors proceed to calmly remove, one by one, just about every strut supporting the theory that dietary fat causes heart disease... Only two studies have ever found ‘a significant positive association between saturated fat intake and risk of CHD [coronary heart disease]’; many more have failed to find an association. [pp. 41-3]

But at least we know that high cholesterol is bad, right?

As for the dangers of dietary cholesterol, the review found ‘a weak and nonsignificant positive association between dietary cholesterol and risk of CHD.’ [p. 43]

Still, encouraging us to replace all that fatty red meat couldn’t have been all bad-- it’s not like what we ate instead could have been worse for us:

By the end of the review, there is one strong association between a type of dietary fat and heart disease left standing, and it happens to be precisely the type of fat that the low-fat campaigners have spent most of the last thirty years encouraging us to consume more of: trans fats... the principal contribution of thirty years of nutritional advice has been to replace a possibly mildly unhealthy fat in our diets with a demonstrably lethal one. [p. 44]

If this were fully recognized for what it is, it would be considered one of the great government screwups of all time, nutritionism’s Vietnam. In the late 70s government started encouraging us all to eat in a new way, eating less fat and, more importantly, different kinds of fat. The “low fat” or “lipids” theory was embraced by food companies and is evident in thousands of products at every supermarket today. Yet what was supposed to make us thinner and healthier instead has made obesity, diabetes, every “disease of affluence” far more prevalent. It has blown the O-ring on American health and sent its flaming wreckage spiraling toward the ocean. It has done exactly the opposite of what it was supposed to do, and in a real sense the famous joke in Woody Allen’s Sleeper has proven prescient:

Dr. Melik: This morning for breakfast he requested something called "wheat germ, organic honey and tiger's milk."
Dr. Aragon: [chuckling] Oh, yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.
Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or... hot fudge?
Dr. Aragon: Those were thought to be unhealthy... precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.

But at least from a food marketer’s, or a diet book author’s, perspective, it’s been an enormous success, because it’s created a massive market whose hunger is limitless for new products-- which have the tremendous benefit, from a marketer’s point of view, of never working.

* * *

So if nobody knows nothing, what the hell do we do now?

Pollan starts by suggesting that we back our way out of the nutritionist mindset and accept that we just don’t know what we don’t know about how food works. The search for magic bullets has been a red herring, we just don’t know how the combinations of foods produces healthful effects, eating one thing to produce one result almost never seems to work. We’re in the dark ages still on this stuff.

But what we can reasonably deduce is the basic validity of things like the French paradox-- that if we need complex combinations to produce a fully healthy diet, then the traditional diets of most cultures have evolved to provide such combinations. As he points out, nearly every culture, whether they eat lots of vegetables or nothing but meat and blubber, manages to have roughly the same low incidence of diseases of affluence-- except us. Only we managed to create, scientifically and industrially, a diet that so overdelivers on the things humans crave that it causes us problems.

This is where the advice to eat nothing your grandmother wouldn’t recognize comes in. Basically, he says, if you eat real foods from before the days of food science, you should wind up with a diet that reflects cultural knowledge of what makes you healthy.

The problem with this is that the apple’s been eaten and we can’t go back to Paradise. Once we have knowledge of Mexican and Thai and sushi, we’re not going to be happy living on an American farm diet full of English or Germanic touches circa 1910 (which would probably be what most of us, strictly choosing to eat like Grandma, would wind up with). But the danger of being an omnivore is that in choosing to eat from many cultures, we’ll wind up cherrypicking the most appealing foods from those cultures-- and miss out on the balance part.

To my mind, the grandmother advice doesn’t really work, except as a reminder to keep a skeptical eye toward the new foods (or, as Pollan calls them, edible foodlike substances) that pop up every year in the supermarket. The other problem is that the foods in the supermarket aren’t themselves any more, anyway. Grandma might recognize a steak (though it’d look pretty darn lean to her) but its cornfed taste would seem very odd. And that difference conceals the fact that a cornfed steak is lacking precisely the omega-3s that were one of a grassfed steak’s contributions to your balanced diet and health. It really isn’t the same food it was in her day.

Nevertheless, Pollan does try to identify some basic principles which, if followed, will help you generally work your way toward a diet as balanced and healthy as Grandma would have recognized:

Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle. [Since the real stuff tends to be along the walls, and the fake stuff is in the center.]

Avoid food products that make health claims. [If it had to be engineered and tested, it’s too fake to be part of a balanced Grandma diet.]

Eat meals. [Grabbing a sack of food and wolfing it down in the car, or grazing all afternoon, is not a meal. The way the French sit and eat for an hour and a half has all sorts of mechanisms built into it to provide satisfaction and feedback without stuffing yourself silly.]

These principles are the way Pollan avoids falling into the trap he’s set for himself, which is being someone who’s just condemned nutritionism, and then proceeds to write a diet book. There are no recipes and no weight-loss schedule here-- which is why it’s all the more startling when he suddenly turns up advocating we all take supplements. Isn’t that exactly the kind of nutritionism, healthy eating reduced to a pill, that he’s been against in the rest of the book? It may be good advice for the middle-aged, but so is making sure to invest in your employer’s 401k, that doesn’t mean it belongs in a book about looking at eating as a part of a rich and happy life, not as a system of self-medication.

One principle is perhaps the most thought-provoking: Eat less and pay more. It’s not that paying more is exactly a positive good, but until you know you’re paying more for your food and spending more time preparing it, you’re not getting the stuff that’s better for you, better for the farmer and the food chain. If it’s cheap and convenient, there’s something wrong with it, is Pollan’s basic point. To be that cheap, it must be being grown in a way that’s less than ideal.

