Critiques of In Defense of Food
1. "More Than One Man Can Chew" http://www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=2715
Big claims. Not too much support. Mostly unconvincing. That’s my nutshell response to Michael Pollan's most recent answer to “the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.”
Tough assessment, I know. Pollan is wildly popular. For millions of acolytes, he’s the Dr. Phil of food, counseling the foodie elite on such matters as the virtues of grass-fed beef and local produce. Pollan mesmerized his audience with first-rate nature writing in The Botany of Desire and proceeded to take the world by storm with The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a smart book that’s become a Bible for environmentally conscious eaters. Through it all, he continues to publish lively, get-a-load-of-this-I’m-chasing-a-boar-through-the-woods! pieces for the New York Times Magazine, while maintaining a respectable foothold in academia as the Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley. All in all, a nice run.
This time, Pollan has stumbled. It’s not that he’s written a bad book. That’s probably not possible. Instead, the problem with In Defense of Food begins with the fact that Pollan’s central claim reveals little that his well-informed audience doesn’t already know. Indeed, take away the book’s handsome packaging and Pollan’s popcorn prose, and what’s left is hardly a news flash: Processed food is less healthy than whole food. Not much to build a book on, much less a manifesto. Pollan no longer has a genuine dilemma to solve, but a burden to overcome. He has to overwhelm us with an inherently underwhelming argument: You’d be better off eating more fresh, leafy vegetables, less meat, and less processed food overall. Somehow, he must make this ordinary observation seem extraordinary.
Two sleights of hand aid him in his attempt. Unfortunately, they seriously compromise the book’s integrity. First, Pollan grossly overstates his case. Extrapolating from the axiom that whole food is healthier than “fake” food, he reduces the developed world’s most common health problems to the singular cause of an industrialized diet. Rather than exploring the multifaceted relationship between contemporary food production and public health, or placing the issue in historical perspective, Pollan blames diabetes, heart disease, obesity, chronic hypertension, and cancer exclusively on the fact that Westerners gorge on factory-produced nutrients rather than real food. Pollan is right to highlight a surely important connection between industrialized food and disturbing health trends, but his unrestrained exaggeration serves only to compensate for the otherwise tired premise of his project.
Pollan, it should be said, seems to be aware of his skewed emphasis. At one point, he scolds medical researchers for practicing “parking-lot science,” which is the idea that when one loses his keys in a dark parking lot, he automatically searches under the nearest streetlight. The reference, however, fails to prevent Pollan from allowing processed food to become his own streetlight. Ignoring altogether the roles that exercise, heredity, race, social class, occupation, access to health care, and geography play in mediating the myriad connections between diet and health, Pollan limits his search to the well-lighted space under industrial food’s streetlight, where he finds—no surprise—the lost keys to “a maximally healthy diet.”
Pollan’s second sleight of hand has a conspiratorial twist. Without caveat or qualification, he boldly asserts that doctors, nutritionists, government officials, schools of public health, corporate America, factory farmers, and medical journalists have all contrived to kill us through bogus health claims about processed food. Once again, the problem is not that Pollan posits a connection where none exists, but rather that he overstates the matter to such an extreme that he undermines an otherwise valid point. I’m as appropriately paranoid as the next guy, but am I really supposed to believe that my doctor, not to mention the many nutritionists I know, are out to murder me in the spirit of corporate greed? Pollan’s trumped-up premise that entire cohorts of professionals are causing “a global pandemic in the making” while we foolishly trust their advice is more red herring than legitimate claim.
This second move does allow Pollan to transform a well-known health assessment into an apparent exposé. Suddenly, a work confirming a no-brainer (fruit and veggies are really good for you) becomes a muckraking alarm (the “nutritionist-industrial complex” is out to fatten your ass and clog your arteries). No longer is it mom yelling at us to eat our broccoli, but a best-selling journalist insisting that the culinary apocalypse—symbolized by such insidious enemies as refined flour and processed sugar—is well nigh upon us.
I’ll not dwell on the fact that this “manifesto” is, essentially, a theory of everything laid out in the form of a long magazine piece. Nor will I dwell on the fact that a book routinely making sweeping claims such as this one—“the National Academy of Sciences, the dietary guidelines of the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society and the U.S. food pyramid bear direct responsibility for creating the public health crisis that now confronts us”—lacks those pesky little bits of tracking data called footnotes. I’ll leave these matters for readers to ponder.
