In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
Release date: 2008 / 205 pages
First lines: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly 
incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.”
Synopsis (from back cover): “Food. there’s plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it. So why should anyone need to defend it? Because most of what we’re consuming today is not food, and how we’re consuming it — in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone — is not really eating. Instead of food, we’re consuming ‘edible foodlike substances’ — no longer the products of nature but of food science.”
Review: After somehow coincidentally reading 3 books about failed or failing marital relationships in a row, I needed a little variety.
Happily, Pollan’s latest book arrived at the library just in time. I did not read his very popular The Omnivore’s Dilemma because, well, I’m not an omnivore. I stopped eating meat over 20 years ago and didn’t want to read about the state of the meat industry, etc… But I did want to see what all the hype was about surrounding Pollan, and I thoroughly enjoyed his latest.
He begins with a history of how we have come to eat “food” that has a list of unpronounceable ingredients as long as our arm — and leg — combined. Although this information was new to me, it was not surprising. Powerful lobbies, the desire for lots of cheap food, and an uninformed populace has resulted in an obesity epidemic, yet a return of archaic diseases like rickets as well as an epidemic of diabetes. As Pollan states, “a diet based on quantity rather than quality has ushered a new creature onto the world stage: the human being who manages to be both overfed and undernourished, two characteristics seldom found in the same body in the long natural history of our species.”
His premise is that we need to return to eating food — actual, whole food — instead of processed chemicals mascarading as food. Our recent obsession with “nutrients” (like Omega 3s, Vitamin C, etc.) ignores the likely possibility that it is not possible to isolate a nutrient and expect it to function or benefit us in the same way it would in its original source — an orange vs. “vitamin C enriched yogurt”. Check out a couple of his eye-opening, yet common-sensical insights:
Regarding why organic is better (beyond the obvious chemical issue):
“Crops grown with chemical fertilizers grow more quickly, giving them less time and opportunity to accumulate nutrients other than the big three (nutrients in which industrial soils are apt to be deficient anyway). Also, easy access to the major nutrients means that industrial crops develop smaller and shallower root systems than organically gorwn plants; deeply rooted plants have access to more soil minerals… In addition to these higher levels of minerals, organically grown crops have also been found to contain more phytochemicals — the various secondary compounds… that plants produce in order to defend themselves from pests and diseases, many of which turn out to have important antioxidant, antiinflammatory, and other beneficial effects in humans.”
How do we compensate for this?
“…we turn for salvation to the health care industry. Medicine is learning how to keep alive the people whom the Western diet is making sick.”
So, how we fix this problem? Here are just a few of his suggestions:
- Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food
- Avoid food products containing ingredients that are: a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable, c) more than five in number, or that include d) high fructose syrup.
- Eat mostly plants, especially leaves
- You are what you eat eats too
- Eat well-grown food from healthy soils
- Eat like an omnivore
I could keep on quoting, but I strongly recommend you check it out yourself — it could revolutionize how you feed yourself!
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