Book Review: In Defense of Food

Michael Pollan’s follow-up to the acclaimed Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food offers an intriguing, haiku-like mantra for healthy eating in the 21st century.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

This book provides a detailed account of how the “food” we now eat has been manipulated and regulated by politicians and agribusiness giants over the past four decades. The end product is a supermarket full of processed foods which distantly resemble the fare of previous generations.

What or who is to blame for this detour? Pollan points to the world of food science and the practice of nutritionism. Nutritionism is the term used to describe the reductionist process of assigning harm or benefit to one nutrient, while disregarding other relationships with the consumer’s lifestyle or environment. Examples of nutritionism include the recent shift to whole grains and the focus on omega-3 fatty acids found in fish oil. While these practices can provide tangible benefits to our health, they are unable to make pop-tarts and potato chips a suitable substitute for whole fruits and vegetables.

This highly engineered approach to food has left us with the Western diet. A diet consisting primarily of corn and soy products, little fresh vegetables, and multitudes of preservatives and artificial ingredients. As a result of this diet, obesity and diabetes rates among US citizens has skyrocketed in the past few decades, bringing with it increased health care costs and decreased worker productivity. Studies show that this diet is also consumed “on the go” and with little social interaction, a fact which modern science has shown further impedes our cardiovascular health.

Pollan presents a striking case against the Western diet, yet agribusiness marketing firms continue to latch on to the latest nutritional fads, leading the consumer to believe that they have made good choices.

The solution to this diet lies in the aforementioned basic principles for eating. This solution includes much of the advice already brought us by the “localvore” and slow-food movements, but goes further by presenting a seemingly endless array of scientific and anecdotal data on the benefits of reestablishing a strong relationship with our food, our land, and our farmers.

In short, plant a garden, do most of your shopping at the farmer’s market, stay along the periphery of your local grocery store (where the whole or minimally processed foods are stacked), and spend time cooking and enjoying food again.

It seems like such simple, even insulting advice to our civilization but in this ever changing landscape of processed foods, we can all benefit from a renewed focus on whole foods that have been produced in healthy soils, not in a laboratory.

Wilmington Riverfront Farmer’s Market
http://www.localharvest.org/farmers-markets/M9307