IN DEFENCE OF FOOD; The myth of nutrition and the pleasures of eating
Michael Pollan
Penguin, pbk, $37
By Charmian Smith
Michael Pollan, author of the acclaimed Omnivore's Dilemma, continues his polemic against industrial food in In Defence of Food. It's ‘‘an eater's manifesto'', he says, and starts with the good advice: ‘‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.''
The rest of the book is partly an explanation of the difference between real food and food-like products usually marketed with dubious health claims in supermarkets.
Food-like items can be anything that has ingredients you don't recognise as food. They may also be masquerading as real food such as bread, yoghurt or muesli, he says.
In America (but rarely New Zealand), it could also be beef raised on feedlots, fed on grain, industrial waste products, antibiotics and hormones.
Everywhere, it could be battery chickens with super-sized breasts or plants grown with a cocktail of chemical fertilisers and pesticides rather than in healthy soil.
Such plants and animals do not develop healthy immune systems and need chemicals that make them less vulnerable to pests and diseases.
He cites studies that show not only does this diminish their nutritional quality, plants and animals have been bred for yield rather than flavour.
His other thesis is demolishing the ‘‘great conspiracy of scientific complexity'' or ‘‘nutritionism'' which befuddles consumers, told one day to eat more carbohydrate and the next day to eat less; told one day a low fat diet helps prevent cancer and the next that it does not; one day that fats are to be avoided and then that we should eat more omega-3 fats.
‘‘Omega-3 fatty acids are poised to become the oat bran of our times as food scientists rush to croencapsulate fish and algae oil and blast it into such formerly all-terrestrial foods as bread and pasta,'' he says.
He describes the history of nutrition, from the discovery of the three main nutrients, carbohydrates, fats and protein (a bit like NPK fertilisers in farming), and when these proved not to be the answer to various deficiency diseases, vitamins and minerals were discovered.
More recently, we have learned about antioxidants - and yet we still don't really know how the body uses nutrients or how the combination of nutrients in whole real foods works differently from isolated nutrients in supplements.
‘‘Everything solid we've been told about the links between our diet and our health seems to get blown away in the gust of the most recent study,'' he says.
When the US Senate select committee on nutrition and human needs in 1977 told Americans to eat less red meat and dairy products, the big red meat and dairy industries forced them to beat a retreat, recouching the advice in obscure terms, such as ‘‘low saturated fat''.
This creates a reason for designing and marketing new processed foods and reasons for people to eat them, he says.
‘‘Nutritionism'' has developed in tandem with the industrialisation of our food and so takes it for granted. It is an ideology that hasn't made us happier or healthier, but fatter, sicker and more poorly nourished, he claims.
The complex of chronic diseases that strike people eating Western diets seldom strike people eating traditional diets, and he believes we can learn more about eating from history, culture and tradition than from ‘‘nutritionism''.
Instead of searching for products with low GI, low fat or added folate or antioxidants, if we took his advice at the beginning of the book and ate (real) food, not too much and mostly plants, we would get all the nutrients we needed, he says.
While Pollan's argument and examples are based on food in the US, much applies here because food or components in the food-like items on our supermarket shelves may well come from China, the US, Australia or Europe. His advice to shop in local farmers' markets or from farm gates applies equally here.
- Charmian Smith is Otago Daily Times book review editor and a food writer.
