ProgressOhio

Michael Pollan has written a fascinating little book about what we eat called In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. Here's the summary: 

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. Many of them come packaged with health claims that should be our first clue they are anything but healthy. In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion. The result is what Michael Pollan calls the American paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become.

But if real food -- the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food -- stands in need of defense, from whom does it need defending? From the food industry on one side and nutritional science on the other. Both stand to gain much from widespread confusion about what to eat, a question that for most of human history people have been able to answer without expert help. Yet the professionalization of eating has failed to make Americans healthier. Thirty years of official nutritional advice has only made us sicker and fatter while ruining countless numbers of meals.

Pollan proposes a new (and very old) answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. By urging us to once again eat food, he challenges the prevailing nutrient-by-nutrient approach -- what he calls nutritionism -- and proposes an alternative way of eating that is informed by the traditions and ecology of real, well-grown, unprocessed food. Our personal health, he argues, cannot be divorced from the health of the food chains of which we are part.

In Defense of Food shows us how, despite the daunting dietary landscape Americans confront in the modern supermarket, we can escape the Western diet and, by doing so, most of the chronic diseases that diet causes. We can relearn which foods are healthy, develop simple ways to moderate our appetites, and return eating to its proper context -- out of the car and back to the table. Michael Pollan's bracing and eloquent manifesto shows us how we can start making thoughtful food choices that will enrich our lives, enlarge our sense of what it means to be healthy, and bring pleasure back to eating.***

Lots of food politics factoids in Pollan's book, including these footnotes:

"Only the power of the sugar lobby in Washington can explain the fact that the official U.S. recommendations for the maximum permissible level of free sugars in the diet is an eye-popping 25 percent of daily calories. To give you some idea of just how permissive that is, the World Health Organization recommends that no more than 10 percent of daily calories comes from added sugars, a benchmark that the U.S. sugar lobby has worked furiously to dismantle. In 2004 it enlisted the Bush State Department in a campaign to get the recommendation changed and has threatened to lobby Congress to cut WHO funding unless the organization recants." (No condoms, more sugar!)

"Americans were particularly disturbed by the way many immigrant groups mixed their foods in stews and such, in contrast to the Anglo-American practice of keeping foods separate on the plate, a culinary format anthropologist Mary Douglas calls '1A plus 2B' -- one chunk of animal protein plus two vegetables or starches. Perhaps the disdain for mixing foods reflected anxieties about other kinds of mixing."

And this interesting parenthetical account: "Few things have been more likely to get an American political candidate in hot water than a taste for fine food, as Martin Van Buren discovered during his failed 1840 reelection campaign. Van Buren had brought a French chef to the White House, a blunder seized on by his opponent, William Henry Harrison, who made much of the fact that he subsisted on "raw beef and salt." George H.W. Bush's predilection for pork rinds and Bill Clinton's for Big Macs were politically astute tastes to show off."

If you don't think you're influenced by your culture, just consider your eating habits. And "Culture," says Pollan, "at least when it comes to food, is really just a fancy word for your mother."