Food thoughts

Just read Michael Pollan’s new book, In Defense of Food--An Eater’s Manifesto, courtesy of friend Peter. It is always a nice pat on the back to read a book that says what you have been thinking for years but in a knowledgeable, well-researched and documented way. “Yeah! That’s right!”—team membership, signing on to a believe system, powerful emotions for apes. The whole book is summed up in the first sentence: “Eat food, not much, mostly plants.” As Pollan says, if you understand this you don’t need to read the book. A fortune could be made in attractively designed refrigerator magnets with this quote.

I have been harping at my extended family for years about the first of these three rules. The problem is “food”. There is a basic difference between food and food-like products. A while ago I proposed the rule that nothing belongs in our pantry or fridge if it has an ingredients label. In the U.S. that means anything sold in a package. The food-like products industry has not yet figured out how to adulterate and addify things like a head of cabbage or bulk brown rice and therefore these things aren’t labeled (yet). The mega-corporations also don’t make much money on these things so you don’t see ads for cabbage on TV. If someone has figured out how to package something, they have also figured out a lot of processes to do to that item which your body might not like. Shelf-life and mouth-feel become more important than nutrition, additives mean patentability; there is absolutely no reason to believe that each and every item on a long ingredients list was put there so the food-like product would make you healthy and happy. They only want you to eat more and buy more, so in fact, if there is less nutrition in it and if it sufficiently manipulates your taste buds with potent artificial chemicals, you will feel the need to eat more and your instincts will serve to create more profit for Conagra.

Throughout my adulthood I have always thought that my instincts about what I should eat at any given time should be listened to. Over the years remembering what makes me feel healthy and what doesn’t have built up a system that works for me. That has meant, after listening to my body’s instinct that it REALLY needs another beer or a huge pile of French fries, I am honest enough with myself the next day to say: “Don’t do that again!” Eventually, by the time age creeps in, you start listening to the day-after voice. It helps to get old and less healthy—the robustness we all have as 20-somethings masks a lot of toxic effects, plus there is that thing: “I’m so tough and cool I can even get away with poisoning myself with this whiskey and cigarette.” By age 50 I was sensitive enough to accidental poisonings that I could fine tune my intake a little bit; finding that I did not like sleepless nights and unexplained hangovers, I stopped eating things that came in boxes or had labels with more than 2 ingredients . . . and switched to organic beer (don’t laugh!). It also helps that I refuse to waste my time being titillated by TV ads trying to make me hungry when I'm not. Of course in our culture the no-label rule is too strict--we no longer have the space, time, or cultural resources to be self-sufficient peasants and we must shop at the grocery store with our precious time and cash. Few of us can press our own oil, brew our own soy sauce—you have to buy the packaged version. Eating at all in modern America demands you spend almost all your waking hours filling a job, earning money for the mortgage and the health insurance (let’s not even go into why we need health insurance). But I firmly believe (and my innate curmudgeon-ness helps me stick to it) that we should NOT trust the food giants and NOT put packaged food into our mouths.

Many of the facts and figures in Pollan’s book are scary, but not unexpected. We all seem to instinctively know about the decreasing nutrient levels in all our food, it goes along with the common world view of most thinking people that “everything is getting really fucked up.” He mentions an article in a produce packagers’ trade journal which celebrated the experimental evidence that apples, spinach, and other produce have only 1/3 the nutrients they did 50 years ago—the journal smugly crowed that this would cause Americans to need to eat more produce. As many of us have also learned to do, he roundly condemns the “Western diet” (no flour, no sugar). He takes us through a brief history of nutritional science, letting us clearly see how tentative any scientific conclusions are about what the human body needs to be healthy. A quick overview of the major scientific studies on diet and health makes you want to either laugh or throw up in disgust. Like Pollan’s previous books, this is a good read and necessary information for those attempting to exist in this modern world.

If you don’t think much about what you eat and what you therefore are, or if you do think a lot about this and want some corroboration, read it.