I admit it, my obsession with any potato product liberally sprinkled with salt has resulted in four years off and on the South Beach Diet. The basic principles all make sense-good carbs, good fats, good sugars-but actually maintaining a steady diet of eating well is hard work. It takes time to shop for food and prepare it. And time is what most of us don't have. So we eat what can be consumed on the run. And often what we eat is not really food at all.
Thus the reason for Michael Pollan's book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, the follow up to his best-seller, The Omnivore's Dilemma. Starting with the credo, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants," Pollan launches an attack on "nutritionism" and the industrialization of the food industry. He lays out his position clearly in the first few pages, making the rest of the book in some ways unnecessary:
Eating a little meat isn't going to kill you, though it might be better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you're better off eating whole fresh foods rather than processed food products. That's what I mean by the recommendation to "eat food," which is not quite as simple as it sounds. 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. These novel products of food science often come in packages elaborately festooned with health claims, which brings me to another, somewhat counterintuitive, piece of advice: If you're concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it's not really food, and food is what you want to eat. (1-2)
But do read it. If nothing else, the recounting of the history of nutrition legislation, the radical reversals in nutrition advice we've received in our lifetime, and the billions of dollars spent each year on diet "foods" will make you think differently about what, when, and how you eat. And thinking is what is often absent in our consumption.
In three sections, Pollan deals with nutritionism, the industrialization of the food industry, and then finally practical ways to change the way we eat. Even if you don't buy his argument about how diet-based food manufacturing is more of a business model to increase market share than increase health, just following the statistics on heart disease, diabetes, and other dietary-related health problems, it is quite startling to realize that as a whole, Westerners are fatter today than when low-fat foods were introduced. And while death due to heart disease may be down, heart disease itself is up. So the change is more likely as a result of medical gains and not health improvements. Perhaps an indication on why health care costs are soaring?
To further compound our dietary dilemma, Pollan says, "You've probably…noticed that many of the scientific theories put forward to account for exactly what in the Western diet is responsible for Western diseases conflict with one another." Fat is out, then it's in. Carbs are in, then they're out. Butter, bad; margarine, good-or is it the reverse?
In the final section of the book, Pollan maps some practical advice for getting back to eating real food. Starting with this most basic tip, "Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food," the point is illustrated with a popular kid's treat:
She picks up a package of Go-Gurt Portable Yogurt tubes-and has no idea what this could possibly be. Is it a food or a toothpaste?…Sure there's some yogurt in there, but there are also a dozen other things that aren't remotely yogurtlike, ingredi-ents…including high fructose corn syrup, modified corn starch, kosher gelatin, carregeenan, tricalcium phosphate, natural and artificial flavors, vitamins, and so forth….How did yogurt, which in your great grandmother's day consisted simply of milk inoculated with a bacterial culture, ever get to be so complicated? Is a product like Go-Gurt Portable Yogurt still a whole food? A food of any kind? Or is it just a food product? (149)
Other amusing tips: "Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle"; "You are what you eat eats too"; "Do all your eating at a table"; and "Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does" (148-92). And let me add my own-avoid eating anything that when you type the ingredients, the words are not already in your spell-check feature.
One theme I found odd was the perception of the role of Christianity-or more exactly, American Christian ideology-in the demise of the Western diet. For those of us in the Reformed world who take delight in God's creation, including the enjoyment of a good meal, statements like Laura Shapiro's assessment of Christian social reformers of the nineteenth century come as a bit of a shock: "The naked act of eating was little more than unavoidable…and was not to be considered a pleasure except with great discretion" (55). For many of us, good food is a joy and an integral part of family life as well as hospitality. Puritans also take a bit of heat:
Nutrition science has usually put more of its energies into the idea that the problems it studies are a result of too much of a bad thing instead of too little of a good thing. Is this good science or nutritionist prejudice? The epidemiologist John Powles has suggested this predilection is little more than a Puritan bias: Bad things happen to people who eat bad things. (67)
Putting that aside, what is the take-away value of the read? For me: pay attention, slow down, enjoy my food, eat real food. And remember that meals are more than the sum of the food on the plate.
My husband and I have been part of a neighborhood dinner group for the last five years. Most Wednesdays, twenty to forty of our neighbors (ages fourteen months to early eighties) gather together and share a meal, all taking an assignment from our weekly Evite. Because we are each providing one item, more effort is often put into the selection and preparation. Many of us do not live near family and this gives us opportunity to talk over the news of the day, laugh over common foibles of life, and grieve in the loss of life within community. One woman has become a believer, two divorced men have found companionship in the group, and a homesick