Instead, my aim, after summarizing the book’s modest accomplishment, is to show how Pollan’s overblown claims require him to construct a defense that falters on a series of logical contradictions. In short, I hope to show that while this is a passionate book with a lot of potential, an altogether different kind of defense is needed to help us think more clearly and realistically about contemporary food, personal health, and environmental sustainability.
The most unfortunate aspect of Pollan’s overstatement is that it obscures his more sober observations about diet, health, and nature. While I am not at all convinced that processed food is (in and of itself) the plague Pollan portrays it to be, I did appreciate being reminded that our bodies respond poorly to fat and sugar manufactured by modern agribusiness. Similarly, while I’m not buying the grand conspiracy that Pollan concocts, I think he’s right to doubt the objectivity of “experts” and, even more so, government officials. Pollan, moreover, can be a masterful stylist when it comes to teasing out nature’s more subtle interrelations. His all too infrequent meditations on the symbiotic relationships between humans and the soil that sustains us evoke the best that Wendell Berry or E.O. Wilson ever wrote. I wanted more of it. Finally, who knew that purslane was so good for you? For that matter, who knew what purslane was? (It’s a salad green in much of the world, but widely considered a weed in the U.S.)
These strengths remain unsustained because Pollan, having made a series of hyperbolic assertions, must spend the bulk of his book building necessarily contorted defenses. As is often the case, the quality of the argumentation reflects the quality of the argument. Most notably (so notable that he admits his contradiction toward the end of the book), Pollan excoriates nutritionists for “thinking about food strictly in terms of its chemical constituents” (rather than thinking about food as real food), and then, in a classic do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do move, proceeds to write about food in terms of its chemical constituents. Such lack of consistency is chronic and drags down much of the book.
Consider omega-3s, the nutritionally significant fatty acids found in many fruits, nuts, and fish. When he’s taking nutritionists to the woodshed, Pollan explains that nutritionism—the “ideology” that distills food to its essential nutrients—relies on false dualisms whereby one nutrient is lambasted and another glorified. He writes, “At the moment trans fats are performing admirably in the former role, omega-3 fatty acids in the latter.” He then condemns this dualism in the following terms: “It goes without saying that such a Manichaean view of nutrition is bound to promote food fads and phobias.”
Point taken. But when it comes time for Pollan to tell us what to eat (something I’m coming to realize no serious writer should ever do), he changes his tune. Drawing on the literature of clinical nutrition, he argues that we should eat more leaves and fewer seeds because “[t]here are the antioxidants and phyto-chemicals; there is the fiber; and then there are the essential omega-3 fatty acids found in leaves; which some researchers [um, nutritionists?] believe will turn out to be the most crucial missing nutrient of all.” In essence, Pollan argues, nutritionism is bunk ... until it’s not.
Every book is allowed an inconsistency or two. But In Defense of Food contains so many logical contradictions that it eventually leaves the impression of having been cobbled together in a mad rush to meet a publication deadline. Pollan laments on page 9 that “we are becoming a nation of orthorexics: people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.” But by page 186, as if lacking a culinary care in the world, “we” are consuming calories “found in convenience food—snacks, microwavable entrees, soft drinks, and packaged food of all kinds—which happens to be the source of most of the 300 or so calories Americans have added to their daily diet since 1980.” Suddenly, and without explanation, a nation of obsessive nutrient-counting orthorexics has become a nation of careless, Twinkie-gorging anti-orthorexics.
If this flip-flip doesn’t sufficiently confuse, there’s Pollan’s dance around the issue of food anxiety. On page 53, Pollan, who is still in “kill your nutritionist” mode, notes that “nutritionism tends to foster a great deal of anxiety around the experience of shopping for food and eating it.” We should revel in the sensuality of food, not stress out over it, he rightly insists. But by the end, when Pollan is dishing out his own dietary advice, he tells us to eat less food, spend more money on it, eat it at a table (“No, a desk is not a table”), plant a garden, eat wild foods, avoid the grocery store, buy a deep freeze to store cow carcasses, and, if possible, assume the identity of a native French, Italian, or Greek person. OK, I exaggerate the last point (barely), but you get the gist. Talk about anxiety! The only consolation in this stressful fumarole of dietary guidance is that it’s still permissible to drink a decent amount of red wine every day.
