In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

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IN DEFENSE OF FOOD

An Eater’s Manifesto

By Michael Pollan

244 pages. The Penguin Press. $21.95.

I already mentioned that I was reading In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto and that when I reviewed it the review would be positive. That’s because I freaking LOVE this book.

It seems weird that such a book would have to be written. A defense of food? An eater’s manifesto? But the common sense contained in this book is all things that deep down we should know, and sometimes do know, but the knowledge has been lost or confused by the actions of the food industry and it’s marketing. The common sense it contains is desperately needed considering we our a nation of mostly overweight and obese people with an obsession with healthy eating (or health claims at least).

As he mentions in the first section, the author’s goal is to “help us reclaim our health and happiness as eaters.”  The idea is that much of what we are now eating is not actually food and how we are eating it is not actually eating. This might seem like an absurd statement at first glance but the case is strongly made in the following pages of the book.

In the beginning Pollan gives away this main answer to the question of what we should do to be healthy: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.  He then follows that with three sections of the book including a in depth look at nutritionism, a study of the Western Diet and the diseases it causes, and a guide of how to overcome nutritionism and eat a healthy and sane diet.

Pollan makes the case that we have been harmed by the nutrition science and the food marketers. Basically nutrition science has been broken down so that they study nutrients, instead of whole foods, and those claims are of studies are often used by food marketers to sell processed foods. Overall we are left confused on what we should eat and how what we eat will affect our health.  It’s not hard considering the fact that things like high fructose corn syrup and nutella have a advertising budget for commercials to convince you they are healthy. With the bombardment of messages about what is good and what is not, it’s easy to be confused. Certainly this is true, as even those of us who read and try to figure things out are left confused by the constant barrage of food studies telling us contradictory things. We try to eat “scientifically” following the advice of what nutrients to eat and when, instead of enjoying our food fully and as a whole.

In the second section of his book, Pollan makes the case that the Western diet is highly linked to the chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and more. He details the story of how we eat has changed radically since the industrialization of our food and that the diet we have now – high in processed foods and sugar; low in vegetables, fruits, and whole grains – makes people both sick and fat.  He explains the four biggest changes to our traditional diets:  from whole foods to refined, from complexity to simplicity (the loss of micronutrients in food because of the changes in growing it and processing it), from quality to quantity (most of which ending up as sugar, fats, and refined grains that lead to people being both overfed and undernourished), from leaves to seeds (the move away from having green plants at the base of the diet), from food culture to food science (relying on science to tell us how to eat instead of our culture and our bodies).

The best part of the book in my opinion is where the author explains that humans can be healthy on a number of very different traditional diets. It almost matters less about what you are eating and more that it’s a way of eating that sustained people for many years before our food changed. He proposes it is possible to escape the Western diet and it’s effects about a dozen personal rule for eating that improve both health and the pleasure of eating. The rules are not a diet; he doesn’t tell you what to eat.  But with such a confusing food landscape to navigate he tries to give some guidance for a world where even whole foods have been tainted by the Western diet (animals raised on the Western diet change the meat and therefore what you are eating).

The basic rules of eating from In Defense of Food (buy the book to read them in detail):

Eat food. Food defined.

- Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
- Avoid food products containing ingredients A) unfamiliar  B) unpronounceable C) more than five in number, or that include D) high fructose corn syrup.
- Avoid food products that make health claims.
- Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.
- Get out of your supermarket whenever possible. (CSA, farmer’s markets!)

Mostly plants. What to eat.

- Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.
- You are what you eat eats too.
- If you have space buy a freezer.
- Eat like an omnivore.
- Eat well-grown foods from healthy soils.
- Eat wild foods when you can.
- Be the kind of person who takes supplements.
- Eat more like the French. Or the Italians. Or the Japanese. Or the Indians. Or the Greeks. (Traditional food culture!)
- Regard nontraditional foods with skepticism.
- Don’t look for the magic bullet in the traditional diet.
- Have a glass of wine with dinner.

Not too much. How to eat.

- Pay more, eat less.
- Eat meals.
- Do all of your eating at a table.
- Don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does.
- Try not to eat alone.
- Consult your gut. (Full? Stop!)
- Eat slowly.
- Cook, and if you can, plant a garden.

Many of his policies and rules involve more work, time, and money to prepare the food you eat. He has a great point that sadly may go unnoticed in our fast food culture that has no time for anything. But personally I’ve been taking more time and effort to prepare my food and I’ve found that it helps my enjoyment of it. I love the food I spent time on much more than anything I can buy prepared by someone else.  It’s sad what we’ve done to food in our culture and personally I’m sick of it. In my own life I’ve slowly been moving toward eating like Pollan outlined in the last section of his book.

I completely recommend this book to … everyone. If you haven’t read it yet you should.  Buy it on Amazon. Rent it from the library.  Whatever. Just read it. Start thinking critically about the choices you are making with your food.

What did you think of In Defense of Food? Do you follow those eating guidelines?

