The companion volume to The New York Times bestseller The Omnivore's Dilemma
Michael Pollan's lastbook , The Omnivore's Dilemma, launched a national conversation about the American way of eating; now In Defense of Food shows us how to change it, one meal at a time. Pollan proposes a new answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Pollan's bracing and eloquent manifesto shows us how we can start making thoughtful food choices that will enrich our lives, enlarge our sense of what it means to be healthy, and bring pleasure back to eating.
Excerpted from IN DEFENSE OF FOOD by Michael Pollan. Reprinted by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright (c) Michael Pollan, 2008.
FOOD SCIENCE’S GOLDEN AGE
In the years following the 1977 Dietary Goals and the 1982
National Academy of Sciences report on diet and cancer,
the food industry, armed with its regulatory absolution, set
about reengineering thousands of popular food products to
contain more of the nutrients that science and government
had deemed the good ones and fewer of the bad. A golden age
for food science dawned. Hyphens sprouted like dandelions
in the supermarket aisles: low-fat, no-cholesterol, high-fiber. Ingredients
labels on formerly two-or three-ingredient foods such
as mayonnaise and bread and yogurt ballooned with lengthy
lists of new additives—what in a more benighted age would
have been called adulterants. The Year of Eating Oat Bran—also
known as 1988—served as a kind of coming-out party for the
food scientists, who succeeded in getting the material into
nearly every processed food sold in America. Oat bran’s moment
on the dietary stage didn’t last long, but the pattern
now was set, and every few years since then, a new oat bran
has taken its star turn under the marketing lights. (Here come
omega-3s!)
You would not think that common food animals could
themselves be rejiggered to fit nutritionist fashion, but in fact
some of them could be, and were, in response to the 1977 and
1982 dietary guidelines as animal scientists figured out how to
breed leaner pigs and select for leaner beef. With widespread
lipophobia taking hold of the human population, countless
cattle lost their marbling and lean pork was repositioned as
“the new white meat”—tasteless and tough as running shoes,
perhaps, but now even a pork chop could compete with
chicken as a way for eaters to “reduce saturated fat intake.” In
the years since then, egg producers figured out a clever way to
redeem even the disreputable egg: By feeding flaxseed to hens,
they could elevate levels of omega-3 fatty acids in the yolks.
Aiming to do the same thing for pork and beef fat, the animal
scientists are now at work genetically engineering omega-3
fatty acids into pigs and persuading cattle to lunch on flaxseed
in the hope of introducing the blessed fish fat where it had
never gone before: into hot dogs and hamburgers.
But these whole foods are the exceptions. The typical whole
food has much more trouble competing under the rules of
nutritionism, if only because something like a banana or an
avocado can’t quite as readily change its nutritional stripes.
(Though rest assured the genetic engineers are hard at work
on the problem.) To date, at least, they can’t put oat bran in
a banana or omega-3s in a peach. So depending on the reigning
nutritional orthodoxy, the avocado might either be a
high-fat food to be assiduously avoided (Old Think) or a food
high in monounsaturated fat to be embraced (New Think).
The fate and supermarket sales of each whole food rises and
falls with every change in the nutritional weather while the
processed foods simply get reformulated and differently
supplemented. That’s why when the Atkins diet storm hit the
food industry in 2003, bread and pasta got a quick redesign
(dialing back the carbs; boosting the proteins) while
poor unreconstructed potatoes and carrots were left out in
the carbohydrate cold. (The low-carb indignities visited on
bread and pasta, two formerly “traditional foods that everyone
knows,” would never have been possible had the imitation
rule not been tossed out in 1973. Who would ever buy
imitation spaghetti? But of course that is precisely what low-carb
pasta is.)
A handful of lucky whole foods have recently gotten the
“good nutrient” marketing treatment: The antioxidants in the
pomegranate (a fruit formerly more trouble to eat than it was
worth) now protect against cancer and erectile dysfunction,
apparently, and the omega-3 fatty acids in the (formerly just
fattening) walnut ward off heart disease. A whole subcategory
of nutritional science—funded by industry and, according to
one recent analysis,* remarkably reliable in its ability to find
a health benefit in whatever food it has been commissioned
to study—has sprung up to give a nutritionist sheen—(and
FDA-approved health claim) to all sorts of foods, including
some not ordinarily thought of as healthy. The Mars Corporation
recently endowed a chair in chocolate science at the University
of California at Davis, where research on the antioxidant
properties of cacao is making breakthroughs, so it shouldn’t
be long before we see chocolate bars bearing FDA-approved
health claims. (When we do, nutritionism will surely have entered
its baroque phase.) Fortunately for everyone playing this
game, scientists can find an antioxidant in just about any plant-based
food they choose to study.
