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| The Plate Debate |
| by Sarah Karnasiewicz |
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Not so long ago, the closest thing America had to a public debate on food was the question of whether McDonald's served the best french fries or whether Burger King did. That the landscape has changed—and it takes just one look at the organic-groceries isle at the local WalMart or the food books lining Barnes and Noble's shelves to confirm that it has—is due in large part to the efforts of a brigade of activists, farmers, chefs, environmentalists and writers who are intent on challenging the American culinary status quo. After years of eating with our eyes closed, we consumers are being urged by these reformers to look critically at the victuals on our plates and embrace good food as a political issue worth rallying around.
Out of this chorus, Michael Pollan, Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and contributing editor to the New York Times Magazine, has emerged as a curious and sharp-witted pied piper, leading the public toward a better understanding of what we eat, how it's grown, and why. In his 2006 best seller, The Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan traced four meals through the dysfunctional channels of the modern American food chain and across the fields of corn and industrial feedlots, sussing out the environmental and ethical implications of our menu choices along the way. Although Dilemma took readers on an illuminating and educational journey, when the last page was turned one practical question remained: Given the mixed-up state of our foodways, what should we eat?
This month, Pollan returns with an extended answer in the form of a new book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. Picking up where Dilemma left off, he dissects the ways that aggressive food marketing, reductive nutritional science, and myopic journalism distort our understanding of a good diet and argues for a return to a commonsense, simple approach to eating. As a manifesto, Defense makes demands at once revolutionary and pedestrian: whenever possible, forgo the supermarket for the farmers' market; reject foods that make health claims; and don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize. The result, he maintains, will be lives that are not just healthier but happier.
SAVEUR spoke recently with Pollan from his Berkeley, California, home about his new book, the politics of the plate, the tyranny of nutritional science, and why, when it comes to square meals, Mom really does know best.
This seems an odd time in which to offer a defense of food, since if you open a newspaper or turn on the TV you'd think we were in the midst of an explosion of popular interest in chefs and cooking. Why do you believe food needs defending?
The way I see it, food is under attack from two corners. One is the food industry, which is busy turning perfectly good food into abhorrent, complicated products. The example I cite in the book is "whole wheat white bread", which is a new, 40-ingredient monstrosity, designed by Sara Lee and some other companies, that has all the tactile pleasures of Wonder bread and "whole grain goodness", too. Real bread needs to be defended from imitations like that.
Food is also under attack from nutritionists and a nutritional–industrial complex that encourages us to look at it strictly as a conveyance of nutrients and which elevates the question of health above all others. To ask only Is this good for your body? Is this going to make you live longer? Is this going to help prevent heart disease? is a very limited and even counterproductive way of looking at food. So while, yes, food certainly has supporters right now, they're a pretty elite group. The attack, on the other hand, is widespread and includes just about everything going on at the average supermarket.
Your book's first chapter chronicles the rise of what you call "nutritionism". What's the difference between nutrition and nutritionism?
Nutrition is the science of nourishment; it examines the food we need, breaks it down, and analyzes the components. Nutritionism is the pervasive ideology that has grown out of that science; it looks at food as simply a collection of nutrients that can be redesigned to improve health.
The food industry loves nutritionism because, basically, since nutrients are invisible and incomprehensible to most of us—who the hell really knows what cholesterol is or what an antioxidant is?—it means that we have to depend on experts and food scientists to explain and give them to us. Any product can be rejiggered so that it contains oat bran or omega-3s or whatever is the nutrient of the moment, so suddenly we find ourselves in a situation where the people manufacturing processed foods have an edge over the people growing cauliflower. That leads us to create more and more processed foods, all of which are supposedly designed in the name of better health.
But the reality is that our knowledge is not perfect enough for us to design foods to make them healthier. We simply don't know enough. Everything we think we know is disproved every couple of months. Nutrition science is sort of where surgery was in 1650. Would you have chosen to have elective surgery in 1650? I don't think so. For the same reason, I am not prepared to let food scientists decide my menus.
Many of the conclusions you draw about what to eat—like "avoid all foods that make health claims"—embrace the counterintuitive. Should we all just do the opposite of what we're told is good for us?
When I say avoid food products that make health claims, it's not necessarily because those health claims are untrue, though they're likely based on pretty lousy science. It is because when a food makes a health claim, it probably has a package to make the health claim on—and if a food is in a package, it's a processed food. The most important distinction we can make is whether a food is highly processed or whether it's whole food. I wouldn't say the answer is to always do the exact opposite of what the nutrition scientists are telling you, although, frankly, if you'd done that for most of the past 30 years you would probably have turned out okay.
You've just written about the farm bill for the SAVEUR 100, and one of the refrains in your book seems to be that there is a fundamental conflict of interest at work when governments get involved in the role of food authority. Do you believe that the cause of eating well is inherently incompatible with politics?
Yes, but it doesn't have to be that way. In this country, the mistake we made was giving the role of advising people on nutrition to the department that is also responsible for selling food. The USDA has a real conflict of interest about what it does. It's in business to promote U.S. farms and agribusiness corporations, but it is also charged with telling us what to eat. So, lo and behold, what it encourages farmers to grow the most of—which is to say, refined carbohydrates and meat—is what ends up in the food pyramid.
And because the USDA is afraid to ever say a discouraging word about any particular food, it has seized on nutritionist vocabulary. They couldn't tell people to eat less red meat, so they say reduce your saturated fats, choose foods with less saturated fat—but no one really knows what that means. Simple messages about food are forbidden, because the USDA is beholden to the meat industry. One of the ways in which this is a political book is that I am suggesting that the information the government is giving us is corrupted by corporations that have an interest in selling us as much food as we can possibly eat.
Yet you often return to the subject of shopping and eating as a way of exercising a vote, itself a political process. How do you see that playing out?
People voting with their forks have already brought substantial changes to the food system. Look at the growth of the organic movement, which had very little help from the government until recently, and you can argue that the government is still not helping. That movement was created by consumers working directly with producers and voting by spending extra dollars on a different kind of food, a different kind of agriculture. Now we're seeing, with grass-fed beef and pastured poultry, that there is a market for that, too, and it ends up having a demonstrable effect on the landscape and the way animals get to live.
That's part of why I think people feel good at the farmers' market: they're supporting farmers, and farmers are preventing sprawl from reaching any further into the countryside. At a time where the public doesn't really feel that their political will gets represented in Congress, this kind of direct voting with consumer dollars is very empowering. The problem is, of course, the people who don't have the extra disposable income to make such choices. They need changes at the policy level in order to reap the benefits.
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