May 02 2008
Review: In Defense of Food
In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
by Michael Pollan
This book is the follow up to Omnivore’s Dilemma, that answered the question “Where do the foods we eat today come from?” This book, however, answers the question, “What foods should I eat?” As Pollan says, it seems a little silly that we should have to present an argument of why food is good and what foods should be eaten, but as he points out a little later, this is the point that our Western society has gotten to.
In the first part of the book, “The Age of Nutritionism”, he explores how ever since William Prout identified the 3 principal elements of food (protein, fat, carbohydrates), science in the form of nutritionism, has been trying to break food down to core elements and then duplicate that food through science. Margarine is a good example and one he uses often. But as he also points out, it is a very young science and whole food is a very very complex set of intertwined resources that can be nearly impossible to duplicate. The flaw of nutritionism is that by its very nature (studying nutrients) it is forced to break a complex, intertwined system into its component parts and unfortunately for them, food is more than the sum of its nutrients. This leads to declarations of nutrient health (”fat is bad for you!”) that are established and then decades later found out to be wrong and potentially harmful for you (”oh, remember that trans fat we used to replace saturated fat? It actually causes heart attacks and that saturated stuff is ok. Sorry about that.”).
The second part, “The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization”, talks about the Western Diet: “lots of processed foods and meats, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything except fruits, vegetables, and whole grains” and how whenever it is introduced to a new society, the same diseases start cropping up almost immediately: cardiovascular diseases, cancer, diabetes, and obesity - otherwise known as the Western diseases.
He also points out that the human being seems adapted to almost any diet - all plants, mostly animals, mostly fish, etc, etc. About the only diet we’re not adapted to is…wait for it…the Western diet. He goes on to talk about the history of refined food (a staple of the Western diet) and how it reduces complex food to simple food, and as nutritionists are finding out, simple food loses a lot of what we need to thrive and survive. That reduction to simplicity causes a change from quality to quantity in the food we eat, which is quite possibly one of the major elements in the Western diet that leads to its namesake diseases.
The third part, “Eat Food: Food Defined” gets back to the first sentence of the book (and one that is on the cover as well) - Eat Food. Mostly Plants. Not Too Much. He clarifies that by food, he means real, whole food and not the foodish products that line the shelves of your local supermarket. He then lays out what he likes to call “food algorithms”. They’re not rules. He doesn’t want to tell you exactly what to eat. He just wants to give guidelines; patterns of behavior that if we keep them in mind, we can eat whatever diet we want and remain healthy (and do the environment a service as well). This, of course, excepts the Western diet, which is the diet we’re trying to escape in the first place.
Some of these algorithms include: “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food,” “Avoid food products that make health claims,” “Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle,” and “Eat more like the French, or the Italians, or the Japanese, or the Indians, or the Greeks”. There are more and I plan to go over them in more detail when I establish the guidelines for my In Defense of Food Challenge, which will start next week. But the gist of them is: Try and revert back to the kind of food/diets we know work for human beings and stay away from the processed foods of the Western diet whenever possible.
This, like, Omnivore’s Dilemma, is a complex, interesting book that this review has only really skimmed the surface on it. I highly recommend you pick up a copy from your local library, or if you’re in a hurry to read it, your local book exchange. And tune in Monday for the rules of the In Defense of Food Challenge (IDFC), which is going to be a lot of fun and a lot of challenge.
