February 5th, 2009 | |
Posted in Books
I finished reading In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. After reading the Omnivore’s Dillemma last year, I was looking forward to this book. Unlike Omnivores Dillemma, this book is not as much of a narrative. This book was more prescriptive about why we should eat certain types of food and what exactly are the food’s we should eat.
Basically, there are 2 main ideas set forth here. Firstly, Pollan describes the advent of "nutritional science" and how it has played a fundamental role in determining what foods are eaten. Nutritional science does not look at food holistically, but rather views it from its constituent parts, i.e., "nutrients". The marketing folks have picked up on this, which is why we see labels and advertisements that say things like "rich in anti-oxidants", as if that should be reason enough for us to buy and those foods. Furthermore, food science has injected "healthy nutrients" into as many foods as possible, thereby enabling the marketers to tag foods as "nutritional" even though they may not be. In this regard, you could say that the era of food has become ideological, which is what Pollan wants to counter.
The second focus of the book is to actually spell out what foods we should eat. He asserts several "rules of thumb" for what we should eat. For example, eat foods that your grand-mother would recognize as food or they themselves would eat growing up, eat foods whose ingredients are words that you can pronounce, or eat foods that do not contain derivatives of corn or soy, and so on. He also makes a case for eating foods that are expensive. The reason being is that more expensive foods tend to be less processed and possibly organic. Additionally, we typically eat less quantity of more expensive foods and enjoy the experience of eating rather than just gorging ourselves.
This book was certainly more dense that Omnivore’s Dillemma, but it has had the beneficial effect of making me think twice about what me and my family are eating. Definitely worth reading.
