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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Voice of Reason, Voice of Revolution , 24 Aug 2008
This may be one of the best books I've read this year. I came across it mostly by chance, when browsing the biology books. Michael Pollan has written a book about the evolution of fruit-trees, and when looking at that, "In Defense of Food" came up too. Since it's very popular, I naturally wanted to see what was shaking!
I wasn't disappointed. I originally assumed that Pollan was a wacky independent thinker, but actually he's a professor of journalism at Berkeley, and a regular contributor to the New York Times. He's not a Green radical or militant vegan either. In fact, Pollan's book is eminently reasonable, almost conventional, but precisely for that reason, revolutionary!
As you no doubt have guessed, "In Defense of Food" is a critical book about the American food processing industry. But not just the industry! What makes the book so interesting, is that Pollan *also* criticizes the nutritionists and their health fads. At first glance, this may seem strange. Aren't nutritionists and the food industry adversaries? Don't the nutritionists often criticize the food processing industry for producing unhealthy food? Isn't it a good thing that government regulations force the food companies to make healthier food?
Pollan's answer is: well, no, not really. In his opinion, the nutritionists are part of the problem. Indeed, the industry and the nutritionists are two sides of the same coin! Artificial, processed food (such as margarine) has *always* been marketed with the argument that it's more "healthy", "scientific" and "nutritious" than the real thing (in this case, butter). Conversely, the nutritionists have never criticized the production of processed food as such. They only criticize it for lacking this or that nutrient, this or that vitamin or fatty acid. The food companies can easily "solve" the problem by simply manufacturing a new artificial product, and pretend that's "health food". Besides, the federal regulations aren't exactly water-tight, and allows companies to market even snacks and candy as health food!
About a century ago, people had no problem with what to eat. They simply ate what they had always eaten, for generations, and this seems to have worked very well! As Pollan puts it: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants". Or "Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't have recognized as food". While more people died of infectious diseases a century ago, fewer people died of heart attacks, diabetes and other food-related conditions. A person who made it into ripe old age was less likely to die of food-related conditions in 1900 than today. In plain English: food was healthier and more nutritious in the good old days (and no, Pollan doesn't sound like a paleo-conservative). What went wrong?
The industrialization of food productions, that's what went wrong. Together with mass marketing and mass lobbying of Congress, the food industry created a situation where what we eat was no longer decided upon by culture and tradition. Rather, eating became a matter decided upon by corporate executives, lobbyists, politicians and nutritionists, many of whom were employed by the food processing industry itself. Naturally, they recommended that we eat more processed food. And when this food turned out to be dangerous, the industry responded to pressure by simply producing even more processed food, now with some extra "nutrient" added to make it look healthier. Once again, there is a connection between the phoney food produced by modern industry, and the periodic health fads and health crazes. (Pollan's argument is more subtle and complex than I can summarize in a short review, but this is the bare gist of it.)
So what's the solution? Pollan describes an interesting experiment in Australia, where a group of Aborigines who lived a modern and unhealthy lifestyle (they had developed both diabetes and insuline resistance!) were persuaded to return to their original hunter-and-gatherer way of life. After a very short period, they became *much* healthier. Of course, modern Americans can hardly "go native" in the same way, but Pollan believes there are things one can do, such as buying food from farmers' markets, or straight from farms, rather than from supermarkets, or at least avoiding the most obviously artificial foodstuffs in supermarkets. He also makes a compelling case for common meals (real common meals, as in the good old days), and calls on people to stop snacking all day long.
On the face of it, this sounds like pretty obvious advice, almost boring. No sensational new diets, no extraordinary health cereals or chocolate bars, no genetically engineered or irradiated superfood. And no New Age meditation! Just plain, old-fashioned cooking: "Eat (real) food. No too much. Mostly plants". Come again?
