In Defense of Food: an Eater's Manifesto

Written by Michael Pollan

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." With these words, Michael Pollan validates the balanced approach I've been pushing for years. The message lacks drama. It doesn't require complex calculations, obscure ingredients or specialized menus. With heartfelt simplicity and surprising humor, Pollan's manifesto In Defense of Food (Penguin Press, 2008) makes a quiet case for radical transformation of the way Americans eat.

His attack on what he terms "nutritionism" - the concept that foods are the sum of their nutrient parts and that the basic purpose of diet is to promote bodily health - is humbling. I am a trained nutritionist. I entered college the year after my department changed its name (formerly Home Economics) and graduated the year the first set of governmental dietary guidelines appeared. I've deciphered the food pyramid and prescribed low-fat diets.

Over the years though, I've come to doubt much of the dogma that was drilled into me. I've watched nutritional fashions change and established verities disproved. First fats were bad, then carbohydrates, then the low-carb fad faded, to be replaced with something yet unknown. Chocolate and red wine were bad; now they're good. A guidebook my obstetrician gave me in 1980 suggested a relaxing cocktail to cut back appetite and weight gain - not exactly conventional wisdom today! Sometimes I think I should have majored in literature. It has more basis in fact.

Outside of a hospital setting, calculations of calories and nutrients are impractical and inaccurate, especially when you are dealing with anything more interesting than four ounces of chicken or a half-cup of rice. I couldn't see the practical utility of telling someone to get thirty percent of their daily food intake from fat, even if there was conclusive evidence that doing so would extend their healthy lifespan. Which there is not.

While spending a summer in Italy, I noted that Italians drank more, smoked more and ate more fatty food (and often, fewer fruits and vegetables) than Americans, but had lower rates of obesity, heart disease and cancer. The more Americans fixated on nutrition and health, the fatter and unhealthier they got. Surely something else was at play here. The heart of Pollan's thesis began to dawn on me: how we eat is as much or more important than what we eat. As he states: "Most of what we're consuming today is no longer, strictly speaking, food at all, and how we're consuming it... is not really eating, at least not in the sense that civilization has long understood the term... food is as much about culture as it has been about biology."

In Defense of Food is divided into three parts. The first makes an effective attack on the flaws of reductionism. Reductionism is driven by both cultural expectation, our desire for "magic bullet" solutions, and scientific necessity. Science requires assumptions that are easily measured and fit neatly into double-blind studies or epidemiological statistics. What often gets lost in the process is an awareness that we are dealing with systems, not separate entities, and any rigorous examination of cause and effect.

Take for example, as Pollan does, cholesterol. Many people with heart disease also have high blood cholesterol levels. But the jump from this association to the conclusion that high dietary cholesterol causes high blood cholesterol and therefore heart disease, has more holes in it than a wedge of Swiss Emmenthaler. Cholesterol is a naturally occurring substance, essential to such diverse bodily processes as nerve transmission and hormonal function. People vary widely in the rates that they convert dietary cholesterol to blood cholesterol. Other blood factors, such as triglycerides, are also linked to heart disease. High blood cholesterol could conceivably result from another, more basic, factor in heart disease, such as arterial inflammation, rendering it a coincidental finding rather than a primary cause.

All these subtleties were lost on the overconfident scientists who made the case against cholesterol, the journalists who sensationalized the findings, the food processors who rushed to create low-cholesterol products like Eggbeaters, the health professionals who dutifully promoted the new wisdom and the public who bought into it. Yet over the past thirty-some years, the case against cholesterol has been quietly evaporating. A recently published study noted that statins, widely prescribed drugs that do indeed lower blood cholesterol, do not necessarily prevent heart disease or extend lifespan.

