In Defense of Food

I just zipped through Michael Pollan's "In Defense of Food" and it was the perfect book to get me back into the swing of things in terms of thinking about what I eat and more importantly, where it comes from. I am eagerly awaiting spring and am beginning to get started with gardening, one local summer, the farmers market, and summer parties. I haven't been very committed to eating locally or even cooking too much over the winter though I did stick with my usual purveyors of locals meats and I did consume large quantities of Red Hook Beer. I also shopped pretty exclusively at the Food Co Op, which does its best to buy local, organic and sustainable food. Dairy, protein, and alcohol remained easy to find though its hard to wean yourself off of salads, veggies, and fruits and still maintain a relatively sane diet. Maybe next year I'll be better, maybe not.

In Defense of Food is sort of a parallel universe to Omnivore's Dilemma. It looks at human health, your individual health, as it fits into the food systems that surround us. He describes the wrongheadedness of "nutrtitonism" or the reductionist and scientific notion that we can reduce healthy eating to its elemental parts. He gives us a rich history of nutrition and modernization with an anthropoligical bent that Margaret Mead would be happy to read. To put it simply, for many generations culture defined food, and now, with the advent of science, science defines food and tries to keep it simple (stupid). He makes it seem like the Dupont phrase "better living through chemistry" applied to every thing post WWII including food, as if our grandmothers and mothers swallowed it wholesale and didn't doubt it for a second.

In that way the book itself is a bit reductionist, painting good and bad, outlining rules to live by, and simple frameworks to judge whether we should put something in our bodies. There is a tension in Pollan's writing as if he knows that he may be writing a self-help book but he knows his advice is too good to not pass along. Its very motherly of him and he is quite embarrassed at the demand from people that he tell them what to do.

Despite its tension it is a quick read and I appreciate a bit of fascism in an otherwise chaotic world. If you liked Omnivore's Dilemma and you can't figure out how to make its lessons work for your own health than read In Defense of Food. If you haven't read OD, don't bother with IDOF, it's a sequel.