In Defense of Food

I recently finished Michael Pollan’s latest book, In Defense of Food. In it he argues that eating well is actually relatively simple, once you cut through the combined forces of the food industry, food scientists, and the media (which is maybe not so easy to do). I thought at first this book was not going to be as good as his last few (how could you top Omnivore’s Dilemma?) and in a way it’s not. It lacks the narrative that drives Omnivore’s Dilemma, the actual human drama of searching for a meal- something that we can all, on a very intrinsic level, relate to.

Though In Defense of Food is based more on science than human interest, it remains profound in that it is really a culmination of Pollan’s work to date. Starting with the story of the deeply symbiotic relationship between humans and certain plants in The Botany of Desire and progressing through how we get those plants to our plate in Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan finally comes full circle in his latest book, looking again at our relationship with plants from the biological perspective of nutrition, and combining this with how the way we raise our plants affects the nutritional quality of our food. It is worth reading if only to see these pieces fall into place. A quote:

“Health is, among other things, the product of being in these sorts of relationships in a food chain… It follows that when the health of one part of the food chain is disturbed, it can affect all the other creatures in it. If the soil is sick or in some way deficient, so will be the grasses that grow in that soil and the cattle that eat the grasses and the people who drink the milk from them.”

In addition, the book provides up to date information about the fallacies of nutritional science that will have you throwing all your other “nutrition” books out the window- and rightfully so, as it has always seemed absurd to eat by attempting to figure out the nutritional content of food, when for thousands of years people have got on by eating based on food combinations their culture has worked out, over thousands of years. The olive oil/ tomato combination, for example: olive oil makes the lycopene in tomatoes more available, but when it comes down to it, who the hell cares? The two work well together, and people have survived for centuries eating those two foods in combination. As Pollan says:

“You would not have bought this book and read this far into it if your food culture was intact and healthy. And while it is true that most of us unthinkingly place the authority of science above culture in all matters having to do with our health, that prejudice should at least be examined. The question we need to ask is, Are we better off with these new authorities telling us how to eat than we were with the traditional authorities they supplanted?”

Really, as he concludes, you only need nutritional science if you are eating industrial, processed foods, which don’t have much in the way of nutrition- unless you extract it from something else and add it in. His rules for eating well are sensible and don’t require a calculator, or much in the way of label reading, because when it comes down to it, if it has a label, it’s probably not something you want to be eating. I most enjoyed the rule of thumb, don’t eat it if your great grandmother wouldn’t have recognized it as a food, as this is one of my personal rules of thumb. He means, of course, if you took your great grandmother to the grocery store and handed her a tube of Go-Gurt, or whatever the hell it’s called- would she recognize it as a food?

Probably not. And maybe, neither should you.