Pollan details the flaws in several commonly referenced studies, such as the Nurses Health Study and the Women's Health Initiative, and suggests that "what people don't eat may matter as much as what they do." He notes that once you remove one factor, say saturated fat, from a diet, you put all sorts of other variables into play, including calorie reduction or less meat or fewer environmental pollutants. Additionally, confounding environmental and cultural factors can never be fully accounted for, and people probably lie more about how much they eat than anything else, so the data is suspect. Most insistently, he discusses how our exaltation of the scientific reductionist approach has led to anxiety around food, reliance upon experts, and a "sacrifice of pleasure" that supposedly, but isn't really, compensated for by improved health.

In the second section, Pollan outlines ways in which the post-industrial American diet has changed for the worse: the shift from whole foods to refined and processed; from complexity to simplicity (commercial fertilizers, decline in crop diversity, overwhelming use of cheap corn and soy products in processed foods); the shift in emphasis from quality to quantity; from eating "leaves" to eating "seeds" (with a concomitant decrease in long chain fatty acid intake); and the shift in reliance from culture to science in making dietary decisions. At the same time, he cautions the reader against anointing any one of these sometimes conflicting theories as the primary cause of our dietary decline.

It is in the third section that the truly radical nature of his recommendations becomes evident. Pollan gets down to practical specifics and suggests that people buy simple, basic foods - "nothing your great grandmother wouldn't recognize." He suggests that people eat less meat, and enjoy a glass of wine with dinner. He suggests that they eat meals, at a table, with others.

When he cautions readers to avoid processed foods, he urges readers to go beyond the obvious and consider deeper levels of processing. Meat and vegetables from "processed environments" such as feedlots and chemically fertilized soils also qualify as processed foods. Individual foods are not standalone items but part of an intricate web encompassing the land on which they are grown and/or raised, farmers and food processors, grocers, cooks and ultimately, food waste and compost. Individual bodily health and environmental health are two sides of the same coin.

One who pursues this line of thought seriously will be lead out of most conventional supermarkets and into the natural food market, farmers' market, CSA or home garden. "We need to invest more time and money in how we eat," he states. This seems obvious, but not always politically correct to admit.

Home cooked, sustainably-grown food is too often dismissed as an elitist luxury. This is hogwash. The average American spends less than ten percent of their income on food, less than half an hour a day preparing meals and a little more than a hour enjoying those meals. As Pollan notes, "for most people for the most of history, gathering and preparing food has been an occupation at the heart of daily life." But not in the modern U.S., where ads recommend buying precooked Thanksgiving meals so you can "spend more of your time relaxing with your family." Excuse me? I thought rolling out pie crust, sautéing onions and sitting around the kitchen table while the fragrance of a roasting turkey wafts out of the oven WAS relaxing - the very essence of Thanksgiving.

People who wouldn't think twice about dropping thousands of dollars on a Hawaiian vacation or a plasma TV use food as their opportunity to economize. I once listened to a financially-comfortable, educated woman extol the virtues of a case of avocados she'd bought that "stayed good for six months." It didn't occur to her that there was something biologically eerie about this. As Pollan cautions, "don't buy anything that can't rot."

Basic cooking skills - the kind that transform whole grains into filling soups and cheap cuts of (free range) pork shoulder into comforting stews - are no longer passed down from generation to generation. My immigrant grandmothers used to churn out nourishing meals with full time work and very little money. I worked for the federal WIC program in the 1970s. When I asked the teenage moms I counseled what they ate for dinner, the standard answer was "whatever she cooks." "She" referred to grandma, usually up from the South, who could create inexpensive, nourishing concoctions out of cheap cuts of meat, beans, grains and greens. Once Grandma is gone, I fear Burger King will take up the slack.

Big box stores have moved into organics, and this is admirable to some degree. But the harsh fact is that eating sustainably is by definition a small, local, timeconsuming process. Which brings up the sticky need for societal change. Is it really necessary to schedule children's sports activities and play practices right at the dinner hour? Maybe we should restore home economics - for both sexes - to the classroom. Maybe, just maybe, someone needs to spend more time at home cooking and have that societal contribution recognized and respected.

"You have to wonder whether its realistic to think that the American way of eating can be reformed without also reforming the whole American way of life," says Pollan.

One can only hope.