* * *

In warning us against the latest breakthrough in nutrition science, Pollan runs the risk of being exactly that-- this season’s Scarsdale Diet or The Zone or South Beach, the book that finally Explains It All... until the next one. And in reviewing it, I run the risk of becoming the acolyte who has Found the Answer... until the next book.

Yet I think the first half of the book, demonstrating how completely farbungled our dietary situation is, thanks largely to science and experts who were just plain wrong, is extremely important-- a key text of American skepticism and debunking, up there with Mencken and Jessica Mitford, if not as wittily written.

And the second half, if not entirely news you can put to use today, thinks seriously and practically through the issues involved in trying to get back to a more sensible way of eating in today’s world, as it’s just becoming possible enough to actually do it thanks to farmer’s markets and CSAs and so on. And so anyone who's thinking seriously about these issues should find the book's wrestling with them worthwhile. It may not be possible to live entirely according to Pollan’s principles yet, without growing it all yourself, but living according to as many of them as you can will make that day come a little closer, and probably make your meals taste better-- even as they also take longer to make and cost you more.

I think he might have phrased it better, but I interpret "eat nothing that your grandmother wouldn't recognize" as "eat nothing that anyone's grandmother wouldn't recognize," therefore getting us all off the hook as far as "exotic" or "ethnic" food goes. I imagine a "global" grandmother: if no-one's grandmother would recognize this lo-fat, no-carbs, pre-cooked slab of processed foodstuff--it's not food. Don't eat it. If it's lamb biryani spiced with green cumin pods and fresh mint, there is a grandma out there saying, "Eat this, honey--it's good for you!" And it'll taste good, too.

...Pollan avoids falling into the trap he’s set for himself, which is being someone who’s just condemned nutritionism, and then proceeds to write a diet book.

MikeG,

Nice synopsis, but I depart with you regarding the quote above. I think Pollan does fall deeply into the trap of writing a book about what he himself says is nonsense: nutritionism. Take, for example, The Harvard study you summarized, which takes up such a large portion of your review and his book. What's that if not some nutritionists' analysis of other nutritionists' claims? I have no doubt that the food industry could cite some equally "convincing" Harvard or Cornell study "proving" that the lipid hypothesis is exactly right. In Omnivore's Dilemma and this book, Pollan notes that these types of studies have limited utility because there are too many variables to measure, and the scientists are sure to miss some key ones. That's why he says it's better to rely on history, culture and Grandma. Apparently that's only true if the studies don't support Pollan's view.

Pollan later goes on to describe why the counterintuitive carbohydrate may better explain our health problems. He talks about numbers of calories in various nutrients and explains effects on insulin metabolism. What's that? More nutritionism.

In an argument against industrial agriculture, Pollan goes into some detail about a study by Bruce Ames, one of his chums at Berkeley. Pollan cites a number of esoteric scientific claims from that study, including, "deficiency of vitamins C, E, B12, B6, niacin...mimic radiation by causing single-and double strand DNA..." blah, blah, blah. He's using these reductionist findings to make the claim that the modern diet and its "micronutrient deficiencies" may be responsible for growing rates of cancer and obesity. Apparently, as the above example shows, nutritionism is just fine when it's performed by one of your friends and it supports your book's premise. Following the Ames example, Pollan goes on a 10 page dissertation about Omega 3's vs. Omega 6's. Guess what the source is of that nutritionist argument - more colleagues at Berkeley.

I agree with just about all of Pollan's basic premises, and his books have served as a helpful guide to my eating life. I just wish he filled them with less hypocrisy. In Defense of Food really felt to me like a hastily-thrown-together attempt to use propaganda and oversimplification to capitalize on the author's rather sudden (and perhaps momentary) popularity. You might call it "Industrial Journalism."

Kennyz, I think this is the problem I was trying to get at-- that sooner or later the act of advocating against snake oil starts to take on aspects of snake oil salesmanship. And I strongly suspect the origin of this book was, indeed, an agent or publisher saying "Now you need to write The Omnivore's Dilemma's 30-Day Miracle Weight Loss Guide," and the book is not untainted by that impulse. On the whole, though, I think Pollan's laying down of principles, most of which seem solid and commonsensical (not that common sense isn't polluted by all the misinformation he decries), is qualitatively different from "Eat these 7 superfoods!" or "Week 1: Pineapple juice 8 times a day." Even if, at times, his tone isn't.

I think he might have phrased it better, but I interpret "eat nothing that your grandmother wouldn't recognize" as "eat nothing that anyone's grandmother wouldn't recognize," therefore getting us all off the hook as far as "exotic" or "ethnic" food goes.

Yes and no, Geli-- the risk is that we'll eat the icing off the cake of each culture, the foie gras from France and the kobe beef from Japan and so on, and not get the effect of balance of any one culture. I think this is one of the real problems of his argument which is not dealt with head on: if balance is so all-fired important, it's not necessarily clear at all that we can mix and match. Yet the notion that culture-tested balance is essential is merely an intuitive notion of Pollan's, and might just be New Age nonsense for all we know ("the wisdom of the ancient Inuit says, seal blood three times a day prevents...") And in any case, we're going to mix and match and no two ways about it. This is one part of Pollan's book that I think is really kind of half-baked, or at least unexamined with the same rigor he applies to others' assumptions.