Actually, Professor Pollan's advice is revolutionary. Although Pollan himself is presumably pretty main-stream, this must be the most revolutionary book published this year! It's obvious from his analysis that the food processing industry is a powerful special interest group that simply cannot stomach this kind of reasonable advice. Why not? Pollard points out that the food processing industry would loose a large part of its profits if people would go back to traditional cooking. Since food cultures that existed for centuries tend to be naturally conservative, there would be less room for innovation, and hence for windfall profits. Naturally, profits would fall if people ate less, and skipped the snacking altogether, or bought more food from local organic farms rather than from multinational supermarket chains. The author also points out that the food processing companies have a vested interest in marketing bad eating habits, such as snacking in the car, children eating alone after preparing food in the microwave oven, etc. In other words, the proposals of "In Defense of Food" would threaten the commodification and marketization of food! They point in the direction of a Green community.
If that's not revolutionary, what is?
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Against 'nutritionism', 11 May 2009
Michael Pollan, professor of journalism at Berkeley, is a prolific writer on food and food-related issues, which have drawn much attention in the United States in recent years. After his more historical and philosophical works, "In Defence of Food" is a practical guide to and defense of food. To be precise, food as opposed to processed, additive-filled, can-conserved and/or microwavable goo that passes for food in most of our Western supermarkets.
Pollan uses a pleasant style and a usefully skeptical attitude towards the faddish nutritional science of the past decades to launch a critique on the industrial process of food production in the Western world, which has made us at the same time less healthy, fatter, and less nourished. As Pollan shows, typical 'rich' diseases such as cancer, type 2 diabetes, coronary disease, stroke and so forth are directly and invariably correlated to following the broadly defined 'Western diet' (which despite Pollan using this name is really mostly the American diet). This, in turn, is caused partially by an excessive focus on single 'good' or 'bad' nutrients in food science, which eliminates both the interplay of various elements in given foodstuffs as they relate to our health, partially by the social and cultural contexts of food being ignored in such science, leading to useless and confusing study results, and finally in part by the food industry bribing and cajoling governments and researchers alike to make these practices suit their profit needs. He calls this 'nutritionism', following an Australian researcher on the same topic.
Although Pollan's critique is backward-looking in the sense of supporting traditional conceptions of food, where food is healthy qua food, not because of one or another 'good' nutrient du jour being part of it, its radical nature is by no means to be underestimated. Consistently, at times even repetitively, Pollan shows chapter after chapter how all the negative effects associated with the American way of eating as well as the 'food' consumed are the result of the modern agrocapitalist food industry and its unrestrained victory over any standards of healthcare or regulation other than removing explicit poison (and even that not always).
As alternative, Pollan proposes methods of food production that eliminate the artificial focus on individual nutrients as well as restoring the social context of meals in the classic sense, which implies eating natural, unaltered foods (organic or better), eating them in normal quantities, and taking your time with the meal to enjoy it. He summarizes his basic viewpoint as "eat food, not too much, mostly plants", but expands upon this in the final chapter to give some more detailed considerations on what kind of attitude to take to choosing food in our kind of society.
In a pleasant change from the normal faddish type of diet advice book, he actually looks at the structural issues around the production of food, not just choice of specific nutrients in them, and he gives tips on what kind of things to consider when choosing rather than telling the reader specifically what kind of food to eat. This is indeed a great advancement and for that reason this book is certainly to be recommended. The only downsides are a gratuitous and unnecessarily anti-socialist attitude (he repeatedly compares things he doesn't like to Marxism or the Soviet Union, even though that has no relation to the topic whatsoever), and the fact his critique gets a little repetitive over time.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Essential Reading, 5 Jun 2009
Everything I read in this books makes complete sense. Pollan's 'manifesto' is not a diet in the traditional sense (thank goodness - we don't need any more of those). It has reinforced my belief that we don't need to look to scientists to tell us what to eat and that there is so much more to eating a healthy balanced diet than nutrients and calories. Even doing some of what he suggests, some of the time would make an enormous difference to our health. Don't hesitate, buy this book right now!
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