Other contradictions: On page 147 we’re told that “ordinary food is what we should eat,” but 13 pages later Pollan urges us to buddy up with our local farmer because he “can impress on eaters the distinctions between ordinary and exceptional food, and the many reasons why exceptional food is worth what it costs.” On page 56, Pollan, to show how neurotic Americans have always been about food, mocks 19th-century dieters for chewing their food excessively, but then, on page 194, he tells us to “EAT SLOWLY.” Pollan condemns an FDA report as “pseudo-scientific” and then, eight pages later, declares, somewhat less than scientifically, “don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” Pollan tells us “it’s a good idea to try to add some new species, and not just new foods, to your diet,” and then, seven pages down the road, equivocates: “Innovation is interesting, but when it comes to something like food, it pays to approach novelties with caution.” And so on.
I dwell on these contradictions because they collectively support my argument that Pollan, with his overblown claims, has finally bitten off more than he can chew. Food, contrary to Pollan’s belief, is complex. Endlessly so. It is therefore misguided at best to think that a single person, no matter how smart, could distill the infinitely varied matter of eating well into an inherently consistent manifesto applicable to all Western eaters—which is exactly what Pollan’s poorly framed argument forces him to do. In making this point, however, I’m struck by an alternative proposition. In the face of food’s complexity, and recognizing the agricultural systems that nurture that complexity, might it be that those who choose to write about their personal experiences interacting with the world of food and farming will make a more lasting mark on our newfound cultural awareness of food than Pollan, whose universally encompassing attempt has more in common with all-you-can eat buffets?
In other words, like Thoreau and his woods, Melville and his whales, Burroughs and his drugs, or Kerouac and his road trips, In Defense of Food could have given us what surely would have been a fascinating record of Michael Pollan’s personal relationship to food, leaving socially concerned eaters to listen to our own bodies, inform our own minds, construct our own defenses, and—should we be so bold—arrive at our own manifestos.
Contributing writer James E. McWilliams is currently a fellow in the Agrarian Studies program at Yale. His book, American Pests: The Losing War on Insects from Colonial Times to DDT, comes out this summer.
2. "Crossing the Line" http://www.theomnivoressolution.com/the_omnivores_dialog_/
by "Greensgal"
December 28, 2008
The line I want to talk about crossing is one described in Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, in which he pointed out that a major problem with “modern” food is that the food is first broken down into component chemicals in a factory, and then reconstructed into something not quite resembling food (such as Twinkies), in a different factory. He said that in eating such things we were losing touch with something important about the food chain, and in later work he associated this process with a variety of health, environmental and economic problems. I began wondering exactly how long we have been doing that, and whether it was quite as much of a problem as described. In fact, just what separates “cooking” food, a procedure he would describe as wholesome, from “processing” food, which sounds in some way industrial and corrupted?
I’d like to look at a couple of historical examples of food processing, and then compare them to the more modern mischief behind Ho-Ho’s and Cocoa Pebbles. About three thousand years ago, when agriculture started to yield certain types of food surpluses, it became obvious that storing food was at least as important a problem as growing food. Grain was produced in abundance in the Nile and Tigris valleys, and animal husbandry assured a decent supply of meat, at least for the wealthy, but grain rots in storage, and even dry baked bread corrupts after a few days. Flour does little better in hot weather, and there are always rodents and insects in the storage areas. Meat can be cured, but without refrigeration is a risk in warm weather. Dried it lasts a while longer. The processes of baking, curing, smoking and drying probably count as cooking rather than processing, but the intent is the same, and fish were dried before distribution (i.e. by a processor), to make the transportation easier. Socrates wrote that you had to be very rich to eat fresh fish. The usual commodity was dried.
Edging closer to the line is fermentation. Here food (grain) is definitely broken down into component chemicals (carbohydrates) and these are converted to other chemicals (alcohol) for enhanced shelf life. Beer is made from roughly the same ingredients as bread, but sealed beer can be stored for months, while bread… well maybe a week. The Celts used to refer to beer as “liquid bread”. To sell this product further, much like modern marketing, a number of health advantages of dubious validity were attached to beer. Ancient texts describe it as providing courage in battle (though I doubt if it made you more likely to survive the fight). It was widely believed to be an aphrodisiac, though even Shakespeare observed it was more helpful to the desire than the performance. It was thought to be a digestive aid, to the same Romans who coined the term “vomitorium”. And it was used in medicine as a soporific and analgesic, by doctors who failed to notice the addictive properties. Beer preserved the grain the way wine preserved the grapes, which otherwise could only be eaten at the end of summer.
