In Defence Of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating
Michael Pollan
How did something as fundamental as the food we eat turn into such a hopelessly muddled issue? And what we can do about it?
Professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, Michael Pollan cuts through the jargon and balderdash in this lucid and sensible tract on eating healthily.
The book is divided into three parts.
The first deals with how reductionist science has pervaded and perverted our thinking about food. We look at foods as the sum of their nutritional components and ignore the long-standing cultural relationships we have had with food.
Pollan points out that before we listened to the scientists, we used to listen to Mum, who, according to him, is the repository of our cultural knowledge of what to eat and how to eat.
In the second section, he tackles the Western diet of “lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything except fruits, vegetables and whole grains”.
The relevance here is that societies who have adopted the Western diet display “higher rates of cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and obesity” compared to those who have kept to traditional diets.
He also points his finger at the industrialisation of food. While this has brought about easy access to greater amounts of food, the trade-off was a fall in the quality of what we consume.
For example, refined flour is “nutritionally worthless, or nearly so” as the germ of the grain, which contains oils rich in nutrients, is removed to produce a “gorgeous white powder” that is both durable and portable.
In the third part, Pollan dispenses advice on how to eat healthily. “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
He goes on to unpack these three statements and offers rules such as “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food” in order for one to avoid health-claim inflated, processed pseudo-foods.
While the message of the book is empowering and might persuade you to change the way you eat, perhaps the equally important lessons to be digested here are the fact that science is very much fallible and that a healthy dose of scepticism towards the prevailing orthodoxy, culinary or otherwise, never hurts.


If you like this, read: My Year Of Meats by Ruth Ozeki
A novel that digs up the dirty secrets of the American meat industry. More evidence, if needed, on why we should go green and eat more veggies.
(ST)