Michael Pollan seeks to reconnect humans with their traditional knowledge of diet and the pleasure of eating simple healthy real with the mantra: ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants’. In Defense of Food is a passionate argument against ‘nutritionism’ – the idea that it is only the scientifically identifiable nutrients on food that determine their value in the diet.
Pollan briefly explores the history of nutritionism, beginning with the first experiments in the 19th Century to identify the so-called magic essentials of food, moving through the discovery of vitamins in the 1920s, and is at pains to emphasise how inconclusive most research into individual nutrients was. He lands in the 1970s when the US Dietary Goals and food labelling were developed. Pollan directly links the proliferation of ‘Western diseases’ such as obesity and type II diabetes to these guidelines, arguing that the way they were framed (for example ‘choose meat that will reduce saturated fat intake’ rather that ‘eat less meat’) and presented encouraged people to eat more, not less, and began an eating culture marked by ‘speak no more of food, only nutrients’. I thought this idea could have been explored in more depth.
Pollan goes on to explore several claims about nutrients such as saturated fats that have been shown to be false, baseless or dangerous. I also thought that Pollan let himself down a little in this section, because while he argues against relying too much on science that reduces food down to nutrients, he seemed to me to be a little selective about the science that backed his claims. He does list all his references though.
The book also has a short history of the industrialisation of food, which Pollan breaks down into five steps:
- Wholefoods became refined foods
- Complex foods became simple foods
- Quality of food was replaced by quantity of food
- Eating leaves was replaced by eating seeds
- Food culture became food science
This last is Pollan’s jumping off point for what to do about the whole sorry mess. His point is that food is more than just its constituent nutrients, and that the effect that it has on our bodies comes more by culture than by nutrients (my personal favourite piece of evidence for this thesis is the belt bib). However he doesn’t delve into this idea in depth. He winds up with the mantra above: ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants’.
As you’d expect for a journalist, Pollan writes cleanly and crisply, so the book is quick and easy to read. To some extent I probably enjoyed the book because it confirmed my own prejudices. But it is interesting and informative and reasonably free from politics and blame games. The day I finished it I had two unfortunate encounters with the industrial food chain. The first was a Qantas inflight meal of ‘pizza bits with caesar dip’ which resembled neither pizza nor caesar nor dip. The second was an executive from CSR, speaking at length about CSR’s new sugar-free sugar and low-GI sugar, both introduced in response to the growing incidence of type II diabetes. Pollan may well be onto something.
This article in the NY Times is a condensed version of In Defence of Food. You can also read or watch an interview with Michael Pollan and Kerry O’Brien here, or listen to a podcast from the Sydney Writer’s Festival here.
In Defense of Food
Michael Pollan
Penguin, 2008
