jankp's Full Review: Michael Pollan - In Defense of Food: An Eater's Ma...
The 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act strictly required foods that were an imitation food product to be labeled as imitations and this ethical, health-promoting rule lasted until 1973 when the FDA (note that it wasn’t Congress who wrote the law) silently repealed it as so much useless baggage from the past. This did not make headlines. What it did do was allow the rejoicing food industry to flood the market with cheaply-made food products that were not the real thing. Consumers faced low-fat products made with hydrogenated oils or guar gum or carrageenan, bacon bits became soy protein, the cream in whipped cream or coffee creamer came from corn starch and the list went on. Michael Pollan was asked by his editors to write In Defense Of Food: An Eater's Manifesto and the FDA’s unacceptable behavior and its deadly consequences to Americans are why.
Maybe you already realize that and wonder if Pollan has something else to say. Yes, he has much more to say, but I’ll try to be brief in my defense of his defense of real food. He points out correctly that it’s ironic that most of us need to read a book like this. Isn’t it evident that we need to eat food, not too much and mostly plants as he advises? Not to most Americans. I myself am asked by well-meaning friends to try food products because they have so many health claims from added nutrients or are made with soy. I always disappoint them and so they turn to pushing supplements on me, even vegan-safe ones. “Give it up already!” I wish I could yell.
Pollan, an investigative journalist, holds to the same standards I try to hold to. We avoid those fake food products, and this isn’t simply what’s considered junk food, that dominate all but the outer sections of supermarkets and almost all of convenience stores. He passionately explains that real food, such as fresh organic produce, meats, and whole grains, don’t need health claims or added nutrients. They don’t have labels with unpronounceable chemicals in their ingredients that may interact poorly with the chemical soup we live and breathe in. This may surprise you, but most of us are hooked on nutritionism instead of honest nutrition. Nutritionism, as Pollan tells us, has become the ‘official ideology of the Food and Drug Administration’ and it began taking over our understanding of nutrition in 1973.
In Defense Of Food has three sections (The Age of Nutritionism, The Western Diet And The Diseases Of Civilization, Getting Over Nutritionism), seventeen well-organized chapters in total and about two hundred pages packed with information garnered from many books (as well as his own) and articles from clinical journals cited on a dozen or so pages in Sources, plus helpful guides in print and the web for finding real food and eating locally. Besides Pollan’s excellent books The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore’s Dilemma (hey, it interested me, anyway), I’ve only read one other book he cites, which is The Omega Diet: The Lifesaving Nutritional Program Based on the Island of Crete by Simopoulos and Robinson. It’s a fantastic book, but he prefers a newer book about omega fatty acids that I’ll check out. I thought he knew his subject quite well, but would suggest he read Mastering Leptin that I’ve reviewed to better understand why eating only three meals a day and no snacks is important.
Pollan’s eating advice makes sense. It’s how I eat and I’ve never been overweight except very temporarily in college. Not that I’ve always been a vegan, but I grew up on a farm with a huge garden. I’ve always loved fresh produce and whole grains to the exclusion of fake food and prefer buying locally-grown food, not industrial organic fakers that may come all the way from China! He’s right to deem suspicious those new soy products that are just as industrial and processed. I use firm tofu, plain soy milk and well-fermented miso and soy sauce only (beans, legumes, nuts and seeds too for protein). Pollan eats a little complimentary meat and dairy from pasture-fed animals and certain wild fish.
There are many great reasons for eating this way. It’s much better for our health, for one thing. Eating imitation food is the main culprit behind the declining health and expanding waistlines of Americans for the last few decades. Pollan elaborates on this in his book and on the reasons for loving farmer‘s markets and co-ops like the one I shop at. As Pollan observes, eating this way is like a vote and it shows the food industry you don’t believe in nutritionism and cheap, fake food.
I was especially fascinated by his research into the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs that was formed in 1968 and headed by Sen. George McGovern. Their original dietary guidelines advised Americans to reduce consumption of red meat and dairy products, but the outcry from the meat and dairy industries caused the committee to cave and revise them to say we should choose foods with less saturated fat. Nutritionism was born. It has led to great confusion over what to eat as well as worse health in most cases. Pollan criticizes the USDA food pyramid for causing the same problems. He discusses much more to help us to understand how our relationship with food began changing and why other countries don’t have such health problems.
Maybe this wasn’t a brief review to you, but I really was brief and only covered the main points. Pollan has always impressed me with his research and how easy and enjoyable he is to read. In Defense Of Food may not be all new information to me, but much of it was and fascinating, too.
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