Related posts:

1. Book Review: The Secret
2. Processed Food is Killing the World
3. Do You Celebrate With FOOD?
4. POM Wonderful 100% Pomegranate Juice Review
5. Food is my PROBLEM

Tagged as: book review, In Defense of Food

http://amerrylife.com/2010/06/12/book-review-in-defense-of-food/

Books of The Times

Obsessed With Nutrition? That’s an Eating Disorder

By JANET MASLIN

Published: January 3, 2008

Not all scientific study of Mars is about extraterrestrial exploration. Some of it is about chocolate. Scientists at Mars Corporation have found evidence that the flavanols in cocoa have beneficial effects on the heart, thus allowing Mars to market products like its health-minded Rich Chocolate Indulgence Beverage.

Skip to next paragraph

Alia Malley

Michael Pollan

Related

First Chapter: 'In Defense of Food' (January 3, 2008)

Unhappy Meals (January 28, 2007)

Articles by Michael Pollan for The Times

In the same spirit, nutritionism has lately helped to justify vitamin-enriched Diet Coke, bread bolstered with the Omega-3 fatty acids more readily found in fish oil, and many other new improvements on what Michael Pollan calls “the tangible material formerly known as food.”

Goaded by “the silence of the yams,” Mr. Pollan wants to help old-fashioned edibles fight back. So he has written “In Defense of Food,” a tough, witty, cogent rebuttal to the proposition that food can be reduced to its nutritional components without the loss of something essential. “We know how to break down a kernel of corn or grain of wheat into its chemical parts, but we have no idea how to put it back together again,” he writes.

In this lively, invaluable book — which grew out of an essay Mr. Pollan wrote for The New York Times Magazine, for which he is a contributing writer — he assails some of the most fundamental tenets of nutritionism: that food is simply the sum of its parts, that the effects of individual nutrients can be scientifically measured, that the primary purpose of eating is to maintain health, and that eating requires expert advice. Experts, he says, often do a better job of muddying these issues than of shedding light on them. And it serves their own purposes to create confusion. In his opinion the industry-financed branch of nutritional science is “remarkably reliable in its ability to find a health benefit in whatever food it has been commissioned to study.”

Some of this reasoning turned up in Mr. Pollan’s best-selling “Omnivore’s Dilemma.” But “In Defense of Food” is a simpler, blunter and more pragmatic book, one that really lives up to the “manifesto” in its subtitle. Although he is not in the business of dispensing self-help rules, he incorporates a few McNuggets of plain-spoken advice: Don’t eat things that your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize. Avoid anything that trumpets the word “healthy.” Be as vitamin-conscious as the person who takes supplements, but don’t actually take them. And in the soon to be exhaustively quoted words on the book’s cover: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” An inspiring head of lettuce is the poster image for this mantra.

Do we really need such elementary advice? Well, two-thirds of the way through his argument Mr. Pollan points out something irrefutable. “You would not have bought this book and read this far into it if your food culture was intact and healthy,” he says. Nor would you eat substances like Go-Gurt, eat them on the run or eat them at mealtimes that are so out of sync with friends and relatives that the real family dinner is an endangered ritual. Other writers on food, from Barbara Kingsolver to Marion Nestle, have expressed the same alarm, but “In Defense of Food” is an especially succinct and helpful summary.

Among the historical details that underscore a sense of food’s downhill slide: the way a Senate Select Committee led by George McGovern was pressured in 1977 to reword a dietary recommendation. Its warning to “reduce consumption of meat” turned into “choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated fat intake.”

When Mr. McGovern lost his seat three years later, Mr. Pollan says, the beef lobby “succeeded in rusticating the three-term senator, sending an unmistakable warning to anyone who would challenge the American diet, and in particular the big chunk of animal protein squatting in the middle of its plate.”

Mr. Pollan shows how the story of nutritionism is “a history of macronutrients at war.” If the conventional scientific wisdom has moved from demon (saturated fat) to demon (carbohydrates), creating irreconcilably different theories about the health benefits of various foods, it has also created an up-and-coming eating disorder: orthorexia.

“We are,” he underscores, “people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.” This book is biliously entertaining about orthorexia’s crazy extremes. A recent “qualified” F.D.A.-approved health claim for corn oil makes sense, Mr. Pollan says, “as long as it replaces a comparable amount of, say, poison in your diet and doesn’t increase the total number of calories you eat in a day.”

Since a Western diet conducive to diabetes has led us not to improved eating habits but to a growing diabetes industry, complete with its own magazine (Diabetic Living), Mr. Pollan finds little wisdom from the medical establishment about food and its ramifications. “We’ll know this has changed when doctors have kicked the fast-food franchises out of the hospitals,” he says.

Until then he recommends that we pay more attention to the reductive effects of food science, recognize the fallibility of research studies (because to replicate the healthy effects of, say, the Mediterranean diet completely, you need to live like a villager on Crete) and dial back the clock. Mr. Pollan advocates a return to the local and the basic, even at the risk of elitism. He recommends that Americans spend more on food: not only more money but also more time. Eat less, and maybe you make up the financial difference. Trade fast food for cooking, and maybe you restore some civility to the traditional idea of the meal.

“No, a desk is not a table,” he points out. Though he shouldn’t have to tell us that, readers of “In Defense of Food” will be glad he did.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/books/03masl.html