PrintIn Defense of Food
Generally positive reviews are starting to trickle in for Michael Pollan's new book In Defense of Food, which officially hit the shelves January 1. Following on the success of The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food picks up where the former left off urging a return to simpler, whole-foods approach to eating. He gives us neatly-packaged mantras: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." And, "Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food."
Like The Omnivore's Dilemma and The Botany of Desire before it, Pollan's most recent book is also broken into discrete sections to present a logically constructed, multi-faceted view of a complex topic. The first of three parts tackles the idea he calls "nutritionism," by which he refers to the reductionist approach taken by many scientists that treat our food as an assemblage of components (fats, carbs, proteins). The second tackles diseases of the so-called Western diet, including Type 2 Diabetes. The third and final section offers us ways to "escape the Western Diet" by avoiding heavily processed foods.
While the reviews are mostly good, some think Pollan's advice is too broad. Regarding his guideline, "Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food," Charles Matthews of the San Francisco Chronicle says:
This needs a bit more explanation. After all, many of our great-grandmothers weren't exposed to the great multicultural bounty we find in stores and restaurants, so a lot of them wouldn't recognize some perfectly wholesome stuff as edible. Calamari, for example, or tofu... But Pollan's point is this: Great-Grandmother never cooked with guar gum, carrageenan, mono- and diglycerides, hydrolyzed vegetable protein, modified food starch, soy lecithin and any number of other ingredients found in processed food. She would never eat cotton, but cottonseed oil is commonplace in all sorts of the "edible foodlike substances" found in supermarkets today.
Matthews himself might be a bit misleading here. Even though his great-grandmother never ate calamari or tofu, there were surely many great-grandmothers in other parts of the world eating those two things. And they certainly weren't eating any modified food starch or any of the other industrially processed ingredients mentioned.
If you've read the book and have some early thoughts on it, let us know. It will be interesting to see what the broader reactions will be given the hype and given the level of love many people have for Omnivore's Dilemma.
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6 Comments:
This sounds like another interesting food related book. I've been trying for months to pick up a copy of Omnivore's at the library, but none of the branches here have had it in stock. I guess it says something that all 12 or so copies we have in this town have been in constant demand. Perhaps I will get to this one first while everyone else is distracted by his prior works. Or maybe I will just give in and order a copy of my own.
dbrackst at 7:42PM on 01/03/08
We can bog ourselves down in semantics and history, or we can decide to take the words as symbolic. Don't eat anything somebody's grandmother wouldn't recognize as food works for me.
I think the ideas are simplistic because he's recognized that a lot of people won't listen if they have to think. That quote about what to eat circled the globe because it was easy for anyone to understand and spurred lots of discussions. So now more people think, although not enough, folks, not enough.
If only people will spend even half as much time thinking about the quality of their bites as they think of their kid-delivery trips or their dining out options, we'll see a healthier generation, and maybe one that "gets" food and nutrition. After school activities can't be as important as eating decently, and if college entrance requirements have made them so, as I am told, then change the college entrance requirements. And while they're at it, maybe they can change the college food offerings as well. My memories of college food are still traumatic 33 years later.
Judith in Umbria at 4:03AM on 01/04/08
I saw a copy of this book in the Atlanta airport on December 29, and was surprised that Pollan had a new book out that I'd never heard of. The first chapter and a lot of his rules sounded familiar to me, as though he is compiling them from other things he has written and lectures he has given. I didn't buy it (airport book prices! Yikes!) but will probably check it out from the library sometime this year ...
greentwist at 12:44PM on 01/04/08
I sympathize with Pollan's reaction against phony nutritionism. I like the way the French eat too. But I get tired of that worldview where everything we approve of lines up on one side, and everything we don't approve of lines up on the other. Claiming that Big Money, Big Oil, Corporations (hiss) foster obesity make it easy to criticize. But he has nothing to say about the great cultural shift which has liberated women from domestic chores and permitted them some independence, i.e., a job. Grandmother didn't cook with guar gum, and yes, the farming "grandmother" of his imagination prepared all the families' food from scratch -- but she spent at least 5 hours a day doing so.
madmad at 7:27AM on 01/05/08
Unlike the wise greentwist who commented above, I did make the airport impulse buy last weekend . . . but the book was worth it and I wrote a review on my blog here. Cheers to another year of Serious Eats.
FoodRockzMan at 5:57PM on 01/11/08
As a person who buys both Gogurts and Sara Lee Soft & Smooth whole wheat white bread for my kids, I was a little overwhelmed by the scale of changes needed to follow these recommendations. Since reading this very interesting book, it has been a challenge to find food products with less than five ingredients and that fit all the other criteria (e.g., no high fructose corn syrup). I would be interested in strategies for moving in the whole food direction, that would not require me to quit my full-time job and/or spending the entire weekend shopping, preparing and cooking.
aneum at 1:03PM on 04/15/08