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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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A brief but compelling history of four plants whose genetic destiny has been markedly altered by man – the apple, the tulip, cannabis, and the potato. Pollan’s argument is that, though we see domestication as a strictly top-down, subject-to-object process, there really may also be some co-evolutionary force at work. Johnny Appleseed’s efforts were to the overwhelming advantage of apple genetic proliferation, and the science of mass potato farming means more seeds are planted every year. But we’ll get to the argument bit in a minute.

As quirky, offbeat history, this is fabulous. It turns out botany is an incredibly versatile vehicle in which to travel from social psychology to religion to bioethics. Pollan makes fascinating detours through early American advertising schemes, pauses briefly to describe the hallucinogenic mixture of mushrooms and opium European witches would administer via dildo, and then hops blithely on to the cost-benefit economics of potato plants engineered to make their own pesticide. It’s a wonderfully engaging trip, made all the more so by Pollan’s lucid, thoughtful, frankly lovely writing. I haven’t enjoyed a spot of nonfiction prose on a purely esthetic level in a long time, and for that pleasure alone I could recommend this book.

As for the argument – how best to put this – it’s not so much one. This whole co-evolution idea occurred to Pollan one day as he was gardening, and it never really leaves the realm of warm afternoon, busy hands, strange and intriguing thought. The whole thing comes out interesting, undeniably pretty, but ultimately nothing more than an intellectual exercise. An exercise I enjoyed, mind you, but I’m really not after musings over the Apollonian and Dionysian paradigms in my discussions of anything related to evolution: I’m after, you know, scientifically sound genotypic mechanisms. But like I said, I was perfectly happy to go along. I just fervently hope no one came away from this book believing this is what is meant by “theory of evolution.”

Eclectic, engaging subject matter. A bit of pleasant but deeply fluffy intellectual masturbation tacked around the edges for an excuse. Wonderful writing. A good time, all around.