Michael Pollan: Americans' Unhealthy Relationship with Food

By Tom Philpott, Grist.org. Posted October 19, 2007.

In his 1996 book Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom, the great food anthropologist Sidney Mintz concluded that the United States had no cuisine.

Interestingly, Mintz's definition of cuisine came down to conversation. For Mintz, Americans just didn't engage in passionate talk about food. Unlike the southwest French and their cassoulet, most Americans don't obsess and quarrel about what comprises, say, an authentic veggie burger.

But if cuisine comes down to talk, things are looking up a decade after Mintz cast his judgment. Now, more and more people are buzzing about food: not only about what's good to eat, but also -- appropriately for the land that invented McDonald's and Cheetos -- about what's in our food, where it came from, how it was grown.

No writer has galvanized this new national conversation on food more than Michael Pollan, from his muckraking articles on the meat industry for The New York Times Magazine earlier this decade to the publication last year of The Omnivore's Dilemma.

On a recent day when he was reviewing the galleys of his latest book, due out in January, I rang up Pollan at his Berkeley, Calif., home to talk ... about food.

Tom Philpott: So tell me a little bit about what you've been working on recently.

Michael Pollen: The new book is called In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. It's a book that really grew out of questions I heard from readers after Omnivore's Dilemma, which was basically so how do you apply all this? Now that you've looked into the heart of the food system and been into the belly of the beast, how should I eat, and what should I buy, and if I'm concerned about health, what should I be eating? I decided I would see what kind of very practical answers I could give people.

I spent a lot of time looking at the science of nutrition, and learned pretty quickly there's less there than meets the eye, and that the scientists really haven't figured out that much about food. Letting them tell us how to eat is probably not a very good idea, and indeed the culture -- which is to say tradition and our ancestors -- has more to teach us about how to eat well than science does. That was kind of surprising to me.

It really comes down to seven words: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." What is food? How do you know whether you're getting food or a food-like product? The interesting thing that I learned was that if you're really concerned about your health, the best decisions for your health turn out to be the best decisions for the farmer and the best decisions for the environment -- and that there is no contradiction there.

TP: The other thing that's interesting, along the same lines, is this idea in American culture that what is good for you tastes bad, and what tastes bad is good for you.

MP: Yes, exactly right. There's no sacrifice in eating well, there is no sacrifice in pleasure. To the contrary, the best-grown food is actually the tastiest. Now, it wasn't always true. I mean, you know, in the first generation of organic farmers, they weren't that good at it. But the quality has dramatically improved and is superb right now.

TP: Then there's this idea that food is something you can endlessly fragment: if you find something in a food that's beneficial, you can isolate it, and concentrate it, and put it in a pill.

MP: It's the reductionist's logic of food science, basically. And the interesting thing is that whenever that has been tried, it has failed. Foods are much more than the sum of their nutrient parts, and you cannot expect to get the same effect. Now there are things like vitamins that have been isolated, and in their isolated form they can cure deficiency diseases. But when they've tried to take out the antioxidants, things like beta-carotene and vitamin E, they don't seem to work.

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Grist staff writer Tom Philpott farms and cooks at Maverick Farms, a sustainable-agriculture nonprofit and small farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.

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