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In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the award-winning author Michael Pollan answers myriad questions about food in America: What is it? How is it grown or raised? What makes it taste good? In exploring these questions he discussses almost every aspect of the obtaining and eating of food, ranging from philosophical to ethical to practical, ranging from monoculture to hunting to high fructose corn syrup. Along the way, he shows what people do eat, but he does not directly engage the issue of what people should eat, particularly regarding their health.
His newly released book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, attempts to do just that, but not before Pollan, in his usual lucid prose, skewers, with thoughtful reasoning and thorough research, the state of food in America and common knowledge of how diet relates to health. For instance, there was never much evidence that animal fats, as bacon lovers will no doubt be glad to know, caused the negative health consequences attributed to them. The main culprit, in Pollan’s estimation, is “nutritionism” – the hypothesis that foods “are essentially the sum of their nutrient parts, ‘pushing’ food aside in the popular imagination of what it means to eat.”
From this hypothesis comes the conclusion that processed foods enhanced with certain nutrients are the equals of the whole foods from which the nutrients are derived. What this has gotten us, besides bags of potato chips sporting health claims, is “anxiety and confusion about even the most basic questions of food and health, and a steadily diminishing ability to enjoy one of the great pleasures of life without guilt or neurosis.” Not to mention the subject of the book’s second portion, our Western afflictions: obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.
Referencing, among other things, studies of Native peoples and their alarming susceptibility to disease when they adopt the Western diet, Pollan argues that these health concerns are a result of the diet itself. It may be, he acknowledges, that there is some main molecular culprit that science has not yet conclusively demonstrated, but, he argues in the absence of a smoking gun, the way to avoid these diseases is by abandoning the Western diet itself.
Lest his readers don loincloths and loft spears, Pollan defines his challenge as “figuring out how to escape the worst elements of the Western diet and lifestyle without going back to the bush.” To do this, he returns to the simple phrases with which he began his book: “Eat Food. Not Too much. Mostly plants.” He uses these three principles to organize a set of rules that he believes are the healthiest way to eat. In devising them, he gives strong weight to culture, which is essentially “a long, incremental process of trial and error; to skepticism of processed foods; and to careful reasoning. The heart, and the beauty, of the book” are in these rules.
They are simple, “don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food” and “avoid food products that make health claims,” for example, and one can easily invent exceptions to them – say, that my great-grandmother never ate sushi. But that’s what gives the rules so much potential: the eater cannot follow them mindlessly. Rather, he or she must think about them, think about the food he or she eats, and decide for him- or herself how to apply them. In making readers think about their food, about what food should be and about what food means, Pollan may well have designed a system of eating that will help us to eat more healthfully, and discover anew how to enjoy food.
On display throughout the book are Pollan’s well-reasoned, not to mention well-researched, conclusions; his ability to find dramatic, pithy examples; and his superb talent for describing scientific concepts with clarity and truth. Readers having read The Omnivore’s Dilemma will feel that they know, perhaps only subconsciously, some of what is presented here, but will undoubtedly envy his ability to marshall all of the facts in such a way that they lead inevitably to his conclusion.
Any reader looking for a diet without guilt or neurosis, not to mention one that will make him or her healthier, will want to have a copy, for it is as “an eater’s manifesto,” that In Defense of Food is especially successful.
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