Yet as a general rule it’s a whole lot easier to slap a health
claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a raw potato or a
carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods
in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section,
silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over in Cereal the
Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming their newfound
“whole-grain goodness” to the rafters.
Watch out for those health claims.
*L. I. Lesser, C. B. Ebbeling, M. Goozner, D. Wypij, and D. S. Ludwig, “Relationship
Between Funding Source and Conclusion Among Nutrition-Related
Scientific Articles,” PLoS Medicine, Vol. 4, No. 1, e5 doi:10.1371/journal.
pmed.0040005.
“Seven words to live by: ’Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.’ ... As always, Pollan is true to his word. His manifesto acts as a how-to companion to the rich narrative of The Omnivore's Dilemma. While guiding readers through a distilled history of how food science, agribiz and nutritionism have complicated the meals we consume, Pollan manages to offer ways to simplify and enjoy food, one bite at a time.”
—Globe and Mail / ROB Magazine
“...buy Pollan's book and read his argument. It's compelling and worthy of January reading... In Defense of Food is...a good, quick, lively, mid-winter read.”
—Toronto Star
“Amid the never-ending slurry of trendy diet books and sensationalized health scares, Michael Pollan is a voice of sanity and reason. The Berkeley professor and journalist writes about chow with a grace and cogency lacking in so many analyses of the modern food industry. He eschews didacticism in favour of critical balance, exposing the inner workings of agribusiness with the same engagement and candor he brings to descriptions of hunting a wild boar with his bare hands. A natural next step from The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006), his examination of the contemporary food chain, Pollan explores our relationship with eating in modern Western society.”
—CBC.CA
“After the best-selling and thought-provoking Omnivore's Dilemma, which has now found its way into popular lexicons around the debate on food, where it's grown and its various externalities for the environment, Pollan returns with a book that's more philosophical in nature. Refusing to simply dismiss our prepackaged fast-food society as "bad," the Berkeley professor seeks to redefine what the word food even means, and consequently to discount the many edible nutrient carriers with which we replace real food in our daily lives.”
—National Post
"In his hugely influential treatise The Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan traced a direct line between the industrialization of our food supply and the degradation of the environment. His new book takes up where the previous work left off. Examining the question of what to eat from the perspective of health, this powerfully argued, thoroughly researched and elegant manifesto cuts straight to the chase with a maxim that is deceptively simple: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." But as Pollan explains, "food" in a country that is driven by "a thirty-two billion-dollar marketing machine" is both a loaded term and, in its purest sense, a holy grail. The first section of his three-part essay refutes the authority of the diet bullies, pointing up the confluence of interests among manufacturers of processed foods, marketers and nutritional scientists-a cabal whose nutritional advice has given rise to "a notably unhealthy preoccupation with nutrition and diet and the idea of eating healthily." The second portion vivisects the Western diet, questioning, among other sacred cows, the idea that dietary fat leads to chronic illness. A writer of great subtlety, Pollan doesn't preach to the choir; in fact, rarely does he preach at all, preferring to lets the facts speak for themselves. (Jan.)"
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
In Defense Of Food
Introduction: An Eater's Manifesto
I. The Age Of Nutritionism
One: From Foods to Nutrients
Two: Nutritionism Defined
Three: Nutritionism Comes to Market
Four: Food Science's Golden Age
Five: The Melting of the Lipid Hypothesis
Six: Eat Right, Get Fatter
Seven: Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Eight: The Proof in the Low-Fat Pudding
Nine: Bad Science
Ten: Nutritionism's Children
II. The Western Diet And The Diseases of Civilization
One: The Aborigine in All of Us
Two: The Elephant in the Room
Three: The Industrialization of Eating: What We Do Know
1. From Whole Foods to Refined
2. From Complexity to Simplicity
3. From Quality to Quantity
4. From Leaves to Seeds
5. From Food Culture to Food Science
III. Getting Over Nutritionism
One: Escape from the Western Diet
Two: Eat Food: Food Defined
Three: Mostly Plants: What to Eat
Four: Not Too Much: How to Eat
Acknowledgments
Sources
Resources
Index
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