Pollan Declares War on the Western Diet

I’ve been a diehard Michael Pollan fan ever since I read his first book, Second Nature, back in 1991. So I can never wait for the next Pollan book to come out—and, thanks to the Strand bookstore, my trusty source for review copies—I never have to. (Pollan himself was perplexed last April when I handed him my copy of The Omnivore’s Dilemma to sign at a Manhattan book party on the day it was released, asking “Where’d you get this?”)

His new book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, is due out on New Year’s Day, so the Strand landed me a copy just in time for Christmas. I know you can’t judge a book by its cover, but I do love the choice of a pristine head of red Romaine—the variety of lettuce richest in iron, potassium, and folate--as the “cover crop” for a book bemoaning the rise of “nutritionism.” Rich in irony, too.

In Defense of Food’s subtitle, An Eater’s Manifesto, is a subterfuge: what lies beneath those nutrient-packed bronze and green leaves is really an out-and-out assault on the way America eats. Culture wars? That’s so last century. Welcome to the agri-culture wars, where Big Food, Agribiz, food scientists, and nutritionists battle not for our hearts and minds but our stomachs.

Pollan documents the decline of “real” foods in our diet—i.e., things that our grandparents would recognize as edible--and the corresponding dominance of processed, packaged substances full of gobbledy-gook ingredients masquerading as food on our supermarket shelves. Beware of packaged foods making health claims, he warns; the mere fact that a food is in a package means it’s already been processed, and is therefore, in all likelihood, less nutritious than the more wholesome produce that languishes on the supermarket sidelines, its health benefits unlabelled and unballyhooed.

The FDA, “under tremendous pressure from industry,” Pollan notes, “has made it only easier for food companies to make increasingly doubtful health claims…When corn oil and chips and sugary breakfast cereals can all boast being good for your heart, health claims have become hopelessly corrupt.”

And don’t look to nutritionists and the latest diet studies to help you make wiser choices, according to Pollan, who dissects the flawed methodologies and contradictory findings behind all the food fads that have left consumers so befuddled about what to eat. The low-fat craze gave way to the low-carb craze, which has in turn fed the “fat is just a scapegoat” mini-craze. Oddly enough, Pollan buys into this latest fad, which claims (among other things) that saturated fats and cholesterol don’t contribute to heart disease after all.

His dismissal of the “lipid hypotheses” seems to be based on some pretty sketchy science, so I’m according it the same skepticism he directs towards all the other nutritional studies. Yes, there are plenty of pharmaceuticals making billions off of cholesterol-lowering drugs, but I’m not sure that means there’s a conspiracy to convince us all that high cholesterol is unhealthy.

Pollan notes that the meat-heavy Western diet inevitably leads to high rates of heart disease, obesity, and diabetes in every culture that adopts it, but theorizes that this may be due to the foods we’re not eating—namely, fruits, vegetables and whole grains--rather than an excess consumption of animal fats.

In Defense of Food documents, in depressing detail, how the advent of industrial agriculture has robbed the American diet of anything resembling diversity:

Pollan cites the endless incarnations of corn and soy that the food industry foists on us before concluding that the only way to achieve a truly varied diet of predominantly plant-based, naturally nutritious whole foods is to simply stay out of the supermarket altogether, if possible, and rely on farmers’ markets instead. If only there were enough farmers’ markets across the country to make that a viable option for more Americans.

His other prescriptions for our overweight, undernourished nation? “Pay More, Eat Less”—i.e., the ol’ quality over quantity adage. Scale back the Paul Bunyonesque portions, if you don’t want to look like a lumberjack on steroids. And for pete’s sake, stop with the snacking! I went to Radio Shack the other day to buy some batteries and was astonished to see a candy kiosk; is there any other country in the world where junk food is so ubiquitous? The so-called French paradox is not such a mystery, according to Pollan—they frown on snacking and seconds. We glorify gluttony and grotesquely large portions.

So we consume soda, chips, cookies and candy all day long, but we no longer have time to prepare a decent meal, much less to sit down and savor it with friends or family. The antidote for this sorry state? Pollan gives a nod to Carlos Petrini and his Slow Food movement:

Pollan’s final piece of advice is my favorite: “Cook, And, If You Can, Plant a Garden.” As a longtime edible landscaping enthusiast, I know well the joys (and sorrows) of growing your own food, and the way it connects you to the seasons, and the land. Yeah, it’s a lot of work, but it’s a gratifying kind of labor, and besides, when things go wrong, as Pollan notes, “gardening cultivates in you a deep respect for the skill of the farmer who knows how consistently to get it right.”

The simple act of growing one’s own food was a nearly universal skill a few generations back, but after World War II, we let the military industrial complex invade our pantries and install a regime of partially hydrogenated hucksters and high fructose corn syrup imposters, relegating real food to the fringes of the shaggy left. We built sterile strip malls on fertile farmland and became so alienated from nature that we didn’t realize, until a little birdy told us, that we were fouling our own nest when we saturated the air and soil with toxins.

What Pollan advocates is nothing less than a wholesale rejection of the modern American food chain. It’s a radical proposal, he admits:

Pollan is just the latest agri-culture warrior to call for a return to real foods; In Defense of Food is, as he admits, “a work of synthesis, built on a foundation of research and thinking laid by others.” Indeed. If the snappy slogan that sums up Pollan’s book—“Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants”—sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because it echoes the mantra of one of the mentors Pollan acknowledges, NYU nutrition professor Marion Nestle, who wrote in her book What to Eat last year:

The basic principles of good diets are so simple that I can summarize them in just ten words: eat less, move more, eat lots of fruits and vegetables.

Pollan’s succeeded in reducing Nestle’s formula to a mere seven words, which, in this era of ever shorter attention spans, is, I suppose, a public service. In any case, In Defense of Food is a welcome addition to the arsenal of agri-prop lit. The fight for a saner, shorter food chain is just heating up, and I’m grateful we have a compelling voice like Pollan’s to help rally the troops.