Animal husbandry also gave us something hunter-gatherers had never known – milk. It is extremely nutritious, and provides essential nutrients hard to get elsewhere. But before refrigeration, it was a huge risk after 24 hours. Thousands of years ago we learned how to break milk down into components with increased shelf life, calling the parts cream, and curds and whey, millennia before these would be called lipids and proteins and the aqueous phase. Butter keeps for weeks, if cool, and cheese for an entire season or more. A desperate farmer with lots of cheap labor could make these on his own, but in cities, these products came from dairies, where a savings of scale could appear. Remember, nature has no “food” similar to beer, or cheese or sour cream – these are from factories, not kitchens. You could make these things at home, just like you could shoe a horse or dig a well, but they come from processing, not cooking.
The domestication of the soy bean in Asia provides another example of ancient food processing on an elaborate scale. Soy beans can be mashed, separated into oil and protein meal portions, and then reassembled into myriad products, all discovered hundreds or thousands of years ago. Bean curd resembles no natural food, but it is awfully good for you, and tastes a lot better than boiled soy beans. Add soy sauce if it seems bland. But don’t try to make it at home; that would involve a long and complex process.
To return to the original question, what separates Chateau Margeaux from Budweiser, or Kraft American singles from Stilton, or a Saint Honore cake from a Ding-Dong? Are dried matzoth from a factory, Saltine crackers or potato chips really different? Matzoth was once made in homes, crackers resemble hardtack, which used to be made in homes, while potato chips resemble, I don’t know, overcooked potatoes? I think the differences are more in form than substance, and some of my answer is food elitism. Preparing food should be a highly skilled art, done by individual artists. Like the difference between hand made and factory furniture, removing the artist reduces the value, though not necessarily the utility and substance. Factories are gauche because they are factories, but not evil because of it. There is no spiritual difference between mass producing beer and converting food into sweetened pastry-esque objects with a moist soft (notice I didn’t say cream) filling and an infinite shelf life. Stilton cheese crafted by hand from milk happens to taste better (to me, my latest date won’t eat it) than Kraft cheese made from corn oil. But they use similar methods to increase the storage life of food products. I could quibble and say that Kraft makes an artificial cheese, but we have already agreed that cheese is an artificial chemical construct made from milk solids, albeit a time honored one. It would be just quibbling.
And finally, I would debunk the “grandmother test”. Eat only what your grandmother would have recognized as food. My grandmother ate freely of Sugar Frosted Flakes and Oreo cookies, both around from before her birth at the turn of the century. She would not have known tofu from laundry soap. She also saved up all cooking fat into a big jar, and reused it for frying – homemade lard. Surprisingly, she lived a very long time.
I think what I’m trying to say is this. Processing food to increase its usefulness is not always bad, when the purpose is to avoid waste, prevent famine, or for a little bit of fun, like beer and soy sauce. It becomes evil when the fake imitates the real, and is passed off as such. Beer isn’t fake bread, it’s something new. Bean curd isn’t fake soybeans, it’s something new. Velveeta processed cheese spread is fake cheese, and it’s sold to the public as cheese. Twinkies are fake pastry. Potato chips are fake snack crackers for dipping, which in turn are fake pastry. Corn chips are fake potato chips, and so on. Cold breakfast cereals, in the old days, were legitimate new forms of corn and grain. Clearly marketed for convenience rather than economic need, they were still legitimate food. Granola was the earliest form, and it doesn’t bother me. Unsweetened corn flakes were a high fiber health food made in factories in the 1870’s, and not having to fire up a wood stove at 5 AM to make breakfast is more than a little convenient. It allowed families to have two wage earners. But when they started adding sugar and shapes, marshmallows and chocolate, it started being desert in breakfast disguise; when they added vitamins, then it became a junk food passed off as a health food. Truly execrable. They even shape children’s cereals to look like deserts. One looks like chocolate chip cookies, another like donuts. Fake, fake, fake. This is over the line.
Greensgal would add that making unwholesome changes in food, not for storage or variety or even convenience, but for increasing sales, compounds the felony. The company that makes Cocoa Pebbles knows eating pure sugar before school is bad for kids. They put the sugar in because it’s addictive, and it increases sales. They disguise the corn flakes as donuts to increase sales. I’m not suggesting that Anheuser-Busch changes bread into alcohol as a humanitarian gesture of good will. But at least the people who buy beer aren’t lured into it because they think it will be good for them. Or that it’s more nutritious than ordinary bread. They wanted beer, and presumably couldn’t afford the better tasting varieties from abroad. People who buy Twinkies think they’re food, whereas they are just non-toxic chemical glop disguised as food. They are clearly more than one toke over that line.