Author decries food industry

[Guest guest]

Eat food, not too much, mainly plants, says Michael Pollan

Feb 29, 2008 04:30 AM Kim Honey food editor

Michael Pollan wants a cappuccino made with cow's milk. But Live Organic Food Bar on Dupont St. near Spadina is vegan, so real milk, even organic, is out.

"What's their thing about milk?" the best-selling author of In Defense of Food and The Omnivore's Dilemma wonders aloud. When reminded it's a vegan restaurant, he grins. "Oh right. They're vegan. Silly me."

Pollan, who is strict about eating three spare meals a day, has just come from a lunch prepared by Jamie Kennedy at the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, so he is full of local Muscovy duck and a creamy onion soup garnished with a small filet of splake, which the chef has to explain is a man-made hybrid of lake trout and speckled trout farmed in Georgian Bay.

The 53-year-old former executive editor of Harper's Magazine eventually chooses almond milk, "which is milk only in the sense that it's white," he says drily. Then he scans the menu. Bee pollen, touted as "brain food," can be added to any juice or smoothie, but Pollan's not hovering there. "Leave it to the bees," cracks the Berkeley journalism professor turned food guru who, in true journalistic style, has helpfully boiled down his manifesto to just seven words: Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mainly Plants.

You wonder how Pollan could object to a vegan restaurant that serves raw food, especially when one of the main tenets of the book he is promoting, In Defense of Food, is that people should eat more fruits and vegetables.

"I am generally skeptical about any extreme eating approach," he says. "There's a kind of absolutism in our food that I wonder about." This is, after all, the man who coined the word "orthorexic" to describe those people who are obsessed with food as medicine that can keep us upright and compos mentis for decades, possibly even a century.

Pizza Pandemonium catches his eye. The crust is made of sprouted buckwheat, carrot and golden flax, while the "mockzarella cheese" is made of macadamia nuts. It's a raw food extravaganza, with toppings of dehydrated tomato, marinated onions, olives and radish sprouts.

"I like the crust. I think this is really good," he says, after crunching through the buckwheat disc. "This is what I object to: why are we calling this mozzarella and this a crust? It's its own thing."

It reminds him of his vegetarian sisters, one of whom is actress Tracey Pollan, which makes Michael J. Fox his brother-in-law. All three sisters are vegetarians and have been since they were in their teens.

"Whenever they have a brunch, they have all these mock meat things, which I think is horrible," he says; spoken like a true older brother.

It's not so strange that Pollan dislikes fake bacon when you read the book, which preaches one thing above all: avoid industrially produced food and eat only what your grandmother would recognize as food.

Before you take that last piece of advice too literally, he was just in England promoting the book when someone approached him to say his grandma cooked bangers and mash.

"It doesn't have to be your grandmother," Pollan says. "Maybe an Italian grandmother."

In a multicultural city like Toronto it is even more important, since our Western diet makes North Americans sick, Pollan contends, and it makes immigrants sick, too. By sick he means rising rates of obesity and heart disease and diabetes and fatty liver disease.

"The challenge for them is to preserve their food culture," he says, and that means maintaining the content as well as the form. For example, Italians eat a small plate of pasta as a first course, followed by a small meat course, not great troughs of spaghetti. His advice? "Eat real food grown in good soil by farmers." Animals fed their traditional food (for beef, that's grass, not corn) are okay to eat, as long as the meat is treated more as a condiment than the main event.

Peter H

 

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