We lost our backpack in a New York City cab last week, and with it went our newly acquired book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, by Michael Pollan. The book was gifted to Gregg recently by Bill, and I consider it to be the biggest loss of our whole backpack debacle. I had read almost all of the first section, "The Age of Nutritionism," on the train ride in, and of course that was as far as I got. I liked In Defense of Food enough, however, that I am going to break my own rule and write about a book I haven't finished until a new copy lands in my lap.
The central idea, as proposed in the first line of the introduction, is that we should "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Pollan goes on to describe the historical process by which our food has been (ideologically, hence the "ism" in "nutritionism") broken down into nutrients in the public's consciousness, so that people came to believe they had to shop nutrient by nutrient, knowing which nutrients were "good" and which were "bad," as opposed to trusting their senses as humans had always done before and eating whole foods. One of the many effects of this changed way of thinking about food is that it relegated the expertise of eating to scientists and took it away from the individual eaters, complicating and thereby removing pleasure from the eating process, which, he argues, is a crucial component for human health and happiness.
The other thing the "age of nutritionism" did was to open the door for the development of a whole range of what he calls "edible food-like substances," distinct from real food, that tout a wide range of health benefits depending on the latest fad--from "low-fat" to "low cholesterol" to "high carb" and so on. Margarine is one such food-like substance, having reinvented itself over the ages depending on the latest fad, for example, by removing "bad" nutrients such as cholesterol and saturated fats and replacing them with "good nutrients" like polyunsaturated fats and vitamins. Later, when the new and improved hydrogenated margarine was discovered to produce "bad" trans fats, these were removed too. The key is that no matter what, margarine could be continually reengineered, always to be "healthier" than butter--and so it made for the perfect, albeit evolving, marketing tool. People believed the claims, and so they made the switch. (The recipe blog userealbutter comes to mind as I write this.)
Pollan argues that when we break foods down to their individual nutrients and attempt to replicate those nutrients in "edible food-like substances," a prime example being baby formula, it is likely we will miss something and not actually succeed in getting all the requisite nutrients in a given food product as we would if we ate the actual food itself. This statement is supported by many studies demonstrating the superiority of breast milk over formula for a baby's health. Furthermore, Pollan gives evidence to support that the "low-fat" movement actually spawned fatter and less healthy Americans, because a) Americans ate more as a result, and b) the replacements were actually worse for us, contributing to the rise in heart attacks and other ailments that modified diets were supposed to address in the first place.
Anyway, that's as far as I got reading In Defense of Food and hopefully our backpack will end up in a New York City lost and found because I really want to finish the book.
One of the things I like about what I've read of Pollan's book so far is its application to my own interest in the collection and consumption of wild edible plants. Obviously, wild edible plants are whole, natural, and organic foods. These wild whole foods were good for our Native American ancestors and certainly they are also good for us today compared to the genetically modified, pesticide-laced vegetables we get from the supermarket.
In that same context I'd also like to mention the article "What's Your Water Footprint?" by Josh Harkinson that I read in the August 2009 issue of Mother Jones on the way back from New York. The article contains a list of foods and products and the number of gallons of water it takes to make each one. Harkinson goes on to explain that the concept of reducing our "water footprint" can actually be at odds with some tenets of the sustainability movement because local and organically grown food, for example, might rely on water from, say, a threatened salmon habitat, thereby harming efforts to conserve the salmon. There's plenty more to be said on this topic and I will do so at a later date, but in the meantime I have to conclude an additional value of using wild edible plants: they require no watering on our part.
A sorry state of things when I am the only one commenting on my own articles, he. Anyway a friend posted this link on Facebook & I wanted to make it available here: Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food. You've got to skip the ad first.