lightreads | In Defense of Food

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was The It Book in food a couple years ago, and I can see why. Its prescriptions are succinct and comprehensible, if not actually easy to follow. Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much. The "eat food" bit is about, y'know, food, and how much of what we eat is actually the nutritional equivalent of Styrofoam packing peanuts. It's a nice thought, and a pretty sound theory, but Pollan vastly overestimates the degree to which people below the upper middle class have access to food, as he defines it.

And, well. Talking about nutrition is like talking about religion: everyone's got the one and only way to save you. And none of them are particularly credible to me. I made a deliberate choice years ago for the sake of my health -- psychological, I mean, not just physical -- to eat what I want, when I want, discussion over. My current interest in food science is first because becoming a better athlete requires more deliberation and nutritional planning on my part, and second because it's allegedly possible to treat a nebulous endocrine disorder of mine with certain dietary modifications. So I guess you could say my interest in food science is about performance -- change x and y inputs to improve a and b outputs.

Digression. My point is that it doesn't matter how simple and sensible this book tries to be about food, food science is still barely past the 'world is flat' stage of development, and no one can agree even on Pollan's basic principles. Like how one of his big prescriptions is to cut out snacks and emphasize set, regular meals. Whereas speaking athletically and endocrinologically, that is the exact opposite of what the most credible research I can find says I should be doing. Many little things like that. It's not that I mind a field in flux, but I mean really, come on. It's like watching people argue over which Bible translation is the "right" one -- it doesn't matter how much it matters to them, or how much it might actually matter to me. The whole exercise is enough to make me say fuck it and abandon food science to its own devices.

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It's like watching people argue over which Bible translation is the "right" one -- it doesn't matter how much it matters to them, or how much it might actually matter to me. The whole exercise is enough to make me say fuck it and abandon food science to its own devices.

Or you do what I do and learn Hebrew and Greek and translate the sucker for yourself.

Not that I've ever considered doing that with food mind you. And around these parts, Pollan is kind of like his own deity, and I avoid those like the plague.

Yeah, I've toyed with the thought of doing that for food. And then I realize that way lies madness, and backed quickly off.

The Botany of Desire was my favorite book on the subject of plant life, so I'll definitely have to give this a read, just to see where Pollan is at on the subject :) Though Desire is, in all fairness, really a book of poetry and that's why I love it so - and this one is in a totally different vein. But I like the way his brain works :)

Reading about food is doubly aggravating, when the writer is evangelizing about The One True Way involving an entire food group you're allergic to or that hopelessly screws your hormones, or pH, or blood sugar, or sanity *snort* About the only thing I can wholeheartedly stand by, is eating mostly whole foods...all the more so as a newly sussed out intolerance just cancelled our licence to eat ANYTHING in a package *headdesk* No gluten, casein, corn, nuts, seeds, soy....and now glutamates. I don't even like cooking! :D

You can't go wrong with reccomending fresh, very diverse, and moderate intake.....but most Americans don't know how, even if they have access to Real Food they can afford. Sigh.

This book is good in the sense that it isn't pushing a particular food, and it's trying to teach how to eat fresh, local, and moderately. I just don't think it's going to be any more successful at instilling good habits than a deprivation diet plan would be. And he's awfully casual about assuming everyone can get fresh food, we just choose not to. Uh-huh.

My gf is starting back on the pre-radiation diet next week, which also basically means no packages, and only small amounts of everything else. (She has to cut iodine, which is in, you know, everything.) So I figured what the heck, solidarity. I've been thinking of trying a low glycaemic index diet for a brief period, see if it changes anything hormonally.* And I thought hey, doing one complicated food restriction, it'll be easy enough to add another.

Oh how wrong I was. One is plenty hard: coordinating two is a nightmare. *salutes you*

*Have I told you this? We're coming at it from both ends -- the Vitex is working at my hypothalamic-pituitary axis, and I'm taking d-chiro-inositol to catch things at the insulin end of things and see if that helps. I started them very close together, unfortunately, so I don't know which is making me feel peppier this month, but then again I don't really care. If I ovulate next month, we'll really know something is working. But it turns out I'm one of those people whose severity of cycle disturbance can't be explained by test results, which are just a tiny bit off from normal. So we have to try everything and see what sticks.

Anyway, point is, I thought I'd experiment with a low GI diet and see where it gets me. Though the trick will be not to lose too much weight...

Pollan rubs me the wrong way in which everything he says about the way he eats is the way I try to eat, except he is such a smug SOB about it.. I find myself second-guessing everything I say about food -- when I talk about farmer's markets, when I talk about gardening, when I talk about eating locally, do I sound as self-righteous and judgmental as he does? He's like the dark mirror into some of the less pleasant parts of my own psyche. Kind of like my mother that way.

(Also, he's convinced that if you eat the way he does you will necessarily lose weight, and of course that is everyone's goal, right? And he also doesn't really confront the lack of scalability of his system. All the Polycarp farms in America are not going to do a very good job of feeding Pittsburgh -- and if you confront that problem, I think there something really interesting to talk about there. So I wish he confronted it.)

I spent the first half of this book thinking hey, he's talking about health, not weight. That's refreshing! Until I realized that to him, they're interchangeable, with very little exception.

There's also this thing related to the smugness you're talking about. He says correctly that part of the chane in the way we eat is because our moms aren't deciding what we eat like they used to. Presumably when they stayed at home and cooked fresh every night. And I'm like 'okay, yes, likely true. But you really, really can't stop there, because it has to be obvious to you that there's a problem in your system if changing social roles for women outside the home means we don't have time for it.'

I dunno. He makes a whole lot of sense, in a 'I live two blocks from a farmer's market' way. Just, the access stufff...

In Defense of Food

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