In Defense of Food

[Guest guest]

[vitalchoice.com]

 

Michael Pollan's " In Defense of Food "

Incisive cultural commentator takes a more prescriptive approach in his

engaging new book

by Craig Weatherby and Randy Hartnell

-------------

Michael Pollan is the journalism professor at the University of

California Berkeley who's become a bestselling author, regular New York

Times Magazine contributor, and major voice on food issues.

 

He's published three provocative but persuasive books on food and

culture: The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and now, In

Defense of Food [

http://www.imakenews.com/eletra/go.cfm?z=vitalchoiceseafood%2C229118%2Cb1kJkvww%\

2C2023498%2CbbSq5FS

..

We enjoyed meeting and speaking with Michael at Dr. Andrew Weil's 2007

Nutrition & Health conference, finding him as thoughtful and engaging in

person as he is in print.

 

His In Defense of Food answers some of the questions posed in the

bestselling The Omnivore's Dilemma, making it a somewhat more

prescriptive, but still very engaging work.

 

Pollan attacks the current cultural paradigm for food and health

- called " nutritionism " by a fast-growing army of critics - which he

says turns food into mere delivery vehicles for a collection of

chemicals that promote or prevent disease.

 

As he points out, the nutritionist approach provides fodder for food

marketers and media outlets, jobs for journalists, and funding for

academic research.

..

This dominant, reality-distorting perspective constitutes a serious case

of reducto ad absurdum: one that warps public discourse about food and

health.

 

Of course, food is much more than the sum of its parts: a point argued

persuasively by two university researchers, as we reported last issue.

(See " Whole Foods Seen Superior to Supplements [

http://newsletter.vitalchoice.com/e_article000984000.cfm?x=b61yNVj,b1pTrCB7,w

" .)

 

Michael Pollan describes his central theses in his own words, in the

form of the Introduction offered on his web site.

 

The following excerpts come from " An Eater's Manifesto " , Pollan's

introduction to In Defense of Food [

http://www.imakenews.com/eletra/go.cfm?z=vitalchoiceseafood%2C229118%2Cb1kJkvww%\

2C2023498%2CbbSq5FS

 

Introduction: An Eater's Manifesto

Michael Pollan

by Michael Pollan

" Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

" That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly

complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order

to be maximally healthy ... you're better off eating whole fresh foods

rather than processed food products. ... For while it used to be that

food was all you could eat, today there are thousands of other edible

foodlike substances in the supermarket.

 

" As I argue in part one, most of the nutritional advice we've received

over the last half century (and in particular the advice to replace the

fats in our diets with carbohydrates) has actually made us less healthy

and considerably fatter.

 

" All of our uncertainties about nutrition should not obscure the plain

fact that the chronic diseases that now kill most of us can be traced

directly to the industrialization of our food ... These changes have

given us the Western diet that we take for granted: lots of processed

foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything-except

vegetables, fruits, and whole grains.

 

" That such a diet makes people sick and fat we have known for a long

time.

 

" Early in the twentieth century, an intrepid group of doctors and

medical workers stationed overseas observed that wherever in the world

people gave up their traditional way of eating and adopted the Western

diet, there soon followed a predictable series of Western diseases,

including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer.

 

[Here, Pollan probably refers in part to Francis Pottenger, Jr., MD,

Weston A. Price, DDS, and others who conducted research into traditional

diets in the 1920's and 1930's.]

 

" They called these the Western diseases and, though the precise causal

mechanisms were (and remain) uncertain, these observers had little doubt

these chronic diseases shared a common etiology: the Western diet.

 

" What's more, the traditional diets that the new Western foods displaced

were strikingly diverse: Various populations thrived on diets that were

what we'd call high fat, low fat, or high carb; all meat or all plant;

indeed, there have been traditional diets based on just about any kind

of whole food you can imagine. What this suggests is that the human

animal is well adapted to a great many different diets. The Western

diet, however, is not one of them.

 

" Nutritionism prefers to tinker with the Western diet, adjusting the

various nutrients (lowering the fat, boosting the protein) and

fortifying processed foods rather than questioning their value in the

first place. Nutritionism is, in a sense, the official ideology of the

Western diet and so cannot be expected to raise radical or searching

questions about it.

 

" But we can. By gaining a firmer grasp on the nature of the Western

diet-trying to understand it not only physiologically but also

historically and ecologically-we can begin to develop a different way of

thinking about food that might point a path out of our predicament.

 

" This is the burden of the third and last section of In Defense of Food:

to propose a couple dozen personal rules of eating that are conducive

not only to better health but also to greater pleasure in eating, two

goals that turn out to be mutually reinforcing.

 

" Among other things, this book is an eater's manifesto, an invitation to

join the movement that is renovating our food system in the name of

health-health in the very broadest sense of that word.

 

" I doubt the last third of this 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 and growing all your own food. It

would have been the manifesto of a crackpot.

 

" That anyone should need to write a book advising people to 'eat food'

could be taken as a measure of our alienation and confusion. Or we can

choose to see it in a more positive light and count ourselves fortunate

indeed that there is once again real food for us to eat. "

 

© Michael Pollan. Excerpted from the Introduction to In Defense of

Food [

http://www.imakenews.com/eletra/go.cfm?z=vitalchoiceseafood%2C229118%2Cb1kJkvww%\

2C2023498%2CbbSq5FS

(Penguin Press HC 2008) at

http://www.imakenews.com/eletra/go.cfm?z=vitalchoiceseafood%2C229118%2Cb1kJkvww%\

2C2023769%2CbbSq5FS.