In Defense of Food

[lightreads]

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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Comments

[jadelennox]

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.)

[lightreads]

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...