In defense of food

a draft written in 2010...

How much do you on your meals in a typical workday? Less than $10 for a sausage bun in the morning? Below $30 for a McDonald combo? Between $30 and $40 for a set dinner in a fast food restaurant? No more than $80 a day. Fantastic. Not too soon. Think about the food you eat and the way you eat. Is this life? Pathetic. After all, food is not the smartest place to economize. 

Can you distinguish food and food products? Pick up a pack of chips on your desk or a loaf of bread, cottony soft and snowy white ones, from any supermarkets, and try to read the food labels. You find it hard. Right? Can you recognize and/or pronounce the ingredients on the it at all?

Michael Pollan's In defense of food: the myth of nutrition and the pleasures of eating (London: Allan Lane, 2008) provide you with answers and food for thought.

As Pollan explains, the book starts out with seven words and three rules. Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Eat meat as a side dish than as a main. (1)

you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food products is a strong indication it's not really food, and food is what you want to eat. (2)

three pernicious myths: that what matters most is not the food but the "nutrient"; that because nutrients are invisible and incomprehensible to everyone but scientists, we need expert help in deciding what to eat; and that the purpose of eating is to promote a narrow concept of physical health. After all, food is considered as a matter of biology, thus we must try to eat "scientifically". (p. 8)

Pollan writes that the most important fact about any food is not its nutrient content but its degree of processing. We should simply avoid any food that has been processed to such an extent that it is more the product of industry than of nature. "[W]hole foods and industrial foods," Gyorgy Scrinis says, "are the only two food groups I'd consider including in any useful food 'pyramid.'" (p. 143)

The book is divided into three chapters. Pollan unfolds his discussion by an interesting introduction, An Eater's Manifesto.

Chapter One: The Age of Nutritionism. From foods to nutrients; Nutritionism defined; Nutritionism comes to market; Food science's golden age; The melting of the lipid hypothesis; Eat right, get fatter; Beyond the pleasure principle; The proof in the low-fat pudding; Bad science; Nutritionism's children.

Chapter Two: The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization. The aborigine in all of us; The elephant in the room; The industrialization of eating, which comprises of five sections: From whole foods to refined; From complexity to simplicity; From quality to quantity; from leaves to seeds; From food culture to food science.

Chapter Three: Getting Over Nutritionism. Escape from the western diet. Eat food: food defined. Mostly plants: what to eat. Not too much: how to eat.

One of the problems with the products of food science is that they lie to your body. Foods that lies leave us with little choice but to eat by the numbers, consulting labels rather than our senses. (p. 149)

The last chapter is the most interesting part and provides straight straightforward rules of thumb about food.

• Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. (doesn't sound scientific but listening to old wisdom merits some reflection) Don't eat anything incapable of rotting.
• Avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable, c) more than five in number, or that include d) high-fructose corn syrup.
• Avoid food products that make health claims. (What can you choose after all?) All plants contain antioxidants, all so-called scientific studies on plants are guaranteed to find something on which to base a health oriented marketing campaign. (emphasis original)
• Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle, where processed food products dominate.
• Get out of the supermarket (and the convenience store, and the fast-food outlet) whenever possible. (rather obvious)
• Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.
• You are what what you eat eats too. (what do the caged chickens eat?)
• If you have the space, buy a freezer. (to freeze quality meat in bulk)
• Eat well-grown food from healthy soils.
• Eat wild foods when you can.
• Be the kind of person who takes supplements.
• Eat more like the French, or the Italians, or the Japanese, or the Indians, or the Greeks. the foods a culture eats and how they eat them. Cuisines can have purely cultural functions; they're one of the ways a society expresses its identity and underscores its differences with other societies.
• Regard nontraditional foods with skepticism.
• Don't look for the magic bullet in the traditional diet. there is no magic in food.
• Have a glass of wine with dinner.
• Pay more, eat less. (pay more, eat more is rather commonplace) Quantity vs quality. The better the food, the less of it you need to eat in order to feel satisfied.
• Eat meals. (too simple? too hard?) It is at the dinner table that we socialize and civilize ourselves and our children, teaching ourselves and them manners and the art of conversation.
• Do all your eating at a table.
• Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does.
• Try not to eat alone.
• Consult your gut.
• Eat slowly.
• Cook and, if you can, plant a garden. to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it: that food should be fast, cheap, and easy; that food is a product of industry, not nature; that food is fuel, and not a form of communion, with other people as well as with other species - with nature.