Get real
By M. John FayheeIn Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. By Michael Pollan. The Penguin Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-1-59420-145-5. $21.95.
It is, I guess, somewhat telling that, before even finishing the Introduction of Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, I took not one, but two tours of the interior of my house. The first tour was of the kitchen, where I pulled food items — mostly, I should say, of the purported “healthy” variety — from my refrigerator, freezer, pantry and cupboards with the intention to scrutinizing ingredient labels from a fresh perspective that I fully understood after finishing Pollan’s book a week later amounted to a realization that I have for many years been not only shoveling borderline excrement into my gullet, but that I was doing so with the idea that I was eating in a fairly enlightened fashion.
The second tour was to my main bookshelf, where I found literally 17 tomes that deal either totally or to a large extent with the subject of “food.” (There were, among others, The Paleolithic Diet, Eat Right 4 Your Type, The Carnetine Miracle, The Raw Diet, The South Beach Diet, The Pritikin Promise and the The New Detox Diet.) And that’s not even counting the dozen or more cookbooks we have that are centered on specific diets (raw, low-carb, high-protein, vegetarian, vegan, macro-biotic).
And I suspect the Casa de Fayhee is far from unique in this context. Americans spend more time thinking about food and scrutinizing food labels and reading faddish diet books than any other people in the world, yet, in every measurable way, we are the fattest and sickest culture in the world, with the exception of the Tongans, and, well, I have no idea what’s going on over in Tonga.
All of this is so overwhelming that even people with an active and honest interest in trying to eat right simply don’t know what to do. Our society has devolved to the point that we can’t get our basic shit together when it comes to what ought to be one of the easiest processes in life. So, many of us just throw in the towel and hope for the best as we make our way down supermarket aisles that include organic pepperoni pizzas and whole-grain Pop-Tarts.
Pollan, also the author of the best-selling The Omnivore’s Dilemma, proudly states that he is not a scientist or dietician. He is a journalist and a professor of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. This is an important distinction, because, as a journalist, Pollan has no ulterior agenda, in that he did not pen In Defense of Food with the idea of supporting any sort of diet that he is simultaneously peddling. Second, unlike many fad diet authors who hold credentials (one would hope) in applicable dietary or food-science fields, but who are not professional writers, Pollan understands that it is the prime responsibility of a nonfiction author to self-examine his own work and to preemptively answer any reasonable questions that might pop into the mind of any reader while making his or her way through In Defense of Food.
Pollan’s book is essentially an indictment of nutritionism, that is, the so-called science where diets are broken down into their component food stuffs, while individual food stuffs are further broken down for research processes into their component nutrients. Pollan considers nutritional science, even though it is often well intentioned, to be essentially anti-science.
And his point is made compellingly. Pollan points a pointed finger at the unholy alliance that defines diet in the U.S. today: a food industry whose main raison d’etre is to not only sell as much food as possible, but to achieve that end by offering thousands of new food “products” every year, a marketing juggernaut designed to assist the food industry in its specious goals, government oversight that is such a corrupt, inefficient joke that products like Lucky Charms and Fruit Loops are legally allowed to advertise themselves as healthy, and a research community that is often funded by the very entities that benefit most from gaining, shall we say, certain results.
What those certain results have resulted in since 1980 is a country in which almost two-thirds of the population is overweight or obese. A country where the so-called “Western diseases” (diabetes, heart disease, cancer) have reached epidemic proportions. A country where there is more economic effort being placed on medical research to combat those diseases than on preventing them.
Pollan examines in impressive detail the causation of the situation we are now in. Everything from governmental policy changes that resulted in subsidies for the corn and soybean industries to how food corporations have played a role in premeditatedly tweaking American lifestyle perceptions to the point that more than half of all families right now do not eat meals together on a regular basis.
And what those contentions amount to is that our culture has lost its relationship with food on all levels — the growing of food, the preparing of food, the consumption of food, the ceremony of food, the knowledge of food. And here’s where Pollan gets past what we all know as the tendency toward espousing a particular diet. He points out that, in every culture in history clear up until the past few decades, endemic cuisines evolved that were based upon locally available ingredients. And, since those cuisines were tweaked and passed down for hundreds of generations, they naturally became balanced in every way you can define the word. They were balanced with the surrounding ecosystems. They contained complimentary nutrients. They satisfied a culture’s definition of itself. It matters not one whit if a culture’s native cuisine was what we now call the Mediterranean diet, the Okinawan diet or the diet of the steppe-dwelling Mongolian yak herders. None of those cultures displayed any evidence of the Western dietary diseases that now define life in the U.S. They all worked, because people ate the food that evolved throughout the course of their culture’s long history, and they learned about that food via their parents and grandparents.
And now, here we are, not just eating what Pollan calls food-like substances, but eating those faux foods by the goddamned barrel. And we’re suffering mightily for it.
Pollan gets around to offering advice, which he acknowledges is hard in a 2008 America dominated by companies like Kraft, Nestle and General Mills. And that advice, not surprisingly, is deceptively simple. It actually appears on the cover of In Defense of Food: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. There is more, of course, stuff like don’t eat anything your great-grandmother would not have recognized as food and eat all meals at a table, preferably with family and friends. But, when push comes to shove, Pollan shows us that we have managed, as only Americans can do, to fuck up something so simple that Neanderthals had it down pat.
Recently, the excellent movie, Thank You for Smoking, has been making the rounds on HBO. In that movie, three characters hold a weekly luncheon. One works for the firearms industry. One works for the alcohol industry. And one works for the tobacco industry. After reading In Defense of Food, it occurred to me that there ought to have been a fourth member of that cabal of death: There ought to have been a representative of the industry that labels Lucky Charms as healthy.
And if this all seems like too big a leap, remember this: As Pollan points out, the U.S. is now starting to experience a new medical condition, one that has yet to be studied extensively or even named. It is a condition wherein overweight people are suffering from malnutrition. Yes, in this country, we can even fuck up diseases.
