Let's summarize Michael Pollan's most recent essay, appearing in last weekend's NY Times Magazine: Forget about the nutrients - focus on the food.
This essay, like all of Pollan's work, is truly worth the read. He traces the development of "nutritionism" - a peculiarly Western and American way of looking at food, arguing that it severs the table from its cultural and ecological ties, offering instead a reductionistic plan for eating that emphasizes "essential nutrients."
The problem? Science doesn't know everything - not even close.
As Pollan says, nutrition scientists have barely begun to unravel the incredibly complex web of connections and interdependences between foods. Eat a steak with coffee, he says, and the coffee inhibits the intake of iron. Eat a banana, eat some cheese, eat an apple - what you eat it with, depending on your blood chemistry, your age, your genetic makeup - there's millions of variables that can affect how it affects your body.
And yet the way we eat in American has been profoundly affected by this kind of nutritionism, leading, Pollan believes, to valuing nutrients out of context over a more holistic and intuitive way of eating. This leads to bizarre health claims in the supermarkets, with sugary, preservative-filled granola bars getting cheerful healthy stickers and the simple foods sitting neglected in the produce department.
One other emphasis of this piece is the idea that sugar is getting "mainlined" into the American bloodstream. As whole foods are more refined and processed, and people turn more and more to convenience packages and fast food, these delicious and easy-to-digest foods are getting sugar into our bloodstreams in a way that can shock people from other cultures. Pollan says that perhaps we will adjust to this by evolution, eventually, but for now we are dealing with diabetes on a massive scale because our bodies are simply not built to handle this much sugar.
In the end, Pollan's results are what we are hearing all the time: Plant a garden. Eat whole foods. Eat less sugar. Eat less processed foods. Eat less, period. And yet perhaps we need to hear them even more, to balance out the huge emphasis of advertising shouting at us every day that these "fake foods" are really more healthy for us, because they have some ostensibly essential nutrients added in.
What about you? Did you read this article? What did you think? What kind of next steps come to mind?
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I am confused. Growing up in a developing nation and having only enough We never put on extra weight nor we were never starved or undernourished or malnourised. I have been here for almost 7 years and have tried to experiment from convenient fast foods, boxed dinners ( which is nothing but POISON) to "fresh" organic produce. I have only realised more that the organic food is completely not organic. I am scared to eat ,and I love to eat - somedays I can control my eating - somedays I don't - I am just trying to eat less, period. My attempt started in the last week of December. I will write to you one year from now what has happened
I was raised in a house where pretty much everything was homemade -- from bread products to mayonnaise to dessert. We didn't have enough money to eat out or even buy lunch at school. We ate three meals a day (if you were particularly hungry you could maybe get an apple for an afternoon snack). We always ate dinner together as a family, ca. 6:00 pm; no phone or other interruptions were allowed. We never threw anything out (my mom was incredibly efficient with the leftovers). I look back on this with gratitude (though at the time I often yearned for fritos and fast food). Though I didn't start cooking regularly until I got into my 30s (I had boyfriends/husbands who did it for me), I pretty much internalized this combination of frugality, home cooking, and dinnertime togetherness. NowadaysI am lucky enough to live in an area (Berkeley) where produce is plentiful, varied, seasonal, and relatively cheap, and this has expanded my veggie horizons considerably. I love dessert and have it almost every night -- except for ice cream, I always make it myself. I cook pretty much every night, except when I go out for dinner. I don't cook much meat and I try to shop seasonally and locally and to use up all the produce I buy before it goes bad. I try to factor in the information I've absorbed about the economics of (and labor issues in) the food industry. But I can't stand to worry about how my nutrients are interacting or whether I'm eating too much sugar. It ruins my food buzz.
Could it be that as American's lifestyles have changed, we have forgotten much of what had been passed down by previous generations. Have we gotten to the point where we don't even know the basics of eating and nutrition unless it's told to us by an "expert"?
I thought this was an amazingly eloquent article summarizing what I've come to believe about food in the past few years. The distillation of his arguments into concrete steps we can take to be more healthy was a wonderful ending that brought me to tears. (Yes, I'm an emotional geek about Michael Pollan.)
I believe Mr. Pollan is correct about eating whole foods, eating locaqlly where possible, etc... but I think we are forgetting our own part the popularity of processed foods. I think it is a mistake to assume people that this is entirely the fault of big business and government. It is easy to romanticize the past and think "oh, previous generations ate better and had a better lifestyle!" In the depression and sWWII era, fast food was not readily available and many people could not afford to go out to dine - it was a treat. Later, pre-packaged foods and meals were considered a God-sent for busy mothers; also, many people also thought fertilizing chemicals and mass-processing were ways to improve food productivity in a world that had been ravaged by war. Easy made meals in a box made it easier for households with two working parents to get things done.
We have all done this to ourselves, and it will require a giant commitment by government, science, business and people to get us back on the path Mr. Pollan has described.