Instead of pointing out the usual suspects, Michael Pollan makes the case in his new book “In Defense of Food” that it is our country’s obsession with health and nutrition that has ironically undercut our nation’s dietary well-being. The paradoxes abound: We Americans are overfed but undernourished, health-focused but unhealthy, indulgent but dissatisfied with what we eat.
Compellingly, Pollan depicts a century or so of often contradictory American health fads, ridiculous at their worst and dubious even at their best.
Consider, for example, the 1960s belief that saturated fats were the cause of all of Americans’ health problems, with products like margarine that used partially hydrogenated vegetable oils (aka trans-fats) created as healthy alternatives (scientists now accept that trans-fats are far and away the most detrimental of all fats for our health).
A self-proclaimed “Eater’s Manifesto,” “In Defense of Food” is Pollan’s most recent effort and his most didactic. Essentially an elaboration of an article (“Unhappy Meals”) he wrote last January for the Times magazine, the book begins with three guidelines on how to eat, Zen-like in their simplicity. “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
Pollan is critical of what he views as dogmatism in nutritional science, manifested by the idea that food is merely the sum of its nutrient components, thus creating the need for nutritionists to explain to us what exactly is good to eat. Food is more than the sum of what we can discern as its parts, the prime example being breast milk ““ its benefits have never been replicated in formula despite equal nutrient content.
In many ways, the book reads more as a critique of our industrial food system, wheels greased by an unholy triumvirate of politicians, nutritionists and, alas, journalists, than as a manifesto of how exactly to eat.
Pollan cites a case where a Senate committee chaired by Sen. George McGovern issued a report calling for Americans to “reduce consumption of meat” in 1977. Reduction is never a good business slogan, and after coming under fire from cattle ranchers, a large voting constituency of Midwestern states, the committee was forced to retreat: “Choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated fat intake.” As Pollan notes, “Notice that the stark message to “˜eat less’ of a particular food ““ in this case meat ““ had been deep-sixed; don’t look for it ever again in any official U.S. government dietary pronouncement.”
Pollan is a gifted raconteur, and his ability to relate complex ideas and theories simply is one of his great strengths. The book is an effective history of the nutritional movement and a righteous call for a nutritional paradigm shift. But Pollan has set himself a trap: By disparaging nutritional advice and the journalists who report on it, he has left himself little to write about.
Even at 201 pages, Pollan’s book seems a little too much like the food he criticizes: force-fed fluff to be fat enough to sell.
Chances are we’ve already heard that we should support farmer’s markets and organic fruits and vegetables, and while Pollan accounts for the financial limitations that might prevent one from eating so, he fails to account for the deeper problems of scope and access to fresh food that plague this country. What about those who don’t live with access to a place like Berkeley Bowl Marketplace ““ the famed institution where Pollan gets his grass-fed “pastured” beef ““ or even near a decent supermarket? While often asked, it is a question that is worth repeating until someone has a decent answer.
Overall, the book is a righteous urge for an ideology shift around food in the country. It’s part of a dialogue that has become increasingly loud in recent years thanks to the dedication of authors like Pollan, and a dialogue that one can only hope will continue.
““ Eli Rosenberg
E-mail Rosenberg at erosenberg@media.ucla.edu.